The men who led the world into the age of the Industrial revolution were hard headed men who held no truck with niceties of any kind. They kept their eyes on the bottom line and exalted gold to the level of a deity. They saw all human beings only through the prism of profit and every single thing they did was towards the enhancement of their bank balance. They seized every opportunity that came their way and turned it into a tidy profit. Everything considered, there was no point in appealing to their humanity because they had none to speak of but to them had fallen the responsibility of building an enduring global order. Or, have they, could they?
It was no coincidence that the industrial revolution took off in England. To start with, England had profited most from the slave trade and therefore had more money in private pockets than any other country including the United States whose economy was based primarily on the production of agricultural products using slave labour. It was becoming clear by the turn of the eighteenth century by which time the industrial revolution had arrived in the Northern states of the Union that the slave economy of the southern states was no longer tenable. However, it took more than sixty years before the debate over slavery was to be resolved on the battle fields of the American civil war. The North, with her almost limitless industrial capacity, at least compared to the South, was of course no match for those hill billies from the South. If they had a little gumption, they would have known that they had no chance against the North but how could anyone tell them that they were swimming against the currents of history and that sooner or later, they would be pulled under the waves. As General Sherman said as he rampaged through the South on his thirty-seven day march from Atlanta to Savannah on the sea, war was hell and Sherman made sure that the Confederates appreciated the meaning of hell as he destroyed all infrastructure in his path and bagged all the food in his path to ensure that his men were well fed and if such food was lost by the rebels, that was good for the Northern cause. He was able to carry out an expedition that has been described as the first action that could be described as modern warfare because of the Industrial base behind him and the lack of modern industry in the South. By the time Sherman reached the sea, it had become clear that the war was over bar the shouting. But I get beyond myself and it would be necessary to go back some seventy years to tell the story of how the USA was dragged into the industrial age.
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England is said to have set off the Industrial revolution by the middle of the eighteenth century and maintained a monopoly of industrial processes which made sure that English industrialists were much richer than the elites in other European countries and of course the USA which for much of that period was still fighting to gain her independence from the British. The situation changed in 1789 when Samuel Slater migrated to the USA from Derby in the English Midlands carrying in his head the industrial method of producing textiles. He had to memorise this process because there was a law preventing the transfer of this technology to any place outside England and having been able to achieve this transfer, Slater became known as a traitor by the English. By 1807, two brothers, William and John Cocktreil also moved the industrial production process to Belgium and it was not long before the Industrial revolution spread right throughout Europe except Russia which at that time was too backward to appreciate large scale industrial enterprises. It was not until 1865 that serfdom, a form of slavery was abolished in Russia and as was the case in the West Indies and the southern states of the USA, any form of slavery is incompatible with the industrial production of goods.
It has to be said that apart from the riches from the slave trade which had set up England to be the seat of the industrial revolution, geography was also kind to England in that all the materials and conditions needed for the take-off of the industrial revolution were present. In the first place, coal was found in considerable abundance in several parts of Britain and this made it possible to switch to steam power as soon as versions of the steam engine were available. Indeed, the first use of the steam engine was in pumping out water from damp mines before it was adapted to providing power to make the first power looms work to produce textiles on an industrial scale. Apart from the production of textiles perhaps the greatest boost to the industrial revolution was the invention of the railways which were not only a marvel of engineering in themselves, they also made it possible for goods to be transported cheaply over long distances. Another advantage that England had was the presence of navigable rivers over which raw materials could be transported. In addition to this, the presence of these rivers made it possible for canals which were an additional aid to the movement of goods all around the country to be possible. By this time also all types of raw materials especially cotton were flowing into England from India and parts of China to be used in those early industries. It is also pertinent to add that the financial institutions needed by those early industrialists; banks, joint stock companies, insurance companies, not to talk of a huge merchant navy were at the disposal of those early English industrialists.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution was spreading through Europe with varying degrees of success from one country to another but nowhere was the British success fully replicated. Engineers were required to service the engines used in the new factories and the best engineers were British (and this is one area where the Scots came into their own) and they could be found all over Europe tending to the machines which were driving the industrial revolution. In what could be described as the second stage of the industrial revolution, British engineers could be found all over Europe supervising the laying of railway tracks and servicing the locomotives which hauled the rolling stock. Everywhere they went, the British also took with them their love of football which they spread together with the railroads they were building so that some of the most famous European football teams such as AC Milan and Juventus have some relationship with one Englishman or the other. AC Milan actually started life as Milan Football and Cricket Club! Both Spanish giants Real Madrid and Barcelona also have considerable English background to their illustrious history.
This reference to football clubs is actually prelude to something much more serious. It was clear quite early in the industrial revolution that the most successful industrial countries were those that had areas of influence from where they had a guaranteed supply of raw materials and to which they could sell the cheap products from their factories. After all, for all the success of British industry, the most important raw material for textile production was cotton, a material which had to be imported from India and the USA. On the other hand the factories were churning out so many yards of cheap textiles that the local population especially with their low wages could never hope to consume more than a small fraction of the materials produced. The solution to this problem was a secure overseas market. In other words colonies or areas of influence were a prerequisite for industrial success. And once again, Britain with her long association with slave traders in Africa and control of most parts of the Indian sub-continent and China was in pole position in the race for the commercial domination of the world. The industrialised countries of Europe including Britain, France and Germany became locked in the race to acquire colonies wherever they could. They competed furiously against each other in Africa, fought wars against each other in India but cooperated with each other in China where they presented a united front agonist the Chinese emperor. All these manoeuvrings signified the end of the beginning industrialisation and the beginning of colonialism or as Lenin so elegantly put it, the age of imperialism which marked the highest state of capitalism. The point to be made here is that as soon as capitalism enters the stage of imperialism in which capitalists are able to carve out areas of interest abroad, there is great danger to the welfare of the workers in both capitalist countries and those in the periphery to come under lash of the oligarchs which working through giant finance corporations control everything and everyone. The current global situation suggests that we are now entering the period of imperialism bringing out the purest form of capitalism but again I am getting ahead of my narrative and must revert to a discussion on colonialism.
There is no doubt that Britain was well ahead of other industrializing countries of Europe right up to 1849, the year that The Communist Manifesto was published and the warning about the spectre of communism haunting Europe delivered. Thereafter however, other countries especially France and the German Empire which was about to be put together by Otto von Bismarck now known to the world as the Iron Chancellor began to catch up with the British. This was competition which was not welcome by the British especially in the case of the German Empire sitting as she was right in the middle of Europe.
The Germans came late to the party and although they tried to make up for this crippling disadvantage by developing superb engineering skills and inserting themselves into small territories which for one reason or the other had been overlooked by either the French or the British in Africa. They were thus restricted to small territories; Togoland and parts of Cameroon in West Africa, an awful lot of sand in the practically uninhabitable desert in South West Africa as well as Rwanda, Burundi and Tanganyika in East Africa.
This situation had the potential of causing a lot of trouble in Europe, trouble which was quite capable of toppling the balance of power in Europe which had been devised to prevent any war in Europe after the turbulent Napoleonic wars which had come close to bringing every European empire to her knees. This arrangement which came to be known as the Concert of Europe had succeeded in preventing any major war in Europe save the Crimean war which was fought in the Crimean peninsular, an area which was not really part of Europe. The war between the newly unified Germany and France was over so quickly that it did not disturb the Concert but it gave warning of the danger to the peace of Europe if disputes were not resolved before armies were mobilised and shots fired. By 1884, it had become clear that the squabbling over Africa had the potential to profoundly disturbing peace in Europe. This formed the impetus for Otto von Bismarck to invite fourteen countries including the USA to Berlin in 1884 for what has come to be known as the Berlin Conference.