For the first one hundred and fifty years the industrial revolution was principally a European enterprise even if the Americans had come to the party about the same time as it had crossed the English Channel into the European mainland. As soon as it spread to any country, it was adapted to fit local conditions. Since there was a multiplicity of local conditions, several variants of the process took hold in different countries and this led to rivalries of the destructive variety all over the continent. The capitalists in the different countries, mainly in Western Europe competed with each other to secure spheres of exploitative financial interest in different parts of the world. From Africa to the Far East, back to the Middle East and even in the less sophisticated parts of Europe such as the Russian empire, not forgetting the Ottoman Empire which at that time was audibly, if slowly, disintegrating. Over time, these rivalries became deadly just as it was in the early days when the Spanish and Portuguese had cornered Africa and South America between them with the English, French and the Dutch muscling in to corner different bits of the New World and parts of Asia for themselves. It was the riches wrung from these overseas territories that triggered the industrial revolution in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. This time, other European countries were determined not to miss out on any of the good things that were up for grabs in any part of the world. They were therefore determined to match anything that was cooked up by English industrialists in the area of seizing territories for exploitation abroad. From that point of view, both imperialism and colonialism were not allowed to be exclusively English thus setting the stage for deadly rivalry.
One of the most important triggers for industrial revolution in England was the draining of the population from the rural areas into the cities. This happened gradually over several centuries but by the middle of the eighteenth century, the large number of people, enough of them with critical skills, were on hand to kick-start work in the factories which the early industrialists were building in London, Birmingham, Manchester and other lesser cities dotted across England. However, this meant that there was a growing shortage of agricultural workers and a concomitant fall in food production both in terms of quality and quantity. The immediate consequence was that available food not only became more expensive but increasingly so with time. Under these circumstances, the workers became restive, demanding the provision of the food they needed to save themselves from starvation. To cope with the circumstances in which they were mired, they demanded that food be imported from wherever it could be imported to be sold at reasonable prices. They may have been hopelessly hamstrung by their situation. But the landlords who were benefitting from the high cost of food stood resolutely in the path of the legal reforms needed to allow the importation of food. It is interesting to note that the response of government to the agitation for food importation was to throw a wall of tariffs around food from abroad thereby maintaining the high cost of food even in the face of starvation as was the case in Ireland. There, up to a million people starved to death when the local potato crops failed two years in a row. Ironically the wheat crops in those years were better than they had ever been before. There was more than enough food to feed the people. But the people did not have money enough to buy the wheat which was grown in Ireland in those lean years. The abundant wheat harvests were sealed up under military protection in trains and shipped across the Irish sea to England to be sold at great profit to the landlords. The welfare of millions of people paled into massive insignificance in the face of the overwhelming need to generate profit for the members of the ruling class.
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It has to be said however that the people at the sharp end of government policies did not simply fold their powerless arms. They raised their voices in protest and when it was apparent that nobody was bothering to listen to them, they poured into the streets and rioted in one city after the other. They were insistent on overturning the Corn Laws which stood implacably between the people and affordable food. The battle was fought in parliament from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 with varying degrees of success. Finally the industrialists who were best placed to benefit from cheaper food for their workers were successful and the oppressive Corn Laws were repealed by parliament in 1846. Thereafter, wheat and other grains poured into Britain shifting the balance of power within the country to the cities. Consequently, Britain not only became an importer of food but other materials as well thereby establishing the principle of global free trade. She was of course able to do this because she had a far flung empire on which the sun never set demonstrating the power of imperialism to the rise and rise of capitalism on the global level.
Grains were being produced at minimum cost on the prairies of the USA, the pampas of Argentina and by the serfs toiling for next to nothing in the vast lands of the Russian empire. These were imported to Britain at a much lower cost than before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Consequently, British workers not only had money for food but also to spend on factory produced goods. A win-win situation for the industrialists and capitalists to the detriment of the land owners whose hold on political power was also being loosened. It also removed the spectre of starvation which hung over Europe making Malthus to sound the alarm about imminent starvation in his famous thesis which was published with much doom and gloom in the closing years of the eighteenth century. At that time the global population was still short of one billion. Today, hand in hand with the inexorable rise of capitalism global population is matching steadily towards the nine billion mark suggesting that the ghost of Malthus has finally been exorcised.
It has become clear that the Malthusian prediction about the end of the world has been premature. It is highly unlikely now as it was indeed then that human civilization is not likely to come to an end with the whimper of global starvation. The trajectory of human existence suggests however that the danger of a spectacular ending such as some form of global war cannot be discountenanced or simply dismissed out of hand. Evidence provided by the Boer war eloquently suggests that the rise of capitalism goes hand in hand with the possibility of armed conflict. And this is what happened in Europe where the first war to have been fought on a global level was precipitated by the rivalries which followed the rise of capitalism within the continent. The simplistic answer to the question of how the First World War began is that Serbian nationalists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and heir to the throne of the Austro Hungarian Empire (together with his consort) on the streets of Sarajevo. Yes, that was the immediate cause because it prompted the issuance of a string of ultimatums which led to the mobilisation of troops all over Europe. What is missing from that scenario is that the clouds of war, seeded by the rise of capitalism had been hanging over the continent for many years. In the beginning, it appeared that the scramble for Africa might light the fire of general war in Europe. The Berlin conference was convened with the specific intention of putting out that fire. And it did. But it soon became apparent that the embers of the fire were still glowing under a thin cover of ashes. The fire was still alive and was soon to be blown into a conflagration which all but destroyed Europe completely. That it did not do this was not for the want of trying.
More than a hundred years after the end of the First World War, there is still a great deal of debate about how the war began or more appropriately, which country lit the fatal torch that brought about the conflagration that led to the incineration of millions of Europeans. Germany lost the war and to suit the narrative of the winners, she was blamed for starting the war. This made it possible for war indemnity to be levied against Germany. The weight of the reparations imposed was so crushing that it virtually guaranteed a return match only twenty years after the end of the Great War as the First World War has come to be known in history.
The truth about what led to the First World War is that it was caused by at least several different reasons each one of them as compelling as the next one. Whatever the reason, that war did a great deal of damage to everything associated with human existence if only in terms of scale. For the first time in human history, millions of men were mobilised in a matter of a couple of weeks and poured into the cauldron of the first war to be fought on a scale invented by industrialists who are totally incapable of doing anything by halves. The killing that took place on the various theatres of that war was on an industrial scale. Soldiers were rushed to the various battle fields by train travelling at dizzying pace along railways which had been cleared of other trains except those carrying instruments of slaughter to the war front. At the battle of the Somme, the British army lost sixty thousand men in the first hour of battle. By the time that meaningless offensive ended, the French, British and German armies had sustained between them, the loss of more than a million men in a little over three months. All casually wasted over a few metres of muddy, unproductive tract of land. In the end, perhaps the only thing shining above those blood soaked fields of Flanders and elsewhere in the world was the flag of the industrialists celebrating the rise, rise and rise of capitalism.