| Comments: |
Perhaps best placed to make the most of the century's opportunities was a grandee who owned large estates rIch in mineral resources, served by good communications and located in industrializing regions, and - perhaps most important of all - who was blessed with the necessary intellectual and personal qualities to become an entrepreneur. p. xxvi
. A new kind of poverty emerged, not a sudden affliction by famine, plague or war but a permanent state of malnutrition and underemployment. It was also a VICIOUS cIrcle, for the undernourished were not so wretched as to be unable to produce the children who perpetuated their misery. They were also Increasingly at the mercy of market forces, as capitalism eroded the traditional society of orders and its values. xvii
Whether the form it takes is symbolic, as in speech, or physical, as in travel, it is communication between people and people, or between people and places, that weaves the social fabric. That is why communication provides the best point of entry to the past. 3.
For most Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the condition of the roads which dictated the pace of communications and the degree of mobility. Almost everywhere the 'roads' were tracks, with no foundations or drainage and consequently deeply pitted by wheel-ruts. They were muddy quagmires when it rained and dust bowls when the Sun shone: 'more like a retreat of wild beasts and reptiles, than the footsteps of man', in the view of an English observer writing about the early eighteenth century. 3.
The roads of Europe were essentially those of the Roman Empire - after fourteen hundred years of neglect.
On the very eve of the coming of brought the cost down appreciably, a stagecoach journey from Paris to Bordeaux was still costing the equivalent of a clerk's monthly wages. 6
"'he cumulative effect of greater expertise and investment was to create arterial roads capable of carrying passenger transport much more quickly and reliably than in the past. This is one improvement that can be quantified: in 1650 two weeks were needed to travel from Paris to Toulouse, by 1782 that had been cut by more than half; in r664 it took ten or eleven days to travel from Paris to Lyon, a century later just six days; in the seventeenth century it had taken at least three days to cover the 60-odd miles (roo kill) from Paris to Rauen, on the eve of the Revolution it could be managed in thirty-six hours. Perhaps the most spectacular reduction was in the time needed for the route to Bordeaux, which shrank from fifteen days in r660 to five-and-a-half in I789. According to Daniel Roche, there was not a city in France in 1789 that could not be reached in a fortnight. 7
Freight continued to move at its earlier lethargic pace of 2-2Y2 mph (3-4 kph). The cloth of Laval in Mayenne still took two good weeks to reach the ports of Brittany and Normandy and three to four weeks to reach Lil1e.
Only a tiny proportion of the French population :ould travel in post-chaises up and down the 'royal routes'. According to Pierre Gaubert, most peasants - i.e. most of the population - lived out their lives within a radius of only 4 to 5 miles (6 to 8 km), that is to say the area which encompassed their family, the weekly market, the notary and the seigneurial court and which they traversed on foot. They had been doing that in I66o, and they were still doing it in 1815
y the late eighteenth century the situation was different in Great Britain. Distances between major centres were shorter, the terrain was more co-operative, commercial incentives were stronger, and capital was more plentiful.
Since 1555 every parish had been obliged to provide labour and tools for the maintenance of the roads which passed through it.
another method had been found.This was the 'turnpike', a word which originally designated just a barrier acr~s:~: road to keep marauders out. As a place where a toll was to be paid, the word was first used in legislation of 1695, which began a new age of road improvement. It was underpinned by the profit motive. An entrepreneur secured an Act of Parliament authorizing him to levy a fee on traffic passing along a certain stretch of road, in return for maintaining it in good condition.
[[he most spectacular acceleration W.l\ .tehicvcd in moving people and - as we shall see later - post, but freight too could benefit. Much larger and more heavily laden wagons could pass along the improved roads: in the 1740s three-ton loads were permitted, by 1765 that had been doubled. The improved surfaces meant that fewer drought animals per ton were required. 12
'[his was a culture-shock which many found upsetting - especially when the lower orders started to move out of their villages, on to the roads and into the towns, picking up insubordinate habits on the way. 12
Among other disagreeable side-effects of the transport revolution to make contemporaries wonder whether it was all worth it were crime and congestion.
turnpikes were places where hard cash had to be paid, so were frequently robbed.
The forces of friction that slowed the progress of carts and coaches were greatly reduced if the vehicle could be moved from land to water, for here there were tides and currents to be enlisted and winds to be harnessed by sails.
That was the problem with sea travel: time and tide might wait for no . man, but man often had to wait for time and tide. Passage from Nantes, on the west coast of France, to Danzig, in the eastern Baltic, could take as few as 18 days if conditions were just right, averaged about a month, but could be extended to IOO or even I50 days in winter, if the wind went round to the east and ships were obliged to take refuge in port. So one of the main characteristics of modern travel - the timetable was conspicuously absent.
== control
It was in the Low Countries, however, that the plethora of both natural and man-made waterways made something approaching a r1JOdCTn p,1~scnger-transport system possible.
--> modern passenger transportation <-
"his was part of a more general move away from what Walter Benjamin called the 'Messianic' concept of time, which had prevailed throughout the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period. It was characterized by a lack of awareness of the passage of historical time but a belief in the 'simultaneity of past and future iI1 an instantaneous present'.
time ceased to be cyclical and became linear, so that the dominant metaphor became 'time's arrow' rather than 'fortune's wheel', in other words directional rather than endlessly repetitive.
Both symptom and cause was the growing popularity of clocks and watches. Together with developments such as the Dutch timetables, this encouraged a new sense of time. 21
This shift also had important . cultural implications, as the notion of a 'time budget' increasingly divided the day into work and recreation and led to the separation of the arts from everyday activities.
1670 an English author estimated that a smaJJ boat of thirty tons could carry as much from London to Bristol as a hundred horses overland. Another English observer, Sir Robert Southwell, quantified the cost benefit: in his view, sea carriage was twenty times cheaper than wheeled carnage. The chief beneficiaries of this discrepancy were dealers in commodities that were high in bulk but low in value. A single individual could carry a fortune in diamonds in his pocket, but a fleet of barges _ or an army of wagons - would be needed to transport the equivalent value in coal or grain.
== payload, packaging
The Dutch Republic was the only country in Europe where water transport was appreciably greater than land transport, in terms of tonnage carried. In England it was about 50-50; in Germany the ratio was I:5, but in France it was 1:10.
Rivers too had their limitations, the most serious being their inability to adapt their direction to changing human needs. That could only be accomplished by canals. The 'canal age' began in Great Britain a good century after 'canal fever' had gripped the Dutch. The model here was the Duke of Bridgewater's canal, opened in 1761 to bring coal from his mInes at Worsley to rapidly expanding Manchester. Its well pu blicized success encouraged a host of similar projects.
Not least of the problems of the Habsburg Monarchy in modernizing Its economy was the lack of a waterway network. Apart from the short stretch at Wiener-Neustadt and a few very minor enterprises, there were no canals.
Travel by water, whether it was sea, river or canal, enjoyed numerous advantages over its terrestrial equivalents. But it suffered from one serious drawback - its slowness. The ocean-going traveller might sometimes find a following wind to speed his passage, but more often th:e not he was condemned to becalmed immobility or laborious tacking. On the inland waterways, the barge could proceed only at the pace dictated by the draught animals, or in other words at walking pace. 34
[he rapid' increase in the speed of road travel in Great Britain, made possible by the turnpikes, has already been noted. In the 1780s the accelerator was pressed further by another innovation - the mail coach. Hitherto, letters had been carried up and down the main postal routes by a mounted messenger known as a 'post boy', defined by one dissatisfied customer as 'an idle boy mounted on a worn-out hack who, so far from being able to defend himself against a robber, was more likely to be in league with him'.
===
control and payload diversification.
In 1786, the travelling time from Edinburgh to London was shortened from three-and-a-half days to sixty hours. It was once thought that it was a combination of the railways and the factory system which introduced a more structured attitude to time. In fact, it was the mail coach which obliged people to think in terms of units as short as minutes. 35
== 10x change - qualitatively different level of "detection" and control.
It was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there was a qualitative leap in the movement of private individuals; it was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there was a qualitative leap in postal services.35
By 1671, one of the most celebrated of all correspondents, Madame de Sevigne, could write to her daughter: 'I am full of admiration for the post-boys who are constantly on the move, bringing our letters to and fro; there isn't a day in the week when they cannot bring them; they are always there, a,t every hour of the day, out in the country. What honourable people! How helpful they are, and what a fine invention the post is!'
== frequency - the timeline: year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second, etc.
vlanuals and formularies enjoyed enhanced popularity in the late seventeenth century. This rage for letter-writing owed much to postal improvements. Madame de Sevigne would not have written 1,700 letters to her daughtef, nor would Horace Walpole have written 1,600 letters to Madame du Deffand or Boo-plus to Sir Horace Mann {whom he did not meet for the forty-four years of theIr correspondence) if they had not been confident that they would be delivered. Right across Europe (and the Atlantic), the post created a network which ever-increasing numbers of intellectuals could u~e for the exchange of opinion, information and gOSSIp. The medium also influenced the message, for the relative immediacy now available in long-distance intercourse encOuraged a more intimate and subjective style. Indeed, Goethe assigned part of the blame for the effusion of sentimental correspondence to the excellence of the Thurn and Taxis postal service. 39
Letter writing for dummies. How-to guides, etc.
..Joseph II stated as a central axiom: 'I consider that the principal object of my policy, and the one to which all political, financial and even military authorities should devote their attention, is population, that is to say the preservation and increase of the number of subjects. It is from the greatest possible number of subjects that all the advantages of the state derive. ' 41
The shift in Europe's demographic centre of gravity was momentous. Late medieval and Renaissance Europe had been dominated by the Mediterranean. In manufacturing, trade and banking, its cities had been pre-eminent; in culture, the Italian city-states had created a civilization which bore comparison with classical Greece; in politics, the Spanish branch 0£ the Habsburgs had created an empire on which the sun never set. Yet by the eighteenth century, northerners were coming south as if to a museum, their admiration for its past exceeded only by their lon tempt for its present. As an English visitor put it in 1778, Rome had once been 'inhabited by a nation of heroes and patriots, our was now in the hands of the most effeminate and most superstitious people in the universe
lany event, one reason for the striking differ:nce between the demographic histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must lie in the reduction in the number and severity of famines.
These enterprising ladies were exploiting what was common knowledge everywhere - that a mild form of smallpox granted immunity for life. The technique may have been known already in western Europe too, but it was certainly Lady Mary's proselytizing that led to its popularization. Her exampk. was quickly followed by the Prince of Wales, who had both his daughters inoculated. Other social leaders to set examples included the due d'Orleans, Frederick the Great of Prussia, the _Empress Maria Theresa, the King of Denmark and Catherine the Great of Russia.
A second breakthrough came at the very end of the century when an English country doctor, Edward Jenner, discovered the much safer and less elaborate technique of vaccination. He had noticed that infection with cowpox, a disease that is relatively benign when contracted by humans, granted immunity against smallpox. In 1796 he inoculated an eight-year-old boy with pus taken from the pustule of a milkmaid infected with cowpox.
his discovery las publicized by Jenner in An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Vario/ae Vaccinae, published in 1798. By 1801 it had gone through wo more editions and the technique was well on its way to gaining Jniversal acceptance. It was made compulsory in a number of continental countries: in Sweden, for example, where deaths from smallpox per tal countries: in Sweden, for example, where deaths from smallpox per where the King set a personal example and then made it compulsory in 107, total deaths from the disease fell from c.7,500 per annum to 150 and then to zero by I8IO. Napoleon had his entire army vaccinated. .
Any temptation to divide these various resources into the scientific and the superstitious should be resisted. The former often did more harm than good, the latter often did more good than harm. A striking :xample of the shadowy relationship between the two was provided by the discovery of the cardiotonic properties of the foxglove plant by the Shropshire physician William Withering in 1775. Unable to help one of bis patients with a serious heart condition, he was suitably embarrassed when the patient obtained a herbal tea from a gypsy-woman and when the patient obtained a herbal tea from a gypsy-woman and twenty-odd ingredients until he had isolated foxglove as the benefactor. The digitalis purpurea the plant produces increases the intensity of the eart muscle contractions while reducing the heart rate, and can also be used to treat dropsy. Aft Withering published in 1785 An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses ete; With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases, which advertised its curative properties to the world. It has been used ever since. 67
homas Hobbes observed: 'I would ather have the advice or take physick from an experienced old woman lat had been at many sick people's bedsides, than from the learnedst bu t unexperienced physician.'
In four ways, however, there can be said to have been progress, in the sense that the chances of patients receiving beneficial treatment improved.
First, there was a fitful but definite move away from a humoral view of disease to one centred on the material structure of the body and employing a mechanical metaphor to understand its workings. The chief theoretical influence here was Dscartes.
The chief practical influence was the growing practice of conducting post-mortems.
Secondly, in a few places there developed clinical training, which gave aspiring physicians the opportunity to learn their profession at the bedsides of real patients.
It was not the university but the hospital that provide the instutional based for medical progress.
A third form of progress was provided by voluntary movements of various kinds.
Lastly, there was a marked increase in the number of formally educated and certified practitioners [ besides physicians].
Baltic-Cadiz route that remained the great employer of shipping. In 1660 it was dominated by the Dutch. Despite - or perhaps because of - the eighty-year struggle to break free from Spanish rule (only ending in 1648), the Dutch had put together a trading system of truly amazing size, complexity and prosperity. One simple statistic illustrates their predominance in European commerce: in 1670 their merchant marine totalled 568,000 tons, more than that of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal combined. The basis of Dutch trade was the huge surplus of grain, chiefly rye; produced by the Baltic countries, especially Poland-Lithuania. It was almost all shipped to the Dutch Republic, 80 per cent of it in Dutch ships. Around 40 per cent was then re-exported to feed the numerous parts of Europe, notably in the south, that were unable to feed their populations from their own resources. This plentiful supply of basic food allowed Dutch farmers to specialize, to concentrate on branches of agriculture best suited to their soil and climate, namely livestock, dairy products, vegetables, barley, hops, tobacco, hemp, flax, cole-seed (for lamp-oil) and various sources of dye (madder, weld and woad).
Down their matchless waterways, these cash crops, and the articles manufactured from them, went to markets all over northern and western Europe. More Important still, in terms of value, were the 'rich trades', the commodities such as spices, sugar, silk, dyestuffs, fruit, wine and silver that the Dutch gathered in southern Europe and took back to all pOInts north. By the I660s this branch of commerce was generating seven times as much profit as the bulk freightage from the Baltic. It also provided much of the raw materials that formed the basis of the Republic's flourishing manufacturing sector: fine cloth, silks, cottons,sugar-refining, tobacco-processing, leather-working, carpentry, tapestryweaving, ceramics, copper-working and diamond-cutting. 97
Part of the explanation of Dutch superiority was technological. From their first introduction at the very end of the sixteenth century, the famous fluyts (known to the English as 'fluteships' or 'flyboats') provided a sharp competitive edge. Thanks to the adoption by the Amsterdam shipyards of standardized designs and labour-saving devices, the f/uyt maximized carrying capacity and minimized cost. It has been estimated that an English ship of 250 tons cost 60 per cent more to construct than its Dutch rival.
== scale & standardization
== another explanation was emergence of financial markets
Dutch shippers were able to undercut their competitors from other nations by between a third and a half.
== packaging == cf. container shipping.
Inderplnnlng their global trading complex were the financial institutions of Amsterdam. Founded in 1609, its eponymous bank quickly eclipsed the traditional leaders, Venice and Genoa, as the centre of Europe's money market. It was soon joined by Loan Bank. Together with the Stock Exchange, which moved to a palatial new building in 1609, the banks gave Dutch merchants a headstart in managing their business affairs. Nowhere else could credit be obtained so easily, quickly and cheaply. Nowhere else could go()d~ he insured with such facility. Symbolic of the methodical approach adopted by the Amsterdam agents was their introduction of printed forms for the registration of insurance policies. So superior were the services they offered that during the Third Anglo-Dutch War of 1672-4, the British fleet was insured at Amsterdam. For II Europe's businessmen, a bill on institutional infrastructure in place by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch were in a Position to establish quickly what Jonathan Israel has called ,'world trade primacy' when peace returned in 1648.
fhe Dutch Republic had suffered the fate common to many other economIes enjoying the initial advantage of being first in the field. So rapid was its expansion, so astounding was its wealth, that it was bound :o attract the jealous hostility of other states.
lis led the English Parliament, for example, to pass the Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660 and 1696. These required all trade to and from English colonies to be carried in English ships and all colonial produce to be brought to nglish ports. A similar attitude was adopted by the French.I 1662 a tax of fifty sous per ton had been imposed on every ton of cargo carried in a foreign vessel. The result: 'we have seen the number of French vessels increase yearly, and in seven or eight years the Dutch have been practically excluded from port-to-port commerce, which is [now] carried on by the excluded from port-to-port commerce, which is [now] carried on by the French. 101
The great lesson of the eighteenth century was that the key to commerce was shipping and the ability to protect that shipping. 107
=== why? == adding sources and consumers, population and production growth. roads, etc. (cf agriculture).
As the British saw it, their four great mutually supportive achievements - power, prosperity, Protestantism and liberty - were all secured by commerce, so the merchant enjoyed a correspondingly high status.
Daniel Defoe agreed: 'trade in England makes Gentlemen, and has peopled this nation with Gentlemen'.
Swiss traveller, Cesar de Saussure, who observed in 1727: 'In England commerce is not looked down upon as being derogatory, as it is in France and Germany. Here men of good family and even of rank may become merchants without losing caste. I have heard of younger sons of peers, whose families have been reduced to poverty through the habits of extravagance and dissiparion of an elder son, retrieve the fallen fortunes of their house by becoming merchants.'
1e most common form of organization for manufacturers - the craft guild. Its longevity was due not least to the plurality of tasks it performed: quality control, social disciplining, social welfare, status maintenance, religious devotion and collective recreation being just a few. At its heart, of course, stood its monopoly of production f a given commodity in a particular community. In most European towns for most of the eighteenth century, aspiring manufacturers had to join a guild.
Like so many other organizations enjoying a monopoly of their chosen activity, the craft guilds had a built-in tendency towards ossification. By the eighteenth century many were showing all the negative conservatism of a vested interest overtaken by events: dogged devotion to old techniques, suspicion of innovation, resentment of competition and xenophobia.
wherever governments valued social harmony and control above productivity, the guilds could find friends. So the troubled times after 1789, and even after 1848, saw the guilds taking on a new lease of life.
subversive of guild domination of manufacturing was the expansion of rural industries, especially in the manufacturing of textiles but also of goods such as gloves, ribbons, stockings, shoes and hats, not just on a small scale for local consumption but on a mass basis for export markets. The key figure here was the merchant-capitalist, who co-ordinated the various processes on a 'putting-out' basis. It was he who bought the raw material and had it delivered to the homes of the laboun.'r~, first to the spinners, then to the weavers and then to the fullers and dyers who turned it into finished clotl1. It was he who paid them on a 'piecework' basis. It was also he who found a cloth factor to take it to market. The advantages of this system were manifold: it exploited cheap rural labour, increasingly available as the population expanded; it minimized the need for fixed capital; it gave peasants the opportunity to supplement the returns from their plots by working after dark or during slack periods of the agricultural year; it allowed the unskilled labour of :omen, children and the elderly to make a contribution to the household's income; it promoted the division of labour; and it evaded all the rules and regulations ,£ the guilds, especially quality controls and limits on the size of enterprises. 121
From the point of view of the entrepreneur, the least attractive feature of putting-out was the lack of control over the workforce. The labourer worked unsupervised, at his own pace and when he felt like it. When the household's income reached a certain point, there was a tendency to prefer leisure to labour, even if the market - and the merchant - were crying out for more goods. One answer was to concentrate production in a single centre and to move from paying piece-rates to paying wages. That required higher fixed capital in the form of buildings, and consequently greater vulnerability to market fluctuations, but it did allow the tories' proved to be an effective way of responding to market opportunities in the eighteenth century.
== scale & control ==
== system collapses under the weight of distribution and orchestration costs ( time, money, lost opportunity)
cf. dutch shipping & schedule.
However, whereas the term 'French Revolution' was in use by contemporaries from the start, 'Industrial Revolution' took much longer to get established. It was first used in the French form 'revolution industrielle' in the 18208 and it was also a French pundit - the economist Jerome Adolphe Blanqui - who first pronounced on the world-historical nature of the phenomenon when he wrote in 1831, 'industrial conditions were more profoundly transformed than at any time since the beginnings of social life'.
Arnold Toynbee's Posthumous Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England had begun the term's long and busy career as a central organizing concept in British historiography.
Rondo Cameron, who in an article provocatively entitled The industrial revolution - a misnomer', asserted: 'probably no term from the economic historians' lexicon has been more widely accepted by the public at large than "industrial revolution". That is unfortunate, because the term itself has no scientific standing and conveys a grossly misleading impression of the nature of economic change.'
clear distinction needs to be drawn between railways and steam locomotives. The great advantage of a railway, defined as parallel tracks along which wheeled vehicles can be drawn, is that it greatly reduces friction, and hence increases proportionally the load that can be pulled by a given motive force. The latter can be human, animal or mechanical. Wooden railways had been m use in German mines since around 1500 and can be found in England about a hundred years later. Their loadbearing capability was greatly increased when iron began to replace wood. Between 1768 and 1771 Richard Reynolds introduced cast-iron rails at the great Coal brookdale ironworks near Telford in Shropshire, adding an inner flange to the rail to improve stability. Later rails were constructed from malleable iron and the flange was transferred to the wheel. Eventually there were more than 20 miles (32 km) of rails within the Coal brookdale works.
Steam-power was first applied on an experimental basis by Richard Trevithick in the late 1790S. By 1804 he was able to demonstrate a locomotive on the line at the Pen-yDarran ironworks in Glamorganshire, which pulled ten tons of ore and seventy passengers at 5 miles (8 kill) per hour. As is often the way with technology, once the trail had been blazed, others quickly followed, n?tably John Blenkinsop, whose five-ton locomotive Salamanca pulled ninety tons of coal on a level surface at 4 miles (6.5 km) per hour in 1812; William Hedley, another locomotive builder but better known for patenting a smooth wheel and rail system in 18 13; and of course George Stephenson, whose locomotive Blucher of 1814 was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive and could pull thirty tons of coal up a hill at 4 miles (6.5 kill) per hour. In short, the 'railway age' was well and truly underway before 1815 and had taken so long to come to fruition that 'revolution' does indeed seem something of a misnomer.
=== the change that is easy to detect is growth and scale. "the age" starts when the S-curve gets into its acceleration phase.
Two major innovations were made during our period. By the early eighteenth century, iron production in England was on the decline, not through want of demand but due to a shortage of the timber from which charcoal is made. In 1709, after much experimentation, the Quaker Abraham Darby succeeded in making iron using coke rarher than charcoal. Coke is the residue left after mineral coal has been heated to a high temperature out of contact with air. As it is rich in carbon, it can substitute for charcoal both as a heating agent and as a necessary additive to the iron ore. On the other hand, because it is a much firmer, more robust. substance, it can bear a much larger weight of iron ore in the furnace, thus allowing much larger furnaces to be built, with corresponding economies of scale. Darby's blast furnaces at Coal brookdale were each soon producing up to ten tons of pig iron a week. As there were virtually limitless resources of coal, much of it close to the surface, the inhibition placed on iron production by timber shortage was rellloved. 130
The second major innovation was a response to the imbalance between improved pig-iron production and slow and inadequate 'fining'. In 1784 Henry Cart patented his 'puddling' process, which used a reverberatory furnace to turn pig iron into malleable iron. A reverberatory furnace uses hot air and gases to heat the metal, without allowing the latter to be polluted by coming into direct contact with the fuel used for heating. fogether with his development of a more efficient way of creating bar iron, patented the previous year, Cart's invention helped to encourage a rapid increase in iron production, which quadrupled during the next twenty years.
A similarly gradual story unfolded in the second component of the railways - steam-power. Once again, innovation was driven by need. In this case, it was the need to pump water out of coalmines that had to go deeper as the surface seams were exhausted. In 1702 one mine in Warwickshire was using more than 500 horses to work the pumps. The first mechanical pump was invented by Thomas Savery in I698.
t was barely practical, since the alternate cooling and heating was hugely wasteful and the tin-soldered joins proved to be positively lethal in their failure to handle the steam pressure consistently. Much more efficient was Thomas Newcomen's 'atmospheric engine' of 1705, which used the partial vacuum created by condensing steam to move a piston inside a cylinder. This machine also had distinct limitations: it was Sl and voracious in its appetite for coal. Indeed, its thermal efficiency was only about I per cent, or in other words of every hundred units of coal consumed, only one was actually used to pump Water. However, the cost of coal was of little concern at the pit-head and Newcomen engines were introduced into almost all the large mines in Great Britain within a few years.
The real breakthrough came when James Watt, a Glasgow instrumentmaker, found a way of dispensing with the hot-cold routine that had ade previous steam-engines so inefficient.1769 he patented his 'new: method for lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire engines', formed a partnership with the great Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton and began producing steam-engines for use, not just in coalmines but in all forms of industry. Further developments by Watt, notably the double-action engine invented in the early I78os, improved efficiency still further. It has been suggested, not without reason, that this was a truly epochal moment, because for the first time in its history, humankind had at its disposal a source of power wholly independent of location.
=== location independence seems to be the key ===
enables a much better degree of control of where processing can be done, e.g. near resources or consumption.
payload implications?
t is important to understand why cotton was an attractive but problematic fibre. Its great advantages are that it J~ Itlt, holJow, with a natural twist and a long 'staple' (the natural length of the fibre). Consequently, it combines comfort with strength and durability. Its great disadvantage is that it is very labour-intensive. The cotton 'bolls' which grow on the plant have to be harvested, ginned (separating the seed from the fibres), cleaned, roved (drawing out, lengthening and twisting) and carded (combing out, straightening and making the fibres naturally parallel) before it can be spun Into yarn and then woven into cloth.
:otton was the luxury cloth in I784.
1 number of inventions designed primarily for other fabrics. John Kay's 'flying shuttle' of 1733, for example, which doubled a weaver's productivity, was intended for woollens. However, it called for a corresponding increase in the spInnIng of yarn, which encouraged the invention of mechanical spinning devices. Lewis Paul and John Wyatt's roller spinning machine, patented in 1738, James Hargreaves' spinning-jenny, invented in 1764 and patented in 1769, Richard Arkwright's water frame of 1769 and Samuel Crompton's 'mule' of 1779 (so-called because it combined the functions of both the jenny and the frame) combined to bring a massive Illcrease III productivity, economies of scale, improvements in quali and a precipitous fall in the cost of yarn.
t has also been pointed out, by Samuel Lilley for example, that the jennies, frames and mules did not represent a technological breakthrough comparable with, say, the discovery of synthetic dyes or wireless telegraphy. He adds that 'the early stages of the Industrial Revolution - roughly up to 1800 - were based very largely on using medieval techniques and on extending these to their limits'.
Why were the British first in the field? No one explanation will work, for it is next to impossible to find a single characteristic peculiar to the British economy. Was it perhaps the excellent communications, both natural and man-made? The Dutch Republic was equal if not superior natural and man-made? The Dutch Republic was equal if not superior expertise, the integrated money market, the advanced commercial agriculture, the flexible social structure, the religious toleration, the relative immunity from war-damage? Here too the Dutch were at least equal and several other European countries boasted at least some of these factors. Was it the availability of raw materials, especially coal and iron ore (which the Dutch lacked)? Yet Belgium and several parts of western and central Germany were equally favoured. And so on. Perhaps a combination of all these advantages was needed to achieve the critical mass. 137
=== need a system view here: a co-evolution of elements enables non-linear effects.
can we talk about a "network" effect here? [re-]sources, tools, distribution, control ( financial, physical), suitable payloads, demand ( see below).
was on the demand ;ide that the British were so special. As Neil McKendrick has stated firmly in a seminal study, 'There was a consumer revolution in eighteenthcentury England. More men and \\'omt.n than ever before in human history enjoyed the experience of acquiring material possessions ... <'hat in the past had been seen as luxuries now became 'decencies' and what had been decencies now became necessities. The work of McKendrick, Sir rohn Plumb, Roy Porter and John Brewer has shown how eighteenthcentury Britain, and especially eighteenth-century England, was increasingly gripped by a rage for spending which transformed the economy. 138
..Jike most contemporaries, Owen did not make the econonetrician's fine distinctions between various forms of wealth creation. What he saw was an expansion of the British economy proceeding so fast and so far as to justify revolutionary status, even if he did not use the phrase 'industrial revolution'. He looked around him and saw paupers going from rags to riches in just a few years. In Lancashire in 1780 it was recorded that within a single decade 'a poor man not worth £ 5, now keeps his carriage and servants, is become Lord of a Manor, and has purchased an estate of £20,000'. Significantly, Owen also linked thIs material prosperity to political stability and military success.
=== why all of a sudden social mobility?
property rights, personal rights, information.
te need for fallow resulted in low ?roductivity. But as the great majority of Europeans relied on cereals for their subsistence, rhc:y wt:rc obliged to devote a high percentage of their land to arable farming. That necessarily meant that only a low percentage could be devoted to pasture and the maintenance of livestock, which in turn limited the amount of manure available. And that necessiIted leaving the land fallow every second or third year, which brings us back to low productivity and square one.
This circle could be broken, indeed it had been broken in many places in north-west Europe before 1700. It could be broken, first by planting crops on the fallow land which not only did not exhaust the soil but actually rejuvenated it by putting back precious nitrogen.
leclally clover. The 1st-named were the most effective because they could be stored and used as forage for additional livestock during the winter months. In articular, roots and hay could be used to promote stall-feeding, which In turn facilitated the collection of manure, the maximization of its benefits and the reduction of the need for fallow. In other words, the 1fernal circle could not only be arrested, it could be put into reverse. 145
Arthur Young, 1771. Although he did not use he word 'revolution', that in effect W,lb what he was describing. During the previous two generations, he observed, the agriculture of Norfolk in particular had been transformed. This he ascribed to seven reasons:
. enclosures · the use of marl (a kind of soil consisting principally of clay mixed with carbonate of lime, forming a loose unconsolidated mass, valuable as a fertilizer) · new rotations . turnips . clover and rye-grass · long leases · 'By the country being divided chiefly into large farms' 147
t IS no accident that the most lnnovative regions were also among the most productive. Literate cultivators found it easier to gain access to the rapidly growing body of literature and to give the lie to Voltaire's quip that, 'Many useful publicatIons are written about agriculture and everyone reads them, with the exception of the peasants.'
However, knowledge of what to do and how to do it was only the first, and by no means the most difficult, step.
=== invention vs innovation
This reluctance and/or inability of the French state to press ahead fVith the abolition of communal rights, and thus to permit enterprising cultivators to enclose their land, provide an excellent illustration of the narrow limits within which the absolutist state in practice operated. It was in constitutional, parliamentary Britain that real action that ma:: a real difference was taken. This was because the British Parliament represented the landed interest of the country.
=== long-term control system that allows for a greater degree of dynamic adjustment
The potato was also less vulnerable to adverse weather than most other staple foodstuffs. As we have seen in Chapter 2, for the early modern European, it was not so much a question of whether a cereal harvest would fail as of when. A community that could fall back on potatoes when this happened was a community that had freed itself from the threat of famine. As rhe Englishman John Forster claimed in a pamphlet of r664, the potato was 'a sure and easy remedy' for food shortages. 155
=== a higher degree of orchestration required for organizing rotation, harvesting, animal feeding, etc.
ibraries across Europe are stuffed with eighteenth-century volurnes dedicated to agriculture, describing - with varying degrees of indignation - its current deficiencies and explaining ri th varying degrees of realism - how it might be improved. Both reflecting and encouraging debate were the numerous periodicals dedicated to the subject, as well as those aimed at enlightening the cultivators. 188
Agronomists seeking to raise the status of agriculture and the Peasant received powerful support from one of the most original and influential minds of the period. This was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in I749 experienced a Pauline moment of conversion when a sudden flash of insight revealed that despite its superficial attractions, urban civilization had alienated humankind from its natural rural roots.
== cf the role of architect in the 15th, 16th centuries.
also, scientist vs artisan; doctor vs barber.
emergence of the educated class.
During those three centuries, three crucial axioms were formed: first, politics came to be regarded as a discrete realm, independent of theology; secondly, the supreme authority in any polity came to be regarded as independent of any international agency such as the papacy or Holy Roman Empire; and thirdly, that authority also claimed a monopoly of legislation and allegiance within its borders. 287
=== formation of additional local institutions ( control mechanisms )
== complexity - control?
In the more medium term, military developments made a powerful contribution to the development of the state. As Otto Hintze observed: War is the great fly-wheel of the whole political activity of the modern state.' 289
Recruiting, financing and deploying these great hordes naturally led to a corresponding expansion in the powers of the state. We have already seen how the relationship between rulers and elites was influenced by the process. 291
=== large scale operations require standardization ( prussian army )
atever reservations have to be made about individual rulers' enlightenment, or lack of it, the obstinate fact remains that most educated people in most countries believed that Kant was right, and that they were indeed living in an age of enlightenment. 295
If the state was one master-noun of eighteenth-century political discourse, the nation was another. Indeed, as a source of inspiration, it was rhe more potent. For although the state was an ambitious, omnivorous, hyperactive agent, the blood it sent pulsing round the body politic was very much on the thin side.
lost Europeans found it difficult to work up much nthusiasm for such an abstract entity. The nation, on the other hand, )roved to be brimful with motivating force, for it triggered both positive lnd negative responses in a self-generating dialectical progression. For every virtue a nationalist ascribed to his own national group, there was a corresponding vice to be denigrated in the 'other' against which national identity was defined. Moreover, this was a two-way process, because the nationalist believed that the other both failed to give credit where it was due and refused to recognize its own shortcomings.
=== religion was no longer a uniting ideology ( vernacular literacy vs. latin )
.t the top end, the elitism of educated Europeans was well put by Frederick the Great in a famous letter to d'Alembert in I770. He asked the latter to imagine a state with a population of ten million, from which one would have to exclude at once all peasants, labourers, artisans and soldiers, leaving around 50,000 of both sexes. Once all the women had been excluded, together with all stupid and unimaginative males, one would be left with, at best, around a thousand people capable of intellectual activity - and even among this tIny group there would be marked differences of ability. So, he coneluded, there was just no point in trying to educate mankind [sic], indeed it would be positively dangerous. All one could safely do was to content oneself with being wise, taking good care to keep the mob under control but abandoning them to their ignorance and stupidity.
== elitism and focus on personality. associate with the fundamental attribution error (?)
lS the number of public spaces proliferated during this period, so did opportunities for the exchange of information, ideas and criticism. An exemplar was the coffee-house. Within fifty years of the founding of the first in Europe - in Venice in 1645 - it had spread across the COntInent, reaching London in the early 1650s. By 1659 Samuel Pepys could record that he had been to the Turk's Head coffee-house in New Palace Yard, close to Parliament, and had heard 'exceeding good argument agaInst Mr Harrington's assertion that overbalance of propriety [property] was the foundation of government'.
== communications - compare with "material" communications, as an entry point.
n 1706 a French visitor reported that 'there is an incredible degree of liberty in these places, where not only generals and ministers but even the emperor are torn to shreds'. Things had not changed a generation later, when an observer found 'every kind of discussion of current affairs and loud-mouths sounding forth about the actions and plans of great sovereigns and a thousand-and-one other bits of political business'. Attempts by the city government to control them could not prevent their continuing proliferation.
![[User Picture]](http://lj.rossia.org/userpic/3318/2147484044) | | | newspapers, social network | (Link) |
|
rhe coffee-houses were important centres of recreation, with cardgames, chess and billiards being played, often for money. Also very opular in bringing in customers was the supply of newspapers and periodicals. Cesar de Saussure reported from London in 1727: 'What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses are the gazettes and other public papers. All Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. · . Nothing is more entertaining than hearing men of this class disc LlSsmg politics and topics of interest concerning royalty.'
| | | public sphere. social network | (Link) |
|
The coffee-house was only one kind of social space that reached its first flowering in the eighteenth century. Also important were the various forms of reading clubs discussed below in Chapter IO; voluntary associations such as literary and musical societies; and Masonic lodge:' Modern Freemasonry was the creation of the eighteenth century, dating from the founding of the Grand Lodge of England in London in 1717. From there it spread with amazing speed until, by the late eighteenth century, there was no town in Europe of any importance without at least one lodge. In England by the end of the century there were more than 500 lodges, 140 of which were in London, figures which include only those affiliated to the Grand Lodge, so the real total was appreciably higher. In ::rance there were more than 700 lodges by 1789, including about 70 in Paris, with a total membership of at least 50,000, representing perhaps as much as 5 per cent of the urban adult male population.
== masonic lodges as a threat to the existing powers.
| | | Re: public sphere. social network | (Link) |
|
332
| | | quote, selection, expression | (Link) |
|
To paraphrase George Orwell, who observed that the best books are those that tell us what we know already, legitimate public opinion is what confirms our own opinion. Unfortunately for enlightened intellectuals, more often than not 'the people' proved to be not just unenlightened but positively reactionary, just as likely to riot against attempts to remove discrimination against Jews or Catholics as to demonstrate in favour of 'Wilkes and Liberty!'
== marginal to the forefront ( Heidegger)
| | | contradiction, dilemma | (Link) |
|
At the heart of Bonaparte's success, therefore, was his ability to combine two apparently irreconcilable ideals: liberty and order. He managed this trick by giving the semblance of liberty but the reality of order. Behind the revolutionary rhetoric lay an autocratic will far stronger than anything an old regime monarch could boast. To rform this feat, he relied on plebiscites, ideally suited to his purpose, for they allowed foregone conclusions to be presented as popular choices.
== control and manipulation.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is not difficult to appreciate why the Jesuits were so hated and so vulnerable. As the complementary principles 0£ state sovereignty and nationalism developed, so did the order's vow of absolute obedience to the papacy become increasingly offensive to the secular powers. As a mainly urban order, whose members frequently moved from place to place, country to country and even continent to continent, it had failed to put down the deep regional roots that made the older monastic orders so resilient. Rich, powerful, privileged and secretive, its apparently over-mighty members naturally attracted hostility from outsiders, including members of other religious orders.
| | | s-curve: religion->science->tools->technology | (Link) |
|
The interaction between a growing knowledge of the world outside Europe and attitudes to religion inside it can be illustrated particularly well by Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, one of the great bestsellers of the century, first published in 1719. Shipwrecked on his desert island, Crusoe at once set about making the best of it: 'as reason is the substance and original of mathematics, so by stating and squaring every thing by reason, and by making the most rational judgment of things, Very man may be in time master of every mechanick art'.
| | | Mozart - Beethoven contrast. | (Link) |
|
the course of the eighteenth an,d early nineteenth centuries, culture shed its representational or recreational function to become a sacralized activity to be worshipped in its own right. One clue is provided by comparing and contrasting two funerals dating from the late eighteenth Ind early nineteenth centuries. No one knows exactly when Mozart was burried, not even the day. He died in Vienna at I a.m. on 5 December 791, according to his widow, Constanze. At 3 p.m. on the following jay or on the day after that (accounts conflict).
How different was the treatment of Beethoven thirty-six years later. When he died in Vienna at around 5.45 p.m. on Monday, 26 March 1827, his friends had already selected an appropriate plot in the Wahring cemetery. 522.
'art of the explanation for the very different obsequial treatments accorded to Mozart and Beethoven lies in the establishment of art in general, and music in particular, as an independent, autonomous source If value and authority in human society. 523
=== is it due to diffusion and specialization? would be interesting to look at it from an economic value perspective.
| | | art vs technology: the leisure class | (Link) |
|
It was in the eighteenth century that 'art' acquired its modern meaning. For Dr Johnson, 'art' still meant skill, as in 'the art of boiling sugar', tlthough by this time it was becoming established that 'the fine arts', 'elegant arts' or 'arts of taste' could be distinguished from 'necessary', 'mechanical' or 'useful' arts.
was from the Germans that the English 'Oak the belief that literature, the visual arts and music possessed some common quality that raised them above technology.
eviewing what had happened since r648, two opposing kinds of narrative might be constructed. The first could be labelled 'progressive' and 'optimistic' and might be presented as follows: in 1648 the belief that the earth was the centre of the universe was almost universal; by 1815 it had been discredited even in the most conservative circles (Pope Benedict XIV lifted the ban on heliocentric works in 1757). In I648 prayers were said and church bells were rung to ward off electrical storms; by 18 I 5 lightning conductors were being installed. In 1648 heretics and witches were being burnt across Europe; by IBI5 it was their accusers who found themselves in the dock. The dominant leitmotiv was expansion, for this was a period when popuIation, literacy, towns, ease of communication, voluntary associations, economic activity, overseas empires - just to mention a few of the tastier items from a much longer menu of possibilities - all grew. It was also a period when humankind made the decisive breakthrough from the feudal world of the society of orders, the domination of landed wealth and authoritarian government to classes, capitalism and democracy, for it witnessed both the American and French Revolutions and the beginning of the industrial revolution.
| | | beautiful moment, do not pass away! | (Link) |
|
But there is also more than enough material to support quite a different kind of exercise, which might be labelled 'conservative' and 'pessimistic'. This would draw attention to the superficial nature of much of the apparent change and the illusory quality of much of the apparent achievement. At the end of the period, the land-owning elites were still firmly in charge of even the most advanced countries, the overwhelming l11ajority of Europeans were still illiterate peasants, superstition was still rife and a major religious revival was underway.
As for the 'agricultural revolution', 'commercial revolution' and 'industrial revolution', they were not revolutions at all, just labels attached retrospectively to an evolutionary process. The changes that had Ol"curred had been for the worse: states were more ,ntrusive, more demanding and more despotic; armies were bigger and more destructive; for the..' poor, work in the 'dark satanic mills' and life in f he mushrooming shanty towns was even nastier and more brutish than in the past. e emancipation offered by the Enlightenment had urned out to be a chimera, being merely the exchange of one kind of (ranny for another and opening the gates that led to the totalitarianism and genocide of the twentieth century.Ioreover, the period had ended in the tWenty-three years of a world war that in terms of loss of life and suffering put every revious European conflict in the shade. 677 | |
![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/imported-profile.gif){kind=small}