Admiration for Britain was not new. At the close of the eighteenth century a traveller, the geologist Barthélemy Faujas-Saint-Fond, marvelled at the excellence of British products, such as leather, beer, and, above all, Wedgwood earthenware (known in France as fayance anglaise), which, deservedly in his view, had become universally available from Paris to St Petersburg, in Holland, Sweden, Spain, and Italy.89 He even mentioned the excellent dinner he had enjoyed at the Royal Society, though he was puzzled and a little upset by the lack of napkins, amazed by the terrible coffee, and alarmed by the huge consumption of port.90
Admiration for England, as virtually all continentals called the United Kingdom, was as strong as ever fifty years later. In 1845, as Britain was poised to repeal the Corn Laws, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, future Prime Minister of a united Italy, but then a simple deputy in the parliament of the Kingdom of Sardinia, wrote:
The commercial revolution which is now taking place in England … will have a mighty impact on the Continent. By opening up the richest market in the world to foodstuffs, it will encourage their production … The need to provide for regular foreign demand will arouse the energy of these agricultural industries … Trade will then become an essential element in the prosperity of the agrarian classes, who will then naturally tend to join the supporters of the liberal system.91
Fifteen years earlier, the liberal economist Giuseppe Pecchio, in exile in England (he died in Brighton in 1835), wrote in his Osservazioni semi-serie di un esule sull’Inghilterra (Semi-serious Observations of an Exile in England, translated into English in 1833) that ‘There is scarcely a single nation in Europe which is not in her debt for the protection afforded’, and that everything in England was better, including the roads and the canals, for there were more of them than in the rest of Europe put together’ and ‘more civilization’. Even the lunatic asylums were better, including Bedlam, which was ‘vast and sumptuous’.92
In the Italian intelligentsia, Anglophilia was the default position even after the unification of the country and particularly among the more conservative elements. After all, Britain had managed to be both rich and free and had changed gradually, unlike the French, who were in regular upheaval. The jurist Domenico Zanichelli constantly compared Britain favourably to France and Italy. In an 1883 lecture he celebrated the ‘great spectacle’ offered by Britain, ‘the only European state where revolutionary doctrines did not succeed in establishing themselves, the only one which Napoleon could not defeat; all of this contributed to push the people towards orderly freedom’.93 In another lecture, in 1886, in the presence of the King and Queen of Italy, he declared that ‘Constitutional development in England is quite different from that of France, and history shows us that the English system is by far better than that of France’.94
The more developed countries offered the ‘backward’ countries of Europe, those on the ‘periphery’, an economic challenge and an opportunity: rapidly industrializing countries became importers of raw material and agricultural produce, and ‘backward’ countries could become exporters of raw materials, thus joining in world trade.95 However, the countries of eastern Europe were not equipped to take up such a challenge; precisely because they were backward, they had no adequate institutional and economic frameworks, suffered from the persistence of feudal customs, lacked a sound financial system, had poor education, and no unified national market. Their elites were split between modernizers and traditionalists.96 Eastern European countries remained behind western Europe before the First World War, between the wars, under communism, and after the fall of communism.97
The problem is not just one of industrial development. Not all the more advanced countries were industrialized. The United States, for example, was a major exporter of food, and Australia, not usually classified as a laggard, was and has remained largely an exporter of primary products. The problem is that the ‘laggard’ countries of eastern Europe were backward as agricultural producers too. And if they managed to export agricultural produce (as Romania and Hungary did with their grain), they only strengthened a backward agricultural sector ready eventually to be eclipsed by the higher agricultural productivity of advanced countries.
The case of Hungary was emblematic. The country (part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) saw a great spurt towards industrialization only in the late 1880s with annual growth rates of 6–7 per cent.98 Leading sectors were all in heavy industry, usually connected to the railways, public works, armaments, and therefore connected to the state-induced demand.99 The main export, however, was wheat and, indeed, the years before 1875 were years of relative prosperity for wheat growers (who were seldom the small farmers). In the 1880s and 1890s Budapest was, next to Minneapolis, the second-largest flour-milling centre in the world.100 Since there was money in wheat, other crops and sheep farming were abandoned whenever possible in favour of wheat. Then disaster struck: improvements in transportation and cultivation (such as railroad building in North America and commercial steam shipping) made American wheat far cheaper than that of Hungary. By the 1890s the cost of producing wheat in Hungary was 30 per cent above that of the United States. When international prices dropped by almost 50 per cent, poorer Hungarian farmers were hit badly. There followed the gradual abandonment of the land by the better-educated sons of the better off. It was the same story in Romania (see Chapter 4). And since the best jobs available were in the public sector and above all in the state bureaucracy, this is where they went. The larger and better-organized landlords formed pressure groups lobbying the state for tariffs to protect them against foreign wheat.101 Once again ideology was trumped by sheer necessity. Sándor Wekerle (Finance Minister from 1887 to 1892 and then thrice Prime Minister of Hungary) was a liberal and committed to laissez-faire, but when he faced the beginnings of the agrarian crisis, admitted that ‘Agriculture is unable to intensify production. The population is increasing and the excess can be absorbed only if the state is ready to intervene.’102
By 1914, Hungarian agriculture in output per capita was roughly the same as the rest of western Europe, albeit with lower productivity, and per capita industrial production was roughly the same as Italy.103 Unlike Italy, however, Hungary was not a sovereign state but part of an empire, though integrated in a market of 40 to 50 million people.104 The advantages of being part of a wider market (such as the European Union) at the expense of some loss in sovereignty would be constantly debated.
Each country entered modernity in its own way, though not always at a time of its own choosing; at times internal forces were dominant, at others external pressures were decisive.
So, if there were no well-trodden paths to follow, no recipe for success, no models to imitate, how was one to drag one’s country into the era of so-called modernity, however and whoever defines modernity? Until it is well entrenched, modernity has few friends, but these are often powerful enough to be able to use force to drag the recalcitrant majority onto the path of the new. The operation is made easier by the relative lack of democracy that generally precedes the establishment of capitalism. It is, after all, rare that industrialization can advance without some human suffering. Or, as Marx put it, rather melodramatically: capital comes ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’.105 In eighteenth-century Britain, common land was forcibly enclosed by landlords. Money was made by transporting slaves to the Americas to pick the cotton that made Lancashire manufacturers rich (including Friedrich Engels’s family firm, Baumwollspinnerei Ermen & Engels, which had cotton mills in Manchester and Oldham as well as in North Rhine-Westphalia). Much of this cotton cloth was then sold to India, which before the Industrial Revolution had been the main exporter of cotton. Landless peasants made their way to insalubrious cities where work could be found in the new factories. Others went across oceans to settle in what were colonies or former colonies – like the United States. More violence ensued as the native population in the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa was exterminated or marginalized. The process of
industrial growth was not accompanied by anything resembling full democracy – not in Britain in the 1830s, not in Russia in the 1930s, not in China in the 1980s and 1990s, not in Japan before 1945, not in Taiwan before 1996, not in South Korea before 1987, or in South Africa until 1994, and not in Spain until the end of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s.
In all instances industrialization was guided from above by elites, sometimes enlightened and sometimes not, but often acting, in the words of Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, a French specialist on Russia writing in 1881, with the vanguard spirit of members of the Russian nobility:
The Russian nobility behaved like a General Staff who, impatient to rush ahead, launches into a gallop without looking back. Meanwhile its army, carrying its baggage and pulling its carriages is left behind, stuck in muddy marches, or tangled in the underbrush, deaf to the calls of the trumpet or clarion … So the elites of Russian society hurled themselves forward. Attracted by the fascinating lights of civilization, they rushed towards Europe, leaving the stragglers behind without a thought for those unable to follow, as if the whole country had been conscripted in its armed ranks, as if the whole of Russia shared the same goal as the world of St Petersburg.106
The Russian reformers were too precipitate, going much faster than the country was ready for. Yet they were not entirely wrong. Industrialization was more a matter of politics than economics. And examples mattered. When Britain began on the road to industrialization, it may have been the most democratic country in Europe, but this ‘democracy’ involved just, at best, the middle classes. The common people, as they were called, were not involved, even tangentially, in the business of political decision-making. It was only in the last decades of the nineteenth century that it would become difficult, though not impossible, for any European country to industrialize without seeking some kind of popular support (not necessarily through the electoral process). The people would have to be involved not just in the construction of an industrial society but of a national community.
How such a national community could be formed became a major political issue in the decades preceding the First World War. Various strategies were pursued. The most obvious was available only to the wealthiest countries: distributing rapidly the gains of industrialization by a rapid improvement in consumption. The conditions of existence in even the most prosperous European countries were low for the majority of the population, though in countries such as Britain, Germany, Belgium, and France the skilled working class was well on the way to becoming part of the system. On the whole, however, people would have to be harnessed to the capitalist project by ideological means as well as by material prosperity, by making the people feel they were part of a common project and also by establishing or reinforcing the limits to capitalist exploitation, such as the length of the working day, promoting public health, welfare, and free education – what we now call the welfare state. This, as we shall see in greater detail in Part Three, developed with greater intensity in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Other ways of constructing a national community were deployed: nationalism, which sought to embrace every citizen; the acquisition of colonies, which provided not only national pride but also markets, a focus for emigration, and state-subsidized jobs; and, finally, the development of democratic structures subject to some form of popular control. Democracy, welfarism, nationalism, and imperialism thus became part of the capitalist project. The consumer society was yet to come. Even in Britain it took a long time for the benefits of industrial growth to trickle down to the wider population.
Eventually, capitalism extended its dominion over the globe. The cosmopolitan tendencies of capitalism had been noted by Marx and Engels as early as 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, when they declared:
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations … National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible …107
But laggards also have advantages. In a relatively brief period of time they can use what others have invented or perfected over many decades. Thus Japan and Germany eventually caught up with the leading countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, partly thanks to borrowed technologies. Great Britain was no longer the pioneer in agricultural technology. Land productivity increased rapidly in Denmark and the Netherlands (dairy farming), in Germany (potatoes and sugar beet), and in the USA, thanks to the mechanization of agriculture. All these were economies where peasant owners – the champions of the principle of property rights – dominated.108 Between 1840 and 1910 productivity in American agriculture had doubled, as did that of Sweden and Switzerland. Germany, an agricultural laggard in 1840 (in European terms), had surpassed Britain by 1910, but Russian agricultural productivity had barely improved.109
The truth of the matter is that the economic development of a country does not depend just on the country itself but on the entire world economy, including those countries that remain under-developed. How good you are depends also on how bad the others are. Moreover, the pioneers, by the mere fact of being first, alter the environment of others and often, at least in the short term, for the worse. As Marx and Engels explained in their early work, The German Ideology (1846):
the more the original isolation of the separate nationalities is destroyed … the more history becomes world-history … Thus, for instance, if in England a machine is invented which in India or China deprives countless workers of bread, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires, this invention becomes a world-historical fact.110
Such a view of global interconnectedness had already been noted by Immanuel Kant: ‘The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere.’111 Fifty years later this had become a familiar theme, at least among specialists. The Austrian statistician Franz Xaver von Neumann-Spallart, writing in 1887, explained:
It is becoming ever more apparent that the economic condition of individual nations is determined by their dependence on all other nations, to which they are connected by countless ties … Today the course of trade in general is being decided outside the continental boundaries of Europe; it is being decided on one side of the far west, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other side in the far east …112
In 1891 the Reverend William Cunningham, President of the Economic Science and Statistics Section of the British Association, in his address entitled ‘Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Economics’ pointed out that at least in England:
We no longer contemplate isolation from the rest of the globe; we only grumble because other people interpose barriers which check free commercial intercourse between all parts of the known world … We have given up all idea that the nation should be self-sufficing … we regard England as part of a greater whole … as one portion of a cosmopolitan economic organism …113
This unambiguously extolled celebration of interdependence in a globalized world, one century before the term globalization would become commonplace, entailed a vision of a future nationless capitalism: ‘patriotism is left out of sight, and capital is invested wherever there is an apparent promise of profits’. ‘Capital tends to minimize the differences between nations …’ noted Cunningham, and he added (almost echoing the famous concluding words of the Communist Manifesto): ‘There thus comes to be a class sympathy between wage-earners in many lands, such as has never existed before in the history of the world.’114
Equally optimistic was Gustave Hervé, then a French socialist politician, who in 1910 pointed out that the development of science and communication (railways, steamships, and telegraph) in the second half of the nineteenth century had created a situation in which goods, capital, and people could circulate freely, cheaply, and securely, as if with a touch of a magic wand, and borders just seemed like a grotesque anachronism.115
Jean Jaurès,
the French socialist leader, was equally aware that capital was becoming a free-floating system, able to transcend national boundaries. In a speech in December 1911 he explained that capital has ‘the speed of movement, the freedom of flight of large migratory birds’, adding ‘… over the frontiers of races and customs barriers industrial and financial capitalism cooperate in unison’.116
But what neither Cunningham, Marx, Jaurès, nor Hervé said was that potential class sympathy and internationalism were constantly undermined by the reality of international competition. (Two years later Hervé jettisoned socialism, turned into a rabid nationalist and, after the war, into a fascist.) Lower wages in one part of the world, though sometimes leading to an improvement in the conditions of life of local workers, might cause unemployment or force down wages elsewhere. This was perfectly clear to contemporaries. Thus Giovanni Dalla Vecchia, an Italian commentator writing in the liberal periodical The Contemporary Review about the bread riots in April 1898 in southern Italy, attributed their cause not just to taxation, political corruption, or even the failure to colonize Ethiopia, but also to the rise in the price of bread, itself a consequence of a distant event: ‘the Hispano-American war’.117
Writing in the 1880s, Charles Booth noted the changes that had come over the population of Clerkenwell in central London. ‘Half a century or so ago,’ he wrote in his Life and Labour of the People in London, the local industries ‘… – watch and clock-making, gold-beating, diamond-cutting, and the manufacture of jewellery – were in a flourishing condition, and throughout this district masters and journeymen worked and lived in prosperity’. The trade was almost all carried out in private houses with the manufacturers living on the premises and having a workshop in the rear or in the basement. ‘Now this is much changed. Under the stress of cheap foreign production the Clerkenwell trade has steadily declined.’ The masters and their artisans had left, their place taken by ‘a lower class’: ‘policemen, postmen and warehousemen at the top, casual labourers at the bottom’.118
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