Shocks and aftershocks
3: Freedom for the wolves.
Between 1789 and 1860, Europe was transformed. Industrialisation and liberal economics fused into a kind of new feudalism.
The clockwork economy of Adam Smith and his successors
quickly failed. The seven decades between 1798 and the middle of the 19th
century produced massive wealth for a few but, for the vast majority, little
but upheaval, squalor and desperation.
And there were many more people in that new and massive
underclass. The agricultural and industrial revolutions happened first in
Britain and underwrote a century of expansion, imperial conquest and wealth.
Between 1800 and 1860, Britain’s population increased by 169% and Germany’s by
101%. France lagged: its lack of population growth stunted its economy and
probably, in turn, contributed to the political and social dislocations that
followed a quarter-century of crippling war.
In the new world – the United States, Canada, Australia and
New Zealand – population growth fed by mass immigration sent population and
economic growth soaring.
Underlying all this were the massive changes in agriculture
and industry that propelled the first-mover, Britain, into a position of global
leadership that it retained until the first world war.
At the beginning of the century, Britain was still a
primarily agricultural society. By 1860, that had been transformed into an
industrial titan: it, like China now, became the workshop of the world. The old
rural way of life depended on small, mostly independent farmers and local
gentry. With the enclosures of the common lands and the consolidation of
smallholdings by landlords, the gentry prospered. New generations found more
interesting lives in the towns and cities, visiting their large country estates
less often and losing touch with the people who remained there.
But fewer did remain. Previously independent small farmers
became either tenants of the rent-demanding landowners, or were forced off of
the land altogether. The number of agricultural labourers increased, but far
more slowly than the population. After the turn of the century, huge numbers
moved to the new industrial towns to work in mills and mines. The cheaply-built
tenements which were built to house them formed vast industrial slums that
became synonymous with the Victorian era.
The new economy needed huge amounts of food for its people
and fibre for its cotton and woollen mills but, though agricultural production
had increased, Britain and Europe were unable to supply more than a fraction.
Much of that came from the United States which, by 1860, had expanded across
the continent. The vast and productive prairies into food production and the
southern states into cotton.
It was all achieved at appalling human cost in dispossession
of native Americans and the enslavement, by the outbreak of the civil war, of
four million people.
The vast wealth being generated on both sides of the
Atlantic brought little benefit to the majority of the population. Even by
1860, 68% of the British population were living in extreme poverty, unable to
afford the most basic levels of food and shelter. The US and Australia did
better, at least on paper, but the economies of both countries relied
significantly on forced labour: slaves in America, convicts in Australia.
At first glance, the new economy improved outcomes. In the
newly industrialised countries, there was now enough food to go around.
Britain’s current nutrition guidelines say an average adult needs between 2,000
and 2,500 calories a day; by 1860 that was achieved – on average.
But averages can be misleading. In Britain and France by
1860, two-thirds of the population did not have enough to eat and went without
basic shelter.
This is the result of the theories of economic liberalism
framed by Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. There was no sign of
the promised benevolent, egalitarian society in which wealth was distributed
efficiently and fairly.
But the ultimate failure of liberalism lay in its attitude
to government. Without determined and effective government intervention, these
aspirations could not be achieved. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
cruelty and injustice caused by liberal laissez-faire economics.
“The request of industry to government is as modest as that
of Diogenes to Alexander: Get out of my light,” said Bentham.
But that destructive idea has persisted into our own time.
“Freedom for the wolves,” said the 20th century philosopher, Isiah
Berlin, “has often meant death to the sheep”.
The principle of utilitarianism for which Bentham is most
remembered – that society should be organised to secure the greatest good for
the greatest number – was fundamentally incompatible with his notions of
non-intervention by government. Laissez-faire spectacularly failed to
deliver the greatest good to anyone but those with the fewest numbers.
Liberalism also fumbled social policy. There was a revulsion
at the situation faced by the majority of the population, particularly in
Britain but in other modernising countries too. It was manifest in the novels
of Charles Dickens, beginning with Oliver Twist in 1837, but the
procession of apparently progressive laws made little difference to the way
most people lived.
Instead, the emphasis was on mitigating the worst excesses,
rather than addressing underlying causes. The slave trade was made illegal
throughout the British empire as early as 1807 but was not finally ended within
its colonies until 1838. Political reform broadened the franchise from the
landowning nobility to a wider range of newly-prosperous industrialists and
professionals but remained the province of the upper echelons. Control of some
of the worst and most dangerous elements of mining and factory employment was
attempted, but the rules were sporadically enforced. Education Acts did not end
child labour but required children to go to school as well.
Some things improved. The new economy needed a workforce
that could read and add up; literacy and numeracy improved along with
industrialisation, even if living conditions of most people did not.
And when the majority of the population were able to read,
they were able to access new ideas on economics, society and fairness. In 1847,
Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, but socialism gained
traction only towards the century’s end. The power of the working class was yet
to be felt.
The hunger for self-determination evolved more quickly at
the national level. The Congress of Vienna, steered by the reactionary Austrian
chancellor, Klemens Metternich, attempted to restore Europe to the way it was
before 1789. Repression led, in 1848, to liberal revolutions throughout Europe
and, as is usual with failed revolutions, led in turn to conservative
crackdown.
But change was coming. By March 1861 the unification of
Italy was complete, with a new liberal constitution. Prussia, under Otto von
Bismarck, fought three wars to secure predominance in central Europe: against
Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870). And on 18 January 1871, at
the Palace of Versailles, the German Reich was proclaimed.
Once again, the pace of change dramatically increased. The
period around 1860 brought massive transformation to Europe and the world.
In Australia and California, gold rushes created
unprecedented wealth, migration and social dislocation. Between 1851 and 1871,
Australia’s population quadrupled. The Californian rush, a decade earlier,
doubled the population and led to the admission of California to the union as a
state.
By 1855, British colonies in Australia and Canada achieved
self-government. Convict transportation ended.
In 1857, a mutiny of the Bengal Army turned into a
full-scale war through northern and central India. The next year, the British
parliament abolished the East India Company, ending the corporate outsourcing
of empire and beginning a new era of state-owned colonisation.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species,
initiating perhaps the greatest shift in humanity’s view of itself since
Nicolaus Copernicus three hundred years earlier. In 1861, Czar Alexander II
emancipated Russia’s serfs but failed to provide a new economic base for them.
Resentment among these poorest peasants continued and built.
In that year also, the southern slave states of America
seceded and the civil war began. After five years of bloodletting, horror and
despair, slavery ended. For a short while, a genuine freedom seemed possible.
Stephen Vincent Benét wrote:
Bury the bygone South.
Bury the minstrel with the
honey-mouth,
Bury the broadsword virtues of the
clan,
Bury the unmachined, the planter’s
pride,
The courtesy and the bitter
arrogance,
The pistol-hearted horsemen who
could ride
Like jolly centaurs under the hot
stars.
Bury the whip, bury the
branding-bars,
Bury the unjust thing.
It was another of liberalism’s false dawns. White backlash
in the South and political expediency in the North created the Jim Crow era
that kept Black Americans savagely repressed for another hundred years.
Meanwhile, the Union’s five-year blockade of southern ports
prevented cotton getting to the mills of Lancashire and, in an era without
effective welfare provisions, created a devastating cotton famine. A new cotton
industry sprang up in Egypt and, while the war lasted, almost all Egyptian
agricultural output was devoted to that single crop.
Despite the privation in Lancashire, cotton workers
supported Lincoln and his stand against slavery. A message to the president
from a mass meeting in Manchester spoke of the hope that “the erasure of that
foul blot on civilisation and Christianity – chattel slavery – will cause
the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity.”
Until now, progressive reform had been granted, slowly and
ineffectively, by those with power and wealth. The pressure was now coming from
the bottom, the great mass of the people who had always been left out of the
equation.
But for the next fifty years, Liberalism remained ascendant.
Fundamental change would wait until a cataclysmic war tore Europe apart and
slaughtered a generation.
NEXT: 4: And then the world ended. As the 19th century progressed, reforms were minor and grudging, doing little for the great mass of the people. Finally, in 1914, the edifice collapsed.