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Iron making in England.
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Europeans had thought India, China and other countries in East Asia to be lands of wealth. The Asians were, in fact, close to the Europeans in standards of living. India's textile workers in the 1700s had a standard of living equal to that of British workers. This was due to a productive agriculture. Abundant food production kept the price of food low, and cheaper food raised standards of living.
Asian agriculture was producing harvests twenty times the amount of seed planted, while Europe harvests were only eight or less. The Asians were growing rice, and rice took nutrients from water rather than soil. Asians were not leaving land lie fallow as were the Europeans. And farmers in China were impressing visitors from Europe by their ability to get as many as three harvests a year from the same plot of land.
The year 1750 was pre-industrial. Hand and arm muscles were still much involved in manufacturing, and that year India was producing 24.5 percent of the world's manufactured goods. China was producing 32.8 percent. Britain (the United Kingdom), already the leading nation in commerce and technology, was manufacturing per capita around 140 percent of what India was manufacturing, and 125 percent of what China was manufacturing, but given the greater populations of India and China, Britain's total production of manufactured goods was much less than theirs. The British in 1750 were producing only 1.9 percent of the world's share of manufactured goods.[note]
In the early 1800s, India, China and other Asian countries were not maintaining their share of the total manufacturing in the world. In 1800, India's share had slipped to 19.7 percent, and by 1830 to 17.6 percent. China's share in 1800 was up slightly from 1750, at 33.3 percent but down in 1830 to 29.8 percent. Britain's share had risen to 4.3 percent in 1800 and 9.5 percent in 1830. The U.S. share in 1800 was 0.8 percent, and in 1830 it had risen to 2.4 percent. By the end of the nineteenth century, India would have only a 1.7 percent share of the world's manufacturing, China 6.2 percent, Britain 18.5 percent, and the U.S. 23.6 percent (with the U.S. only 69 percent of Britain in per capita manufacturing). [note]
In China - as in India - the abundance in food production had been accompanied by a surge in population growth. By 1800, people in China were moving to lands less suited to high agricultural productivity. Around 80 percent of the people remained in agricultural areas, and more people brought more unemployment. But more important in China not keeping up with the West was its lack of people with both money and interest in investing in technology. In 1800, China had banks in its major cities. It had copper and salt mining and porcelain manufacturing employing millions. Many of China's landlord-aristocrats had money, but they had disdain for grubby matters, including technological change. They saw themselves as gentlemen, and learned gentlemen did not speak of profits. They were imbued with the combination of Confucianism and Taoism. While seeing Europeans pressing upon China with their advanced technology, they tended to claim that it was all heaven's doing. They were not interested in imitating Europe. Their major interest was great books and elevation of the spirit. These intellectuals dominated China's bureaucracy. Government was little concerned with investing in economic development or in change. Bureaucrats made money from taking payment bites from transactions, and they saw change as merely disruption and jeopardy. While the landlord and bureaucrat aristocrats believed in intellectuality, the peasants believed in work - to survive. And all they had went into survival.
India in the early 1800s was in turmoil and being taken over militarily by the British. The British were following a policy of divide and rule. They were gaining control over civil administrations in India and pursuing their own interests in the buying and selling of goods. Local ruling princes and the Brahmans around these princes were not terribly interested in investing in technological change. India did not have people eager to find or support new ways of doing things that Britain did. In Britain, competition, interest in profit and engineering were inspiring a different spirit. There, economic progress was inspiring more economic progress, leaving traditional ways of doing things behind.
British agriculture advanced in the 1700s with the use of crop rotation that had been in use in the United Netherlands - the periodic planting of turnips and clover, which return nitrogen compounds to the soil. Potatoes were being grown. And a seed drill was being used to put seeds deeper into the ground, away from the wind and out of reach of birds. Food became cheaper to buy and the average person had more money to spend on manufactured goods.
Britain's economy benefited from stable government, security in holding private property and relatively free enterprise. Britain was a leading nation in world commerce. Britain's economy benefited from an effective central bank and from well developed credit mechanisms. Internally Britain was without tariff barriers. All of England was connected by waterways, with no place no more than twenty miles away from water transport, and in the 1700s this inland transportation was being improved with more canal building. Government believed in and was friendly toward commerce, and it had an extensive middleclass, whose values included industry, thrift, initiative and education in matters practical. A spirit of audacity contributed to initiative. The shackles that had been put on Galileo were off. And complaints that if God had intended this or that He would have made it so were ignored.
Some in other nations described the British as a nation of shopkeepers, while the British were moving ahead of them economically. Improvements had created a belief in progress, and while working in the sciences and tinkering with mechanics a few people were able to come up with new ways of doing things. New machines were developed. There were the Luddites - workers in the spinning industry during hard times who feared being replaced by machines and who rioted. This was in Nottingham in 1811. A few were hanged. The rioting resumed over much of Britain in 1816, but power was on the side of the mill owners, and prosperity was returning. By the 1830s, mechanization had increased productivity in the spinning industry in Britain between 300 and 400 times what it had been decades before.
The production of steel made steam engines possible, and in 1765 a Scottish instrument maker, James Watt, created a condenser for steam engines that made them more efficient and practical. Steam engines were used to pump water from mines, and steam engines began replacing waterpower in the cotton spinning and flour mills, in the crushing of sugar cane in the Indies and in driving bellows in iron and steel production.
A part of technological change was a change in use of energy. Traditionally, it was animals and humans burning calories that did the work: a horse pulling a plow, a woman behind her spinning wheel using her hands and arms. Wood had been the source of energy for the British, but much of Britain's forests had been chopped down and replaced by fields of grain and hay. The new source of energy was coal, which, fortunately for the economy, was abundant and close to the surface in Britain, eliminating the need to trade for it or to transport it across the seas. In 1800, Britain was producing 90 percent of the world's output of coal.
In the coal mining industry, men pulling carts of coal on rails had improved pulling efficiency - rails being a better surface. The first railway came in 1825 with the transporting of coal on rails seven miles between a mine in Durham and Britain's coast.
The rise in technology in Britain helped it in international commerce. Britain had been a consumer of India's quality cottons. In 1820 it was exporting 11 million yards of cotton textiles. By 1840, Britain was exporting 200 million yards of cotton textiles to other European countries and 529 million yards of cotton textiles elsewhere in the world. The competition put India's cotton industry in decline, producing in the words of some, the deindustrialization of India.
The United States had been expanding territorially. Vermont, in 1791, had become the fourteenth state to join the union of federated states. Kentucky joined in 1792, Tennessee in 1796 and Ohio in 1803. In 1812, nine years after the purchase from France of territory west of the Mississippi, Louisiana joined the union. Indiana joined in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, Alabama in 1819, Maine in 1820 and Missouri in 1821.
The United States was advancing economically. In 1800 it took thirty days to reach New York from New Orleans; in 1830 it took only fifteen days. The world's first journey by steam-powered boat took place in 1807 on the Hudson River from New York to Albany - a 150 miles in 32 hours. In the northeast, water powered flour milling and textile manufacturing was changing over to steam power, the mills employing women and children from the age of seven - a leftover from farming culture, which used child labor extensively. The middleclass saw itself as above the common laborer and perpetuated its values in education, thrift, sobriety and hard work. And they were increasing their consumption of goods. Republicans - the party of Jefferson - was becoming as interested in commercial enterprise and manufacturing as Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists had been.
Tobacco farming and horse breeding spread to Kentucky. Tobacco farming spread also to Tennessee. Sugar was grown in Louisiana, but in Mississippi and Alabama, with their rich soils and warm climate, cotton growing dominated. [note] Eli Whitney, a Yale College graduate in Massachusetts, in 1793 had developed a machine for a more efficient separating of cottonseeds from cotton fibers. The British were paying a good price for cotton for their textile mills, and cotton growing had become a profitable industry.
People were migrating across the Appalachian Mountains. Between 1800 and 1820, the combined non-Indian population of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi and Alabama is estimated to have increased almost six fold. People in the southern states were putting more of their capital into more land and more slaves and into cotton production rather than into ships for transporting goods or into manufacturing. The bales of cotton produced doubled between 1820 and 1830. The economies of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee were becoming tied to the boom in cotton growing in the deeper south. Arkansas Territory was a part of the boom in cotton growing. Arkansas had 1,617 slaves in 1820. It became a state in 1836, and, with an increase in settlement, by 1840, its slave population jumped to 20,000.
Arabs were to wonder what happened that the Western world surpassed the Islamic world. At least part of the answer lay in an explanation as to why the Islamic Middle East did not keep up with technological developments taking place in the West. Islam and the Arab world was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, an empire built, as empires are, on war, and in the days when booty made warring profitable. Warring had been income for the Ottomans, but by the 1800s the Ottomans could no longer advance themselves economically by war. Warring had become an economic drain.
In the 1700s, Europe had a growing agriculture and a growing population, and Asia had a growing population, while the Ottoman Empire stayed sparsely populated - a population that suffered from internal warfare and occasional famine followed by epidemics of disease. The Muslims were spending a lot of time fighting each other. The Ottomans, were trying to maintain their hold on people in Arabia and fighting the Saud family and those Muslims called Wahhabi (Wahabi). The Wahhabi captured the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and then Mecca in 1802. The Ottomans gave to the Egyptians the task of crushing the Wahhabi, and the Egyptians occupied Mecca in 1812.
Most Muslims worked at growing food, much of it subsistence farming. In the Muslim world were merchants and a few banks, but commerce had been diminished from the 1500s by the rise of European trading on sea and the end of trade passing across Islamic lands. Islam remained pre-capitalist, and the economic policies of government aimed not at economic growth but on mere subsistence and collecting taxes. Trade was largely local, with long distance trade of non-agricultural products limited to goods that were expensive and light in weight. Then, in response to the growing populations and demand for products in Europe, more was grown for export - mainly cotton but also food - with Greeks, then ruled by the Ottomans but having their tradition in merchant shipping, acting as the go-betweens. Less was being grown for local food consumption, which endangered food supplies for Islamic cities.
There was little investment in industry and little interest in doing things differently. The sultan, in Turkey, was interested in his harem and in income from taxes and the sale offices in his huge bureaucracy to pay for his style of living. There was little understanding of economic problems and no strong drive to master learning economics in order to cope with change. The sultan was interested in the well-being of his subjects. It was his duty to protect Islam from the outside world and to maintain justice within Islamic society, and he supplied soldiers for maintaining order. There was Islamic law and Islamic courts - the Sharia - seen by people as the source of justice and protection from tyranny. Rather than seeing Islam keep up with Britain economically, the sultan was focused on his authority as maintainer of Islamic traditions.
Recommended Books
The Origins of the Modern World: a Global and Ecological Narrative, by Robert B Marks, 2002, (162 pages).
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