Industrial Innovation

An abundance of industrial, technological, and commercial innovation backed the ambitions of the nation-state and the drive for empire. The last third of the nineteenth century saw new products ranging from the bicycle to the typewriter to the telephone. In 1885, sophisticated German engineer Karl Benz devised a workable gasoline engine; six years later, France’s Armand Peugeot constructed a functioning automobile. Electricity became more widely used after 1880, providing power to light everything from private drawing rooms to government office buildings. The Eiffel Tower, constructed in Paris for the Universal Exposition of 1889, stood as a monument to the age’s engineering wizardry. Visitors rode to the Eiffel Tower’s summit in electric elevators, while to fuel the West’s explosive industrial growth, the leading industrial nations mined and produced massive quantities of coal, iron, and steel in the 1870s and 1880s. Manufacturers used the metal to build the more than 100,000 locomotives that pulled trains—trains that transported two billion people a year.

The factory system spread across Europe and around the world, while agriculture continued to be modernized. Historians used to contrast a “second” Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century, in which manufacturers concentrated on heavy industrial products like iron and steel, to the “first” one of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which innovations in the manufacture of textiles and the use of steam energy predominated. Many historians now believe this distinction mainly applies to Britain, where industrialization did rise in two stages. In countries where industrialization came later, the two developments occurred simultaneously. Numerous and increasingly advanced textile mills were installed on the European continent later than in Britain, for instance, at the same time that blast furnaces were being constructed. Although industrialization led to the decline of traditional crafts like weaving, home industry—or outwork, the process of having some aspects of industrial work done outside factories in individual homes (similar to the putting-out system described in “The Roots of Industrialization” in Chapter 21)—persisted in garment making, metalwork, and porcelain painting. Industrial production occurring simultaneously in homes, small workshops, and factories has continued to the present day.

Industrial innovations also changed agriculture. Chemical fertilizers boosted crop yields, and reapers and threshers mechanized harvesting. In the 1870s, Sweden produced a cream separator, a first step toward mechanizing dairy farming, while wire fencing and barbed wire replaced wooden fencing and stone walls. Refrigeration, developed during this period, allowed fruits, vegetables, and meat to be transported without spoiling, thus diversifying and increasing the urban food supply. Tin from colonies facilitated large-scale commercial canning, which made many foods available year-round to people in the cities and thus improved their health.

Imperial expansion accelerated because new, more powerful guns, railroads, steamships, and medicines allowed Western penetration of Asia and Africa. Improvements in steamboat technology helped in the conquest of the African interior, but the scientific development of quinine was also crucial. Before the development of medicinal quinine in the 1840s and 1850s, the deadly tropical disease malaria decimated many a European party embarking on exploration or military conquest, giving Africa the nickname “White Man’s Grave.” The processing of quinine from Andean cinchona bark, long known by local people as preventing or relieving malaria, radically cut deaths from the disease among soldiers, missionaries, adventurers, traders, and bureaucrats.

As Europeans profited from these advances, drought and famine plagued large stretches of both Africa and Asia in these decades, thus weakening local peoples’ ability to fight off European attacks. Under those circumstances European weapons did the work of conquest despite stout resistance. Improvements to the breech-loading rifle and the development of the machine gun, or “repeater,” between 1862 and the 1880s dramatically increased firepower. Europeans sold outmoded guns to peoples needing protection both from their internal enemies and from the Europeans themselves. In contrast, Europeans crushed African resistance with rapid, accurate, and blazing gunfire: “The whites did not seize their enemy as we do by the body, but thundered from afar,” claimed one local African resister. “Death raged everywhere—like the death vomited forth from the tempest.”

Despite global expansion, Britain’s rate of industrial growth slowed as its entrepreneurs remained wedded to older technologies. Neglecting innovation, Great Britain profited from its investments worldwide and consolidated its global power in the latter nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Germany and the United States began surpassing Britain in research, technical education, and innovation—and ultimately in overall rates of economic growth.

Following the Franco-Prussian War, Germany annexed Alsace and Lorraine, territories with both textile industries and rich iron deposits. Investing heavily in research, German businesses devised new industrial processes and began to mass-produce goods. Germany also spent as much money on education as on its military in the 1870s and 1880s, sending German industrial productivity soaring. The United States began intensive exploitation of its vast natural resources, including coal, metal ores, gold, and oil. Whereas German productivity rested more on state promotion of industrial efforts, U.S. growth often involved innovative entrepreneurs, such as Andrew Carnegie in iron and steel and John D. Rockefeller in oil. Most other countries trailed the three leaders in economic development.

French industry grew steadily, but French businesses remained smaller than those in Germany and the United States. In Spain, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, industrial development was primarily a local phenomenon. Austria-Hungary, for example, had densely industrialized areas around Vienna and in Styria and Bohemia, but the rest of the country remained tied to traditional, nonmechanized agriculture. The Italian government spent more on building Rome into a grand capital than it invested in economic growth. A mere 1.4 percent of Italy’s 1872 budget went to education and science, compared with 10.8 percent in Germany. Scandinavian countries eventually made commercial use of electricity to industrialize in the last third of the nineteenth century and became leaders in the use of hydroelectric power.

Russia’s road to industrialization was tortuous. The terms of serf emancipation bound many Russian peasants to the mir, or landed community. Some villages sent men and women to industrializing cities, but on the condition that they return for plowing and harvesting. Nevertheless, by the 1890s, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a few other cities had substantial working-class populations, and the Russian government constructed railroads, including the Trans-Siberian Railroad (1891–1916), which upon completion stretched 5,787 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok. Even as Russia’s industrial and military power increased, it exemplified the uneven benefits of industrialization: neither Russian peasants nor underpaid urban workers could afford to buy the goods their country produced.