Chapter 56: The Technological Revolution
A quick introduction to the Second Industrial Revolution.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Herreld, Donald J. “An Economic History of the World Since 1400.” The Great Courses. 2016.
Hobsbawm, E.J. The Age of Empire 1875-1914. Vintage Books. 1987.
Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 4th Edition. Westview Press. 2013.
Wells, H. G. “Civilization at the Breaking Point.” The New York Times Current History of the European War, vol. 2, no. 4, University of California Press, 1915, pp. 772–74.
Full Transcript
Reminder: Footnotes and an ad-free stream are available to our Patreon supporters. To sign up, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod.
In May 1915, The New York Times published an essay penned by the English writer H.G. Wells.
By this point, Wells had become a well-known pioneer in science fiction, publishing such novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds before the end of the 19th Century. His stories anticipated human space travel, bio-engineering, and more.
But in this Times essay, he remarked on technological marvels already in use around the globe, as a world war of imperial gamesmanship, driven by nationalistic passions, turned those marvels into deadly force.
“The submarine and the aircraft are quite typical of the new order of things. You can sweep a visible fleet off the seas, you can drive an invading army into its own country, but while your enemy has a score of miles of coast line or a thousand square miles of territory left him, you cannot, it seems, keep his aircraft out of your borders, and still less can you keep his submarines out of the sea… He can work his bloody mischief on your civil life to the very end of the war, and you must set your teeth and stick to your main attack. To that pitch this war has come, and to that pitch every subsequent war will come… The sinking of the Lusitania is just a sign and a sample of what war now becomes, its rich and ever richer opportunities of unforgettable exasperation…
Unless this war does help to bring about a lasting peace in the world, it is idle to pretend that it will have been anything else but a monstrous experience of evil. If at the end of it we cannot bring about some worldwide political synthesis, unanimous enough and powerful enough to prohibit further wars by a stupendous array of moral and material force, then all this terrible year of stress and suffering has been no more than a waste of life, and our sons and brothers and friends and allies have died in vain. If we cannot summon enough good-will and wisdom in the world to establish a world alliance and a world congress to control the clash of “legitimate national aspirations” and “conflicting interests” and to abolish all the forensic trickeries of diplomacy, then this will be neither the last war, nor will it be the worst, and men must prepare themselves to face a harsh and terrible future, to harden their spirits against continuing and increasing adversity, and to steel their children to cruelty and danger. Revenge will become the burden of history. That is the price men will pay for clinging to their little separatist cults and monarchies and complete independencies, now. The traffic and wealth of our great and liberal age will diminish, the arts will dwindle and learning fade, science will cease to advance, and the rude and hard will inherit the earth. The Warpath or the World State; that is the choice for mankind.”
Only a year earlier, the Western nations of the world had been enjoying a Golden Age – a “beautiful epoch.” The first skyscrapers started going up. Moving pictures were drawing audiences to the new cinemas. Major advancements had been made in medicine and public health, the effects of which were now starting to be realized. More and more men – and in some places, even women – were getting the right to vote. And getting around this exciting new world was easier than ever, thanks to numerous new transport methods, including the first automobiles affordable to the masses, made possible by an assembly line process, recently implemented in Detroit, Michigan.
Now this glorious era had been turned on its head, as tanks and chemical weapons and other dark developments showed the world the other side of technological progress.
How did it come to this?
First of all, nations across the planet followed Britain’s lead, consolidating their states and modernizing their economies. The United States bounced back from its Civil War to expand its numbers of factory cities and productive family farms. Prussia unified a German Empire, creating an entrepreneurial environment for machine construction, chemical production, and more.
Second, the gold rushes in California and Australia poured bullion into the global financial market, which the new industrial investment banks used to provide capital to those businesses knee-deep in R&D. And, as a result, the next five decades saw an explosion of new inventions and innovations, transforming consumer and business markets. It was in this age the world was introduced to the electric lightbulb, the telephone, the bicycle, the typewriter, electric rail, the modern steel plant, the water treatment plant, the mail-order catalogue, the tractor, synthetic dyes, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, and more.
It was a second industrial revolution, and it continued to foster many of the phenomena seen in the first. Wealth grew. So did wealth disparities. Corporations became larger and more sophisticated. Demands for democracy spread. Labor unions called for harder and more widespread strikes. Scientists ventured further into the frontiers of the known universe. Artists – be they painters or musicians or writers – got more and more creative. Industrialization expanded across Europe, and the industrial powers of Europe (and elsewhere) expanded their empires across the Global South.
The pace of change was now kicked-up several gears, hurling the world ever-faster toward the technological, economic, environmental, and social orders we experience today.
---
This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 56: The Technological Revolution
---
Well, it feels good to be back. This will be an introductory episode to the Second Industrial Revolution, so it’s a little shorter than usual.
Before we get going, though, I want to take a second to say “thank you” to everyone who supports “The Industrial Revolutions” each month on Patreon. Special shout out to new patron John Newton, as well as Hakim Ahmed, Jim Ankenbrandt, John Bartlett, Adam Bibby, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Harriet Buchanan, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Amelia Dunkin, Matthew Frost, Michele Gersich, Michael Hausknecht, Jason Hayes, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Ian Le Quesne, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Andrew C. Madigan, Duncan McHale, Denis Morgan, Emeka Okafor, Ido Ouziel, Brad Rosse, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Brandon Stansbury, Sebastian Stark, Ross Templeton, Walter Torres, and Seth Wiener. Thank you, all.
You too can become a patron of this podcast by going to patreon.com/indrevpod – yes, that’s patreon.com slash I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D. For just one dollar per month you can access an ad-free stream and get bonus content at the end of each episode, what I call the footnotes. There are additional perks for additional levels, including a monthly book review, merchandise, and more. So, again, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to sign up and support the show.
Okay, on with the program…
The Second Industrial Revolution – or the “Technological Revolution” as it’s sometimes called – lasted from 1870 to 1914. At just 44 years, it is the shortest of the industrial revolutions.
Now, I think I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past, but I’ll say it again: The more I do this podcast the less I think of the idea of multiple “industrial revolutions” to describe the history of industrialization. The history is more complex than that. The concept is really only useful to me as a way to break up this podcast for my research and narrative building.
However, the idea of a distinct period from 1870 to 1914 seems to be one of the more consistently embraced ideas found in the economic history books. And even among those who argue that the Industrial Revolution lasted into the 20th Century, many mark its end with the start of the First World War. In fact, while the start-year of this Second Industrial Revolution varies a little bit from scholar-to-scholar – some start it closer to 1860, some closer to 1880 – almost everyone ends it in 1914.
As our old friend, Hobsbawm, put it, “August 1914 is one of the most undeniable ‘natural breaks’ in history. It was felt to be the end of an era at the time, and it is still felt to be so.” I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the present pandemic will be remembered as another such “natural break” in history. You can feel it in the air – the sense that our social mores, our political and economic systems, perhaps even the fate of our planet (to say nothing of our global civilization) seems to be on the verge of a great transition, a new “reformation” of sorts.
And this was certainly what the people of the time felt, living through World War I. The time of kings and craftsmen, popes and peasants, aristocrats and eremites, was coming to an end. The future belonged to mechanics and metalworkers, bankers and bricklayers, teachers and tailors, soldiers and shopkeepers, professors and party bosses. Everyday people of the once-lower orders – be they now rich capitalists, small businessowners, or struggling laborers – were coming upon the threshold of power. As Wells so elegantly illustrated in the opening today, the world was not going back – could not go back – to the order of things from before the Great War.
But while the Second Industrial Revolution is a short one, it can be broken into even smaller pieces. In fact, we can divide it into two distinct periods.
The first, from 1870 to 1893, was a period we in America refer to as “the Gilded Age” – an age of heavy industrial development, hardship, and corruption. Most of this period was then known as the “Great Depression”, from 1873 to 1897. Bookended by the Panics of 1873 (shout out Chapter 55!) and 1893, today we call it the “Long Depression” to distinguish it from the depression of the 1930s. Across the world, economies saw lower levels of economic growth during these years than they had in the 1850s and 60s, or during the First Industrial Revolution. But they did see growth – growth that allowed much of the modern world to take shape the way it did.
The second period, from 1897 to 1914, marks a very different experience – a period of significantly better economic growth, as well as political and cultural reform. Here in America, we know this period as “the Progressive Era”. In Europe (especially France) it is known as La Belle Époque.
Between the two periods was the Panic of 1893, which lasted until 1897. At the tail-end the Long Depression, such a financial crisis served as a boiling point for what ordinary people were willing to tolerate. The general pessimism convinced contemporary socialists that the world had reached a late stage of capitalism, doomed to collapse in a matter of years under the weight of its contradictions, as once described by Marx. And while Marxism never came close to a majority anywhere, populist swelling did consume the Western world in the aftermath of this panic.
And while industrialization was still mostly happening in the West, it was also starting to spread.
---
So, I would estimate that, so far, roughly half the podcast has focused on the United Kingdom – especially England. That’s about to change.
With the arrival of the Second Industrial Revolution, the geographic focus of this podcast will shift away from the U.K. The stories will be set less in places like Birmingham and Manchester, and more in places like, Essen, Chemnitz, Cleveland, and Pittsburg. Perhaps no city was a better focal point of the Second Industrial Revolution than Chicago, which underwent huge and interdependent advancements in the second half of the 19th Century: Shipping and railroads, banking and futures trading, mass food production, public health crises, public works projects, a great fire, and a World’s Fair.
None of this is to say we’ll abandon the Brits entirely. They will remain a first-tier economic and imperial power. But the Long Depression hit Britain especially hard – almost nowhere else did the pace of economic growth slow more. And it overlapped with a period of especially liberal trade policies. The British, who were more committed to the ideal of free trade than any other country, now wrote of German and American “invasions” hitting their shores in the form of imported goods.
The Germans and Americans, for their part, followed a pretty similar playbook. Both greatly expanded their production of steel, thanks to guys like Alfred Krupp and Andrew Carnegie. Both invested in electrical power generation and invented new machine technologies. Both recruited tens of thousands of miners to dig beneath the earth and extract the coal necessary for these advancements. Both took a scientific approach to managing their workforces. And both took advantage of their recent wartime experiences to drive production and sales in the international arms market.
But the political regimes of the German Empire and the Untied States were very different. As a result, the outcomes of industrialization will look very different in the two countries by 1914. Germany was less democratic, but more amenable to the day-to-day concerns of its working class. The U.S. was more democratic (at least for white men), but more amenable to the concerns of its capitalists.
And while Germany and America are going to become the most prominent focal points for this next industrial revolution, it will spread elsewhere too. Industrialization will take root throughout more of Europe, especially in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and urban pockets like Turin, Belfast, Bilbao, and more.
And two other, non-Western countries will emerge onto the industrial stage: the empires of Russia and Japan. For very different reasons, both the Russian and Japanese governments made concerted efforts to follow the Western example and industrialize during the mid-19th Century. It resulted in enough growth that, by the 20th Century, both nations emerged as major world powers, and they would come head-to-head against each other in the race to conquer what they could of pre-industrial East Asia.
Because as industrialization spread during these years, so too did imperialism. The industrial world used their advanced technologies and surplus populations to militarize themselves and to colonize the non-industrial world. In many places, like Africa, this took the form of formal colonies, administered by European governments. In other places, like Central America, it would take the form of informal colonies, administered by entities like American corporations.
The imperial project served to extract the resources needed for the industrial project. Europeans and Americans scoured the earth for its bounties – base metals, fruit, rubber, and even the fuel source that will push us into the 20th Century, petroleum. Not only will the imperial powers ship these raw materials back home to process, they will also pocket virtually all of the profits that came from extracting the raw materials, leaving the Global South in no better condition. (In many cases, arguably much worse conditions.)
And the same Technological Revolution driving this Age of Empires will also produce upheaval and transformation within the industrializing societies.
---
The Technological Revolution will be the focus of this podcast for at least the next two years, probably three. Much like I did with the First Industrial Revolution, my plan is to break it into two chunks.
In the First Industrial Revolution, I broadly tried to split it between (A) the inventions of the Spinning Jenny and Watt Steam engine up to the Napoleonic Wars and (B) the Napoleonic Wars up to the Springtime of the Peoples in 1848.
In this Second Industrial Revolution, I will try to neatly split it between (A) the Gilded Age / Long Depression and (B) the Progressive Era / Belle Époque. Of course, the split probably won’t be all that neat, as many of the topics I’ll be devoting episodes to will inevitably overlap the two timeframes.
So, here’s a taste of what’s coming.
The Technological Revolution will, of course, have a lot of new technologies to talk about, as well as the figures who invented them and/or delivered them to market. That means we’ll be talking about Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. It means the new steel furnaces and rubber plants. It means John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. It means the Wright Brothers’ famed flight at Kitty Hawk. It means a slew of more over overlooked innovations as well.
But it also means societal transformation. It was during this age that serfdom and chattel slavery were finally abolished for good, inventors and industrialists surpassed dukes and lords in terms of informal social status, public pensions were introduced, living standards and the quality of housing improved dramatically, sports were professionalized, and the cost of food – long the biggest line item of a family budget – fell as agricultural products were effectively commoditized.
It was also an age of brutal exploitation for Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Workers’ rights and labor unions were violently suppressed. Immigrants found themselves crammed into tenement housing. Rebellions and revolutions appeared in France, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines, China, Russia, and beyond. And, not knowing it of course, the world was hurtling toward a catastrophic war that touched almost every continent.
Now, among the many new technologies of this Technological Revolution, there were transport technologies – the bicycle, the electric rail car, the automobile, the airplane. But it was also the height of the railroad age. And the steam-driven locomotives were driving not only the trains of these railroads, but also massive changes to everyday life – when the Industrial Revolutions returns in 2022.
---
I’ve been a little distracted from social media lately, but that is soon to change. To follow along, find the handle @IndRevPod on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D. Thanks again.