The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (22 page)

Scholars have argued that slavery in the Iberian colonies operated more benignly because the Portuguese and Spanish were accustomed to the institution and had incorporated slavery into their laws. Their long association with North African Muslims had brought them into sustained contact with people of color. In addition, the Catholic Church adamantly insisted on converting slaves. Portuguese slavers routinely baptized their cargoes before they set sail. The church sanctioned slave marriages, but the Protestants did not. Spanish and Portuguese rules set out very specific terms by which an enslaved person could regain her or his freedom, and custom, law, and religion encouraged masters to manumit their slaves. Slaves also had access to the courts as witnesses and litigants.
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There was an accompanying toleration of the many mixed race children in their settlements. One contemporary called blacks and mulattoes “the hands and feet” of Brazil because they did all the work in their communities. Reflecting the attitudes of the hildagos at home, whites considered labor debasing. A foreign traveler said of Argentina that Negroes were the most intelligent people he met because they were the craftsmen, builders, farmers, miners, transporters, cooks, nurses, and general laborers. “If it were not for slaves,” he said, “it would not be possible to live here, for no Spaniard, no matter how poor, will do any kind of work.”
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A closer examination of the records indicates that the exploitation of slaves in Brazil and Cuba was extreme, even though Portuguese and Spanish colonists mixed socially more easily both with Native Americans and enslaved Africans. More significantly, slaves survived better in Anglo-American colonies than Latin American ones. The pattern of natural population growth was stronger there. An astounding two-thirds of the descendants of African slaves live in the United States, though it had received less than 6 percent of the total number taken from Africa!
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Several factors account for that: More women were brought to the continental colonies. The higher birthrate suppressed the number of African imports, and the climate was healthier. Three-quarters of all blacks worked on plantations with fewer than fifty slaves, in contrast with the West Indies, where work forces normally numbered in the hundreds. The system was still brutal, but less debilitating and more racist.

A more significant question for this history is how important was the Atlantic slave system to capitalism. At the very least it generated enormous wealth, most of which was repatriated to the countries of the European investors. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the New World was the biggest depository of British and French funds overseas. Their colonial trades employed hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen, though like the Africans, these men suffered greatly from the insalubrious conditions at sea and in the West Indies. Half the British soldiers stationed in the Caribbean lost their lives there. The mortality rate among crew members of all slavers was even higher. Most investors in the sugar islands were absentee landlords who avoided at all costs this deadly zone. In 1789 the British Privy Council reported that a total of fifty thousand whites, mostly men, lived in their island colonies alongside slightly fewer than five hundred thousand slaves and some ten thousand freed men and women of color.
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One thing we can say for certain is that the use of slave labor produced no sustained economic developments in South America, the West Indies, the American South, or Africa itself. The Atlantic system declined as swiftly as it had flourished. More like a footprint left in the sand, the whole elaborate structure of sugar making disappeared after abolition. Slavery persisted longer in the United States, but the story was the same. The market value of American slaves on the eve of the Civil War was almost three billion dollars, a sum greater than the value of all manufacturing and railroads in the United States. Four years later the South lay in ruins. The damage from war and a twelve-year military occupation depressed the southern economy until well into the New Deal.

Great Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, the French in 1848, the Dutch in 1863, Spain in 1886, followed by Brazil two years later. Neither abolitionists nor sugar nabobs expected the near collapse of West Indian sugar production when the enslaved men and women were free, but they voted with their feet and moved to small family farms away from the scenes of their wretched past.
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Efforts to convert slavery into a kind of peonage in Jamaica in 1867 produced a violent revolt that was brutally suppressed while in the American South a rigid system of segregation ordered the relations between blacks and whites until the middle of the twentieth century.

The abrupt decline of plantation production suggested to some scholars that the abolition movement had been prompted by a decline in Britain’s sugar industry rather than by moral outrage.
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In the sixty years since that thesis was propounded, historians have demonstrated that in fact both imports and exports from the British West Indies were on the rise when Parliament passed the statute abolishing the slave trade. In the ensuing years, Britain spent millions on naval squadrons to patrol the waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean to prevent other countries from importing slaves—something of a Sisyphean task. Notwithstanding these efforts, more than two million more slaves were sent to Cuba, which was reaching the apex of its productivity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. When Parliament abolished slavery, the market for sugar was still growing.

Industrial Inventions

Spelling the end to the Atlantic slave system brings us back to another eighteenth-century chapter in the history of capitalism, the one that took place back in England when technological wizards transformed the world of work. There used to be a joke that only the best graduate students were told that there had been no Industrial Revolution. The problem with the concept is lodged in the word “revolution.” It implies both dramatic change and suddenness. Only the dramatic change part of the phrase fits what actually happened in nineteenth-century Great Britain, for the industrial innovations covered under the rubric of revolution took more than a century to be conceived, designed, tested, and adjusted, as had been the case with the earlier Agricultural Revolution. Then even more time elapsed before the new machines were applied to spinning, weaving, making dishware, firing bricks, working up iron, and transporting cargoes and people on rail and water.

“Industrial Evolution” would be a much better term for the genesis of the machines designed to do the heavy lifting for men and women. The phrases that we use in talking about human evolution—“the unvarying operation of natural laws,” “replications,” “random variations,” “waste,” and “survival of the fittest”—fit better here. All these came into play in the perfecting of the steam engine. Like evolution, the sequence of steps leading to the completion of any particular machine was not optimal, but with enough time, satisfactory models emerged. Since I doubt very much that my “Industrial Evolution” will catch on, I shall use the term, “Industrial Revolution,” hoping that my readers will remember that the pace of transforming the world of work was measured.

A change in the European political order proved propitious for industry. Trade patterns shifted away from intra-European to colonial commerce because of the fierce rivalries between Britain and France during the eighteenth century. This led nations to promote processing raw materials at home, where they kept rivals at bay while creating a lot of jobs in refining sugar and rolling tobacco. Colonies were ideal sources for raw materials and good customers for manufactured items. And they had to obey—more or less—the laws laid down by the mother country. The English Navigation Laws specified that sugar and tobacco had to be shipped directly to Great Britain, just as any items the colonies might import from Europe had to be landed first in British ports. The British cut back on imports of linen from German and Holland and of wine from France. Port became the favorite drink because of the exceptionally good diplomatic relations between Britain and Portugal. Of course other countries retaliated with their own protective legislation. These were the policies that Adam Smith decried in the
Wealth of Nations
. Calculating the cost of maintaining British colonies, he argued that the country’s best trading partners were its closest neighbors.

A lot of economic developments enhanced the possibility for an Industrial Revolution, though none of them can be seen as a cause per se. Conditions make things possible for causes to work, but they cannot cause anything. First and foremost were the dramatic agricultural changes that cut in half—from 80 to 40 percent—the number of men and women working in agriculture. The Dutch and English had long been manufacturing in innovative ways, but until they were capable of improving the productivity of their farmers, manufacturing remained a minor part of the economy. The redundant workers from rural England eventually became the proletariat of the industrial age. And not only workers were shed from farming. Expenditures went down as well, leaving money to invest elsewhere and to purchase goods other than food. A century of profitable trade had built up and dispersed capital throughout England.

More specifically, two major economic realities in England put a premium upon finding laborsaving devices: high wages and the very cheap cost of coal. Wages being high in England seems counterintuitive in view of the many men and women no longer needed in the fields. Still, English workers got paid substantially more than elsewhere in Europe—much higher than in other parts of the world. This can be attributed to the leveling off of population growth during the seventeenth century and the expansion of other kinds of employment. Many of the redundant workers stayed on in the countryside and became part of the putting-out system where clothiers brought raw wool to cottagers whose families washed, fulled, carded, spun, and wove it into cloth. Master craftsmen in England also did much of the country’s ironworks in their own homes through much of the eighteenth century.

In this domestic system, employers paid by the piece. The head of the house set the hours, the pace, and the conditions of work. Mothers were at the spinning wheel; fathers at the loom with children—depending upon their age, sex, and dexterity—doing other tasks in the operation that took sheared wool from the backs of sheep and turned it into bolts of cloth.
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A step in turning much of the old rural population into a modern working class, the putting-out system also led to an increase in family size. Not having to wait for a piece of land to farm before starting a family, cottagers could marry earlier, thanks to an expanding industrial economy. Their earlier marriages pushed up the birthrate.
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It was during the decades that English agriculture was shedding workers that London began its ascent to preeminence among European cities. Its population of roughly 400,000 in 1650 had grown to 575,000 by 1700, 675,000 at 1750, and 800,000 by 1800. By comparison, when London passed up Paris, France had a population six times that of England. With a higher rate of deaths than births, London took in a steady flow of men and women from the countryside, estimated at 8,000 to 10,000 a year. One scholar has estimated that 1 adult in every 6 spent some time in London.
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The city’s merchants hired seamen, dockworkers, warehousemen, and the caulkers, sailmakers, brass fitters, and ropewalkers that kept their ships afloat. Importing raw materials paid off in good-paying jobs processing sugar, coffee, tobacco, and tea, not to mention gin, which became a favored drink in the eighteenth century. Higher wages meant that an increasing number of workingmen and women were able to buy the goods coming from England’s workshops. Unlike many capital cities throughout the world, London was not filled with bureaucrats and courtiers but rather with the participants of a great emporium. Its vitality was visually demonstrated when fire destroyed the city in 1666 to be rebuilt with astounding speed by private investors.

Still one more economic factor contributed to the complex of incentives and facilitators of the Industrial Revolution. England had been favored with vast and readily accessible deposits of coal. Once the country’s forests had been depleted, the price of charcoal rose sharply, and people began switching to coal for fuel. Coal was a godsend to industries that required lots of heat like glassblowing and brickmaking. Replacing coal for wood as a source of carbon took pressure off the land as well. With cheap coal, the English could build their houses with brick, further unburdening the land. Timber could be saved for shipbuilding and the framing of structures, though increasingly it was imported from Sweden and shipmaking outsourced to the American colonies. Coal converted into coke fired the blast furnaces that cast iron for weapons, tools, and building structures. The new industrial processes didn’t just produce faster; they vaulted the limits that land and the food and fuel it produced had heretofore placed on what could be produced.
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While fossil fuel was so cheap and abundant with a population relatively small, there was little thought of what mining and burning it would do to the planet over the course of a couple more centuries.

The wildly popular calicoes and muslins from India pointed to a strong home market for cotton. Its fibers could be handled mechanically more easily than those of wool or flax, if ways were found to do it. Finally, the growing reliance on coal in an array of industries made apparent how worthwhile it would be to take advantage of its cheapness to create artificial energy.
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This combination of high wages and cheap fuel in eighteenth-century England created a strong incentive to develop ways to substitute the expensive for the cheap, more fuel for less human labor or put more simply, to invent machines using fuel that could vastly increase the output of human laborers. It was this concept that had eluded manufacturers. It has been said that every element of a modern automobile existed when Leonardo da Vinci lived at the end of the fifteenth century, save the concept of an engine that could turn heat into work by burning fossil fuels.
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