The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (25 page)

Resistance to innovation continued sporadically well into the nineteenth century, going from machine smashing to the threat of insurrections. The Captain Swing demonstrations of the 1830s actually slowed the adoption of threshing machines. Fighting mechanization continued until the end of the nineteenth century among typesetters, sawyers, and those in the boot and shoe trade. Farm workers protested about more things than technical innovations, such as the use of Irish labor and how the Poor Laws were being implemented.
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The atavistic nature of the workers’ response is usually stressed to the neglect of their real grievances about hours, wages, and working conditions.

Technology is often presented as relieving drudgery when in fact the necessary coordination of industrial tasks, the constant noise, and ever-present fear of accidents made manual labor ever more unpleasant. High-pressure work became the norm, not just because of the operation of the machinery but also because machine owners wanted their capital investment to pay off every second. As mines sank deeper so did the danger from explosions, and all mechanized work filled lungs with contaminants.
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Without representation in the production process, workers seized ad hoc means to be heard above the noise of clanking metal. They ran machines at the wrong speed. They neglected the tools that upended their work lives. As machines reduced the number of workers needed, the number of unemployed or underemployed increased. After several efforts to find alternatives to mechanization, the workers’ associations settled down to mind the machines. There is scant doubt that men, women, and their children had to work under conditions far more onerous than their forebears.

From a historical perspective, these aggressive campaigns on the part of workers were very much a rearguard action, but in the immediate future, in which we all must live our lives, the protesters frequently won concessions. The public often sided with them because they had tradition on their side. Parliament took away the power of the justices of the peace to regulate wages, a legal protection that cut both ways for workers. The age of paternalism was giving way to the age of progress, an idea that had acquired a firm hold on the imagination of the British upper class. Few in the press represented the workers’ side to the general public, though Adam Smith did comment shrewdly in
Wealth of Nations
that manufacturers never gathered for dinner but what they set the price of wages. While employers easily made informal agreements, workers, when pressuring for any concessions, fell afoul of the laws against conspiracies. It would be another century before collective bargaining became part of the capitalist system and laborers would be able to enjoy the benefits of industrialization at both work and home.

The Intellectual Impact of Technological Change

People have their favorite English quality to account for England’s industrial career—high wages and low fuel costs, secure title to land, agricultural improvements, low taxation, the rise of cities, and its scientific culture—but why not recognize how mutually enhancing all these elements were? Considering how unprecedented this succession of inventions was, it would have taken many factors, working interactively like genes with their feedback mechanisms, to achieve this revolution in production processes. Those who emphasize how financial incentives induced men to work on laborsaving machines take for granted a major component of England’s advantages, that of fostering attitudes favorable to economic enterprise. Many of these can be traced to a retreat from the political turmoil of the seventeenth century.

What “the best and the brightest” of any generation choose as their lifework has a lot to do with the values they take in when they’re young. Had James Watt been born in England a century earlier, he might easily have devoted himself to reforming the Church of England, though it’s doubtful that such a career would have been climaxed with the placing of an enormous statue of him in Westminster Abbey as happened.
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In the eighteenth century gifted young men poured their considerable talents into industrial inventions and sometimes earned fame as well as wealth. The fact that there were so many of them across several generations sustained industrial development. They also were cooperative competitors, eager to register their patents, but excited enough about the work to share hunches. And inventiveness ran in many a family like the Watts and Maudsleys.

During the eighteenth century it became apparent for the first time that innovation was the secret, if uncertain, spring behind capitalism. I say “uncertain” because there is no way to compel innovation. Certainly it can be encouraged, and evidently some cultures foster it more than others, but innovative ideas begin in the secret recesses of a particular person’s brain. What is astounding is the number of inventors who were self-taught. These were not the tinkerers who used their shop knowledge of how to use pulleys, gears, shafts, wedges, flywheels, and levers to improve existing machines, but rather genuine geniuses like Richard Roberts or John Mercer who taught themselves the scientific literature on mechanics. Roberts automated the spinning machines in 1825, an innovation that lasted until the twentieth century; Mercer pioneered processes for printing cotton, including mercerization, which gave tensile strength to fabrics.
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The Enlightenment in France and England

In the play of ideas that became so critical to the transformation of European society in the eighteenth century, France and England had a fascinating relationship. The British had entered the century with a new kind of society, one that had abandoned censorship and tamed political absolutism with a balanced constitution that distributed power among the king, the nobility, and commoners. (The House of Commons didn’t exactly represent ordinary people. The accumulated wealth of its members exceeded that of the aristocracy, but it stood for the people.) In France, arcane laws bogged down would-be entrepreneurs. Laborers and peasants had privileges that frustrated economic development. Whether it was a province, the nobility, a heritable monopoly owned by an individual, or a corporation, large segments of the society were able to resist that dreadful thing called change.

A moribund French monarchy clung to its unchecked power until 1787, when an empty treasury forced the king to summon the old Estates-General. It hadn’t met in almost two centuries and promptly converted itself into the National Assembly. That fatal step catapulted the country into revolution. And that’s what it took to break through the fetters, red tape, licenses, and letters of incorporation—all the ancient Lilliputians—that had tied down the mighty giant that was France. During the nineteenth century the country played catch-up, and by World War I its per capital wealth matched that of Great Britain.

The radicalism of the French Revolution frightened most of the English, who, after several generations of prosperity, feared anything that would rock the boat. This conservatism affected all levels of society. For instance, after hearing that the scientist Joseph Priestley had expressed sympathy with the French Revolution in 1794, a mob destroyed his house. He fled to rural Pennsylvania. What a difference a century had made! Yet in many ways England had been responsible for the French Revolution. The French reading of English history, their study of Newton and Locke, and their personal discovery of the open, curious, ambitious, and industrious society of eighteenth century England gave birth to the idea that the old regime could be reformed, a more important thought than that it should be.
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The conspicuous changes in the built environment acted on the imagination as surely as the questions that philosophers posed. A peculiarly intense form of curiosity drew the countries of Western Europe along the path of innovation, which grew ever wider as people brushed aside customary practices. On this broad avenue of human inventiveness Europeans encountered themselves as the creators of their own social universe. There is no way to overestimate the reverberations of such a realization, so at odds with their religious traditions. The world, it seemed, was not a given to be studied and revered but rather a work in progress to be improved.

Two publications and one surprising document in 1776 had a critical impact on the history of capitalism: Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
, Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
, and the American Declaration of Independence. Smith wrote in part to free the economy from governmental intrusion. He described in great and convincing detail what he labeled the “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” Supporting his ideas about the economy was a model of human behavior that broke decisively with the traditional notions that men and women were unpredictable, capricious, and irresponsible. Reading his words will make the point: “The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition [is] the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived.” Smith also maintained that the “principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our condition, a desire which though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave.”
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Just as Newton saw uniformity behind the dazzling diversity of planets, meteors, and stars, so Smith found consistency in the multifarious commercial transactions that made up the market. He described an economic universe that was not subject to the laws of the state but, on the contrary, subjected the state to its laws. The inventions that culminated in industrialization had hardly begun when Smith wrote, but there had been enough improvements for him to divine the future.

Integral to Smith’s theorizing was the law of unintended consequences, an arresting insight of the Scottish philosophers that explained how acts could be willed by self-interested individuals but still turn out to be beneficial to a larger group. The most famous example of course was the invisible hand of the market that used competition to convert the profit motive into a force for good. As Smith explained, it is “not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regards to their own interest.”
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Here was a concept that contributed to the strong impression that reality was often obscured by appearances. Smith was responding to the developments of his lifetime, 1723–1790, when it was still relatively easy for an ambitious young baker to get the money to set himself up to compete effectively with established competitors. Later the concentration of capital took a lot of the optimizing agility out of the “invisible hand.”

Smith and his fellow Scots proposed a conjectural history of mankind that traced human society from hunters and gatherers to herders, then to sedentary farmers, and finally to commercial society. The discovery of indigenous peoples of South and North America still hunting and gathering helped anchor the Scots’ hypotheses in observable facts. From this perspective, a slow process of progressive change, not the contingent events and powerful people written about in history books, propelled history forward. Smuggled into Smith’s careful synthesis of economic facts were the propositions that human beings were consistent, disciplined, and cooperative market participants and that natural laws governed the realm of voluntary activities because these qualities were dependable.

The Scots asserted that human history didn’t oscillate through cycles of change, as had been thought, but rather that cumulative, irreversible patterns of improvements were moving events in a new direction. Time carried with it development, not mere change. This realization altered Europeans’ stance toward both past and future. The Garden of Eden had reminded Christians that they lived in a fallen state, and the Renaissance had extolled ancient Greece. The classical notion of cyclical change had linked human life to the observable cycles of birth and vigorous growth to maturity, followed by inevitable decay and death. Now, with time parceled out in dependable processes, sequential patterns, and irreversible trajectories, all the rivulets of human activity could be seen flowing into the great river of progress, though that term did not gain currency until the nineteenth century. The new script of development took over the imaginative space once devoted to the poignant story of inevitable degeneration. Fear moved aside to make room for hope.

Thomas Paine was one of hope’s most successful propagandists. Paine wrote
Common Sense
for Americans after he had immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1773. He was an irrepressible iconoclast and a passionate fighter for reforms that would benefit ordinary men and women, not just their employers and landlords. To make his case, he attacked the whole idea of a balanced constitution in which the British maintained such pride. Paine denigrated the past when he wrote that the British constitution was “noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected.” Quoting liberally from the Bible, he explained that kings had been sent to the Israelites as a punishment. He contrasted society—then a new word and concept—with government. Society came about through voluntary association and was a benefactor whereas government, though necessary, was an unpleasant punisher. Commerce Paine saw as an alternative to war in getting people what they wanted. He described it as “a pacific system” that worked “to cordialise mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other.”
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When Paine wasn’t writing incendiary tracts, he was working on a design for an iron bridge that was eventually built. He joined his radical political platform to an enthusiasm for economic progress. His targets were the vestigial injustices of an aristocratic society, not the new abuses of an industrial society. His writings influenced the history of capitalism not just because he helped push the American colonies out of the British Empire but also because he made the attack on tradition a popular cause. Men like Paine admired the entrepreneurial economy because it was open to talents rather than reserved for those of inherited status. This remains true today, even if it is harder to get access to capital.