Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence-industrial revolution

Bubonic Plague
I was really suprised that Dr. Clark overlooked the main reason for the Industrial Revolution. The Bubonic Plague killed so many people, creating a labor shortage. Those who survived were able to make higher wage demands that improved their economic status. Over time, it provided them with small amounts of surplus income to purchase goods and to educate their children. It allowed them to form trades guilds to bargain with their employers, which raised their standard of living.

In 1450 Johannes Gutenberg made his first printing press, which also triggered education expansion and more prosperity. Business owners prospered as workers could afford to buy their goods. They were able to invest in research to improve their operations and to create new businesses based on new technology.

If the Plague had not occured, it would have taken centuries to create the conditions for the Industrial Revolution. ---BBB

Second Pandemic: Black Death

Map showing the spread of bubonic plague in EuropeFrom 1347 to 1351, the Black Death, a massive and deadly pandemic, swept through Eurasia, killing approximately one third to one half of the population (according to some estimates) and changing the course of Asian and European history. Plague doctors did what they could, which was not much else but say if a person had the plague or not. It is estimated that anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds of Europe's population became victims to the plague, making the Black Death the largest death toll from any known non-viral epidemic. While accurate statistical data does not exist, it is estimated that 1/4 of England's population, totaling 4.2 million, died while a higher percentage of individuals likely died in Italy. Northeastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, on the other hand, are believed to have suffered less while there are no estimates for Russia or the Balkans at all.

The Black Death continued to strike parts of Europe throughout the 14th century, the 15th century and the 16th century with constantly falling intensity and fatality, strongly suggesting rising resistance due to genetic selection. Some have argued that changes in hygiene habits and strong efforts within public health and sanitation had a significant impact on the rate of infection.

Re: Bubonic Plague

Well, no, not really. The effects of the great bubonic plague epidemics of the fourteenth century had largely dissipated by the time of the industrial revolution (there's no agreed-upon set of dates for the industrial revolution, but we can place its beginnings in Great Britain at around 1750). To say that people were able to save more money as a result of the labor shortage in the wake of the plague, and that those savings set the stage for the industrial revolution four centuries later, is a bit like saying that the European price revolution of the 16th century caused the stock market crash of 1929.

joe
Joe, the Plague didn't end until the late 1500s. It took two hundred years for the populations to recover, especially in the working classes, who were more vunerable. The Plague, joined with Smallpox epidemics, made survival a challenge among the poor. I'm not the only one who thinks the Plague changed and improved the economic and social status of the poor and working classes. Without improved educatiion opportunities, there would have been a shortage of workers to operate the new machinery, etc. I will have to search for those with that opinion.

"The Black Death continued to strike parts of Europe throughout the 14th century, the 15th century and the 16th century with constantly falling intensity and fatality, strongly suggesting rising resistance due to genetic selection. Some have argued that changes in hygiene habits and strong efforts within public health and sanitation had a significant impact on the rate of infection."

The following is an excellent thesis on the topic:
http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/archive/00000057/01/indrev-jeeh.pdf

BBB

Re: joe

Well, if you want to be absolutely precise, the plague never ended. It still affects the Indian subcontinent. And the last major outbreak in Europe was in the eighteenth century. But the great plague pandemic was in the late 14th century, and subsequent outbreaks were not the same kind of demographic catastrophes. Thus, even if it took 200 years for the population of Europe to recover, the recovery would still have pre-dated the beginning of the industrial revolution by about two centuries.


The poor always had a challenge to survive, mainly because they were poor. That didn't change over time. And I don't deny that the demographic and social dislocations of the Black Death had some positive economic effects for the survivors in some regions of Europe. I just doubt that those effects had any significant part to play in the origins of the industrial revolution.


A very interesting paper, but it doesn't do much to link the plague to the industrial revolution.

The Industrial Revolution didn't just happen, it was deeply rooted in a radical change in the way Europeans began to see the world. Bubonic Plague appeared in Ravena during 1347, and progressively moved north through Europe. The Plague continued sporadically into the 17th century, but the worst period was the 14th and 15th centuries, when perhaps a third of the population died off. People died, but wealth did not. Production in all parts of the economy declined, and the stability that had existed since the 6th century was badly shaken. In fairness we need to recognize that European population had already begun to decline and cracks to appear in the hold the Church held over the culture near the end of the 13th century.

Europeans began to live for the moment instead of preparing for some heavenly paradise in the sweet by and by. The cause of the Plague was unknown, but its sudden lethality was constantly in mind. Whole villages were wiped out, and fields lay neglected. Religious devotion and penance demonstrably failed to protect even the virtuous from death. Eat, drink and be merry for we may die tomorrow. Wealth that had previously flowed into the hands of the Church and the pockets of feudal lords was increasingly available to the "lower orders".

During this period two important inventions stand out. Gunpowder spelled the lingering end of medieval chivalry, and the eventual rise of great kingdoms capable of financing the high cost of artillery. That in its turn helped kick start the formation of modern nation states. The second, and even more important invention was the adoption of movable type, and the printing of books on a large scale. The first book published with movable type in the West was the Bible, but soon countless other titles followed. People became more literate, and the demand for books in their common languages rose in demand. New ideas, discoveries and inventions spread much more quickly, and the popular culture was ready to accept the idea of change and progress. Inevitably new ideas came into conflict with the dogmas of the Church. The Bible was translated from Latin into modern languages, and the people's questioning of old dogmas increased. The Church fought back with proscription and the Holy Inquisition.

From the late 15th through the early 18th century the brutal wars of the Reformation and Counter Reformation were fought. By the mid-17th century the modern scientific methods was a viable infant, and technologies were soon to follow. There was steady technological progress during the next century, but it hadn't yet "taken off". What lit the fuse?

The threat posed by Napoleon. The American and French Revolution had already alarmed monarchs throughout Europe, and they moved to crush the new-born French Republic. Old style standing armies were pitted against the enthusiasms of the French citizen soldier. It results was a shock for both sides. After some initial successes, the French discovered the faults inherent in volunteer militias led by amateurs. The professional armies were shaken by French successes. At the same time Napoleon, a young artillery officer utilized rapid movement and surprise to defeat opponents many times the size of his own. That really shocked existing military doctrine, and other European states began to reexamine their assumptions.

Out of the chaos of The Terror, Napoleon staged his coupe and restored order. He was extremely popular and proved to be a talented and tireless administrator. Unfortunately, the rest of Europe remained determined to crush France. Napoleon conceived the idea of Total War, and began to mobilize the entire nation's effort for war. Roads were built to speed movement of troops and supplies. Whole industries were organized to produce weapons and the other essentials needed for protracted war. Technology and science were enlisted to produce more and better products in support of the military. And, the French responded enthusiastically. By the early 19th century France was one tough cooky, and Napoleon was on the march.

England was fast to respond, and soon Britain was a web of railroads, and steam was replacing water mills. Manufacturing plants became concentrated in urban areas for efficiency, and cheap labor was found among the throngs of people displaced by Enclosure. England transformed itself from a a rural to an urban society. Landowners and wealthy merchants were able to greatly expand their fortunes, and hurried the transformation. The poor and dislocated crowded into the cities, and became tenders of machines. By 1815, Napoleon was finally defeated but the Industrial Revolution was firmly entrenched in France and Great Britain.

The Congress of Vienna (thank you, Metternich), produced a sort of peace among nations, but beneath that outward quiet boiled dissatisfaction. Nationalism was stirring though Germany and Italy were still fragmented, and the Habsburgs still ruled from Vienna. The Czar tightened his hold over Russia, but even there change was in the air. In Britain the laboring masses seethed under the yoke of wage slavery and class privilege. Enter Dickens, Marx and Engels. While Romanticism was the outward zeitgeist, the seeds for further social revolution were beginning to sprout.

So ... Aunt Bea's pointing the Black Death is appropriate, it's just not quite that simple. Neither, is the idea that the bounty that sprang from the Industrial Revolution the result of evolution in genetics. In fact, it seems to me that notion is somewhat dangerous. Are Europeans and Americans genetically different, or superior to Africans, Asians, or whatever? I don't believe so; we are probably witnessing a cultural/economic divide, not the divergence of species.

BTW, New Mexico is still the locus of periodic outbreaks of Bubonic Plague. However, we now know the cause and there are a number of effective medical treatments. Mortality from Bubonic Plague is only a tiny fraction of what it was even a hundred years ago. The Bubonic Plague is less a threat today than Smallpox, or a new highly resistant form of pneumonia. The world pandemic of the Spanish Lady early in the 20th century is a cautionary tale. The likelihood of a rapidly spreading new epidemic capable reaching over 75% of the total world's population, and killing over 1/3 of those infected, is high and could strike at any time.

Asherman
Asherman, what a wonderful history post. Thank you for presenting it far better than I could, you being the scholar while I'm not.

BBB

How you doing, kiddo? I suspect your well, or we'd have heard.

And so you conclude ... what? That a demographic disaster in the fourteenth century laid the foundations for the industrial revolution four hundred years later?

Well, I suppose you could make that connection. That's not nearly as laughable as making a connection between Napoleon and the industrial revolution, but it's just as tenuous. After all, a connection can be made between any two events according to the "one damned thing after another" school of history, but that doesn't mean that it will be a significant connection. As Jeremy Bentham once wrote:

At Rome, 390 years before the Christian era, a goose sets up a cackling: two thousand years afterwards a king of France is murdered. To consider these two events, and nothing more, what can appear more extravagant than the notion that the former of them should have had any influence on the production of the latter? Fill up the gap, bring to mind a few intermediate circumstances, and nothing can appear more probable. It was the cackling of a parcel of geese, at the time the Gauls had surprised the Capitol, that saved the Roman commonwealth: had it not been for the ascendancy that commonwealth acquired afterwards over most of the nations of Europe, amongst others over France, the Christian religion, humanly speaking, could not have established itself in the manner it did in that country. Grant then, that such a man as Henry IV. would have existed, no man, however, would have had those motives, by which Ravaillac, misled by a mischievous notion concerning the dictates of that religion, was prompted to assassinate him.

That makes for an interesting game of historical connect-the-dots, but doesn't really explain anything.

No, Joe, I'm saying that there are seldom any simple direct cause and effects. The Industrial Revolution resulted from many causes, and those causes resulted from other, early events forming trend lines. Europe was largely a stable system from the 6th through the 14th centuries. That stability came about from events and trends that might be traced back to the beginnings of recorded history. Could it have been otherwise? Of course, it could have, but it wasn't. The complex chains often weren't irrational, but choices made by individuals and groups, and natural conditions (like natural disasters).

What caused the end of the approx. 2,000 years of European stability? Arguably, and many scholars would agree that an important cause was the Bubonic Plague. Could the Renaissance have happened if the Plague hadn't occurred? Perhaps, but probably not. Willingness to focus on the here and now, on the pleasures and comforts of this world was revolutionary. Few would argue that gunpowder and movable type were not sine qua non to the events and trends between the 15th century and the modern world. Gunpowder made kings mighty and consolidated their hold over large territories. Print spread revolutionary ideas and made new discoveries available to an increasing number of literate people. The whole idea of progress was born in the 16th through late 17th centuries.

The Enlightenment and new notions about wealth and political authority gave rise, along with many other factors, to the American Revolution followed a few years later by the French Revolution. At the end of the 18th century the European world was on the doorstep of the Industrial Revolution, but it took the Napoleonic Wars to make Industrialization a necessity for victory, and national survival. France and England were in a race to fully mobilizing their nations for war. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) both France and England were irrevocably in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, though Britain had forged ahead.

History isn't a random jumble of events without cause, but the causes are complex. Major long term trends aren't easily changed, but it does happen and when it does the event(s) that "cause" change can usually be eventually identified. The further back we try to trace a trend and its affects, the more difficult it is to achieve any degree of certainty. On the other hand, who would argue the importance of prehistoric events like the development of agriculture, or metallurgy, or writing? These, along with other events/trends that developed in the thousands of years since are all tied together and in toto form the underpinning of every event/trend we are aware of at the beginning of the 21st century. The pattern is far too complex for anyone to grasp more than a tiny faction of it, and, being immersed in the overall pattern, we are too close to it to read its full meaning. That doesn't stop us from trying to understand how we got to this place in time, nor what the future built on our full history might be a thousand years hence. Sedanta is a fine historian, and I think that I'm no slouch, but though we share the same facts we frequently arrive a very different conclusions. Who is right? No one really knows, though we all believe our own conclusions superior to all others until we are proven wrong. Opinions are a difficult thing to prove/disprove. History, beyond bare facts, is almost never more than a set of opinions we adopt to make sense of our study of it.

Like the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution is still a subject of a vast historical debate over origins, developments, growth and end results.

However, before the industrial revolution started .... there was an "agricultural revolution" (new methods of farming, experiments with new types of vegetables and grains etc).

Large parts of Europe (e.g. more than 2/3 of what is now Germany, Poland, Hungary just to name a bit) never had had any signs of the Bubonic Plague.

I agree.


I don't agree.


Sorry, but that's just ludicrous. As I said previously, most scholars would place the beginnings of the industrial revolution (IR) at around 1750. The early stages of the IR were marked by the increasing use of industrial techniques and advanced machinery, primarily in the cloth industries. The IR, in other words, was already under way by the start of the Napoleonic Wars (1805), but it was centered on industries that were only tangentially related to the production of war materiel.

In addition, industrialization wasn't a necessity for victory for the simple fact that the IR affected the warring nations more or less uniformly. Great Britain, of course, held a substantial advantage in this respect over the continental powers, but Great Britain's major contribution to the wars was its navy, which relied on technology that was, in its basics, little different from that used by the fleet that fought the Spanish Armada in the 16th century. Likewise, the major powers equipped their armies in much the way that had been done since the wars of Louis XIV. No nation possessed any marked technological superiority over any other, so any effects of the IR were largely a wash.


Great Britain forged ahead of everybody else long before the battle of Waterloo. But again, its industrial advantage had little impact on the wars.


The problem isn't that we can't achieve a degree of certainty. Like Bentham said, "nothing can appear more probable" that the cackling of a goose on the Capitoline Hill in 390 B.C. caused the assassination of Henri IV in 1610. The problem is not that remote causes are less certain, but rather that they are less significant. It may be the case that, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost, but it is the historian's task to determine if the loss of that nail was a historically significant event.

Thanks, joe, for your analysis.


The industrial revoluton came ... a lot later to Germany.

However, from 1783/84 onwards we've got spinning Jennies, in 1789 the first steam engines were established in factorie .... and in 1799 the Hintelers sold their ground and farm to built their first combined wind/steam-mill :wink:

The vast majority of scholarship on the industrial revolution focuses on Great Britain. I think that's because: (1) that's really where the industrial revolution started; and (2) British historians are intensely parochial when it comes to writing history. That's a pity, because there's a good deal of work that remains to be done on the IR in other parts of Europe. We still await, therefore, the definitive book on the Hinteler contribution to the industrialization of Germany.

Napoleon's true genius was organizational, not military. He was probably better qualified than anyone else in France to exploit the new military doctrines which had been introduced in the years immediately preceding the Revolution--but he was not himself responsible for any of those innovations. France was, arguably, much better organized for the war than England ever was. It was only thanks to the Duke of York and George Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington), that the militia system was drastically overhauled in order to provide a steady supply of levies for the army. Even then, the English only fought the French in significant numbers in the field in Portugal and Spain, until the very end when Wellington finally invaded France. At the end of the era, the entire establishment of the English army was smaller than the force Napoleon assembled to invade Russia--and in fact, was only about half the size of that force. Napoleon disposed of literally millions of troops over the years--French, German, Polish, Dutch, Italian--and absent the huge armies of the Austrians, the Prussians and the Russians, the English were never in a position to challenge France alone in the field.

England's great contribution was the Royal Navy. This is not to belittle the accomplishment of English army, but only to put it into perspective. Napoleon's response to the economic power of England was the continental system. Modern economic research suggests that the system was actually working. England had had a growth export economy literally for generations until 1805, after which the rate of growth slowed, and finally came to a halt by 1809-1810. It was the Russian challenge to the continental system which lead to the fatal invasion of Russia. If Napoleon ignored the Russian defiance, his grip on Europe would erode. If he invaded Russia and failed, he was equally as doomed. I don't know that he could have done any better than he did in his invasion of Russia, but i strongly suspect he could have. Like crazy old Charles XII, he plunged deeply into Russia, and left the "head," the "brains," unmolested in St. Petersburg. The Swedish king's error is probably more excusable, as St. Petersburg was only five years old when he invaded, and it was understandable that he would drive on Moscow. What is not understandable is how he became so far bereft of reality as to plunge into the Ukraine. It is also not clear why Napoleon rushed on to Moscow with the winter drawing near, when the entire issue of Russian defiance, and flouting of the continental system, reside on the Baltic coast--in Karelia, Ingria, Courland and Lithuania.

Napoleon's other big error was in misjudging Spain--having plunged in there, and having put his brother on a puppet throne, he was committed to a bleeding wound which he could never have staunched. That was a case of his Corsican background overcoming his better judgment. Spain was a faithful ally, and there was no need to invade and remove the Bourbon monarchy. Having committed to Spain, he could not thereafter withdraw.

England was not at all organized for war as effectively and efficiently as France was. It is silly to suggest otherwise.

No big deal, really. (The mill business was closed in the 50's of last century.) :wink:

Joe, what a good idea.

Walter, we all know that you could easily write a book on the history of Germany with concentration on Westphalia. The Hinteler family would add a personal touch that always makes histories more interesting.

As soon as I read that the family business shut down in the 1950's, my first thought was to wonder if it was because of the devastation of WWII.

Come on, let's hear about it. I don't think it would be terribly off subject.

It had to do with WWII as well as with the Nazi-time.

It is quite a bit of topic, I think :wink:
(In that town, the industrial revolution could be watched by rise of the mining industry as well as of the enamelle imdustry.)