Introduction to Raphael Samuel: WORKSHOP OF THE WORLD: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain by Mark Jones Raphael Samuel's classic account of the harsh reality of toil and immiseration that lay behind the hype and hypocrisy of 19th century Britain, is a salutary reminder that some things never change. The high-point of Victorian England was the period from the 1850s to the 1870s. It was a period of exuberance, arrogance and overpowering self-confidence, made manifest in many fields: in architecture, engineering, science and art. It was the Railway Age, when the very face of the land was subjugated and brought under human dominion, when hill and vale was encapsulated and framed by the railway-carriage window and landscapes became the territory of picture postcards. This era of scientific, technological and imperial hubris found its most sensational symbol in the Crystal Palace which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. This vast monument to industrialised construction and engineering brilliance seemed to sum up a high-point of technological achievement: this was the world's first 'new economy', full of labour-saving devices, creature comforts and emblematised by that icon of the engineered economy, the precision machine-tool. This was the England celebrated by conservative historian David Landes in his book 'Prometheus Unbound' (Cambridge 1969). But the reality of mid-Victorian England was utterly different. Britain's fabulous wealth did not only rest upon the silent anguish of the millions of slaves in its vast colonial empire, on which 'the sun never set'. It also rested upon another whale: the phenomenal rate of exploitation of the British working class itself. For the grim reality of Victorian England was not one of mechanisation, but of physical labour, of incredibly harsh and protracted toil by a submerged mass of men women and child proletarians. This is what that great English social historian Ralph Samuel's documents so well: the whole seething reality of Victorian industry and society. It is a tremendous riposte not only to Landes' Eurocentric, technocentric historical hall of mirrors, but also to the modern apologists of hurrah-capitalism who when it comes to history, have (like the Bourbons) learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. The phenomenon of combined and uneven development, of an unprecedented historical synergy between colonialism and industrialism, has a latter day counterpart, in the so-called New Economy whose principal homeland is the United States of America. Here, too, paradoxes abound: as in Victorian England, the onrush of new sciences and technologies and their industrial applications has gone hand in hand with the observed intensification of labour and the lengthening of the working day. As in Britain, the phenomenon of resurgent manufacturing has gone together with a paradoxical fall in the amount of capital assets per employed worker in US manufacturing (relative to other competitor states, and possibly even absolutely). Far from the organic composition of capital increasing, the effect of informatics and computer networking seems to have been to reduce capital-intensities. The truth is that improvements in technique have served to facilitate increased rates of exploitation, and at the same time the growth of extensive labour based on low-productivity service industries. It is really possible to combine hamburger-flipping with high technology new frontier industries. In just the same way, in Victorian England, as Samuel points out, new technologies of mass production of consumption goods such as domestic pottery, went hand in hand with the further extension of some of the oldest and most exploitive techniques: this was the reality of 'combined and uneven development' in historical practice: "The manufacture of china-ware and crockery presents an even more striking instance than glassmaking of mass production on the basis of hand technology. In spite of the early appearance of a factory system (pioneered in the 1760s and 17708 by Josiah Wedgwood), and an intense development of the industry in North Staffordshire, a very simple technology prevailed - 'the same essential appliances as were used in Egypt four thousand years ago'." By the late 1870s this perverse, paradoxical development of British industry was already producing potentially fatal symptoms of long-run decline. Victorian Britain was the world's factory and its bank; it had unified the world market. Growing competition led Britain to become over-extended resulting in adverse trade balances and a drain of gold overseas. Paroxysms of world money began as the Bank of England imposed credit contractions to defend gold convertibility and the sanctity of sterling. In 1873 there was a world industrial crisis as the reversion to gold and the consequent destruction of credit (on which world trade had developed) deflated commodity prices and produced a violent crisis of overproduction. British domination of world market had been based on the cotton industry, which was the locomotive of prosperity but depended on backward India and the southern states of US. Textiles always emerged first from depressions, since the UK's foreign competitors were non-mechanised, artisanal industries located in the non-capitalist peripheries. Cotton was bought on the world market, and yarn and cloth was sold back to the world market, necessitating a gigantic world circulation of bills. The British textile industry had made it possible to unify world economy. The emergence of the railway industry, steel and heavy industries put an end to cotton's leading sector role and opened the era of inner-continental development. Unlike cotton, railways required immense fixed capital but only a small, national circulation of related commodities; world-wide trade credit was not necessary. Railways fundamentally changed the trade cycle, and turned formerly peripheral states like the USA, Germany and Russia into dynamic centres of accumulation. The world was no longer which now ceased a littoral entity dominated by the British. The great concentrations of capital tied up in the new transportation and heavy industries led to grave social crises, with destruction of capital values and the restructuring of industry involving the state in the defence of national capitals - leading to protectionism and what soon became known as social-imperialism, where the working class became co-opted in the defence of the nation, a chauvinism which Marx himself had begun to suspect might be the real destination of English working-class maturity. A new type of international conflict between competing capitalist states began; the crisis of 1873 was a turning point. There was a second industrial revolution between 1870-90. It gave the world mass produced steel, new alloys, developed first for the arms trade, electricity, chemical, mineral oil. The Bessemer process was introduced in 1864. High carbon steels came on the market in 1875. By that time Rockefeller's Standard Oil had already laid more than a thousand miles of oil pipelines in the eastern United States. British steel production rose from a million to 27 million tons between 1874-1913; but German and US steel production grew even more. In the United States the post-Civil War period was one of intense westward migration, resulting in labour famines and rising wages, in a period of rapidly rising productivity and falling costs. Between 1867-1881, a swath of new goodies appeared: the telephone, gramophone, bicycle, wireless telegraphy, electric lamps, combustion engines, mechanised public transport, pneumatic tyres, the typewriter, mass newspapers, rayon, plastics; steam turbines, and transatlantic cables. Mass immunisation campaigns and sterile medicine. It was a period of chronic over-production, price-competition, labour shortages, growing strength of working-class organisations, the rise of trades unions and socialist parties, of the US breaking free of British economic domination and embarking on 'bootstrap' development. As Lenin said, the new colonialism had completed the seizure of unoccupied territories: 'For the 1st time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible, i.e., territories can only pass from one owner to another, instead of passing as ownerless territory to an 'owner'. Hence", "we are living in a peculiar epoch of world colonial policy, which is most closely connected with the latest stage in the development of capitalism, with finance capital' (Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism ,Moscow 1970 p74). Concentration and centralisation of capital, socialisation and rationalisation of the labour process, replacement of competition by monopolistic or oligopolistic control over production, the huge extension of credit which facilitated the growth of monopoly. The mushrooming of banks and finance capital coincided with the appearance of giant combines, trusts and international cartels. Britain had four billions pounds sterling of overseas investment by 1900, vastly more than any other country. So great was the flood of repatriated profits that it was sufficient even to finance new overseas investments; the money spent abroad on railway construction created new demand for the products of British heavy industry, while developing the infrastructure of Argentina and other countries supplying food and raw materials for Britain and thus further reducing her costs and entrenching her semi-monopolistic position in many markets. Marx had said in 1876: 'The world market itself forms the basis for this mode of production. On the other hand, the immanent necessity of this mode of production to produce on an ever-enlarged scale tends to extend the world market continuously, so that it is not commerce in this case which revolutionises commerce' [Capital III p333 (Moscow 1967).] And Engels added: 'The colossal expansion of the means of transportation and communication - ocean liners, railways, electrical telegraphy, the Suez Canal - has made a real world-market a fact' (Cap III p489). The capitalist world market was not the product of commerce, but the result of capital accumulation, of the growth of capitalist commodity-production. So it was now a capitalist world-market, a product of the phenomenon of mass production, which floods the existing market and forces it to expand into new territories as long as the growth of capital forces a growth of production. In Russia , imports of machinery - mainly from Britain - increased threefold between 1860-70. In the two years 1900 - 1912, American fixed capital doubled, and would double again by 1929. In Bismarck's Germany, BASF, the Badische-Anilin-und-Soda-Fabrik, was established 1864 and was the world's first true petrochemical, pharmaceutical and dyestuffs corporation, with its own R&D labs. This was a radical departure from the tradition of individual inventor-entrepreneurs who had made most of the major process innovations until then. Starting with aniline dyes, BASF integrated chemical manufacture with the creation of process machinery. Success was based not on individual brilliance but sustained co-operative work by research scientists and qualified technologists. Helped by German state supported technical high schools, they recruited from a flow of graduate chemists. Britain had traditionally dominated the dyestuffs trade with natural indigo dyes using raw materials imported from the Indian empire -- which meant there was no incentive for research into ersatz & synthetic alternatives. It took BASF 25 years and enormous expenditure (over 20m. marks) to synthesise indigo. But by the end of the 19th century German firms had captured 80 percent of the world market for dyes and a commanding lead in the chemicals industry, which soon laid basis for the 'chemists war' of 1914-18. R&D-based industry required enormous investments in research and production technology and created new capital-intensive industries profitable only with high capacity-utilisation: a new stage in the process of concentration and monopolisation which grew out of the technical potential of German industry and its response to the lack of either a native resource base or of colonies. By 1905-06 many of these dynamics began to conjoin and reinforce one another. Foreign adventures and social stresses and strains fed off each other. In Britain falling wages and inflation produced the beginnings of a social explosion. The seeds of the coming era of world war and revolution were planted in the emergence of the first truly urban, industrial society 60 years before. Samuels full 30,000 word essay is now on the Crashlist website at: Raphael Samuel, Workshop Of The World (Word97 format) http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/samuel.doc Raphael Samuel, Workshop Of The World (html format) (192kb) http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/samuel.htm _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
