BEFORE THERE WERE factories under roofs, there were factories in the fields. As with oil in the twentieth century, sugar could only be produced in a few favored spots, such as Brazil and the islands of the Caribbean. And again like oil, it was in demand everywhere. The lure of profits from raising such a precious commodity drew Spain’s European rivals to the tropical parts of the New World, where they developed an intensive kind of agriculture, using slave labor. Over the course of three hundred years, eleven million African men and women were shipped like cattle to the Western Hemisphere. Although England dominated the trade during its heyday in the eighteenth century, France, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands participated in the traffic in human beings. This is the ugly face of capitalism made uglier by the facile justifications that Europeans offered for using men until they literally dropped dead. Hypocrisy, they say, is the homage vice pays to virtue. In this case, hypocrisy left a bitter legacy. To assuage consciences over such a massive injustice, Europeans made invidious racial comparisons that have outlasted slavery by more than a century.
A much more benign, even awe-inspiring chapter in the history of capitalism paralleled the brutal days of the sugar plantations. Starting in the eighteenth century, a succession of ingenious men discovered how to make natural forces push, pump, lift, turn, twirl, smelt, and grind all manner of things. There was never any thought of importing slaves into Great Britain, but the high cost of workers’ wages proved to be a powerful incentive to find alternative sources of energy.
This gave a push to inventors who began a technological saga that has only accelerated with time. Drawing on seventeenth-century scientific experiments in hydraulics and hydrostatics, these pioneer engineers designed mechanical slaves, machines that could harness energy. Isaac Newton’s brilliant calculations of how gravity kept the planets in place prompted a new respect for human reason. As Alexander Pope wrote:
Nature and nature’s Laws lay hid in Night;
GOD said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.”
Thomas Newcomen, Richard Arkwright, and James Watt demonstrated that lesser mortals could take the Promethean fire from Newton and build engines that could work a lot harder than human beings and their animals.
These two phenomena—American slave-worked plantations and mechanical wizardry for pumping water, smelting metals, and powering textile factories—may seem unconnected. Certainly we have been loath to link slavery to the contributions of a free enterprise system, but they must be recognized as twin responses to the capitalist genie that had escaped the lamp of tradition during the seventeenth century. Both represented radical departures from previous practices. Take farming. Growing food had long been the province of each country’s peasantry. Peasants’ work was hard and demeaning, but families embedded in village customs did varied tasks of raising and preparing food. Sugar plantations began de novo, without rural traditions, using laborers wrenched from their homes to work like robots in military-style routines growing a single exotic crop.
Tapping into the energy of fossil fuel changed forever the relation of human beings to their natural environment. Inventiveness wasn’t new, but the scope of the steam power was. People had created elaborate waterwheels, windmills, fountains, bellows, guns, and dams, but they had never before penetrated the secrets of physics or devised ways to use those secrets to manipulate natural forces. The amount of power that could now be generated and the diversity of uses to which it could be put transformed production processes everywhere. Like that of the sugar plantation, their potential for generating profits accounts for the investment of time and money that people were willing to put into developing steam power. Both took concentration of capital, breaking ground for a new sugar plantation costing considerably more than setting up a cotton factory. This capital investment became the major feature of the new economic order. Perhaps even more significant to the workingmen and women at the time, both factories in the fields and factories under a roof introduced work routines that required long hours of disciplined labor. Employers had always preferred hard work to easygoing habits, but their considerable investment in slaves and equipment turned that preference into an imperative.
Politics in the late seventeenth century altered the history of capitalism by changing the European trading patterns. Fierce dynastic rivalries strained relations between Great Britain and France, France and Austria and the Netherlands, Spain and Great Britain, France and Russia and Spain, as well as some Italian states. Various combinations of these countries went to war against each other eight times between 1689 and 1815 for a total of sixty-three years.1 One major consequence of these hostilities was a sharp reduction in the intra-European trade that had grown substantially in the previous two centuries. Neighboring Great Britain and France, in particular, turned from each other as trading partners toward their overseas holdings. The wars themselves made raising revenue urgent, so heavy import tariffs became the order of the day. The various European colonies in the New World were expected to complement the economic needs of the mother country.
The persistent warfare among European powers created a kind of catch-22. The warring countries needed the riches they extracted from Asia and the New World to support their wars, but the intense competition for control of these lucrative trades triggered more bellicosity. France and England confronted each other in five different spots around the globe: over cotton and silk in India, slaves on the west coast of Africa, sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Indian alliances in the Ohio River valley of the North American continent, and furs in the Hudson Bay area. James Fenimore Cooper commented wittily on this rivalry in The Last of the Mohicans when he observed that the French and English armies in North America were forced to travel long distances in order to fight each other.
Because of its centrality to the sugar trade, the slave trade was the most hotly contested European venture on the face of the globe. The numbers themselves shock one into an awareness of its significance. Between 1501 and 1820 slavers took 8.7 million Africans in chains to the Western Hemisphere; between 1820 and the final abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, 2.3 million more were sent. A total of 11 million men and women came from Africa to the New World colonies in comparison with the 2.6 million Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the same period. Over one hundred thousand separate voyages brought this human cargo, 70 percent of them owned by either British or Portuguese traders.2
Sugar was one of capitalism’s first great bonanzas; its successes also revealed the power of the profit motive to override any cultural inhibitions to gross exploitation. Slavery was old. Egyptian slaves had built pyramids; Roman ones, bridges and aqueducts. What capitalism introduced was sustained and systematic brutality in the making of goods on a scale never seen before. It’s not size alone that distinguishes modern slavery from its ancient lineage in Greece and biblical times; it’s also race. Slavery then often had an ethnic component because slaves were taken as the captives of war, but never a consistently racial one. When the Portuguese brought back captured Africans to work in depopulated Lisbon starting in the fifteenth century, the trade didn’t differ much from the commerce in slaves that the Arabs had been conducting for several centuries throughout central and eastern Africa. A hundred years later, something new had been added to this commerce in human beings: They were integrated into an expanding production system. Those sent to the Caribbean were put to work in gangs planting sugarcanes, chopping weeds, cutting the harvest, and crushing the canes in the mills that turned out molasses and sugar. The very size of the trade promoted warfare in Africa in order to meet the new demand for slaves.
The Spanish, who were the first Europeans to arrive in the New World in search of gold and glory, would have been happy to use indigenous people to labor for them. Europeans did that wherever they could. But that was not to be, for the native people of the New World were peculiarly vulnerable to European diseases. So isolated had they been from the rest of the world’s people that they didn’t even have the same range of blood types as Asians, Africans, and Europeans, who had been mingling for many centuries. The joining of the Old and New Worlds caused an unintentional genocide as tribe after tribe in the Western Hemisphere died from the diseases that Europeans brought with them, leaving but a “saving remnant” of the indigenous population of North and South America.
Historical demographers put the pre-Columbian population at 90 to 110 million, with 10 to 12 million living north of Mexico. Measles, smallpox, pleurisy, typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, and diphtheria actually wiped out whole tribes. Repeated exposure to new diseases culled the indigenous population down to a tenth of its original size. People sickened and died with astounding rapidity. Without knowing what caused disease—germs weren’t isolated until the nineteenth century—no one understood the phenomenon. Indians sustained a profound psychological blow as they watched their own die while their conquerors survived. No less ignorant of the cause, Europeans tended to see God’s hand in saving them while destroying their pagan enemies.
A New Source of Labor
The Spanish, and later the Portuguese, tried to enslave the survivors, with limited success. Columbus had even sent 500 captured Indians back to Seville in 1495. In the early decades of the sixteenth century a succession of Spanish conquistadors moved onto the islands of the Greater Antilles, forcing the native people to pan gold and raise food for them. One of the witnesses of the bloody conquest of Cuba in 1511 was Bartolomé de Las Casas. In a long career as priest, historian, polemicist, Dominican friar, and bishop of Chiapas, he became the Indians’ greatest defender. It was Las Casas who suggested that the Spanish import African slaves as a way to protect the indigenous people. He argued that Africans were better prepared to work than the Indians who, he said, had not yet reached the same stage of civilization.3 From his suggestion came one of the most lucrative plums of Caribbean commerce, the asiento, a contract that Spanish officials awarded for an annual supply of slaves and European goods. The first one, signed in 1595, gave the Portuguese the exclusive rights to land 4,250 slaves annually at Cartagena. In 1713 the British secured the asiento in the peace treaty ending the War of the Spanish Succession.
While the Spanish used Indian and African slaves in mines, cattle ranches, and food-raising farms, the profits that sugar garnered paid for importing slaves. Pioneer agronomists in India had domesticated the sugar plant more than two thousand years earlier. It took more than a millennium for the sweet foodstuff to reach the Mediterranean. There Venetian merchants took control of the European market for it.4 Italians learned how to grow sugar successfully in Sicily, as did the Arabs in Ethiopia and on Zanzibar. The technique for processing sugar through cane-crushing mills came from the Arab world as well. The Portuguese no doubt picked up this know-how after invading Ceuta in Morocco just a few years before colonizing Madeira, its island possession off the Moroccan coast. In short order they experimented with growing sugar there and in the Azores, Cape Verde Islands, and Säo Tomé, all this in the fifteenth century. The Spanish followed suit in their Atlantic islands, the Canaries.
What was startlingly new in Madeira and São Tomé was the Portuguese organization of slaves into strict divisions of labor.5 Large numbers of workers had been collected under one roof before, but Portuguese sugar producers figured out how to coordinate the complicated tasks of crystallizing sugar from vats of boiling cane cuttings. Italian merchants had seized slavs (hence the name “slave”) from Eastern Europe for work in the Mediterranean from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries while Arab merchants had enslaved more than a million Western Europeans from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. At first the slaves the Portuguese used were white, but once Portuguese merchants had begun regularly bringing home Africans, sugar growers switched to black enslaved laborers. The thousand Africans that the Portuguese brought back annually to Lisbon in the mid-fifteenth century grew to thirty-five hundred a century later.6
Good luck and good winds had given the Portuguese a large foothold in South America, Brazil. At first, they concentrated on exporting the famous brazilwood that produced red dye and gave Brazil its name. (Actually Portuguese priests had first called this vast region Holy Cross.) Forests stretched along the southeast coast and inland for several miles. The Portuguese relied upon the Tupi hunters and gatherers to extract the resources from the trees. This turned out to be a temporary labor force, for the Tupi refused to farm. They fled into the recesses of the forests or killed themselves when the Portuguese attempted to coerce them to work. It was more plunder than production, as one scholar commented, and when it was over, the Portuguese in Brazil turned to the sugar production that they had mastered closer to home.7
Breaches on the Spanish Lake
Nowhere is the profit-maximizing imperative of capitalism more in evidence than in the sugar sweep in Europe’s New World colonies. Columbus carried sugarcane slips to the Caribbean on his second trip. Spanish authorities back home encouraged their cultivation, but the colonists themselves were more interested in precious metals. It was left to the Portuguese in Brazil to demonstrate the profits to be boiled out of sugarcane once you secured workers to do the drudgery. Sugar growing in Madeira and São Tomé gave the Portuguese a template for establishing plantations in the New World. Over the course of more than three centuries, Brazil imported almost four million slaves, the largest of any European outpost and more than a third of the total sent to the New World. Small wonder that Brazilians, looking out at the mountain in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro, could only see a sugar loaf.
While the pope made Spain accept the Portuguese presence in Brazil, the Council of the Indies in Seville had every intention of keeping the Caribbean a Spanish lake. Alas, Spain’s wars in the sixteenth century had exhausted both the country and the royal treasury, just at the moment when the French, Dutch, English, even the Danish were eager to enter the scramble for New World wealth. Nor could Spanish manufacturers supply the goods that their colonists wanted—surely not as cheaply as the Dutch and English, who were only too willing to smuggle tools, weapons, cloth, and food into the many port cities of the Spanish New World. Spain’s effort to maintain monopoly control only attracted outlaws to the Caribbean. Soon the area was considered “beyond the line”—outside the norms of European civilization and its international treaties. Here Europeans accepted rapes, abductions, plunder, torture, attacks, piracy, and chicanery of every kind, all made the more debased by the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans and Indians.8
True to their concentration on commerce, the Dutch wanted a toehold on the Spanish Main. Dutch West India Company traders moved from piracy to smuggling and finally to the occupation of Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, in 1634. Near Curaçao also was a source of salt, a precious food additive critical to the Dutch herring trade. The company had already established New Netherlands on the North American continent when it purchased Manhattan for goods worth roughly twenty-four dollars. With its natural harbor Curaçao became the center of the Dutch slave trade. With this gateway to Spain’s mainland colonies, the Dutch entered the competition for the Spanish asiento.
The Spanish had paid little attention to the Lesser Antilles, the so-called Windward and Leeward Islands five hundred miles east of their headquarters on Santo Domingo and Cartagena. The English and French were only too happy to take possession of them, the French settling Martinique and Guadeloupe; the English, St. Christopher, Barbados, Antigua, Montserrat, and Nevis. English entrepreneurs began cultivating tobacco with white indentured servants on their islands; but white servants presented social problems, and the supply was uncertain. When their labor contracts ran out in four or five years, the freed men and women had to be given land or work. Far more attractive as a labor force were African slaves, if an export crop could be found to justify their purchase prices. Enter sugar.
France was continental Europe’s richest and most powerful country, but French entrepreneurs had to contend with an unreformed absolute monarchy in which the capricious use of power threatened the security of their investments. Rather than an integrated market, the internal pathways of French commerce were clogged with tolls to be paid on roads and bridges while most of its peasants lacked the skills and investments to farm well. Yet in the New World the French learned how to produce sugar. The returns grew dramatically during the eighteenth century, but they reached only a small group of favored investors. Heavily taxed, New World sugar plantations postponed a fiscal crisis for the French monarchy until the end of the century.
The Dutch, French, and English not only intruded on Spain’s Caribbean holdings but also challenged Portuguese slavers, mounting an aggressive campaign to break up the Portuguese monopoly of the West African slave trade. Considering the breadth of the coast from which slaves were bought and the diversity of African rulers to deal with, it was not difficult for latecomers to enter this lucrative trade. Europeans themselves did not penetrate sub-Saharan Africa until the nineteenth century. Rather slave cargoes were gathered at fortified castles or factories, often on offshore islands. Sometimes bands of freelancing armed Africans raided villages and sold their captives to all comers. Along thirty-five hundred miles of coastline from Senegambia to Angola, traders gathered slave cargoes that they sold for European goods. Slave sellers particularly favored guns with which to capture more men and women. Separated by sex for the voyage across the Atlantic, the captives were packed into ships, each person confined to a space of four square feet for a period of eight to twelve weeks. A typical voyage would carry 150 to 400 persons, 12 to 15 percent of whom usually died en route. Revolts broke out in about 10 percent of all voyages, almost always in the first weeks.9
By the end of the sixteenth century Europe’s sugar refining center had shifted from Antwerp to London; the sugar industry in Sicily retrenched to meet only local demand. The English entered the slave trade with a monopoly firm, the Royal African Company, but by the end of the seventeenth century the time for monopolies had passed. Interlopers complained vigorously, and the trade was thrown open. Liverpool became its center as Nantes was France’s. At its peak in the 1790s, a slave vessel left an English port every other day. After England secured the Spanish asiento in 1713, it dominated the slave trade for a century, until reformers at home brought a stop to the whole awful enterprise.
Merchants in the English continental colonies, particularly those from Rhode Island and New York, participated in the slave trade along with the slavers that sailed from Liverpool. The northern British colonies also played a major role in provisioning the West Indian colonies, which imported almost everything rather than divert hands and land from producing sugar. They paid for their American colonial imports in molasses, which New Englanders took home and distilled into rum. Sugar went from being a luxury to a necessity in the kitchens of all but the poorest Europeans. The value of sugar imports alone was four times that of the entire commerce with Asian countries.10 Every European country with access to the Atlantic Ocean joined the race for profits from a sweetener that tasted good in tea and puddings, and, more important, could preserve fresh fruits and vegetables all year round.
The sugar planters, who invested their capital in plantations, worked their slaves and land as hard as possible. They accepted the inevitable decline of soil in the pursuit of quick returns. So profitable was the crop and so cruel the plantation owners that they literally worked their slaves to death. The labor force in the Caribbean had to be replaced about every ten to thirteen years. Far from home, European entrepreneurs shed their manners and morality. Many owners left the management of their property to others. These absentee owners returned home to live in luxury. Few questioned the origin of their great wealth. In England about a dozen of these sugar nabobs sat in the House of Commons. Without their plowing money back into the plantations, the fertility of the soil dropped, creating opportunities to bring new plantations into the market. Brazil was important through most of the seventeenth century; Barbados peaked around 1690; Haiti and Jamaica, after 1700. The greatest slave revolt in history brought the heyday of St. Domingue to an end in the second half of the eighteenth century; Cuba prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. While Cuba dominated the sugar industry, slaves could be sold there for thirty times what they had cost in Africa.11 Profits like that would always find takers.
Slaves in England’s Continental Colonies
No European country began its explorations of the New World with the intention of bringing slaves from Africa to raise exotic crops for a worldwide market. The turn to slave labor in the three English colonies of Virginia, Barbados, and South Carolina offers a picture of how the transformation happened. Virginia, England’s first colony, was settled in 1607 with the typical high hopes of finding gold and silver. After a decade of disappointment and hardship, tobacco saved the colony after a colonist had hybridized a leaf that could compete with the Spanish leaf. Smoking and chewing tobacco proved so popular in England that this demand triggered a boom back in Virginia. Anyone with access to land planted tobacco.12 The decentralization of decision making, characteristic of the free enterprise system, led to overcropping, and soon there was a glut of the “filthy weed.” When prices dropped precipitously, tobacco came within the budgetary reach of thousands more consumers. A fresh opportunity opened up: making a profit at the new low price by learning how to cut costs.
Slavery was not essential to raising tobacco. English indentured servants and family farmers had been growing it for several decades, but using slave labor was an alluring alternative for the wealthier planters. A Dutch vessel had brought a score of slaves to Virginia in 1619, but at that early date investing in slaves was not attractive. A few decades later a number of settlers arrived with sufficient cash to establish themselves on larger plots of land. The English king had promoted the slave trade in part to keep the freewheeling Dutch out of their North American colonies. Now English slavers could supply Virginia planters with slaves directly from Africa at a good price. A final inducement to switching from English indentured servants to African slaves came from the fact that servants, after completing their labor contracts, threatened to become an unruly underclass. Governor William Berkeley described the situation when he lamented: “Oh how miserable is that man who must govern a people six parts of seven are poor, in debt, discontented, and armed!” Slaves were more expensive than servants, but they remained in bondage until death and could be kept under better control than ex-servants.13
When healthier conditions lowered the initially high mortality rate in Virginia, slaves became a better buy than white servants. Virginia now had the makings of a planter elite, men with resources to set up slave-worked plantations. At the same time the mother country began a very lucrative business exporting tobacco to the Continent. A leading Virginia churchman complained about Virginia’s lack of clergy and was rebuked by the British attorney general with “Souls! Damn your souls, make tobacco.” The 10 percent black population in the first decade of the eighteenth century moved quickly to its 40 percent plateau. By then the British navy was convoying home an annual tobacco fleet of three hundred ships. Meanwhile poorer folks moved out of the Tidewater to the Piedmont area, Maryland, North Carolina, or the inland valleys, where they could farm on a smaller scale, putting in a few acres in tobacco to pay for blankets, tools, and utensils.
Barbados went through a similar transformation when sugar cultivation replaced mixed farming. When men with the means to buy land, slaves, and machinery for growing and processing sugarcane arrived, the poorer settlers looked for another home in the New World. South Carolina received a charter in 1663, triggering a Barbadian exodus of whites and blacks north to the American continent. South Carolinians too started with a mixed economy. Their slaves introduced the open grazing familiar to Africans, but all this changed with the introduction of rice as an export crop. The Africans, especially those who came from the Sierra Leone area, where rice cultivation had long been practiced, understood the elaborate water and special cultivation that rice required. They also identified native herbs with which some poisoned their masters.14 As with sugar and tobacco, rice produced enough profits to attract wealthier settlers who could afford to buy slave labor. By 1720 there were two African slaves for every English settler in South Carolina. As the Virginia planters had done when they adopted slave labor, the Carolina planter elite passed draconian laws controlling every aspect of slave behavior to still their fears of a slave rebellion.
When American independence brought an end to British subsidies for tobacco, rice, and indigo, the American South was lucky enough to find a new cash crop in cotton. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, invented in 1793, made profitable the short-staple cotton that could be grown throughout the region. Soon the crop spread west to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, embedding slavery in the economy of the new nation. By 1815 southern planters were sending 17 million bales of cotton to the mills of Lancaster and Manchester. By 1860 this total had risen to 192 million bales, and the slave population had quadrupled to almost four million black men, women, and children.
The Caribbean and American South constituted the underbelly of capitalist expansion with the cruel exploitation of foreign laborers to produce drugs for newly addicted European consumers. The range was impressive. In 1714 the French introduced coffee from Yemen, whence it spread to Haiti and regions in Central America. The Aztecs had drunk cocoa cold and spiced. With sugar available, both cocoa and tea became popular drinks in Europe. Though the Chinese were the greatest producers of tea, it was also grown in the Caribbean. With the exception of sugar, all these crops were drugs. Even sugar, one might say, could be addictive, and of course, fermenting the molasses that gushed from sugarcane vats soon turned into rum. All these intoxicating novelties had been inaccessible to Europeans, whose climate prevented growing the exotic crops of the tropics. European governments also liked these taste enhancers and mood alterers because they could load them with “sin” taxes.15 Moralists complained about their spreading popularity, but their scolding lost traction as the value of individual liberty rose. After all, desire had proved a mighty stimulus to steady work habits when people were left free to choose from the cornucopia of goods available to them.
A Labor System That Demanded Rationalizations
The survival of slavery over four centuries compels our attention. What was there in European culture that permitted such atrocities as were committed against Africans as well as the indigenous populations of North and South America? For one, the level of cruelty everywhere in the world at that time made slavery less unusual. A nineteenth-century parliamentary report, for example, coolly described the superiority of adolescent girls over mules for the task of pulling coal carts through the narrow passages of mines. The callousness shown African men and women reflected some of the harsh treatment of all dependents. And then there is that amazing capacity of human beings to justify what they want to do.
As with our reaction to the starving millions today, “out of sight is out of mind” prevails. A very small percentage of the European population had any contact with slavery. This probably accounts for the milder form of slavery in the American South, where master and slaves lived cheek by jowl. In British America, unlike Latin America with its many mulattoes and mestizos, race became the handle that defenders of slavery seized to legitimate their holding men and women in perpetual bondage.
Capitalism twisted relations among the races in a particularly ugly way. The reason for this is obvious and obscure at the same time. Capitalism began as a system of production, fueled by an insatiable drive for profit. Places around the world with natural resources attracted investors. These Europeans could bring with them their capital, but not the laboring men and women required to extract or grow those far-flung resources. Instead they had to rely on workers where the resources were, meaning the mobilization of Asians, Africans, Arabs, or Native Americans—people of color. Abroad European entrepreneurs organized labor to their own advantage, usually with the help of local potentates who were bought off. Europeans judged the new workers by their speed in adapting to their work habits. They were usually found wanting. Europeans filled their letters back home with laments about the laziness and dirty habits of those on whom they depended for labor.
Rationalizations of slavery alert us to the guilty conscience that hovered over the system. Sometimes scholars make European prejudice against Africans appear as prompting enslavement rather than as furnishing excuses after the fact. Once slavery was in place, there was every inducement to disparage Africans. Their black skin evoked the pejorative imagery and expressions associated with blackness: black devil, black market, blackguard. A wonderfully circular reasoning kicked in as well: The unattractive personal traits that slavery instilled in children and their parents—indolence, insolence, sluggishness, lethargy—were exactly the qualities that were used to justify enslavement. By the end of the eighteenth century a new commitment in Europe to liberty and equality had doomed slave labor, though it was not until 1888 that the last Western country, Brazil, ended it. And nobody wanted to talk about it. A twentieth-century English historian wryly commented that the slave trade appeared in their history books only in connection with its abolition.
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.16
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.”17
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!18 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.19
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.20 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.21 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.22 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.23
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.24
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.25 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.26 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.27
A Scientific Revolution
Not all the desire in the world can produce a new idea. As the saying goes, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Because we know that a handful of inventors developed some marvelous machines, we are tempted to believe that if we can supply a motive for them, we have explained why they stepped up to the mat. But machine designing requires more than a good motive and, in this case, more than talent. Thomas Savery, Thomas Newcomen, and James Watt went beyond adding ingenuity to experience; they drew upon knowledge that had not previously been known. Technology met science and formed a permanent union. At the level of biography, Galileo met Bacon.
In 1632 the Italian Inquisition forced Galileo Galilei to abjure his belief that the sun is the central body around which the earth and other planets revolve. Having already had a long and distinguished career as a mathematician and astronomer, Galileo had conceived accurate laws of motion and improved the refracting telescope before he was silenced. He had also infected an English contemporary. Francis Bacon, though a lawyer and judge, was enraptured with Galileo’s observations and his inductive reasoning. In his Advancement of Learning, written to promote the acquisition of useful knowledge, Bacon argued that experiments, not theories, were the linchpins of the new science that was taking shape across the European continent, though it would be more accurate to call it natural philosophy, for the term “scientist” was not commonly used until the mid-nineteenth century.
Objective knowledge became the great desideratum, to be gained through forming hypotheses about forces in nature and then designing experiments that could test the hypotheses. Bacon had heard a lot of sounding off in his long career at court, so he had come to value facts over opinions. Nature, he said, talks back, by which he meant that if someone’s opinions about the order of things were false, experiments would not substantiate them. Opinions, on the other hand, continued circling unabated because there was usually no way to disconfirm them. Bacon endorsed the wide dissemination of the new knowledge. This too was a departure, for knowledge had long been treated as a body of secrets to be passed on to a select group. The practice of openly sharing observations and analyses widened the ambit of investigation. Published findings acted like a magnet, bringing the filings of curiosity from all over to bear on particular problems.
Across Europe the finest mathematicians and philosophers engaged with Galileo’s agenda about the laws of motion, and of optics, and the use of models. Throughout the seventeenth century scientific curiosity fermented, especially in England, but was evident in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and France as well. From two Englishmen, Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, came the experiments that were going to have the greatest impact on industrial inventions. Newton was born the year, 1642, that Galileo died; Boyle was fifteen years old at the time. A succession of seers followed.
The reigning paradigm in natural philosophy had come from Aristotle, who had lived twenty centuries earlier. Aristotle described the world through the dichotomy of matter and form. While his work was astounding in its breadth, it described and defined things in nature rather than explain them. The behavior of matter differed according to its essence or form; the four basic elements of air, water, earth, and fire conveyed the qualities of dry, wet, cold, and hot. Heavy objects fell to the ground because it was an inherent quality of their heaviness. Newton’s theories about the operation of gravity introduced an entirely new principle into the operation of matter. Heavenly bodies as well as those on earth were subject to gravitational pull. More than mere principles, these laws could be expressed mathematically. They could be demonstrated, though only a handful of people could do the math at the time Newton’s Principia was published in 1689.
Aristotle had also said that nature abhorred a vacuum. Responding to this Aristotelian challenge, Galileo experimented with suction pumps. Robert Boyle, working with his air pump and bell jar, demonstrated conclusively the existence of a vacuum that meant that the atmosphere had weight. Because of the open character of English public life, knowledge moved from the esoteric investigations of natural philosophers to a broader community of the scientifically curious. The fascination with air pressure, vacuums, and pumps become part of a broadly shared scientific culture that reached out to craftsmen and manufacturers in addition to those of leisure who cultivated knowledge. Religious toleration, the free circulation of ideas through publications and discussions, and the easy mixing of ordinary citizens with members of the educated elite created a broad receptivity to these theories about the world that were overturning centuries of learning.28
Galileo had been defeated by authority, the authority of the church, but slowly a new authority was being created, that of a community of philosophers who read one another’s writings, copied one another’s experiments, and formed a consensus of experts. England was much more hospitable to this new mode of inquiry than was the Vatican. The Royal Society, founded in 1662, promoted and protected experimentation. In the Baconian spirit of producing useful knowledge and probably to justify its royal support, the society initially surveyed farming practices across England. It sponsored as well a study of the use of the potato as food. Far more important, it brought together in the same room the people who were most engaged in physical, mechanical, and mathematical problems. Its members soon discovered how difficult it was to turn useful “knowledge” into useful practices, but they did initiate a lecture series that took this knowledge to the provinces, where others might actually figure out how to make it useful.29
Of course none of this would have had any impact on the world of work where people sweated near blast furnaces and toiled at weaving looms had not the physical laws they studied affected the actions of lifting, pushing, and rotating. The two important discoveries for the invention of the steam engine, the pivotal innovation of the century, were the existence of a vacuum and the measuring of air pressure. And even this knowledge might have remained locked up in air pumps and bell jars had there not been a diffused conviction, since Newton wrote that nature could be made to work for human beings, that its forces could be understood and controlled.
On the Continent, where the Catholic Church was strong, Newtonian thought was suspect, treated almost as occult. Even in England, churchmen feared that too much study of nature might lead men and women to become materialists, the eighteenth-century equivalent of atheists. But in the Netherlands and England, little note was paid to these objections. Men whom we might call tutors to the world wrote books simplifying the physics that went through many editions in several languages. A participatory society had taken form with a plethora of civic organizations, self-improvement societies, bookstores, periodicals, pubs, and plays. There were popular guides to Newton, even ones written for children, and they found a ready audience. A teenage Benjamin Franklin, visiting London to learn the mechanics of printing, discovered Newtonian physics. About the same time, a young man destined to be the signature philosopher of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, spent three years in England and pronounced Newton’s theory a human triumph.30
The Church’s opposition to learning the new physics added another charge against France’s old regime among critics like Voltaire. France, bogged down with so many problems throughout the eighteenth century, came late to industrialization, but its intellectuals were fascinated by both Newtonianism and its application. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert published in 1751 a magnificent encyclopedia that wedded the speculative with the practical. The editors, both philosophers, visited dozens of workshops to write the seventy-two thousand entries about the useful arts, ranging from clockmaking to centrifuges. From it, Adam Smith apparently picked up his famous description of the division of labor.31 Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedia was but the grandest of a genre that had already found publishers in England who foresaw the appeal of conveniently organized sources for technical information.
Enough curiosity existed in England to sustain fairly expensive adult courses on the new physics. Coming to the capital from the province, Thomas Paine availed himself of such classes, which later paid off when he designed an iron bridge. Young men circulating through London distributed the most sophisticated ideas of the age through the country. Soon itinerant experts were offering lecture series in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and lesser towns. They lugged with them hundreds of pounds of air pumps, orreries, levers, pulleys, hydrometers, electrical devices, and models of miniature steam engines. With these instruments they could demonstrate Newton’s laws of “attraction, repulsion, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction.”32 Mechanics’ institutes started with the specific goal of teaching working men how the new machines actually worked and—significantly—why.
The Inventors and Their Inventions
The pervasiveness of human inventiveness around the world demonstrates that no country, race, or continent has a lock on it. The Arabs and Chinese made critical advances in sciences long before Europeans. They also developed complicated hydraulic systems. In sub-Saharan Africa craftsmen skillfully mined and made artifacts in gold, copper, tin, and iron. Pre-Columbian Mayans, Incans, and Aztecs constructed impressive buildings without the benefit of iron or wheels. Examples like these tell us that it is not a civilization’s superior intelligence that led to the Industrial Revolution, but rather the propitious linkage of technological curiosity to economic opportunities and a supportive social environment. Put simply, it took intelligence and knowledge operating in a society that offered incentives for applying both to production processes. The ambience also had to give scope of action to individuals to experiment. Or more accurately, authorities did not have the power to divert inquiring minds from areas of inquiry and did not punish by law or through prejudice people who undertook innovations that would disturb the traditional workplace.
Two pioneering blacksmiths, Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, were the first to exploit the new knowledge of atmospheric weight, using it to force steam to run an engine. Effective in pumping water from mine shafts, Newcomen’s 1705 invention also pumped life into a number of unprofitable colleries. Those in the know advised mineowners, who might be the Church of England, an Oxford college, or noblemen whose land had mineral deposits, to buy a steam engine. Around the same time Abraham Darby figured out how to use coke, a solid derivative of burning coal, instead of carbon from wood in blast furnaces. In a nice symbiosis, his steam engines used coal under their boilers and were used to pump water from the mines that were producing the coal. As with so many other inventions, it took almost a half century before cast iron could be made easily with coke, using the pumping action of steam engines to blast air into the furnaces.33
Newcomen’s steam engine replaced both waterwheels and bellows in mining and ironmaking, the first of an endless succession of substitutions. The machines were profligate with fuel, but England had a lot of coal. It did mean that steam engines had to be used near the coalfields in the center of England. Economists call this concentration of enterprises around coal deposits the economies of agglomeration. By that they mean that workshops, if they are clustered together, will be able to draw on a pool of skilled laborers, specialized services, and raw materials at lower prices, an unintended and beneficial consequence of what was really a limitation.34 By 1800, sixteen hundred Newcomen engines were in operation in England; one hundred in Belgium; and forty-five in France. The Netherlands, Russia, and Germany had a few; Portugal and Italy, none.35 Something new was needed to make steam engines economically viable in places where coal was scarce, but in the meantime the success of Newcomen’s machines in solving the drainage problems of coal mines turned England into Europe’s principal mining center with 81 percent of its tonnage.
James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker, entered the picture when he was given a Newcomen engine to repair. This encounter inspired him to become a mechanical engineer. Though largely self-taught, Watt drew on the knowledge from the savants he knew in Glasgow. He remained an avid reader and book collector throughout his life.36 Experimenting with the precision of a laboratory scientist, Watt puzzled over the terrible waste of steam during the heating, cooling, and reheating of the cylinders in Newcomen’s engines. For this problem, he designed a condenser to send the exhaust to a separate, but connected, chamber. He patented this invention in 1769. Like the use of steam as a force to move objects, the condenser drew upon a basic property of nature, in this case atmospheric pressure. Through a long career of making steam engines and training steam engineers, much of it spent at his factory in Birmingham, Watt continued to work on his design, transforming it, as one scholar recently noted, from “a crude and clumsy contraption into a universal source of industrial power.”
The average capacity of Watt’s late-eighteenth-century models was five times that of waterwheels, and they could be located anywhere.37 A horse could expend ten times more energy than a man. Watt started with that statistic to specify a unit of artificial energy. One “horse power” measured the force needed to raise 550 pounds one foot in a second, or about “750 Watts.” Among those industrialists who saw the possibilities of the steam engine was Watt’s son. Assiduously guided through mathematics and physics by his father, the young Watt applied himself to designing engines for ships, as did a cluster of Americans eager to find a way to carry passengers and freight up the Hudson and through the lower Mississippi rivers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. From steamships to railroads was an obvious next step, performed by George Stephenson in the 1820s. Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton, turned out hundreds of engines for every conceivable manufacturing application, more than a thousand by 1819, the year of Watt’s death. They fiercely protected their patents, and unlike the many inventors who earned little from their ingenuity, they prospered. The process for getting a patent often operated like an obstacle course. Even more surprising, Watt’s contemporaries recognized the portentousness of his accomplishments.
Improved Textile and Pottery Making
The 1820s mark the beginning of the age of steam that changed the face of the earth—its atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and surface. A hundred years earlier, world population had begun the ascent that didn’t peak until the end of the twentieth century. Prompted in part by the growing number of mouths to feed, bodies to cloth, families to shelter, factories to fuel the voracious appetite for fossil fuel went long unrecognized. Looked at retroactively, the cascading effects of thousands of unintended consequences from the successive technologies of industry were horrendous. It took another century and a half for people to realize that the effects of the collective actions of billions of rather small two-legged animals had actually blown through local and regional limits to become global. Statistics carry the message: Between the closing decades of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, artificial energy made laborers two hundred times more efficient. One expert has calculated that global output grew fortyfold in the twentieth century alone.38 But that is to get ahead of the story that gathered force during the nineteenth century with engineers constantly fiddling to improve the design of Watt’s engine.
Making beautiful things also became easier with steam. Since the sixteenth century, Europeans had been importing porcelain from China. These delicately wrought and decorated pieces put to shame the heavy crockery that European potteries turned out. They also showed what it was possible to achieve. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, firms in Sèvres and Limoges, France, and Staffordshire, England, took on the challenge of matching the quality of China ware. Josiah Wedgwood led this endeavor. Born into a potter’s family, he grew up familiar with the casual organization of work in the potteries of Staffordshire. As in most crafts at the time, workers took off for wakes, weddings, fairs, and personal bouts of drunkenness. Hours were irregular, and the master potter, who typically had a shop with eight or nine journeymen and apprentices, was not much of a taskmaster. Every potter knew most of the maneuvers that turned clay into a pot, and with rare exceptions, they accomplished these tasks with indifferent success. A legendary figure in the history of industrialization, Wedgwood looked at these features as a challenge for reform.
Wedgwood approached pottery making like a scientist, an artist, and a taskmaster. He experimented with clay and quartz, blended metallic oxides, and invented the pyrometer to measure oven temperatures. He perfected a cream-colored earthenware that even the royal family used. His reputation grew from his genius at organizing his factory and molding his employees into expert craftsmen much as they molded clay into plates, bowls, and cups. Truly a visionary, Wedgwood imagined what would be ideal and then bent every effort to achieve it. Contrary to customary work routines in the potteries, he decided that his different lines would be produced in separate rooms and that potters, raised up to do every task, would instead concentrate on a single one. For producing colored ware in Wedgwood’s factory, for instance, painters, grinders, printers, liners, borderers, burnishers, and scourers worked together in a single room, along with the modelers, mold makers, firemen, porters, and packers who belonged to all the divisions.39
Wedgwood took the mixed bag of humanity on his payroll and shaped it into a modern work force. He used bells and clocks to instill punctuality. Exact record keeping enabled him to identify and fine refractory employees. He introduced women into his plants, infuriating his male employees even though they were paid substantially more than the women. He had no tolerance for the easy work habits of his father’s generation, but he did take care of his workers’ material needs, paying them high wages, looking after their health, and building houses to replace the huts that they were used to living in.
Not long after Wedgwood opened up his new factory in the northwest of England, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia placed an order for a thousand pieces of his famous creamware. When he read that the empress wanted her plates and bowls decorated with beautiful landscapes as well as depictions of ancient ruins and magnificent houses, Wedgwood realized that he didn’t have the artists to do this kind of work; nor would it be easy to train the ones he had. Somehow he was able to send 952 dishes to the empress. This close call with failure convinced him to start a school to train designers and decorators from an early age. Perhaps nothing demonstrates better his tendency to think in the long term than this willingness to shape adolescents into skilled craftsmen and women. Visitors to China had reported in amazement that seventy different pairs of hands worked on each plate issuing from a Chinese factory. The difference between Wedgwood’s organization and this extreme division of labor in China was that while Wedgwood wanted quality, he insisted upon efficiency.40
In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Wedgwood shipped tons of his creamware, black basalts, and jasperware to Poland, Denmark, Italy, South America, Germany, France, and the Low Countries. His was the standard of the day for style, artistry, glazes, material, and production facilities. When he installed steam engines into his pottery at the end of the eighteenth century, the modern ceramics industry was born. Wedgwood also helped spur England’s canal-building mania in the last decade of the eighteenth century, giving early proof of the mutually enhancing relationship of industry and transportation.41 Nature favored England with many rivers; canals enhanced their convenience.
Like the Staffordshire potteries before Wedgwood arrived on the scene, the English textile industry had clung to old production routines. Some workers were gathered in factories run by waterpower, but many men still worked at home with the help of their families and a few apprentices. Blacksmiths and clockmakers fashioned the tools with wood and a few iron parts.42 It was an industry ripe for industrialization, and cotton was the fabric that held out the best hope of success. Its fibers were easier to work with than those of wool, silk, or flax, and its market was huge. The goal was to mechanize the movements made by the hands and arms of the spinners and weavers.
Four men, working independently, transformed textile making with their inventions of the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the power loom, all designed to speed up the process of turning wool into thread and thread into cloth. Their differing success epitomizes the mixed fate of inventors. Both James Hargreaves and Thomas Arkwright came up with the spinning jenny, a simple device that multiplied the spindles of yarn spun by one wheel. Once it was in operation, the number of additional spindles went quickly from eight to eighty. Hargreaves was a weaver, but Arkwright had better connections to backers and was able to set up a factory where he successfully brought six hundred workers, many of them women and children, under one roof. Edmund Cartwright, a country clergyman and graduate of Oxford, became absorbed with the weaving process after visiting a cotton spinning mill. A year later, in 1785, he patented a power loom that used steam power to operate a regular loom for making cloth. It became the prototype of the modern loom. Although Cartwright built a weaving mill, he went bankrupt. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which, as the name suggests, combined two inventions, the spinning jenny and the power loom. He had to sell the rights to his mule because he was too poor to pay for the patenting process.
Steam power gave the British the competitive edge in textile making, particularly cotton. They could undersell almost all Indian and Chinese producers. The market for cotton was global, and England’s fabrics were so cheap that they were able to break open many of the world’s protected markets. The boom in cotton sales put a premium on dyes as well, most of them produced in the New World. Brazilwood delivered a red dye, as did the madder plant, which came from Turkey. Human inventiveness is wonderful; somehow someone discovered that the dried female body of an insect found on Mexican cactus, cochineal, could produce a brilliant scarlet color. It became part of the palette for dyeing cottons. Indigo, a beautiful shade of blue, originated in India. Before the age of chemical dyes, colors were hard to come by, and wearing brilliant shades of clothing signaled wealth. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, one of the few female innovators of the period, successfully experimented with the cultivation of indigo in South Carolina. Now both climates of the colony could produce something for the world market: the wetlands with rice and the drier upland with indigo. These brilliant dyes turned yet one more luxury into a pleasure enjoyed by shopgirls and their beaux. Ordinary people could now wear purple, once the color of kings, but not without raising eyebrows at first.
Steam turned textile manufacturing into the principal industry of the nineteenth century. Cotton could be grown in more places than sugar could be, but the places were still limited. Americans didn’t start raising short-staple cotton until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. After that, demand became ferocious, growing twentyfold in fifty years. At last the mills of Manchester had a steady supply of cotton as settlers and their slaves moved into the virgin lands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. When the North successfully blockaded cotton shipments to England during the Civil War, Great Britain turned to Egypt, where the government had been promoting cotton production. Still later the availability of cheap power to pump water long distances made profitable cotton growing in China as well as parts of Arizona and California. But this is to get way ahead of the story of capitalism in the eighteenth century.
The Appearance of Factories
Workers had been long gathered in breweries, shipyards, blast furnaces, mines, and paper mills. With the industrialization of textile making and ceramics, the factory became the symbol of a new industrial era, though factory workers remained a minor part of the diverse work force of modern societies. The poet William Blake memorably called them “dark Satanic Mills.” Those using waterpower dotted the English countryside, but most steam-powered ones clustered around England’s coal deposits in the Midlands. Factories were dark, dirty, and dangerous places, slightly better for employees than were mines. Women and children worked alongside men in mines, moving coal by basketfuls through long, poorly ventilated tunnels. Whether powered by water or steam, factories brought to an end the autonomy of the family working together at home. Now owners or supervisors could monitor their employees’ performances as they coordinated their routines, though kinsmen continued at first to work together in factory units. The increasing complexity of the machinery and consumers’ insistence upon standard products made supervision more and more important.43 Bringing their workers into one location, employers could impose twelve-hour workdays, which became the norm in the nineteenth century.
Wedgwood’s success brought jobs to Staffordshire. His hometown grew fivefold during his lifetime, but other timesaving inventions threw men and women out of work. All the innovations dramatically altered the lives of workers. Taking the long view, economists can show that making goods cheaper usually ends up creating employment by releasing demand for other commodities. The pain comes in the short run, and many an English worker reacted to that pain with bitterness. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Yorkshire laborers whose families had sheared sheep for generations smashed the shearing frames that were undermining their way of life. They took the name of an earlier resister, Ned Lud. These Luddites declared war on the machines that violated venerable work routines and banished comfort and conviviality from the workplace.
Actually woolen clothmakers in the west of England had earlier embarked on a serious effort to thwart clothiers from introducing the spinning jenny. Menacingly, this device could do the work of twenty spinners. These craftsmen had the advantage of a long tradition of regulation in the woolen trade, so they called upon Parliament to enforce laws that had been on the books for generations. After a decade of petitioning, lobbying, and pamphleteering clothmakers finally secured a parliamentary inquiry. These workers were fighting to retain an old and stable way of life; their employers, to enhance profits by saving labor costs. The workers harked back to once-honored rules that inhibited innovations; the manufacturers argued that the laws were archaic and self-defeating. It was a new twist on the much older wrangle between tradition and reform, continuity and change.
Parliament repealed the old statutes regulating the cloth trade in 1809. Two years later Luddite militancy animated thousands of laborers across a wide swath of England. While clothmakers were smashing stocking frames, farm workers attacked another invention, the mole plow used to make draining channels with a steel ball. As the name suggests, it created a track resembling that of a mole, the animal that raises the dirt slightly as it moves just below the earth’s surface. The government sent an armed force of twelve thousand soldiers to quell the rural riots, a force greater than that which the Duke of Wellington took with him to Spain to fight Napoleon. Parliament followed up by adding frame breaking to the list of capital crimes, which already numbered in the hundreds. Over the century that spanned the Industrial Revolution there were more than four hundred instances of direct action against the pace and scope of workplace changes in Great Britain. The destruction of property evoked savage responses from landlords, manufacturers, financiers, and merchants, who exercised a firm control on the British government. Nowhere are that control and the values that underpinned it more conspicuous than during the Irish famine of 1846–1848. While hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were starving, the Irish sent food to prosperous England because the laws prevented their feeding themselves from the product of acres owned by absentee landlords.44
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.45 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.46 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.47 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.48
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.49
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.”50
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.”51 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.”52
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.
The threat from old enemies faded slowly—at least in the imagination. Paine continued to lash out at England’s aristocrats while the new industrialists were consolidating much greater power than they had had. Ordinary laborers lost a lot of liberty in this era. In the nineteenth century factory owners, newly solidified into a powerful class, exercised control over them through their right to hire and fire at will and without cause. Making private property the premium social good, they rejected the idea that freedom is just as precious to workers as to themselves. Because it took laws to protect workers trying to organize on the private property of their bosses, owners have often treated workingmen’s campaigns as attacks on liberty. For others, the protracted battle between labor and management over safety, wages, hours, and working conditions has called into question the linkage of economic and political freedom that once appeared unproblematic when capitalists were fighting against an entrenched landed class.
During the eighteenth century the cumulative effect of capitalist practices could clearly be seen as forming a system. Production was organized to return a profit rather than provide for the survival of the society. Individuals using their own resources made the decisions about how to use those resources without much interference from public authority. The sum of decisions became an economic reality of great significance in the setting of prices. Information coursing through an informal communications network in the form of prices or rates of interest or rents then influenced other participants’ choices. Employers rather than craft customs organized the work to be done. Personal power accrued to those who made money through the impersonal workings of the market. The powerful hierarchies of the church and the landed class continued to exert influence but frequently had to yield to those with power in the economic realm.
We could say that industrialization had a foot in slavery when we follow its course in the United States. Then slavery played a strategic part in the transformation of the textile industry, the leading sector in both the American and British economies. In the nineteenth century the American North and South formed a compatible economic relation. Northern manufacturers supplied clothes, timber, and tools to southern planters, who concentrated their capital on producing cotton, which was the leading export for the nation for the first five decades of the century. Without the profits from southern slavery, the American economy would certainly have developed more slowly, but there would have been nothing inherently unprogressive about a slower pace.
The restrictions on the freedom of wage earners were often difficult to see, but the chains of slavery were only too visible. I began this chapter linking the exploitation of slave labor in the Caribbean sugar plantations with the inventions that led to the Industrial Revolution. Driven by the same profit motive and drawing on the same funds, both material and cultural, the two had similarities, but by the end of the eighteenth century, they had diverged sharply. Industrial innovations took place at home in the midst of one of the most fertile intellectual periods in history; slavery flourished out of sight, in remote and backward areas, but not quite out of mind. Sensibilities further divided them. At home the abundant proof of social progress of which the marvelous machines were part awoke the sleeping conscience that had made possible the Atlantic slave system.
The cause of furthering human rights sprang, as if from nowhere, to animate two generations of reformers in the eighteenth century.53 Dozens of new propositions about men and women and their unfolding nature clamored for attention. The possibility—over time, the probability—of favorable change danced before all eyes in the abundance in the food stalls and the cornucopia of fabrics, china, books, tools, and trinkets shown off in shopwindows. Where once nothing had seemed more certain than that the past would endlessly repeat itself, now all awaited what would come next.
In the midst of this moral ferment a new spirit of humanitarianism infected the popular imagination in Western Europe. Curiosity created new commitments, and these inspired organizations that in turn launched political campaigns. Polemical pamphlets, memoirs of slaves, testimony from those involved in the trade pushed to the fore the vivid image of African men and women in chains. The contradiction between fighting for freedom while holding on to slavery was embarrassingly obvious to leaders of the American Revolution and their British opponents. They had after all justified their break with Great Britain on a universal right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Four years after the Declaration of Independence, the Pennsylvania legislature abolished slavery. Under the Articles of Confederation, Pennsylvania was actually a sovereign state, so it became the first government to demonstrate that an institution as old as the Bible could be ended peacefully through the action of a democratically elected legislature.
Every other northern state followed Pennsylvania into this new era. By 1801 the Mason-Dixon line, which began as a surveyor’s line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, had become the symbolic division of free and slave labor in the United States. The gradual abolition laws of the northern states mandated freedom for those slaves born after a certain date once they had reached the age of twenty-five or twenty-six or twenty-eight. Even in the South, antislavery societies flourished until the 1820s, when profitable cotton cultivation sustained slavery for another forty years. Unlike the British with a statute that applied to their island possessions far from home, northerners freed slaves living in their midst. Far fewer slaves existed in the northern states than in the South, but it is estimated that enslaved men and women composed a quarter of the working population of Manhattan. When New York law denied legitimacy to holding human beings as property, it constituted the largest peaceful invasion of private property in history. It took the American Civil War to complete what Pennsylvania had begun with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution in 1868. If one ever wondered whether ideas had any force in the workaday world, the campaign to end slavery should still any doubts.
Today there are fascinating experiments in capitalism shaping up around the world, but originally and for at least three centuries capitalism came from the West. Its momentum carried Europeans and their modes of operation around the world. Once capitalism was a full system with cultural values and social habits enhancing its power, it was poised to crush any opposition to its expansion. The qualities of Western Europeans—openness to novelty, aggressiveness, tenacity, ingenuity, and sense of superiority—became sharper under the grindstone of success. This is the Europe that the rest of the world knows, admires, and fears. It is also the culture that nurtured natural rights, democracy, and a humanitarian sensibility.