The Industrial Revolution, Part 1
If scholarship is correct, human beings once lived in a hunting, foraging economy.
That is to say, most of the human beings in existence at that time, long, long ago,
spent their time in hunting in the forests and along the prairies
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The first major economic revolution occurred. This began to take place when men discovered that they could assist the processes of nature by growing plants rather than by
We had a major revolution in economic development, which has sometimes been referred to as the
agrarian revolution. In some parts of the world it is still taking place, but it is,
of course, the earliest in the development of human society.
Then about 200 years ago a second major revolution occurred, and it is called the Industrial
At that time it was discovered that human beings could improve their lot significantly, not
only through processes of agriculture and agrarian development, but they could improve
their lot significantly if they would learn how to mass produce various devices that most
people wanted to use because it would make life better for them. And the Industrial Revolution
was born. It may be that at the present time we are on the threshold of a third major economic revolution.
I am not certain of this, because it is not possible to foretell the future.
But one of the things that we can note in both of the earlier economic revolutions
was that in both of them, government played a major role. Government, as a matter of fact,
was probably not even organized until we had the agrarian revolution. Prior to that time,
men lived in hunting and foraging groups and wandered over the face of the earth as the game
trails directed. However, once they found land to be valuable and began to hold it and to build
permanent type dwellings on it, it became necessary for them to hold the land, and they deemed
the use of force as a viable tool under those conditions, and governments were born in process.
Probably the first governments were those invoked over city-states. They undoubtedly
had a theological or a theocratic origin, but in any case, however they developed, characteristic
of Governments as they emerged was the idea of a military force combined with the necessity
for holding land. Actually, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the original governments
were organized along predatory lines with the idea of seizing land occupied or controlled
by other people. Be that as it may, the control of the land and the operation of a military
are co-equal with the development of the state. Now later on, about 200 years ago, when the
Industrial Revolution came along, although we did not have any real modern government,
which we could compare the current situation with in terms of what had happened previously,
Nonetheless, there was a tendency to turn again to the state, and the Industrial Revolution emerges,
primarily in England and then afterwards in other parts of the world, as a development that,
although it is certainly not state-produced, it is state-dominated to a degree. This is what
What causes me to suggest that at the current moment, as developments are going forward,
we are again in the throes of an economic development of such magnitude that it may
very well lead to a time in the future, possibly in another two or three hundred years, I don't
think it will come immediately, but in the foreseeable future we can detect the probability
or at least the possibility that we are going to have to move in a direction which discards
the state.
Government as we know it today has actually become obsolete.
And although that seems like an extreme term, the fact is that we have become so knowledgeable
in the physical sciences and so capable when it comes to creating military hardware that
We can no longer afford an instrument whose prime reason for existence is the carrying
on of military-type actions.
That is, the police-state concept is outmoded and is going to have to be permitted to die
of its own weight.
I'm not suggesting that we have to take it out and kill it.
It will perish if we are able to come forward with better and more viable forms.
However, the purpose of this discussion now relates to the Industrial Revolution, which
began to emerge in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and so altered conditions
that the entire world has become a different place to live ever since that time.
It is important, whenever we are examining any historic period, that we take a scientific
view of history. There are certain tendencies that we naturally have as human beings which
could lead us astray unless we examine these conditions with a view to the accuracy and
the context in which we place the relevant data.
One of the reasons why the development of a true background in the Industrial Revolution
is important is because there remains today a significant amount of popular belief that
tends to hold the Industrial Revolutionary period as a baneful one.
According to the writers or many of the writers and scholars who have commented on this period
in time, it was a time in which human well-being essentially retrograded, the conditions worsened
for people, we are told.
In other words, it was a time when greedy, rapacious, egotistic, grasping businessmen
When industrialists emerged, they built sweatshops that were incredibly bad with bad air and
bad light.
The conditions were actually inhuman, we are told, and they forced men, women, and even
little children to go into these places and to work at drudgery-type tasks, incredibly
long hours for starvation wages, and in process they treated the people involved with all
just for the purpose of advancing the financial well-being of the businessman or the so-called
capitalist who was in charge of the operation.
This is the kind of background that continues today, and it would be important for us to
examine this to find out whether, in fact, stories of this sort are justified.
Certainly it is true that conditions today are much better than they were when the Industrial
Revolution burst on the scene.
And what is important to learn is whether or not these improvements which we can detect
today are the result of the development of industry on a mass scale, or whether they
They are in fact a development of the government intervention in industry, which we are told
did follow once it became known that the businessmen were as cruel and rapacious as they were reported
to be.
So a good look in this area is imperative.
This is why I suggest a scientific attitude, a scientific point of reference.
You see, whenever you want to examine the nature of an historic era or an historic epoch,
it is important that we recognize fundamentally that time flows in only one direction.
We are born young and we grow old.
The past is always in one direction behind us, and the future always lies ahead.
It never goes into reverse.
We are locked into a flow of time that moves from the past into the future, and there is
no other type of movement discernible, at least so far as we are presently aware.
And this means, of course, that we have a tendency of examining our own situation, whatever
it may be, and then we look back into history and we discover the milieu in which these
These people lived, and of course it is not as good as ours.
And the consequence is that we make invidious comparisons.
We say, what were the wages back at the time the Industrial Revolution began?
And then we are told.
And we are horrified because we are comparing our wage rate with the wage rate of an earlier
century.
It seems to us incredible that anybody could ever have worked for the low wages prevalent
at that time.
But that is not to look at it properly.
If we want to understand what happened, say, from 1750 to 1800, the basis of comparison
isn't from 1950 to the year 2000.
The basis of comparison would be in an earlier century, where we would go back to, say, 1650
to 1700, and compare that with 1750 to 1800.
Or even better, we might go back to 1550, and compare the half century 1550 to 1600,
from 1650 to 1700, and then we might know what was actually taking place in the 1750
to 1800 period, which is the period that brought us the Industrial Revolution.
You see, it is imperative, if we are going to examine and discuss history, that we go
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and depression relating to what had happened before.
We must always find out what had happened before, not what happened afterwards.
And this always is the problem that confronts modern scholarship when it looks from now
into the past and makes comparisons between what we have and what we are today with what
we had and what we were in a century or two ahead of our own time.
So let's attempt to do that.
What we would have to do would be to find out what the conditions were like at least
a hundred years prior to the period under inquiry, and preferably back even further
than that, before we would know whether the accusations made relating to the Industrial
Revolution are valid or invalid.
You see, according to the popular notion that is so often mentioned by many, many people,
The Industrial Revolution brought an age of cruelty to the fore. People were oppressed.
Unemployment increased. Human health worsened. Conditions rapidly deteriorated until such
time as the government began to move into the area and pass laws regulating wages, regulating
the hours of employment, regulating the conditions of child labor, and so on, at which time a
a Recovery, it is said, began. So that's what we have to examine.
Now the first thing that we want to do as we begin this examination, trying to get it
into a proper context, would be to ask rhetorically the question, where did the Industrial Revolution
first occur, and why did it happen where it did? There is no question about this. There
There has been a consensus, I think without any notable dissenting voice now, the scholars
who have examined the period agree, that the first industrial revolution in the world occurred
in Great Britain, and that it dates from 1760 to 1830 approximately.
In that period of time, which represents about seventy years or eighty years, in that period
of Time, The Face of England Changed, and with it began to change the face of the entire
world. So the incidents that brought about these alterations began in England. Why? That's
a fair question. Why in England? Why not in France? Or Spain? Or Germany? Or Italy? Or
or Why Not in the American Colonies. What was it about England that made the industrial
revolution emerge there rather than elsewhere? Was it because the government planned it better?
Well in point of fact, the government didn't plan it at all. We find no question as to
The fact that government was not aware of the industrial development until it had gotten
underway and gained a very definite momentum, at which time the ruling monarch, who happened
to be George III, began to intervene in the economy in an effort to suppress the changes
which he saw coming, which were disturbing to the economic system that he understood,
which had been around prior to the time that he gained power. So government did not cause
the Industrial Revolution, and it did occur in Great Britain. Now there must be a reason
for that, or possibly a complex of reasons. I have tried to come up with some reasonable
explanation that I could understand and accept myself. Certainly it was true that Great Britain
The economic conditions prior to 1760, not only in Great Britain, but in every other country I've named and all the other countries in existence, was one of dire poverty by modern standards.
The masses of people lived on the brink of starvation. As a matter of fact, famines periodically
swept all the countries of Europe and Asia. The death rate was high. Death was a constant
recurrence because of the fact that there simply wasn't enough to eat. The major diseases
at that time were diseases related to diet. That is, there were diseases of malnutrition
such as scurvy and beriberi and rickets and things of this sort that decimated the populations.
The major killer had always been the lack of a sufficiently stable diet, and of course
the death rate was high. So that condition pertained universally. It was no better and
and no worse in England than elsewhere, and yet the Industrial Revolution began in England.
What about raw materials? Actually there would have been a number of places that were more
richly endowed by nature as good sites for industrial breakthroughs than England. England
is not a large country. It is insular, as we know, and it does not have a superabundance
of resources. For instance, the Ruhr Valley would have been a far more amiable place to
develop in terms of the resources at hand. Of course, Britain and Wales do have coal
in England. It certainly was not a unique situation in respect to manpower. Manpower
was available anywhere and everywhere, and it was not a superabundance of natural resources.
There must have been some other factor at work. Actually, there were a number of them,
but there is one leading factor, as I see it, that made it possible for Great Britain
and to be the leading location in the world where industrialization occurred.
And this is a development that began in England, it seems to me, back as early as 1066 with
the Norman conquest. It was at that time when William crossed the channel and subdued the
of the Saxons and the Angles on the British Isles, that the British government as such
became in essence a government of an invading power. The Normans conquered, and they were
never chased from power. The Norman kings became the kings of England, and there was
was a gradual absorption and attrition whereby the people who lived in England were finally
absorbed and the Normans and the Angles and the Saxons and Celts and so on became in time
one people.
But the ruling house, the aristocrats, were fundamentally Norman.
And the consequence of this, I think, is one of the things that led to these much later
Development, several hundred years beyond that point.
You see, one of the things that history has taught us is this. Human beings are quite
willing to accept the rule of a dictator or a despot, providing he is homegrown. If he
When he's foreign, we take a dim view of him. In fact, the early Romans made this discovery.
When they went out and, with their legions, conquered a foreign province, they found that
they had nothing but trouble if they attempted to rule it by an imposed Roman rule centering,
say, in a Roman centurion or a Roman senator who was to take charge of that province. They
They found it much more convenient and much more practical to select a homegrown tyrant,
a quizzling, if you please, a Pierre Laval, a quizzling or a King Herod, someone like
this who was a native of the conquered province.
And then they would associate with him and move him forward as a puppet under their control,
but they would back him.
And the consequence is the people would tend to submit to this type of puppet, because
after all, he was one of their kind.
In a sense, this is exactly the same type of action that we are taking today in Vietnam.
If we were to go into Vietnam and attempt to impose our rule there in the Far East,
we could never anticipate a complete subjugation of the people.
They would resent it and resist us, and that resistance would become deeply rooted and embedded,
and we could predict that it probably would never subside.
However, if we could get a puppet leader, someone that was local there who was friendly
to us because he had to be friendly to us because we gave him the backing that he needed,
both militarily and financially, then we could create a puppet regime that, at least in theory,
and the results seems to me to be quite clear in history, from that time on, from 1066 right on down virtually to the present time, certainly up until the emergence of the Labour government in England during World War II, up until this time, the British people were among the most independent, individualistic, self-thinking
Where in the British people feel that independently and individually they amount to something
too?
And although they will bow humbly to their king, they believe that they have certain
personal rights, and they're not about to step away from those rights.
They feel that those are important to them, and they intend to maintain them.
Now, the reason I feel that this is a key point is because of certain things that happened.
For instance, as early as the year 1215—now that's a very early time. This is in the
midst of the period of the Crusades, for example—we find the British noblemen—that
is, the barons, the dukes, the earls, the various lords—actually unsheathing their
swords and going after their own king. Now keep in mind that the kings at this time were
Presumably Divine, but they got a king called John, and John began to throw his weight around
a little bit, and the barons didn't like it, and they took off after him, got him cornered
on an island called Runnymede, and they captured him. And then they forced him, literally,
to sign the Magna Carta. Now, the Magna Carta is a fantastic document, not because of what
it says, but because of the date in which it is said. Here we are in 1215. That's a
very early time. And here we have the barons and the earls, the lordlings in England standing
up and saying to their king, you may be divine and we love you and we're loyal to you. Nonetheless,
there are certain rights that we have and you may not do as you please without consulting
and the consequence is that we had the Magna Carta and we have that same spirit of independence and
the concept of rights that began to to flourish from that time or at least it began to exist from
that time I can't say that it flourished it did not begin to flourish until much later but the idea
was born and it was born in England that individual human beings had merit too and this was a very
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1760, and during this period, although you will find instances of tyranny and oppression
emerging constantly, nonetheless there is a certain spirit of liberty that you will find
in England that does not emerge as quickly or as early in any other country.
Thank you very much.