Between 1780 and 1850 an unprecedented and far-reaching revolution changed the face of England. From then on the world was no longer the same. Historians have often used and abused the word “revolution” to mean a radical change, but no revolution has been as dramatically revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution.1 The Industrial Revolution opened the door to a completely new world, a world of new and untapped sources of energy such as coal, oil, electricity, and the atom; a world in which man found himself able to handle huge masses of energy to an extent inconceivable in the preceding rural world. From a narrowly technological and economic point of view, the Industrial Revolution can be defined as the process by which a society acquired control over vast sources of inanimate energy. But such a definition does not do justice to the phenomenon, in terms of either its distant origins or its economic, cultural, social, and political implications.
Crescenzi in the thirteenth century and the agronomists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could still usefully refer to the agricultural treatises of the ancient Romans. The ideas of Hippocrates and Galen continued to form the basis of official medicine well into the eighteenth century – two centuries after the revolt of Paracelsus. It did not seem absurd to Machiavelli to refer to Roman military arrangements when he planned an army for his times. At the end of the eighteenth century Catherine II of Russia had transported an enormous stone from Finland to St Petersburg, to set it at the base of the monument dedicated to Peter the Great. The method of transporting the colossal stone was much the same as that used thousands of years earlier by the ancient Egyptians when they built their pyramids. As Cederna wrote,
From the Pharaohs to Baron Hausmann certain things in the architecture of the past have remained constant and immutable even through a thousand stylistic variations: the materials – stone, lime, bricks – and certain fundamental relations between supporting and supported, wall and roof, column and arch, pillar and vault, and so on. It is easy to give examples of monuments literally born out of existing ones. The travertine of the Colosseum served excellently in the building of St Peter’s in the Vatican in the 16th century.2
A basic fundamental continuity characterized the preindustrial world, even through grandiose changes, such as the rise and fall of Rome, the triumph and decline of Islam, the Chinese dynastic cycles. As C.H. Waddington has observed:
If a Roman of the Empire could be transported some eighteen centuries forward in time, he would have found himself in a society which he could, without too great difficulty, have learned to comprehend. Horace would have felt himself reasonably at home as a guest of Horace Walpole and Catullus would soon have learned his way among the sedan chairs, the patched-up beauties and the flaring torches of London streets at night.3
This continuity was broken between 1780 and 1850. If, at the middle of the nineteenth century, a general studied the organization of the Roman army, if a physician concerned himself with the ideas of Hippocrates and Galen, if an agronomist read Columella, they did it purely out of historical interest or as an academic exercise. Even in far-away, unchanging China, it was becoming painfully evident to the most enlightened among the scholar-officials of the Celestial Empire that the ancient classical texts and values which had given continuity to Chinese history through invasions and dynastic cycles were no longer valid for survival in the contemporary world. By 1850 the past was not merely past – it was dead.
Yet, if in the course of three generations the Industrial Revolution had become a dramatic watershed in the course of history, its roots nevertheless reached deep into the preceding century. In Chapter 4 I tried to show that the origins of the Industrial Revolution reach back to that profound change in ideas, social structures, and value systems that accompanied the rise of the urban communes in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Chapter 6 I stressed that the technological changes that we identify with the Industrial Revolution were the extrapolation of the technological innovations of the western Middle Ages. The Industrial Revolution occurred in England because it was there that a series of historical circumstances brought about – as W.S. Jevons once wrote – “the union of certain happy mental qualities with material resources of an altogether peculiar character.” From England the Industrial Revolution soon spread to the rest of Europe. To date the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in any country is as arbitrary as to date the beginning of the Middle Ages or the modern age. Within the same country geographical areas, social groups, and economic sectors move at different paces; new activities and new forms of life develop while a number of traditional activities and old institutions manage to survive. In broad terms, however, one can say that by 1850 the Industrial Revolution had penetrated Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland. By 1900 it had extended to northern Italy, Russia and Sweden.
That the Industrial Revolution was essentially and primarily a sociocultural phenomenon and not a purely technological one, becomes patently obvious when one considers that the first countries to industrialize were those which had the greatest cultural and social similarities with England.
The Industrial Revolution gave Europe a tremendous technological and economic advantage over the rest of the world, and the nineteenth century saw Europe proudly asserting this global predominance.
If one pauses to ponder on all that Europe accomplished in the nine centuries of her ascent, one cannot help being filled with amazement and admiration. Undoubtedly there were dark and bloody pages, but there was, above all, an endless series of superb accomplishments in all fields of human activity. The medieval cathedrals; the paintings of the Renaissance; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach; the poetry of Dante; the prose of Boccaccio and Chaucer; the tragedies of Shakespeare; the philosophy of Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant; the wit of Montaigne and Voltaire; the medieval clocks; the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci; the innumerable technological innovations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; the steam engine; the microscope; the discoveries of microbiology, the miracles of chemistry; the Suez canal; the business techniques, from the check to the stock exchange; the condemnation of torture; the assertion of the principle of human freedom and rights; the parliamentary system – there is no end to the list of Europe’s accomplishments in the period AD 1000–1900. Moreover, technology and the Industrial Revolution in Europe irrevocably changed the course of history, not only in Europe’s own territories, but throughout the world. The history of any remote corner of the world after 1500 cannot be properly understood without taking into account the impact of European culture, economy, and technology. Henri Pirenne once wrote that Sans Mahomet Charlemagne est inconcevable. We can paraphrase him by saying that Sans l’Europe l’histoire moderne est inconcevable.
“La Belle Epoque” was the apogee of the European saga. The great International Exhibitions in London, Paris, and Vienna were the proud and optimistic celebrations of Europe’s success. The Eiffel Tower was the monument to her economic and technological achievements. But deep within, the germ of decay was already at work. The reaction against rationalism had been voiced already by Rousseau, and it gained ground in the course of the nineteenth century, favoring nationalism and a whole series of other “isms.” The latent crisis eventually exploded in the brutal form of a war which westerners labeled the “First World War,” but which to a perceptive Asian historian looked more like “the European Civil War.” It was the beginning of a rapid end. Within less than half a century a major economic crisis and a second major war gave Europe the coup de grâce. The Spenglerian vision of the Decline of the West came into sharper focus day by day. The dawn of the twentieth century had seen Britannia ruling the waves and both England and continental Europe ruling the world. “At the beginning of the twentieth century there were six world powers and they were all located in Europe. If one mentioned the United States or Japan it was merely to make a show of geographical knowledge.” At the end of the twentieth century Europe seems to be struggling for survival.
Paradoxically, Europe is on the retreat at a moment when the industrial way of life, which was originally developed by Europe, is taking over the whole world. The agony of Europe finds many echoes around the globe. After the optimism of the 1950s and the early 1960s ample evidence of anxiety is to be found in most nations. A sense of unease and foreboding is blanketing mankind. As the future of Europe looks more uncertain than ever, a question plagues an increasing number of people: is there any hope for the kind of civilization which Europe developed and then spread all over the world?