To describe the change to fossil fuels, to the factory system, and to a manufacturing economy, which began to occur first in England about 1750, some historians use the term “industrial revolution.” Others, including myself, prefer to use “industrialization” to indicate a much longer, gradual process that began as Afro-Eurasia became one network (chapter 10), intensified with the connection of the globe (chapter 11), and completed itself in England about the 1850s, later in other places, and is still going on in many places. Historians mostly agree that the human switch to fossil energy and manufacturing represents one of the three or four fundamental shifts in human history, as significant as the shift to agriculture or to cities.¹

In the development of industrialization, two phenomena new in human history occurred. One concerned population growth, the other economic growth.

From 1 to 1700 CE the world’s population grew gradually, averaging about 12 percent a century. But growth was not continuous; periods of falling population occurred, when the number of people outstripped food or disease decimated society, as noted earlier. After 1700 the death rate began to fall, and the world’s population grew 30 to 50 percent in the eighteenth century, 80 percent in the nineteenth century, and 280 percent in the twentieth century. No one knows why—warmer climate, more food (from new varieties from the Americas and from better agricultural techniques), better transportation, and more circulation of lethal disease (hence more immunity) seem the most likely explanations (Fig. 12.1).²

Even more dramatic, from the late 1600s the English and Dutch economies increased the per capita income of their growing populations, despite diminishing returns in agriculture. Per capita income growth (a rise in real income per person) had occurred before in various parts of the world, but it had always been reversed, leaving the standard of living of subsistence farmers about the same as it was before. In Europe, however, the standard of living has not been reversed, except temporarily in time of war, since the late 1600s. No one knows the causes for this, although much analysis has been made, the best known being that of Adam Smith who argued, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), that societies can promote economic growth by establishing peace, low taxes, and impartially implemented laws to protect property and investments.³

12.1 World Population, 1650-2000

(Source: Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, 2004, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 6.)

Bourgeois Power

Since the establishment of the first states about 5,000 years ago, the most common and durable political arrangement has been the monarchy—rule by a single person, with variable constraints on his (or occasionally her) power. Only a few societies, since the time that cities emerged, have created democracies in which every citizen, however defined, took part, and those societies remained small scaled and short lived.

Once trade increased and the number of cities grew dramatically, beginning about the seventeenth century, powerful communities of merchants and commercial landowners resented the taxes levied on them by monarchs. Large empires, based on ancient traditions, like the Qings in China, the Moghuls in India, and the Ottomans in Turkey and the Middle East, managed these tensions, avoiding civil war.

In Europe, however, where competing small, young states prevailed, the monarchs in two states—Holland and England, could not manage the tensions. Bourgeois leaders took their societies into civil war to limit the power of their monarchs. In Holland the urban elite cast off the Hapsburg authority after a long war from 1567 to 1609 and set up the Dutch Republic.

In England the political revolution, coming fifty years later, also took about fifty years to complete, from the outbreak of civil war in 1642 and the beheading of Charles I in 1649 to the restoration of his son, Charles II, in 1660, and finally to a coup d’etat by Parliament in 1688 to 1689. Men of property in Parliament carried out this political revolution; they arranged a monarch as a symbol of unity, with real power situated in Parliament, as stated in a bill of rights, which guaranteed Parliamentary supremacy by control of the purse, regular and frequent meetings, and prohibition of power to the Crown. Known as the Glorious Revolution, this political change laid the foundation for the dramatic economic and technological changes that followed. The elite who led this revolution, about 5 percent of the population, controlled about 25 percent of the national income. They centralized and reformed public finance, setting strict standards for bookkeeping. ⁴

Other political revolutions arose from the increased Atlantic trade. British colonists in North America, mostly men of property, resisted higher tax levies and declared war on the British in 1776. The colonists won their independence because overseas war proved too expensive for the British and because the French lent their assistance to the colonists. In France the political revolution followed shortly, in 1789, when the peasants joined the Estates General, mostly men of property, to overthrow the monarch. The French endured a period of anarchy, followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, then a restored monarch followed by more revolutions, until a lasting republic emerged after 1871. In the Americas the French sugar colony of Saint Domingue revolted and won its independence as Haiti in 1804. By 1826 an independence movement in Latin America, led by Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), divided most of Spanish holdings in America into independent nations, leaving only Cuba and Puerto Rico, where planters remained loyal to their best customer, Spain. Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822. In Germany the monarchy remained, with a limited parliament, until defeat in World War I, and the Russian monarchy fell in 1917.

Bourgeois men of wealth and property developed the idea of representative government as they sought to counter the power of monarchs to tax their wealth. Two significant Englishmen who articulated the ideas of representative government were the poet John Milton (1608-1674), and the advisor to an earl, John Locke (1632-1704), both men of secure wealth. Milton, the son of a money-lender who funded his son’s future, became secretary of the Commonwealth that lasted from 1649 to 1660, when Parliament ruled through its victorious general, Oliver Cromwell. During the civil war that preceded the Commonwealth, Milton wrote his ringing defense of freedom from government censorship, the Areopagitica. In the pamphlet war that followed the end of the king ’s censorship, Milton defended Parliament’s right to kill the king.

A few years later John Locke, too, defended the rights of Parliament against the rights of a monarch in Two Treatises of Government (1690). In these essays Locke argued that men submit to government, not because the inclination to submit to an absolute leader is innately present in people, but because legitimate government protects their right to property. If government dos not offer this protection, then men of wealth have the right to withdraw their consent to government and to form a new one. Kings have no right to rule, but rather men have a right to consent. To strengthen his case, Locke developed a new theory of mind, in which he denied there were any innate ideas, including the inclination to submit to absolute authority. On the contrary, Locke argued, the mind of a newborn is a tabula rasa, or blank slate, into which all ideas come from experience and reason.

But which people have the right to consent to government? In Locke’s day, only a handful of adult males voted for members of Parliament. When Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) used Locke’s ideas in the Declaration of Independence (1776) to justify the revolt of England’s colonies in America, he substituted in his list of rights the “pursuit of happiness” for “property,” apparently broadening the base of what he considered legitimate voters. James Madison clinched the argument for Jefferson by asserting that, while property in one sense means land, money, and merchandise, in a wider sense it means free opinions and the free use of one’s faculties as one chooses, concluding that “as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may equally be said to have a property in his rights.” ⁵ With these ideas, the consequences of the actions of the wealthy men who challenged and beheaded King Charles I may have been taken further than they ever intended.

Nothing was put into the U.S. Constitution about voting requirements. The Electoral College voted for the president, the state legislatures voted for senators, and each state set its own requirements for electing men to the House of Representatives. Only Pennsylvania had no property requirement in 1800. Slaves could not vote but counted as three-fifths of a person in determining the number of congressmen, giving the slave states extra power. No woman voted until 1920.⁶

As the idea of the political equality of men gained acceptance in Europe and the United States, people in these regions developed the concept of race as a type classified by physical characteristics. If all men are equal, how can it be explained that some appear so backward? the Europeans questioned. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus made a stab at racial classification in 1735, but the most authoritative one was established by the father of physical anthropology, Johann Blumenbach, a professor at the university in Göttingen, Germany, on the basis of measurements of skulls. In his On the Natural Varieties of Humankind (1775), Blumenbach distinguished five races of humans; by the third edition of the book in 1795 he had named these Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. Blumenbach did not believe that Africans were nearer to apes than other people, but he did believe the Caucasians were the first race from which others diverged.⁷

Industrial Revolution

The change to industrialization is now being seen as a global phenomenon, created not by European society but by the forces at work in the whole global network, the interaction of people in Afro-Eurasia with the people of the Americas. After the connection of the two hemispheres, a sharp acceleration occurred in rates of innovation, levels of productivity, and the pace of collective learning around the globe. The Atlantic seacoast of Europe benefited from its location as the first hub of the first world system; Europeans were exceptional by their strategic location and by being young and flexible, ready for change.

The process of industrialization began specifically in Britain, the damp little island off northwest Europe. One major reason lay in the fact that Britain had large deposits of coal. As the island began running out of forests to convert into charcoal for smelting, iron production began to slump. Burning regular coal for smelting iron did not work, since the impurities in the coal made the iron brittle. In 1709 the Darby family in Shropshire discovered that when coal is first converted into coke, smelting could be done successfully.

Coal deposits, however, were deep and were impeded by water filling the shafts. Some kind of pump was needed. In the 1770s a Scotsman, James Watt, improved the design of the steam engine, and by 1800 Britain had about 2,000 steam engines—still only about 5 percent efficient but each equal to some 200 men pumping water out of coal mines. (Coal output grew almost 500 percent from 1780 to 1830.) Improvements had to be made in the steam engine; for this, the English used all their gun-making and clock-making skills. Costs of energy for steam-run equipment went down precipitously after 1830.⁸

Steam engines as curiosities had developed in other societies before the eighteenth century. The Chinese had various systems, but they used the engine as a bellows in which the wheel turned the piston rather than the piston turning the wheel, as in Watt’s design. The Chinese also used coal to produce iron; in 1080 their iron production exceeded that of non-Russian Europe in 1700. But northern China, where the coal deposits lay, suffered Mongol invasions, civil war, floods, and plague. Population shifted to the south, and iron production, when it recovered, used charcoal instead of coal.⁹

In the 1700s the world’s only large exporter of cotton fabric was India. In 1721 wealthy merchants in England, through Parliament, prohibited the import of Indian cloth, in order to increase their own income from local production. They procured the raw cotton from American colonies, produced by slaves, and took it to rural areas of England, where whole families of artisans used hand tools—the spinning wheel and the home loom—to produce cloth, which the merchants marketed. The spinners and weavers worked at home, or in small groups like protofactories.

In 1764 a society in London offered a prize for the best improvement of the spinning process; James Hargreaves won it with his “spinning jenny,” a wood frame with a series of spinning wheels geared together to produce eight threads simultaneously, or 100 threads when adapted to water power. By the early 1800s the English had figured out a loom powered by steam engine; the invention of the cotton gin in Georgia (United States), increased the output of cotton. By the 1860s India could not match British competition in cotton textiles.

The process of industrialization in England required many simultaneous changes. Inventions, as described, were necessary. The American colonies provided raw materials and markets. Canals and roads provided a basic transportation system; later, steamships and railroads speeded up transportation. Financial systems to support the accumulation of capital had started to develop in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Attitudes about usury had to change. Finally, increased agricultural production released workers from the fields to the factories.

English farmers made significant increases in their production by selective breeding of sheep to double their size, by planting seeds in rows instead of by sowing, by using horse-drawn drilling machines, and by figuring out a four-year crop rotation (turnips, barley, clover, wheat) that did not require leaving fields fallow. By feeding turnips to their cattle over the winter, farmers did not have to slaughter in the fall and had milk and butter year round. These changes required larger fields to be effective; the wealthiest farmers demanded enclosure of formerly common areas where poorer farmers grazed their animals. The enclosure movement peaked in the last decades of the 1700s and the early decades of the 1800s, as small farmers became hired hands or left farming for the city. Even though food production increased, so did population, and England by the mid-1800s needed to trade manufactured goods for foods. The last surplus of English wheat for export occurred in 1792.¹⁰

All these changes proved difficult, if not catastrophic, for the poor people of England. Thousands of hand weavers were thrown on the streets by the use of power looms. Wages fell from 1760 to 1815. Historians do not agree on whether conditions for the poor were worse than earlier or, if so, how much worse. Some say that two generations were sacrificed to create Britain’s industrial base, but most agree that after 1850, when industrialization is considered mature in Britain, the people as a whole shared in Britain’s success on the world stage. Meanwhile, a massive migration took place; from 1815 to 1914 20 million Brits left their island. In 1900 the British population was 41 million, but it would have been 70 million without the exodus.¹¹

It is no coincidence that tobacco, cocoa, tea, and coffee became features of everyday life during the process of industrialization. Tobacco from the Americas was cultivated in England by 1565, coffee reached London in 1651, chocolate in 1657, and tea in 1660. All were addictive, quick to prepare and consume, and provided short bursts of energy—perfect for long days away from home. By adding sugar to the drinks, the poor were able to prevent the scarce protein in their diets being burned for energy. An acre of tropical sugar land yielded as many calories as four acres of potatoes or nine to twelve acres of wheat. By 1900 sugar imports had increased eleven times since 1815, and Brits averaged 15 to 25 percent of their daily calories in sugar.¹²

Since industrialization removed work from the family setting, it impacted women and children in a major way. They became a flexible workforce, entering the labor market as needed to supplement men’s labor, holding jobs that men didn’t want, that held little authority or required minimal training. In this way inequality was built into the process. Yet some children had the advantage of being released from productive/grinding labor to pursue education as their primary task, and some women in urban households and service industries (excluding domestic service) were better off than male day-laborers in agriculture.¹³

Why did industrialization begin in England when it did? Historians have come up with various answers. The short one seems to be a combination of unique factors: location on the sea, overclearing of forests, coal deposits, the social and political consequences of the Glorious Revolution, commercial and agricultural development based on land and wealth in the Americas, transportation, instrumentation skills, population growth, printing presses, plus the freedom and incentive to innovate.

After 1815 other parts of Europe and the United States began the process of industrialization. Belgium and Switzerland industrialized early; they had deposits of coal. Germany had the coal-rich Ruhr region, and its industry outstripped the British by the 1880s. France had too little coal to be a leader and had to import it after 1848. The United States pioneered factory management, first using interchangeable parts in weapon production, and by the 1890s its industry outpaced that of Germany to be the world’s leader. The only non-Western societies that began to industrialize before 1900 were Russia and Japan. Russia began in the 1860s and by 1910 had the world’s fourth or fifth largest heavy industry complex, fully mature by 1950. Japan also began in the 1860s and by 1914 had become a first-rank military and industrial power. The great powers of the twentieth century proved to be those who had managed to industrialize in the nineteenth century—Britain, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan.¹⁴

With the harnessing of coal, which made labor less scarce, slavery and forced labor gradually became less attractive or economical. Right at the height of slavery and serfdom in the world, these two ancient arrangements were, rather rapidly, mostly abolished worldwide.

The peak of slavery and serfdom came in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slavery quintupled between 1800 and 1860 in the U.S. South to produce cotton. It expanded in the Caribbean and Brazil to produce more sugar. In southeast Asia slaves on plantations produced sugar and peppers. In Russia millions of serfs raised wheat; in Egypt they formed the army and raised cotton; in North Africa slavery increased during this time, especially to raise palm oil, used as an industrial lubricant.

Agitation to abolish slavery began with the Quakers in England and with the enlightenment philosophers in France in the late eighteenth century. Printing and travel circulated the idea. By 1807 in England and 1808 to 1830 in France the selling of slaves was abolished. In the 1820s Chile and Mexico abolished slavery itself; England did so in 1833. Other Atlantic countries followed: the United States in 1865, Spain in 1886, Brazil in 1888. In 1861 Russia abolished private serfs, who had to work at least nine more years to own their land communally; government serfs were freed in 1866. The Ottomans succumbed to European pressure and banned slave trading but never slavery itself, since it was recognized in Muslim law. In Africa trading ceased by 1914, and abolition came in the first third of the twentieth century. On the whole, the abolition of slavery and serfdom represented a historic liberation for humanity; 50 million serfs in Russia alone gained their freedom. The use of fossil fuels helps explain why slavery has officially if not completely vanished.¹⁵

Inventions in transportation and telecommunication continued to transform world trade. In 1801 the United States and Scotland produced early steamships; by 1860 they left sailing vessels in their wake on the high seas. It took one year in 1650 to sail from Holland to Java; it took three months in 1850, and three weeks in 1920. World shipping increased fourfold from 1850 to 1910.

Britain had the world’s first public railroad in 1830, but by 1845 the United States had twice as much track as Britain, and by 1914 the United States had half the world’s railroad track. The first telegraph messages were sent between Baltimore and Washington in 1844. By 1866 a trans-Atlantic cable was laid down, and in 1870 a line from Britain to India reduced the time of conveying messages from eight months to five hours. By 1902 the British had cables worldwide. In 1860 telegraphs could send ten words a minute in Morse code; sixty years later they could send 400 words a minute. Electrification of the globe began around 1890.¹⁶

At the end of the nineteenth century another invention appeared to transform the world—the use of oil, a fossil fuel like coal laid down millions of years ago, to fuel internal combustion engines. A Scot, James Young, figured out how to refine crude oil in 1850, while Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania proved in 1859 that oil could be obtained by drilling through deep rock. Germans began to develop engines using oil in the 1880s. World production of oil rose from zero in 1800, to 20 million metric tons in 1900, to 3 billion metric tons in 1990, when people in the United States (4 percent of the world’s population) were using 25 percent of the world’s production. Oil would become a major strand, perhaps the major strand, of the story of the twentieth century.¹⁷

Imperialism and World Wars, 1850-1945

By 1870 Europe had about 70 percent of all world trade. By 1914 it occupied or controlled 80 percent of the world’s area. In 1900 China had only 6 percent of the world’s output, falling from 33 percent in 1800, and India had only 2 percent, falling from 25 percent in 1800. Africa had been parceled out to the European powers.¹⁸

In Europe and the United States the peak of racist thinking and policies based on racism marked this period. Racism exists “. . . when one ethnic or historical collectivity dominates, excludes or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences it believes are hereditary and unalterable,” while at the same time professing to believe in human equality.¹⁹ Racism seems to be mainly, if not exclusively, a product of Europe and the United States; its logic was fully worked out and implemented in three societies in the twentieth century: in the South of the United States against African Americans (1890s-1950s), by European colonists in South Africa against Africans (1910s-1980s), and in Hitler’s Germany against Jews (1933-1945).

By the mid-nineteenth century many people of Europe and the United States regarded their dominance in the world as evidence of their innate biological superiority, rather than as indication of cultural, technological, or geographical advantage. France, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and the United States used this racial ideology to justify acquiring new colonial territory.

The fact of their military power enabled the industrial powers to carve up much of the rest of the world among them in the decades before 1914. After the 1840s a significant imbalance existed in weaponry and communication systems; by the end of the 1800s the imbalance became even greater with the development of repeating rifles and machine guns and the medical ability to check diseases. The industrialized countries could take colonies with quick, cheap military action, and they chose to do so.

Britain took the lion’s share of colonies; its empire spanned the globe by 1914, becoming the largest ever in the history of the world. (The Mongol empire was the largest continuous land empire.) India, its richest and most important colony, became Britain’s gradually between 1750 and 1860, after the Moghul empire had lost vitality by 1710. Britain also took control of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Egypt, and enough else in Africa to control about 60 percent of its people by the end of the nineteenth century.

The African social order in the last decades of the nineteenth century was more firmly rooted in slavery than ever, which helped open the way to industrial powers, which took all parts of Africa except Liberia and Ethiopia (Fig. 12.2). The population of central Africa, which had had little prior contact with the outside world, fell perhaps a quarter between 1880 and 1920. Later in the century, with access to medical advances, Africa experienced the most rapid population growth the world has ever seen.²⁰

China never became a colony; the Qing dynasty hung on until 1911 to 1912. But the situation became possibly worse than being a colony, beginning with Britain and the United States smuggling opium from India into China and leading to history ’s largest civil war, the Taiping Rebellion, from 1850 to 1864, in which 20 to 30 million Chinese died.

The United States fought a war with Spain in 1898 to take over Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Russia expanded into the Caucasus, while Japan took Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea from China, gained concessions in Manchuria, and took half the island of Sakhalin from Russia.

The ambitions of the imperial countries were aided by climate change in the late nineteenth century. Three times the monsoon rains failed for a period of three to six years, starting in 1876 to 1879. The lack of rain caused droughts and famines across the tropical countries and northern China, resulting in 30 to 50 million human deaths and contributing to the low industrialization of these regions. Africa has continued to be drought-prone in the twentieth century.²¹

The world system achieved by the Europeans, however, did not last long. It broke down in the twentieth century as the European powers fought among themselves, and the two non-Western industrial powers, Japan and Russia, competed with Europe and the United States for land and resources.

The end of European imperialism began with World War I, from 1914 to 1918, caused by the emergence of Germany as a great power competing with other European nations for colonies at a time of vigorous nationalism. An alliance of Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and eventually the United States narrowly defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The peace treaties slightly shrank Germany and imposed harsh reparations on it for causing the war. In 1920 the victors established an international body, the League of Nations, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to manage and prevent future conflicts. Under its system of mandates, Germany ’s African colonies were given to various victorious nations. Parts of the Ottoman Empire were given to the victors, including Palestine to Britain. The rest of the Ottoman Empire collapsed in revolution in 1919 to 1923, and a secular Turkey emerged, which abolished the caliphate of Islam, leaving the Muslim world without a religious head or political center. The monarchy in Russia fell to revolution in 1917, and Italy ’s government collapsed in 1919 to 1927, giving rise to the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). When the troops went home after World War I, an influenza spread around the world, killing about 40 million people, many more than had died during the war. After the vital participation of women during the war, some democracies began granting women the right to vote.

12.2 Africa in 1914

After this terrible war ended, the nations of the world retreated from global trade and tried to achieve some kind of economic self-sufficiency. With the crash of the U.S. stock market in 1929, banks that were linked to worldwide loans went bankrupt, causing worldwide economic depression. Governments responded by putting up tariffs and trying to minimize imports, making matters worse. By 1932 the world economy had shrunk by 20 percent and world trade by 25 percent.²²

Since World War II ensued only twenty years after World War I, many historians see it as a continuation of the first war. Nationalism was rampant, and the ambitions of Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Germany, and imperialists in Japan led them into aggressions that reignited the war. Britain, France, the USSR, and the United States allied again to defeat the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) in Europe in May 1945 and in Japan in September 1945. Sixty million people died in the war, about 3 percent of the world’s 1940 population. Six million were Jews in Germany and its occupied states, whom Hitler and his followers deliberately wiped out in mass killings. Twenty-five million were soldiers and civilians in the USSR, the country that sustained the highest casualties of the war. Over 100,000 were people killed in two Japanese cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—when U.S. pilots dropped a new weapon, atomic bombs made from nuclear energy, to bring about an early Japanese surrender.

The slaughter of wars and revolutions in the twentieth century had a profound effect on people’s morale; before 1914 many had believed that the industrial world was too advanced to indulge in outmoded slaughter. Despite its horrors, the slaughter had little effect on the total population. Counting up wars, genocides, human-caused famines, and state terror campaigns, the total comes to about 180 to 190 million deaths, only 4 percent of total deaths in the century.²³

Leadership by the United States, 1945-2000

By the end of the Second World War, the world’s industrial powers had greatly damaged each other’s industrial capacity, except that of the United States, which emerged to lead the peace process and to dominate the world’s economy. For a brief period at the end of the war, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and half the world’s industrial capacity. In the period following the war, remembering what happened to Germany in post World War I and responding to anxiety about the USSR and communism, the United States was able to underwrite the rebuilding of Europe’s economy and to supervise the reconstruction of Japan. World industrial production boomed in the next half century.

The big breakthrough in energy in the twentieth century came as people learned to use oil as energy. The United States led the way in basing its economy on the use of oil, which revolutionized transportation, since cars and planes cannot run on coal. In 1912 Henry Ford developed the first electrified assembly line to produce automobiles; he had to pay his workers double to keep them at the monotonous job and, as a result, with two months’ wages they were able to buy a Model-T Ford car. In the 1920s cars, telephones, and radios became widespread in the United States.

Under U.S. leadership, the world reglobalized again in the period from 1950 to 2000. The foundation for economic globalization was laid in 1944, when forty-five nations created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Desperately wanting to avoid another devastating war, the victorious countries established the United Nations, with headquarters in New York City, to function where the League of Nations had left off, only more effectively. Under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first formulation of the rights of all humanity, a mile-stone in human history. Two years later the United Nation Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a statement by leading scientists conceding that no scientific basis for the concept of race existed.

The competition for economic domination, however, did not end with World War II. The closest rival to the United States proved to be the USSR, which engaged with the United States in a cold war of economic and political rivalry, intensifying with the Soviet production of an atomic bomb in 1949 and the victory of communists in China in 1949.

The distrust between the USSR and the industrialized nations of the West dated back to the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917 when, after a brief European-style government, Russians chose the Bolshevik Party to implement a communist revolution. The leaders of the USSR (fifteen republics) nationalized industry and agricultural production and provided housing, health, and education for their citizens. Using the ideas of Karl Marx, they believed that capitalist democracies were destined to collapse and become communist after violent class wars. (The word “capitalism” became common only in the twentieth century to distinguish it from “socialism” and “communism.”)

The ideas of Marx found many adherents in Western democracies, as some people sought ways to diminish the inequality between workers and industrialists. In the USSR, however, the communist system did not keep up in the economic, military, and agricultural competition; by the late 1970s it could not feed its own population, and in the 1980s its finances were undermined by rapidly reduced oil prices. Party leaders desired the material benefits of capitalism. In 1991 the USSR disbanded as the other fourteen republics acquired their independence from Russia, whose leader, Michail Gorbachev, let them go peacefully.

The world wars of the twentieth century not only stopped European expansion but gradually broke up its former empires. After World War I the Austrian-Hungarian empire dissolved into four new nations: Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, while Ireland won independence from Britain. During and after World War II most of the world’s colonies liberated themselves; there were about three times as many independent states in the 1990s as there had been sixty years earlier.

During the 1950s European countries, led by former rivals France and Germany, formed the European Economic Community to support each other and prevent domination of Europe by the United States and the USSR. This led, by the 1990s, to the semi-unification of Europe (after all these years!) as the European Union, with a common currency and common economic, agricultural, and migration policies.

Following World War II a serious problem arose in Palestine. During the First World War French and British diplomats had promised Palestine to both Jews and Arabs in exchange for support. After the war the League of Nations gave Palestine to Britain as a mandate. Britain allowed some Jewish migration to Palestine before World War II, and after it large numbers of Jews migrated there. Agitation for a Jewish state, plus American support, led Britain reluctantly to agree to the creation of the state of Israel in 1947 and 1948, as determined through the United Nations. Many Palestinians fled after some were killed; neighboring Arab states attacked Israel, which defeated them. Four wars took place between 1948 and 2005. Given the importance of Arab and Iranian oil to the United States and its allies, the U.S. has supported unpopular rulers of client Arab states, as well as providing Israel with a large portion of its military and financial support. Israel does not acknowledge developing its own atomic bombs, but is known to have done so, as this dangerous standoff continues.

The achievements of science in the last half of the twentieth century reached astonishing proportions. Antibiotics, developed during World War II, became available to save lives regularly. Scientists continued to find other life-saving medications; by 1987 the world’s highest life expectancy was reached in Japan at seventy-eight years. Russians put the first artificial satellite (Sputnik) into orbit around Earth in 1957. U.S. astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, while in 1977 the Voyager I spacecraft was launched to travel past the outer limit of our solar system. In the 1950s U.S. scientists unraveled the genetic code in DNA molecules, nailing down Darwin’s theory of evolution by showing the random mutation in genes. In the 1960s cosmologists found concrete evidence for their big bang theory that the universe began in a single explosive instant. Chemists produced plastics from oil residues in the 1940s. New strains of wheat, rice, and corn increased crop production two to four times from about 1960 to 1980.

Religions did not wither away as science grew in its power and prestige. Although secular outlooks increased in Europe and the United States, both Christianity and Islam expanded during the colonial period to lead the world in adherents by the end of the twentieth century. Religions emerged that emphasized the underlying unity of all religion, the similarity of all their messages—the Ramakrishna movement in India with its apostle Vivekananda (1863-1902) and the Baha’i faith, an offshoot of Persian Shia Islam, that adopted English as its preferred language. By the end of the twentieth century, in an atmosphere of fear and anxiety, fundamentalist versions of the world’s religions experienced a revival. In 2002 there were estimated to be 10,000 distinct religions, with about 150 having at least 1 million adherents. If a group of ten people represented approximately the world’s religions, three would be Christians, two Muslim, two unaffiliated or atheist, one Hindu, one Buddhist, and one representing all others.²⁴

The last half of the twentieth century witnessed a spectacular sixfold growth of the world’s economy. This seems normal to those who have lived through it, but such economic growth is historically unprecedented on a global scale and depended on science and technology as noted above, population growth, and increased energy use. The world population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 6.1 billion in 2000. Oil production soared six times from 1950 to 1973. In the 1990s the average world citizen used energy equal to the power of twenty slaves, but that figure obscures the inequality in distribution of energy. The average U.S. citizen directed more than seventy-five “energy slaves,” while a citizen of Bangladesh directed less than one. Nevertheless, between 1950 and 1975 inequality between the richest and the poorest regions narrowed, as well as inequality within industrial societies. The ancient gulf separating the rich and the poor in all previous urban societies actually decreased during this twenty-five year period.²⁵

Since the 1970s, however, the inequality between the richest and poor-est areas, and between the richest and poorest people, has started to widen. After the 1980s the richest one tenth of people grew much richer, while the lowest one-tenth grew slightly poorer. By 2000 the income per capita of six nations containing almost half the world’s population could hardly be plotted on a graph with that of the wealthiest nations. In 1985 the independent democracies, with a sixth the world’s population, enjoyed five-sixths the world’s wealth. In 2000 the richest 20 percent of the world’s population controlled more than 80 percent of the world’s gross product (Fig. 12.3).²⁶

12.3 Global Disparities

(Source: Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, 2004, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Geen Publishing, 43.)

By the end of the twentieth century much of the world’s wealth was no longer organized or regulated by national governments; it belonged to multinational corporations in some ways beyond the control of nations and wealthier than many nations of the world. No one knows what this development will mean for the future.²⁷

Into this situation came the networked personal computer, possibly as significant an invention as the printing press. The electronic computer was first used in World War II to break codes; by the 1990s the networked personal computer emerged to widespread use. By 2000 there were several hundred million personal computers in the world, with 1.6 billion web pages to choose from, 78 percent of them in English. Computers put a premium on education; weakened the power of the state, at least temporarily; and increased communication among multinational corporations, academics, pressure groups, and terrorists, while increasing the possibilities for hackers to wreak havoc on the system.

More than 1 billion people in the world live without electricity, yet they are aware, from television in cafés or from radio, of what others have that they do not. The range of inequality in a world where rapid communication makes people familiar with their disadvantages creates an explosive situation whose unfolding cannot be foretold.

The fundamental facts, reduced to their simplest, are that during the twentieth century the human population grew almost fourfold, the world’s economy grew fourteenfold, per capita income grew almost fourfold, while energy use expanded sixteenfold. This scale of expansion is something new under the sun, completely unprecedented in Earth’s history.²⁸

Unanswered Questions

1. What do “capital” and “capitalism” mean?

These are loaded words, whose meanings have been much debated. I have avoided using them as much as possible and can only suggest some of the possible nuances.

Capital originally meant money, but about 1770 in the ideas of the French economist Robert Jacques Turgot it took on the added meaning of the control of labor. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx used “capitalist” to mean those who control the means of production. Today people speak of fixed capital, or roads, bridges, canals, ships, tools, and machines, and variable or circulating capital, referring to raw materials, money, wages, and labor.

“Capitalism” came into widespread use only in the twentieth century in opposition to socialism and communism. One well-known historian of capitalism, Fernand Braudel, sees capitalism not simply as an economic system, or a free market, but as a social order supported by culture and the dominant classes, which are as important as government policy in sustaining capitalism. Long-term capitalism for Braudel includes the rise of towns and trade, the emergence of the labor market, increased population density, use of money, rise in output, and the international market.²⁹

I see capitalism, socialism, and communism as variations of industrialization. Capitalism is industrialization by private initiative, while communism is industrialization by state initiative, with socialism a mix of both.

2. Is industrialization a good thing?

Historical accounts are often written assuming that industrialization is the goal toward which everyone is moving, the “march toward modernity,” as Alan Smith puts it.³⁰

Industrialization does seem to have been irresistible to people in areas where it could be achieved. With it come wealth, health, education, travel, stimulations, pleasures, and challenges of all varieties. A few, but very few, individuals and groups have refused these benefits when they could choose.

Industrialization, however, may prove to be unsustainable without colonies to exploit. Already industrial nations are having trouble keeping up their standard of living. With new nations trying to achieve industrialization, resources for doing so are becoming scarcer. Will industrialized nations be able to scale back gradually and/or find substitute resources? Perhaps the nonindustrialized nations will be in a better situation for confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

3. Did the culture of Protestant Christians play a crucial role in the initial creation of industrialization?

In 1904 the sociologist Max Weber argued, in an influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that Protestants held values and beliefs—hard work, saving, and rationality—that made them effective capitalists. For instance, Calvinists believed that making a fortune gave proof of God’s election for salvation, which motivated people to work hard. Many Protestants believed that riches should not be used for conspicuous living, but for the public good. Weber based his idea on a survey, conducted in a section of Germany, which seemed to show that Protestants were wealthier and more engaged in economic activities than Catholics. This thesis seemed to fit the facts, namely the correlation between Protestant countries and areas where capitalists first flourished (Holland and Britain) and the tendency of the Catholic Church to uphold traditional societies.

In the century since its publication, Weber’s classic has been debated so thoroughly in academia that the debate has been called “the academic Hundred Years’ War.” ³¹ By the late twentieth century Weber’s thesis seemed refuted by further developments. Russia and Japan, with their varying religious beliefs, achieved highly industrialized societies early, and after mid-century several Asian “tigers” did—South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan. Some nations, however, have industrialized more slowly, if at all; theorists debate whether the reasons might be geographical, structural, or cultural, and to what degree. Weber may have correctly identified the original motive for working harder; later transitions to industrialization may be motivated by the rewards of industrialization itself, which could not yet be seen in the first experiment in Europe.