The belle époque, roughly from the 1860s to the 1910s, was a period of mind-bending innovation, rapid urbanization, and exhilarating modernization. Although the period is characterized by a multitude of astonishing advances, arguably those most responsible for the rapidity of the era’s sea-changes were technological innovations in transportation (railroads and steamships), and communications (changes in printing technology and telegraphy). One hundred years later, after the end of what Schumpeter referred to as the “heroic age of industry,” the world started once again down the path of globalization.
In so many ways, aerospace and computer technologies were to the digital age what steamships and insulated telegraph cables had been to the belle époque. Indeed, in both epochs transportation and communications revolutions completely transformed the world. Everything was altered, from social practices to commodity production to political organization to man’s relationship to his environment. The rapid-fire change also produced parallel forms of liberal internationalism, the first half of Polanyi’s double movement.
To better understand the scope of these changes and how they came about, the next two chapters apply Schumpeter’s theory of technological innovation to explain the rise of liberal capitalism. Chapter 5 will trace how new forms of transportation and communications created unparalleled interconnectivity that brought about the first modern liberal era. Chapter 6 will follow suit, examining how one hundred years later, mid-twentieth-century technologies altered man’s ability to traverse time and space, producing the second era of modern liberalism.