By 1914, therefore, industrialization was an established presence in many of the nations of Europe. It is particularly difficult to convey the realities of this in illustrated form. A picture of a seven-storey textile factory in Lancashire in the 1800s does not look so very different from a picture of, say, the blast furnaces at Konigshutte, Silesia, in the 1830s, and a picture of a steel mill in the Ruhr in 1890 would not look much different from one in the Donbas in 1910. All will be huge, grimy, and emitting large quantities of smoke. The illustrations give no clues to the relative measures or spread of industrialization in the various locations at the time. They cannot tell the observer how representative these formidable institutions were of the national economy. And they give no indication of what is not in the picture: how much of the country in question does not look like this. Perhaps they do indicate that industrialization is a very capital-intensive process: the monsters of Le Creusot or Konigshutte clearly consumed a great deal of investment. And they do flag the fact that some parts of Silesia or of southern Russia, amongst many other places, contained some plant that looks quite advanced for the dates which the pictures bear.
This, in turn, connects to the vital point that industrialization is a long drawn out process; it is not achieved in a rush. Professor Rostow, in a famous work, The Stages of Economic Growth, once argued that the achievement of industrial take-off required the doubling of the percentage of national income devoted to investment within thirty years. But this was not believed for long: in most countries, the doubling process appears to take closer to between five and eight decades than to three, and, in the British case, nearer to ten, from the 1750s to the railway boom of the 1840s. If individual factories were capital intensive, and the process of industrialization expensive in the aggregate, it was still not necessary to shift large slices of national wealth across the economy in a hurry: it was indeed better if the transfer was conducted in an accumulative, sequenced manner.
Industrialization is thus not a revolution in the sense of a violent, sudden upheaval compressed into a short period of time. One of the silliest things ever written about it was Charles Beard’s melodramatic remark that it fell upon the agricultural economy ‘like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky’. Instead, in one measure or another, it is a process of evolution, covering many decades. Modern research now insists that Britain’s pace of advance before 1830 was distinctly relaxed, at less than 2 per cent per annum in GNP growth, scarcely better than the pace associated in later times with periods of Britain’s decline. Britain’s industrial growth, it appears, has always been slow. So, the structural transformation which had occurred in Britain by the i85os—when agriculture supplied only 21 per cent of total national product, against 35 per cent for industry and 19 per cent for transport and commerce —had been achieved by an extended period of adjustment. Similarly, the most persuasive description of French industrial development in the period 1815-1914 combines slow growth throughout the century with occasional spurts of accelerated development in the 1850s and 1860s and again after 1905. Even in the case of Germany, the continent’s strongest economy by the i900s, the notable growth of 1850-70 and 1885-1914 was constructed upon foundations first laid well back in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth-century growth in net national product—from 0.5 per cent per annum in 1830-50, to 2.4 per cent in 1850-70, and 3.1 per cent in 1870-1900—displays a fairly orderly progression. Indeed, F. B. Tipton has found, from yearly estimates, a ‘nearly constant long-term growth rate’ on both sides of 1870.
World History
