Conclusion

During the second half of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had a variety of effects on the non-Western world. The power of the industrialized nations of the West overwhelmed the efforts of areas such as India, the Middle East, and Latin America to become equal partners. Political difficulties, cultural differences, lack of education, little home-grown entrepreneurship, few means to attract capital resources, and the creation of virtually no industrial proletariat spelled doom for their transformation to industrialized societies. For the most part, these areas continued to provide cash crops and raw materials to Western nations in return for purchasing finished products and commodities and only limited amounts of machinery and technology that might have assisted their entry into the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, two distinct areas, Russia and Japan, were the exception to the norm and did make significant progress toward industrialization in the last half of the 19th century. Their success was remarkable when compared to other areas of the world and came about in spite of significantly different starting positions and conditions. Neither country possessed the advantages that Western nations had parlayed into the creation of industrialized societies. Both nations retained a larger agrarian class and did not experience dramatic urbanization. In addition, they operated within the constraints of government structures that looked at industrialization with different perspectives. Russia and Japan had to obtain sufficient capital for investment and also Western technology in order to compete, and did so without having to develop their own large class of inventors or pool of new inventions. Finally, a dearth of native resources and the inability to secure them from external sources for a time seemed questionable at best. By 1900 both Russia and Japan solved these problems and proceeded to develop a level of industrialization that astounded contemporary observers. In so doing, these nations took on many of the characteristics of the nations that had previously industrialized. Each experienced significant technological and organizational changes related to the new economic realities that altered the nature of work and society in their respective countries. But Russia and Japan did so in an environment in which they had to react to the pressure of the previously industrialized nations while at the same moment transforming their traditional societies. However, in the end Russia and Japan took different paths to industrialization and had different results. Japan succeeded without social unrest that might have disrupted the economic growth of the nation. Russia, on the other hand, found the experience more painful in the long term and as a result faced the consequences of the social and political upheavals in the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Thus, by the 20th century the Industrial Revolution had extended its impact beyond Western societies. Its scope and influence was somewhat muted in areas such as India, the Middle East, and Latin America but became a transforming force in others such as Japan and Russia. As a result the nature of the world’s economies and the course of world history had been changed forever.