India and the Middle East each had the opportunity to industrialize relatively early. However, despite attempts to replicate the success of the West, each of these areas failed to generate widespread industrial development. In India, the efforts were feeble at best. The East India Company had operated in Calcutta since the late 17th century, and British colonial rule had established close ties with its elite classes. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a few colleges and scientific research facilities and a banking operation had appeared, and some of the existing commercial enterprises and the more primitive manufacturing activities came under the sway of the British. In the 1830s, British capitalists and entrepreneurs controlled portions of the Indian coal mines, sugar refineries, and a few textile mills. The British introduced their equipment and machinery into these ventures in an effort to establish a modern industrial base. However, these efforts proved futile. The cheap British textiles that flowed into India erased the jobs of millions of rural villagers who relied on traditional domestic manufacturing practices for their livelihood. The next stage of development occurred with the introduction of the railroad in the 1850s. Passenger travel commenced in 1853. Some initial fear existed that the Hindu population might reject railroad transportation as being too dangerous. Instead, the populace relied on railroads for transportation, but it did not stimulate noticeable economic change. Railroad construction merely connected the interior agricultural regions with Indian ports. This linkage meant that the traditional cash crops flowed more freely to the coastal areas for export, and British imports had easier access to penetrate the interior.1
The Middle East confronted industrialization from a position of a long-standing bias against Western culture. Aside from the acquisition of some Western armaments, the Ottoman Empire had remained virtually free of any Western intrusion and appeared oblivious to the speed and depth of Western industrialization occurring on its periphery. By the late 18th century the situation had reversed itself as the Ottoman Empire sought additional Western military technology. The reaction of the British to Napoleon’s military escapade in Egypt in 1798 did not go unnoticed. Shortly thereafter, Muhammed Ali seized control of Egypt and began to modernize its society. He established textile mills, sugar refineries, paper mills, and armories to strengthen Egypt’s economy. In the end, this effort failed. Like the experience in India, Egyptian factories could not compete with European enterprises, and the heavy reliance on cash crops to generate income ensured they would be used to purchase European goods and commodities rather than promote industrial development. The Ottoman Empire also attempted to imitate developments in Europe. The first factories appeared in the 1840s, albeit with European machinery and personnel expertise. The government pushed coal and iron production and instituted a postal service in the 1830s, a telegraph service in the 1850s, and the railroad in the middle of the 1860s. However, despite these small efforts, the Ottoman Empire’s industrial growth also was a victim of the overwhelming influence of European entrepreneurs and investors and the exchange of cash crops for cheaper European manufactured products.2
By 1820 Latin American nations had won independence from their European masters. The long tradition of Spanish and Portuguese influence hampered industrial development of its former colonies, as these nations fell outside of the orbit of industrialization occurring in the rest of Western Europe. In addition, the creation of a semblance of political stability took several decades in Latin America and further impeded industrial growth. The real impetus for embracing change came from the economic and commercial connections that Latin American areas had previously established with other Western nations undergoing industrialization. Brazil introduced steam power into a sugar mill in 1815. Coffee producers saw the advantage of steam power, and by mid-century the country had nearly 150 steam engines in operation. Again, however, the pattern followed that of other non-Western areas in the 19th century. The use of new technology, such as the steam engine, merely reinforced Latin American reliance on its cash crops for export in order to obtain sufficient funds to purchase Western technology. In the 1830s railroad development began in Cuba and appeared in Brazil and other regions of Latin America two decades later. Brazil offered financial incentives for assistance in railroad construction and extended its railroad mileage from a paltry ten miles in 1852 to 800 miles by the early 1870s. Mexico only built 369 miles of railroads in 1880, at a time when worldwide construction was booming. Several other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Chile, and Paraguay also attempted to modernize their economies by emphasizing ship building, iron production, and railroad construction, but these efforts achieved only meager results in the face of the more dominant influence of Western powers. But Latin American countries also suffered from resisting the investment interests of its neighbor the United States. Brazil and other countries remained tied to the heavy, bulky, and more expensive European industrial machinery rather than adopting the emerging more light and delicate and less expensive machinery from the United States.3
In truth, the splash of these early efforts fell far short of what was required to establish a modern industrial society in India, the Middle
East, and Latin America. A number of factors precluded the creation of the Western model of industrialization in these areas throughout most of the 19th century. Several conflicts between countries, political instability, the failure of the populaces to abandon their reliance on traditional cash crops for export in exchange for European goods and commodities, primitive education systems, cultural differences, the lack of internal infrastructure development as represented by the relatively modest amount of factories built, and the dearth of railroad mileage and the continued heavy dependence on European entrepreneurs, investment, and technology prevented these portions of the globe from making any serious transformation to industrialized societies.
World History
