Transcript for:
Overview of Capitalism's Historical Development

let's get the cliches out of the way capitalism is the water we swim in it defines in some way at least almost every part of our lives and swimming in it has become so second nature so ubiquitous so all pervasive that we forget that capitalism has a history it has a beginning it's changed over time it's man-made and so like good scientists or engineers is we should seek to take it apart to analyze and interpret and understand it to think through its rules and norms and ideas and its institutions to try and find out where it came from how it works and how and why it conquered the world this is in many ways the biggest and strangest story I've told there are so many moments so many places to go so many people to meet but what fascinates me about it is that it is a good story in fact one of the historians will draw on a lot Joyce applebe starts her history of capitalism like this like a good detective Story the history of capitalism starts with a puzzle the puzzle is one that historians have poured over for decades if not centuries in one form or another and it's a puzzle that changes over time it's the question of how where from who and why this thing we call capitalism developed because unlike say communism or fascism or even something like physics or chemistry you can't neatly point to a tradition of thinkers like say Marx and musolini or Newton or Einstein that kind of Drew out and delineated the framework of how we think about an ideology instead capitalism kind of bubbled up surrounded by other junk from a number of different components but from a bit of a murky depth and by historical standards this is another part of the mystery it did so very quickly so let's see if we can develop a better understanding of capitalism but first who will Define for us so to break the case of this detective story will be traveling across the world from Spain to Italy to the Dutch Republic from England to America across different time periods we'll meet a diverse set of characters and we'll see how the story traverses many different locations and ideas and people from the feudal Estates of Europe to the Industrial Revolution of Britain then Germany then America down to the southern slavery plantations and back up to the Chicago meat district and then to Wall Street and financial crashes and even to the apocalyptic trenches of the first world war capitalism famously booms and busts it goes through phases and ages it's changed and morphed throughout its history but one thing is undeniable that love it or loathe it the speed and veracity with which it changed the entire world was astonishing here's just one first quick figure that I find personally incredible in 1760 that's before the Industrial Revolution really took off Britain was processing around 2.5 million pound of raw cotton to make clothes and so on after just a generation or two though by 1840 that figure that amount of cotton had grown to a staggering 366 million P just think about the scope of that change not doubled not tripled not 4% growth rates or steady Improvement that is an explosion by a factor of of 160 and that's just one example of similar figures in almost every sphere of life that we'll look at but want to try at least and avoid these abstract numbers as much as we reasonably can and think about lives realities flesh emotions possibilities and what we've inherited from this history I want to think about what having 16 times more available clothes and building materials tools and transport food is like for ordinary people what that means why it matters and what happens when a peasant say is a little bit warmer a little bit more satiated watered a little bit healthier a little bit Freer what happens when you can suddenly travel on a tra train for the first time across the country or buy a car for the first time to not worry about surviving the winter for the very first time but also what happens to the rest of the world when one part gets immeasurably richer and more powerful too what happens when warships tanks and guns can be rolled out like clockwork on an industrial scale it's a story of what some historians have called the Conquering Bourgeois the historian Eric hsbor called it a World Revolution and another historian that we'll get to and I'll draw on quite a lot David Landis called it Prometheus Unbound this image of Prometheus as a kind of God who stole something someone with a Janus face the image of fire and steel and oil and power and energy Conquering the world a kind of Frankenstein that we've created and sometimes does things that we don't expect it to these metaphors the idea of going forth going west going into the unknown drawing on some great new power Conquering the world it's an image will return to a lot because I think it's a very useful one and importantly we have to keep in mind how historically new all of this is the Industrial Revolution for example as a term wasn't used until the late 19th century capitalism as a term wasn't really widespread until the 20th century and the subject matter we'll look at it changes as it goes it changes as it evolves and grows and comes to terms with its contradictions and its own growth from small factories and handicrafts to slavery and cotton Mills from very simple steam engines to huge train tracks to cars and warships how small businesses change to massive Corporation multinationals using Global Supply chains conquering and some of the things we think of as integral to capitalism consumer C culture Mass advertising Mass persuasion catalog then online shopping shopping mes all of them become part of the picture much later on we have to then get to terms with why and how capitalism moves and changes into different forms so analyzing capitalism telling this story is like deconstructing a fast car while you're speeding along in it and that's what will have to do too we'll Begin by carefully unscrewing a few nuts and bolts we'll find out where the rubber is from we'll peel back the paint work we'll take out the oil we'll look at the shopping on the back seat and we'll race this thing to Ford's Factory floor and then maybe I better drive this metaphor somewhere off the cliff before the engine falls out but enough of that let's get started [Music] capitalism is the water we swim in it feels so natural to us as we'll see it's actually very historically unusual it just takes getting out of the water to see that in fact I think in a strange way feudalism would feel more natural want to try and really get us to feel how normal it would have been to be an ordinary average feudal person in the Middle Ages want to really try and situate us to take us back to that feudal world to try and imagine the mental landscape of a feudal peasant say only then I think can we understand the change in mentality and outlooks that took place it's really difficult to imagine being an average person in the Middle Ages because it was mainly the big things that were written about wars Kings and religious issues and so on but the mundane work play crops business the village and Village Life The Very things we're interested in in retrospect when thinking about how capitalism developed were thought of as unimportant unnotable first and most obviously the vast majority of the world was rural the global population in 1600 was around 500 million but about 94% of people lived agricultural lives and 80% of these were peasants of some form like this figure 80 to 94% comes up again and again it's probably the most important figure we'll think about and don't worry there won't be many statistics or figures but think about that it took 80% of the population to produce enough food for the entire population and try and guess by the way what number that is today so most of these people were surfs peasants slaves or in casts with certain roles or positions that they were born into certain obligations certain expectations certain things they could and couldn't do it was a very closed down system most practiced a type of polyculture it's multiple plants and animals spent all their time on small patches growing vegetables of different sorts and tending to different livestock fixing their clothes and fences and houses Market Day might have been once a week but would have been a long walk to the town so many wouldn't even do that you'd only go if you really had to so you'd mostly be directly producing the means of your subsistence well likely having to give some of it to your lord in his book Liberty or death historian Peter MC makes the point that the countryside would actually seem very crowded to us today applebe writes whether in ancient Egypt or Greece Babylonia or Mongolia it took the labor of upwards of 80% of the people to produce enough food to feed the whole population and because Farmers often didn't even succeed in doing that there were famines what's striking is how little change there was for the vast majority of human history even a skilled laborer in 16 Century England say would be doing very similar work for very similar pay living very similar lives to their ancestors under the Romans 1500 years before that's a very cyclical static unchanging set of routines ideas practices ways of living lives of course I'm generalizing the ways peasants lived their obligations the politics their status differed enormously peasant being a kind of Catal term that's useful to use generally for the state of what we're focusing on mainly Europe in this context a surf for example was obliged to provide food for their lord many surfs in places like Russia were essentially slaves who could be bought and sold Lords across Europe controlled huge hug States one in Poland for example was half the size of Ireland and one in Hungary was 7 million acres and Catherine the Great once gave away 40,000 surfs which just speaks to how many she had under her control Europe was a patchwork of principalities dukedoms Empires free cities kingdoms all with different setups of different kinds the historian William Doyle writes that over much of Europe quote the reality of the Onan regime was an intense confusion of powers and Perpetual overlaps of unequal jurisdiction in which the king so far from imposing an unchallengeable authority was constantly bargaining with his subjects at a number of different levels in other words it was complicated so I want to focus for a minute it on absolutist France because it's the typical example of an absolute feudal monarchy it was defined by what were called privileges a patchwork of them different towns provinces people Estates senors the church they all had different types of privileges some were taxed less some not at all some had different laws some different courts tithes for example basically a tax of around 8 to 10% at Harvest Time each year were paid to the church by peasants Jews were paid to senors at different time of the year peasants owed their Lords between 15 and 40% of their produce there were many languages many units of measurement and many cultures here's a general example that Muk highlights Gabon in southern France it had a population of just 800 its Senor was the bishop of bzier who was hardly there but there was a list of the obligations that the villagers owed to him each year 85 L of barley 28 of wheat 880 bottles of olive oil 18 chickens 4 pound of beeswax four partridges and one rabbit then pepper nutmeg and clothes Lords would also usually own or control the mill in the village or the village oven at the center of the village that might be shared by everyone and generally The Peasants also owed the Lord some period of labor at Harvest Time all of this was substansi in return for being allowed to use the Lord's land and his protection on top of this because of their uh exalted position French Senor didn't have to pay any taxes another privilege these privileges were a maze of Rights Jews offices tolls Etc that were shared between State and church between different levels of the nobility and the clergy to give some indication of the extent of the church's power it owned a quarter of all property in Paris and this was all a big ladder a political ladder which you needed to climb Louis the 16th for example sold 70,000 venol offices that's offices to raise Royal Revenue there were 4,200 Nobles in France this was just before the Revolution by the way at the end of the 18th century and one in 10 women in the country were prostitutes so that's just a snapshot of Europe as we'll get to England differed somewhat but Germany Spain Portugal Eastern Europe and much of the rest of the world including India and China and the ottoman world all looked very similar from our perspective being a surf doesn't sound like much fun think again about the 80% of the population working in farming number that roughly means that 80% of Humanity's attention was spent working the fields feeding animals fixing homesteads and so on and even that wasn't enough because famine was an everpresent threat to take one particularly bad period in the 1690s the seven ill years in Scotland between 5 and 15% of the population died from famine these were some of the last bad European famines and the reason why these were the last is a big part of this story by the way which we'll get to but if we go further back to the 14th century say as many as 10 to 25% of the population of Europe were wiped out in some of the worst famines the continent had ever seen that's before we've even gotten to bad harvests more broadly to illness and plague and healthc Care problems so the average lifespan in England as late as the 17th century was just 36 but again to really try and situate ourselves in these periods how did an average person think about what seems like to us again we have to remember this is just to us an almost hopeless existence for example in 1833 a Manchester surgeon Peter Gasco painted quite a Rosy picture of England before industrialization saying that the domestic manufacturer the working in homes that most people practiced was quote infinitely superior to the manufacturer of a later date each worked at home with family with a small plot to grow vegetables with maybe an animal or two he says he doesn't intend to paint an Arcadia but that the average person commonly lived to a good round age worked when necessity demanded ceased his labor when his wants were supplied according to his character and if disposed to spend time or money in drinking but this kind of Rose tinted view has largely been criticized by historians as ideologically motivated by certain people at the time or a great example of that oh the good old days genre the nostalgic looking back again through Rose tinted glasses Christopher Bailey sums up ordinary lives in the period like this peasants were not bores as some learned people of the time thought nor by contrast were they Charming inhabitants of an unspoiled Arcadia as many indulgent Literati had begun to assert by the 18th century instead he says most peasants were quite entrepreneurial they wanted more more land more money and more honor but despite this compared with today the world almost everywhere for almost everyone was very tied down tied to Lords tied in Nets of Privileges and obligations and most importantly tied to the soil produce was overwhelmingly determined by the seasons by sunlight by laws that were supposedly fixed by God and then by the Lord by the great chain of being the historian Eric hsbor for example in his age of series which I'll refer to often says in the 1780s and for the first time in human history the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies this idea of being Chained and tied down and fixed and Shackled can be seen in that phrase the great chain of being it was used commonly and it's the idea that God King Aristocrats priests Gentry peasants European African dog bug grass dirt all of it each of them had its place like a place on a board game except you don't move from that place that's your lot that's your Destiny that's where you're meant to be in life and here's what another mancunian Richard guest wrote in 1823 about Lancashire that's in the kind of Midlands of England before the Industrial Revolution he said quote the events of the neighborhood flowed in a regular and broken train politics were a field little entered into and the histories of each other's families including cousins five times removed with marriages births deaths Etc formed the almost only subjects of their conversations and that the Lord was the dictator of opinion the regulator of Parish Affairs and the exclusive settler of all disputes again chained tied Shackled cyclical expected routine and some might even say declining towards the apocalypse away from the Garden of Eden that ideal utopian sense of perfection instead today we often think that things can improve develop progress that we can climb the social ladder maybe that things can get better compare this to Aristotle's view of the world one that Christianity later borrowed from he thought that A rock falls to the ground because that's its place in the universe that's where it belongs that's where God will build it to always move back to same with a king same with a peasant the idea of belonging somewhere being one thing and one thing only doing things one way seems such a powerful ideology to me after all everything has a home the bees in the hive the fish in the Water The Rock on the ground the person in their house and some people are born into power and others into poverty the Sun the cloud the Stars they belong in the sky I think reminding ourselves of this can help remind us how unnatural capitalism would seem to a 13th century French peasant why actually feudalism would seem like the natural putting it in air quotes there way of doing things add on to the this a couple more things for example that wealth and credit were distrusted by Christian culture borrowing and lending business more broadly was thought to be suspicious and that instead you'd be rewarded in the afterlife that worldly things were bad dirty corrupting so I think in a period dominated by the church this is going to be quite powerful you get a situation which seems difficult to see out of let alone step out of difficult to change difficult to imagine something [Music] new it's hard to tell this story because it happens over such a long slow period capitalism wasn't planned it emerged out of many different moments many different factors like the phrase life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards we have to look back in retrospect at what those moments were kind of piece them together it's a strange thing for something to happen that the people of the period didn't really know where it would lead the first class of these moments don't relate to capitalism specifically but to the idea of something new emerging in general out of those fixed shackles of feudal life there was no bigger impetus to challenging the feudal order than the discovery of the new world this was one of the first stages of modern globalization the age of Discovery not just of new lands but of new foods spices animals materials not to make mention new people new cultures new languages when Christopher Columbus landed in America in 1492 the culture of Europe changed in historic terms very quickly many of the new spices vegetables and sugar were very desirable and the idea that there was abundant new land was also very very powerful you have to really try and imagine the powerful desirable effect this would have on people's lives and on the imagination even if it didn't affect you directly even thinking about it would contribute to this new mental landscape this is a period in which the world was getting smaller quicker ships were getting faster the technology better Communications easier roads improved as the invention of the movable type printing press was spreading across Europe at around the same time people could read more and learn more and hear more about these new and exciting novel things things in the most General sense so I'm trying to use the phrase new worlds here in the broadest most expansive way I mean new worlds in here as much as there a broadening of the imaginative Horizons an expansion of the mental landscape the imagination the Renaissance was happening at around the same time too which meant there were also new ways of producing and engaging with things like art architecture and then the rediscovery of lots of ancient Greek and Roman books and ideas and texts it's in this expansive context that we can start to piece together why some countries seem to jump ahead of others having first mover advantages and this idea of first movers is why this story will take us from Spain and Portugal across to Italy to the Dutch Republic to England and then eventually to America in a very real way we can see capitalism as a character going out on a journey and developing as it does think about Portugal it has a very long coastline across the Atlantic it has very good fishing Waters you can go out quite deep good Fisher men fishing culture and all the ship knowledge and technology that comes with it it's still close enough to Europe's other core towns and cities but also near enough to Africa to explore down that west coast of an unknown continent the Intrigue the imagination you have the Canary Islands here a good stopping off point for ships a good slave trading base maybe a good jumping off point too to explore out into the Atlantic Spain of course shares these advantages in this context is it any surprise that these two countries had the first modern empires of course first movers attract second and third and fourth movers so we can already see something integral to capitalism's development mimesis copying countries see what others are doing and say we want a piece of that too this opening of the imaginative Horizons was immediately contagious 500 years ago there were people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean but neither knew about the other on the western side our side the people had reddish brown skins and lived in Huts or wigwams on the Eastern side in Europe the people were wh-- skinned they had learned how to build houses and large sailing ships but they still didn't know much about the rest of the world when we look at it like this it forces us to look at incentives factors causes the things that create the conditions for what we see as a kind of simple genius Voyage of one man across the Atlantic it was more than that it was an entire culture that preceded him that Columbus jumped off literally into the Atlantic applebe writes the Novelties from European trade in the East Indies and the new world promoted new commercial institutions created a fresh group of entrepreneurs and stimulated the imagination of contemporaries I know that I'm right oh I know that I'm right when I say that the world is round oh I'm right my thinking is sound and I'll the world it won't take very long imagination here is absolutely key to set that initial pallet of paints it's crucial because compared with the feudal chain of being as fixed down imagination throws us all mentally into the future and the future's different possibilities most before thought history was either cyclical repeating day after day year after year or even declining so I think people's mentalities would have been completely different thinking only of that day repeating over and over maybe the week ahead but not really the next month or year other than thinking about what you're growing for the seasons why would you why would you think of progress of that type but now there was a new world emphasis on new there with new animals and plants new materials new land once you have sugar cinnamon coffee chocolate to impress guests new silks maybe new dyes and colors the imagination is sparked imagine wearing a heavy scratchy wool garment all of your life and then getting light bright blue cotton say think about the social and cult cultural capital you get from having these new things in your house the look at me Factor the talk of the T Factor imagine how powerful that's going to be how much that's going to change that imaginative mental landscape if we fast forward a little bit because these things always look clearer in retrospect one commentator wrote about trade later on in 6 1990 that the wants of the Mind are infinite man naturally aspires and his mind is elevated his senses grow more refined and more capable of delight another wrote man's wants increase with his wishes which is for everything that is rare can gratify his senses Adorn his body and promise the ease pleasure and pomp of life just imagine eating Bland meals or of your life without any salt or sugar imagine the power of being the only one walking down the street in that bright Violet fabric cloak or wearing a powerful new perfume that everyone can smell I think we don't really have any equivalent to this today the discovery of the new world I think had a similar effect as aliens coming would be the new of it the unexpectedness of it the new peoples and culture and Landscape that is literally what it was like to the people of the [Music] period so I think this is a good first parts of our equation newness desire imagination possibility a sense of pluralism in the most General way just a plurality of new ways of doing things of looking at things of thinking of things a new mental Frontier again these are very loose causes so far the age of Discovery the Renaissance the printing press but there's one that some have seen as crucial as Central the Reformation in fact the sociologist Max vber argued that protestantism was the spirit of capitalism what did he mean by [Music] this very Loosely the Reformation was a 16th century movement which saw many churches countries and theologians break off from the Catholic church because it was seen as being too corrupt and greedy and hierarchical and so on coincidentally it was many of the new independent Protestant areas that first industrialized the Dutch Republic England then Germany a bit later on in his book The Unbound Prometheus the historian David Landis points to how many denters there were in the North and the Midlands of England where industrialization first Toof V's argument was that Calvinism a specific type of protestantism that emerged from the Reformation in the 16th century emphasized something called predestination which sounds a bit technical I know but is basically the idea that God knowing everything being all powerful already knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell that this couldn't be changed by a priesthood say on Earth by a church an all powerful church that has for indulgences to get people out of purgatory and vber says that this inter turn led to people looking for signs that they were part of the select view that they were going to heaven and he said it motivated hard work discipline good deeds and so on this is a debate that still rages on today and many do reject it by the way however I think the idea of nonconformity is a bit more interesting broadly than the idea of looking for signs that you're going to be going to heaven the Reformation eventually at least led to more Toleration for other religious views and so other ways of doing things of thinking of course when most universities to take just one example had a very strong uh religious component to say the least I mean religion obviously uh uh ran through everything in a university Toleration quite obviously a people's doing things differently not just in religion but in other areas too whether that's science or economics or politics so protestantism simply means just a little bit more freedom a little bit more slack from Authority a few more imaginative neural Pathways to spark things to consider again not a cause of capitalism specifically but it cause cont fertilizing of the soil for something something new to grow out of finally let's add the Scientific Revolution this is a big Topic in itself but I think it's more useful to think about not as a revolution per se but as scientific Evolution or revolutions or Revolutions in fits and starts a kind of wave that comes and goes and at some point Peaks very dramatically and other points calms down a bit but this spread across the modern period quite generally I think the central moment here that big peak for us is Francis Bacon publishing his book the new organon in 1620 in it bacon argued that new inventions like the compass gum powder and the printing press had changed the world more than anything else and because of this science and the experimental method in particular should be furthered should be Advanced one result was the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1662 with a goal to further scientific knowledge but this was just one tent pole moment one big wave in a wider culture of again broadening of Horizons Isaac Newton published his principia on the laws of gravity and motion in 1687 there was an intense interest in all things related to physics and gravity and forces vacuums gases pumps Bell jars air pressure experiments all of these things this culture as we get to are absolutely crucial I think in his book on on the steam engine William Rosen writes a new enthusiasm for creating knowledge led to the public sharing of experimental methods and results demand for those results built a network of communication channels among theoretical scientists those channels eventually carried not just theoretical results but their real world applications which spread into the coffee houses and ins where Artisans could purchase access to the new knowledge so new Worlds the imagination the Renaissance the princing press the reformation and a scientific revolution are the broad loose somewhat ambiguous seeds sewn in a stagnant feudal soil they might have led to many different things we have to remember that history is contingent that there's Randomness thrown in that lots of different pathways can be taken but for this story and for history they preceded the emergence of what we now call [Music] capitalism in his book on the Industrial Revolution William Rosen says that there are more than 200 theories about the industrial revolutions causes and if we're thinking about how and why capitalism emerged that's a lot of theories to analyze and test and learn about and as we'll see causes very strange things it would be odd for example to say that Christopher Columbus caused the Industrial Revolution but when we look back through a very long lens in retrospect he at least in a very small part contributed to it in a very broad sense butterflies and wings flapping halfway around the world and all of that but some causes are much more immediate the steam engine say so you have mediate causes that are mediated through lots of different events and immediate causes that are much closer but another way to understand capitalism is to look at those ca is those factors that were present elsewhere too but then didn't cause a takeoff of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism in the same way that happened later in England take Spain a first mover lots of new stuff new Goods new ideas even new cultures being absorbed from the Americas lots of new land and slaves and ship and the shipping technology that was Advanced but the key problem with the Conquistadors was that they were searching for gold this might have brought wealth but not capitalism not new ways of innovating production not factories not new social systems not an emphasis on wage labor in fact it brought inflation there's lots of new gold came back and circulated around Spain driving up prices today we call this a resource curse it still happens notably with oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia who Focus all their attention on the oil fields and the technology to draw the oil from the ground and do get very very rich but then have an economy centered on this in particular and then struggle to diversify especially when it run out later on and many Aristocrats in Europe thought that Commerce Merchant trading work in general was beneath them so Spain didn't open up its markets it was very oppressive they had the Inquisition there was no religious freedom there was book Banning and burning rights and monopolies to trade or explore had to be granted by the Spanish authorities in short it clung to the old trolled top down way of doing things another candidate here is the Italian city states Florence Pisa they were pretty free in comparison with much of Europe they were focused on trade especially trade with Asia to the east being the Gateway cities to those uh Silk Roads they were very rich and the Renaissance happened there the problem though again was the top down control it was very closed it was very fixed it was very authoritarian to use a more modern phrase there was a focus on who traded who were Merchants who benefited and who could skim off the top who was granted the right and what the official granting that right got in return how they lined their pockets the city states might have been the gateway to the trade and silks and spices and luxuries from the East but the political economic system was based on privileges what you'd have is something like a merchant with a monopoly on a specific good uh clothes or a spice say granted by a specific political office who would then be paid for this license for this privilege prices would then be regulated from the top down to short it was a kind of pyramid a closed top down system but the biggest Contender by far to be firm first and in some senses they were first was the Dutch Republic in the early 17th century the Dutch suddenly got very very rich drawing the rest of Europe's attention because it was such a small but increasingly wealthy country this was a place that traded in Herring that was their main industry their main export many turned their pens to trying to explain this new economic Miracle the Dutch were merchants and middlemen much like the Italian and the Iberian Merchants one major factor in their sudden success was their new independence from Spain who were catholic and imposed a Catholicism on the Dutch but after Independence the Dutch welcomed in dis centers from the rest of Europe so we already have this culture of Tolerance there and a skepticism of Orthodoxy the Dutch Republics most radical Innovation was the joint stock company in particular the Dutch East India Company which was formed in 16002 the joint stock company is probably the most immediate cause so far for the emergence of capitalism the premise was simple but it was world changing backed up by law the Dutch could buy stocks in a joint stock company pulling their resources together and sharing the risk of a larger Venture that no one could do on their own the added benefit of the joint stock company was that a nobleman say could invest in it without having to work for the company itself remember work was still thought of as something for the lower classes it was dirty it was beneath Aristocrats it also meant an investor wasn't liable for any debts or losses if the risky business venture like traveling Halfway Around the World to get spices went bankrupt applebe writes nothing revolutionized industrial Finance more than the legal form of incorporation that gave limited liability to the owners of Enterprises so there's a bit of a mystery here as to why capitalism didn't take off further in the Dutch Republic applebe has this hypothesis that the success in trading that they had Commerce might have distracted them from trying to improve things like uh production lines and move into factories the Dutch Republic of course was also very small so unlike the British a bit later on it could be difficult to control the Seas to have a big Navy to uh to impose their will over trading routes and then later still to maintain a big Empire so all of these examples Spain Portugal the Italian city states and the Dutch Republic might be thought of as protoc capitalist or having protoc capitalist elements they did things in a way though that were top down controlled still they were still attached to that old idea of a great chain of being where Authority is at the top and everyone else is commanded downwards and they were missing one very important factor that we see as crucial to capitalism today factories industry efficiency improving the means of [Music] production looking at these false starts we can see some causes that might be proximal factors we might be getting closer to the core but things like profit seeking Commerce and sharing risk in a joint Enterprise aren't exactly unique to the modern world they happened in the ancient world too people always sought to profit people always exchanged and people always in some ways sort to pull together to share risk and to uh go on bigger larger Enterprises of course these get much more uh focused and much more become much more important as we get closer to the birth of capitalism but there's one major cause that's highly correlated that we haven't quite looked at yet and I think if we look at it very closely and then work back and ask what caused that we might get a clearer picture and that moment is the Industrial Revolution the most obvious place for us to start and to really focus on is that most modern of things the engine remember that Royal Society we looked at set up to further scientific knowledge in 1662 well just a tiny bit later in 1698 it advertised quote the demonstration of a new invention for raising of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the repellent force of fire which will be of great use and Advantage for draining mines a catchy title this was Thomas savory's fire engine or the miner's friend and it was the first rudimentary steam engine and I know steam engines can switch many of us off I could be like that too you know they remind us sometimes of kind of nerdy focus on engineering or learning about the Vic torians at school but I promise I'll try and make this as interesting and fascinating as possible because we really have to understand how this incredible new invention completely changed the world and if we're going to understand capitalism today we have to look at how this came about the minui the factors the values the Ambitions the focuses the people involved and it turns out to be actually quite an incredible story now one common problem during this period was flooding in mines it was dangerous of course for miners plus it limited how far mines could be dug I don't want to get really into the mini but Thomas Savory recognized that water heated into steam which was then cooled back to water created a vacuum in the chamber that it cooled in connect this vacuum to a pipe down to the mine and it pulls the water up and out savory's device was one of many invented across Europe but it was the most ambitious and even it was very simple and quite limited but just 7 years later in 1705 the inventor Thomas newom improved on it by adding a piston and a beam which made the design radically more useful at a pace of 12 Strokes per minute each stroke lifted 10 gallons of water out of a 50 m mine making up the first real industrial device to be extraordinarily practical across an entire industry which was a central industry that affected many other Industries this has good claim on being the most consequential the most significant moment or invention in history it leads to so much it leads to more engines it leads to more factories it leads to trains and cars air travel electricity it leads as well sea to war machines it's really the foundation of modernity and Industry to take just one example of how big of a problem newom and savory had solved one mine in England 500 horses have been used to hoist water out of it imagine how much upkeep and work and feed would be involved in this mining was connected to agriculture in this way you know it was part Farm in another example given in the literature horses used at one mine could lift 67,000 gallons of water a day now that is a vast oper operations still but newcom's engine could lift a quarter of a million gallons and remember this was just the first device now remember the name Thomas newcom we'll return to him in this story because if it's so Earth shattering what he did if it took so long in human history before someone did it we want to know exactly why exactly why he worked on this exactly what his motivations were what the conditions and the context were but for now let's just look at how groundbreaking this really was now first obviously it made him relatively wealthy although he didn't die a wealthy man but after a few years newcom's atmospheric engine as it was being called was being used in almost every big mine in the country plus many new mines that couldn't have been mined before the advantage this gave England was astronomical by 1800 there were 1,600 new common engines across England but only 45 in France England was producing 81% of Europe's coal just consider how much more England is mining taking out of the Earth how many more people are employed how much cheaper it's going to be if they're using 1,600 of these engines and the next best competitor is only using 45 it's going to draw a lot of people's attention one of these people was the Scottish inventor James Watt who realized that engines like this would be useful for other things like powering ships especially down the Mississippi he thought what impr improved the efficiency of newcom's design with a separate cylinder and interestingly for us he was a meticulous measurer of wasted fuel wasted heat he experimented with different temperatures and volumes using specific devices essentially improving the efficiency by a factor of four now when you remember how many horses were being used and how many gallons were being drawn in single day just tiny improvements in efficiency were going to save a hell of a lot of time resources money and of course profit Landis says quote that by 1800 the United Kingdom was using perhaps 11 million tons of coal a year by 1830 that amount had doubled 15 years later it had doubled again and by 1870 it was crossing the 100 million ton Mark it's this focus on efficiency that even very small improvements because of the scale because of how many people were going to use them and benefit from them improved function saved time saved money saved Manpower and opened new use cases that weren't as clear weren't as apparent before so it led to scale it led to breath and it led to new focuses and it had an absolutely revolutionary impact what happened next was a series of world shattering KnockOn effects because efficiency was being found to be Central Key the thing that was unlocking a whole range of activities and focuses and that metal work was core to tinkering with that efficiency a corresponding revolution in Metallurgy kicked off too John Wilkinson for example learned to bore cylinders more precisely their advances in lathes and drills screws and so on people started working with gauges to standardized sizes although this came a bit later Applebees starting in the 18th century a succession of ingenious men discovered how to make natural forces push pump lift turn twirl smelt and grind all manner of things and all of this led to small incremental improvements in generating integral things like warmth an ability to cook easier to manufacture the essentials more cheaply things we really take for granted today like warmth just seems like a comfort to us but it can do lots of other things too it can enable you to work longer hours to do more in your home and usually you'd be freezing cold uh to dry things easier Hobs Bor wrote that the gods and Kings of the past were powerless before the businessmen and steam engines of the present but there was another distinct line of innovation happening too I'm at Richard arr's Cromwell Mill which is the first first modern industrial Factory line factory system he brought together water and a spinning frame and workers in this big Factory over here there's a canal it joins to the railway it brings together so much but thinking specifically of what he made clothing clothing brings together two lines and these two lines would eventually meet one was fabrics and the the other was energy steam power engines which he would eventually use first he used water to spin uh a water wheel which powered his water frame but for a moment I'm interested in two of those factors that we've looked at and how clothing really shows how they are cause and effect at the same time and it's those first factors we looked at those first causes the imagination and the new world first you had lighter different more exotic materials coming from the new Worlds the most commonly used material before was sheep wool which was coarse and heavy just imagine how uncomfortable old clothes would have been scratchy horrible wool that you maybe barely wash and that you wear day in day out I mean I throw out t-shirts today because I find them uncomfortable um you know after a year or so these are nice modern you know soft t-shirts wool wearing that scratchy horrible cheaply or untreated uh material day in day out I don't know it must have been very very different to how we think of clothes today so it's no surprise that when people have a bit more time bit more money uh are free to move from the fields and agriculture a little bit one of the first things they spend their time and money on a new clothes think about fabric it has to be picked transported cleaned combed spun into yarn woven sewn finished with dye and bleach and Etc all of this could potentially be mechanized and could at least be improved upon supplying Weavers With Better Stronger cheaper yarn was the most obvious problem that could be solved the biggest invention here was the English inventor Richard arr's 1775 water frame which was powered by water at a mil just tying the road from me and used a complex system of wood and ropes and pulleys on a frame to spin raw cotton into a stronger yarn by twisting it very very tight this is another statistic I find absolutely fascinating that once arcrite had set up his spinning frame here and employed hundreds of workers one of his workers could produce as much in the same time as seven or eight workers elsewhere that would make his products seven or eight times as cheap I mean that's just going to blow the competition out of the water if we think about all this technology all this Innovation all these new machines the culture how it spread we can really see how the Midlands of England of that period was much like how we think of Silicon Valley today it was the height of progress of innovation of intrigue it was the The Pinnacle of advancement in the world and news spread very quickly people came to look one uh traveler from Europe came across and noted how the common Englishman he said wore leather shoes while the people at home still wore clogs within 40 Years of arches invention Steam from Steam Engines was being used instead of water Wheels Plus stronger and cheaper plants cotton was being grown and harvested cheaply by slaves in America and was beginning to be used and imported regularly and again some of the growth numbers here are staggering between 1750 and 1769 so just 19 years cotton trade exports from Britain increased by a factor of 10 in 1760 Britain imported £2.5 million pound of rwal cotton just 27 years later in 1787 that number was 22 million 50 years later again it was £ 366 million the price of yarn was1 120th of what it was before that's like something going from £10 $10 to 50 just think about that today we just don't see anything get cheaper by factors like that anymore the change in just a single generation to people's lives to people's livelihoods to the economy to culture to Tang to the factories would have just been dizzying as many people testified to one English politician said at the time that it was not 5% or 10% but 100% and thousands percents that made the fortunes of Lancashire these companies were the apples the Googles the microsofts of their day by 1780 Britain had overtaken France a country with a much bigger population in terms of trade and 70 years later it had doubled France's output and it's important to remember that these are just the major inventions the big things that really turn the wheels the most common examples looked at the things that we look back at and see uh were the beginning of a line of progression that went through to the major uh uh improvements on them through to today but they were just the big examples of many many many thousands of smaller devices and machines and Innovations and approaches it was a culture of improvement of tinkering of using tools and new ideas to try and make many many things better the same happened in Iron production and technology which was a KnockOn effect of Mining and steam engines and Landis says that small Anonymous gains were probably more important in the long run than the major inventions that have been remembered in the history books Anonymous you know it's that small forgotten Artisan or Iron Monger with a very meticulous focus on a new method to create a more precise thread or something that was just ever so slightly stronger and improved the efficiency by a factor of one% all of this slowly adding up in a bubbling culture take something often underappreciated chemicals they were used for cleaning and dying soaps glass fertilizer to clean homes and shops and of course clothes The Chemical Works in Glasgow had these towering 455 ft chimneys which dominated the skyline they were really the first Modern Skyscrapers businessmen painters and writers all flocked to both gaze at be in awe of and to criticize these factories that were popping up in the Midlands mainly of England but elsewhere too they were becoming unignorable imagine seeing something like this for the first time I love this painting Turner's cobbrook day or by night it was beginning to inspire again both all and the first kind of nent critiques of this still unnamed system the next knock on effect from the steam engine was of course the railways they were first envisaged as very short lines to transport materials using very small trains which replaced horses is dragging carts along tracks to make the ground smoother take a look for example at Richard travic very first locomotive at the Iron Works in Wales in 1804 compare this to Sav engine just a century before that's quite a lot of small precise improvements to the basic engine concept over that Century period by 1830 the first materal materials and passenger line opened between Liverpool and Manchester it was just 32 M long and everyone sat in these little carts once again though the numbers here are huge in 1830 there was still less than 50 m of track in 1840 4,500 M by 1850 just 20 years later 23,500 miles while almost all of Europe still had none again all of this had snowballing effects take iron again in 1750 Britain exported twice as much as she produced by 1814 exports were five times greater by 1850 more than the rest of the world combined from 1740 to 1850 ionite put in Britain Rose from 177,000 to 2,250,000 tons so we have this kind of interlocking System Of Invention improvements of efficiency of snowballing effects one affecting the other cascading clothes need raw materials need Railways need engines need iron need coal so many people were involved in this kind of opportunity to innovate it was ubiquitous it was everywhere not saying it affected everyone but it seems very well spread across the country and England was exporting all of this it was quite literally the workshop of the world now there were clearly lots of geniuses here but what stands out for me especially as something like genius can't really be measured is the culture the economy and the society Rosen writes that thousands of Innovations were necessary to create steam power and thousands more were utterly dependent upon it but we'll return to this idea but a genius doesn't just suddenly invent all of this especially again after you know millions of years of not doing it you need a culture and it's this culture of scientific precision of attention of focus to mintii to valves flu condensers to experimenting with weights and dyes and volumes this is what stands out to me the scientific gaze the industrial gaze was a cultural phenomenon Rosen continues that most Mill owners would be a faat arithmetician knew something of geometry l in and mensuration that is the ability to understand and analyze things like volumes and in some cases possessed a very competent knowledge of practical mathematics he could calculate the velocity strength and power of machines could draw in plan and section so we have a culture of science a culture of imagination a culture of Industry of improving efficiency of investing large sums of capital with the expectation of profit more and more wage labor coming from the countryside to the factories to Growing urban areas in short we have capitalism taking off at an exponential speed but surely such dramatic shifts need dramatic causes was it really just a focus on science or the imag ination that motivated this change or were there other [Music] factors okay so far to reiterate we have a few ingredients imagination new worlds new materials New Horizons more tolerance maybe plus science empiricism experimentation but a lot of these things aren't specifically capitalist if someone asked you for a definition of capitalism you wouldn't say imagination or you likely wouldn't so what is capitalism this thing we just think of naturally I think we should turn to laying this out so we can have a bit more of a clearer picture around how it emerged first capitalism starts most obviously with Capital Money resources assets collected inherited earned stashed extracted stolen whatever it may be but this isn't enough Kings and Emperors have long had lots of reserves of wealth so it's a particular sort of Reserve it's kept for particular use to invest in fact all of the industrial inventions we've looked at so far took a lot of capital for the most part at least Savory had investment from the British government working in war workshops and factories newcoming worked with private investors arite was neither rich nor poor but had very wealthy benefactors and investors and of course Railways iron slavery spice and sugar and the slave trades they all required large sums of initial investment so we can start with capital plus investment and there's a debate over where those initial large stocks of European Capital came from Marx argued that the dispossession of land played a large role here many point to the slave trade and the influx of profit and cotton into England and the numbers are unignorable however was this a primary factor a necessary cause one of those immediate ones was it just a bit more mediate did it help Grease the wheels but not be the wheel itself applebe says that a significant question for this history is how important was the Atlantic slave system to Capital ISM at the very least it generated enormous wealth most of which was repatriated to the countries of the European investors sugar and cotton produced by 9 million slaves transported across the Atlantic for that specific purpose were the first widespread Global capitalist Commodities after all so I think this has to be at least a very large ignorable part of our picture but the question is whether it's a necessary part or whether it's contingent whether it's subsidiary whether it's on the side or whether it's mediate a bit farther back we really have to think about what's crucial and what's not but applebe concludes I don't agree as Europe's Cathedrals indicate there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads canals windmills irrigation systems and wvs it also doesn't explain why these first colonizers like Spain and Portugal didn't turn capitalist first or the Roman Empire or the Chinese before capitalism in other words there's been a lot of wealth and hoarding and financial power across history there's been a lot of slavery and dispossession across history but in those instances capitalism didn't emerge plus capitalism functions without anything like the Atlantic slave trade or slavery in America as it was today so again it can't be an essential primary factor an essential primary cause of capitalism capitalism can function without slavery nonetheless capitalism requires Capital reserved for investment investment requires the expectation of return so profit enters the picture obviously Capital plus profit equals accumulation but again we find these factors in a lot of places and there's one thing that happened in England that we can add here a focus on improving produ and efficiency in her book on the origins of capitalism Ellen mixon's Wood points to four key components accumulation competition profit maximization and so quote the constant systemic need to develop the productive forces another defining feature is that under capitalism compared to feudalism the vast vast majority in fact pretty much all of our goods come from the market in some way they're not produced directly in our Gardens or at our spinning wheels so we can safely add something we call markets to our list finally all of this is pursued by private individuals and groups rather than governments finally and some would disagree with this by the way marxists and many leftist s would argue that wage labor should be a central part of the definition unlike feudalism and other systems where peasants produce their own food clothes materials and so on under capitalism workers are primarily property L and so have to work for a wage a Marxist would mostly argue further that the worker is the source of the capitalists profit this is are contentious debates with no agreement and so I'm going to park it for now there are a ridiculous number of definitions of capitalism I was going through some of them and was thinking about how to include some here without it getting really boring and I came to the conclusion that what we have already kind of sums up and paints an adequate picture of what we're beginning to see emerge in England and what the definitions capture uh that I read so I think this is enough for now we might add more as we go on the question the important question because definitions will change from person to person ideology to ideology everyone has a different idea of what capitalism is the crucial question for us is what caused this absolutely dramatic historical shift and in the scholarship this shift and how it happened is referred to as the transition debate this is another contentious wide ranging sometimes Furious debate with little agreement and many theories and it's still ongoing still changing and it's still really really difficult to get a grip on did the change come from within feudalism a fight between peasants and Lords or without the growth of independent merchants and towns away from feudal Estates away from the Lord's power was it a natural consequence of globalization say was it slavery or was it ideas about Freedom was it our culture of science that we looked at there were so many causes so many different things going on that I think it's better to just lay them out show them as much as possible and then acknowledge that it's in some sense overdetermined what that means is in other words that it's determined it's caused by many many different things in many many different ways depending on the context and the time and the person and the event and some of those causes may have been more important to say newcoming and his engine and then others to JP Morgan later on the best we can do is paint a broad picture of what happened because someone can always say well that didn't happen there and that happened there so you can only get a set of family resemblances um you know the nose is kind of similar the hair is a bit Shaggy that kind of thing and if we do that we at least have again this kind of pallet that we can paint with capitalism may be less like a single recipe and more like a a style or a Cuisine it has typically used ingredients but they differ from dish to dish but to give you a taste before we get stuck into the main course let's look at one of the first people to think about this question the enlightenment Economist and first theorist of capitalism Adam Smith Smith said that humans have a natural inclination to quote truck barter and exchange that markets are natural because of that and because of that profit seeking is natural too that if this is the case if it's a natural inclination all you need to do is remove the chains of feudalism of absolute monarchy of religion whatever you want to throw into that hat of old regime ideas the shackles all you need to to do is take them away and this natural inclination remains and so then humans can flourish Smith maintained that quote the principle which prompts to save is the desire of bettering our condition a desire which though generally calm and dispassionate comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go into the grave again it's this idea of it being natural from the womb to the Grave the British conservative politician Edmund Burke agreed with Smith he wrote in a letter to him that a theory like yours founded on the nature of man which is always the same will last when those that are founded on his opinions which are always changing will and must be forgotten he continued that the uniform constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition is the principle from which public and National as well as private opulence is originally derived this is a great place to start with this debate because it's just so obviously wrong and I think most sensible people and most historians uh would agree that it's wrong today um you might have some extreme capitalist ideologues arguing in this way but it doesn't produce a cogent explanation because just look at some of the words that Smith uses here natural comes from the womb uniform constant meaning being there forever the nature of man if all of these things are true then why do we have humans doing all sorts of other things for hundreds of thousands of years and then very quickly over the course of a couple of hundreds of years develop a new completely novel way of doing things and calling it natural even if you argue that it was natural or it is natural but was repressed was held down was fixed by feudalism you still need a cause that released liberated Unchained it in other words saying it's natural doesn't fit the historic record but it also doesn't answer anything it doesn't provide an explanation of where it emerged from as wood points out if you can accept or if you argue that capitalism is natural there's no need to then do any further work explaining capitalism at all it's always been there ready to go so instead to answer the explanatory question of what really caused capitalism what its roots are where it came from we need to look specifically at those roots at the fertile soil out of which it grew what people were doing culturally artificially uh politically economically with that fertile soil to look at the plant it grew into and to do that we have to go back to Merry Old England [Music] okay again hundreds of theories of capitalism and Industrial Revolution and whether they're connected or separate I think the cuisine metaphor is a good one because you know some factors some causes some ingredients are essential some subsidiary some extra some can be added and taken away imagination and science can be a big part of cooking too of course but they're really broad not very useful not very particular factors ingredients take another one often pointed to the 14th century black death it killed between 30 and 50% of all Europeans it had a major effect on the Renaissance too places like Florence particularly suffered at least half of people died I think it was was more from what I remember plus interestingly for us it meant that there was more money more capital for those that survived plus less labor so workers could demand higher wages there were more things that needed doing than there were people to do them crucial well no because this wasn't specific to England and plague happened before a factor a lubricant likely yes to some people in some places some of the time so all of these broad factors existed in many places we need to look at what was particular about England another is that England had large coal deposits ironically a shortage of forests after they'd all been chopped down led to an increase in coal mining and a demand for the technology to improve that coal is very dense in carbon so has a lot of energy in it but again coal is pretty widespread so it might have been a factor but not a primary one not a central Co one of the things we've looked at is improving productive efficiency these very small gains in how the steam engine functioned how far a mine could be dug how strong a cheap yarn could be spun another efficiency property of England was that you could do things in a quite frictionless way compared with the rest of Europe in the 16th century the tuders had Consolidated and strengthened a single stable cohesive set of Institutions courts government officials Army taxes Etc that didn't really exist at least as much and maybe not at all on the continent there was pretty much one language one currency one unit of measurement a network of single roads you know you could travel from place to place talking to everyone trading with everyone very easily compare this to France it was a patchwork the nobility basically lived off the peasant by charging them levies and tolls and taxes and tithes and Privileges and Jews that we looked at all varing from place to place Village to Village time to time City to City time to time person to person it didn't have a unified market like England did if you sent goods from Bordeaux to Paris say there might be taxes and Bridge TOs and different languages to even get them there it's just less likely to be Tried by a entrepreneurial businessman Germany not yet unified but the Germanic States was even worse there were some 350 principalities with different units different weights and measurements different toll systems regulations currencies and customs and on and on think about those KnockOn effects a network of roads the same language the same courts news culture books could disseminate easier scientific knowledge imaginative stories about new materials new animals plants peoples places so I think cohesion or at least a lack of friction is key to the transmission the smooth transmission of goods ideas culture and new possibilities both physically and mentally one thing often emphasized when it comes to capitalism is individual rights especially in the American context as we'll get to but also in the French Revolution as the Rights of Man the universal Rights of Man in fact Hobs Bor positioned the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution as being the kind of twin Jewel revolutions that defined the modern world and led through to today but the period we've looked at so far mostly precedes both the American and the French revolutions if we take that first rudimentary Engine Thomas savory's minor friend of 1698 as one book end and Richard arr's waterframe powered cotton spinning Mill of 1775 is another book end those big historical Revolutions in America and France were right at the other end however what had just preceded this period was the English Revolution that finished in 1689 the so-called Glorious Revolution after the English Civil War essentially codified a constitutional monarchy with a Bill of Rights that guaranteed property Fair trials Parliament Independence and limited the arbitrary power of the Monarch the English Civil War had started when King Charles I had wanted to suddenly tax a lot of people a lot of money to finance his Wars so in a sense it was that your money and property especially if you're a noble you know with a lot of it could suddenly be taken away by a monarch and the English Revolution changed this this revolution didn't go as far as the American or the French one did later on it affected Ordinary People less with no claims to being universalistic or of declaring the rights of all but it did at least guarantee property stability and a certain confidence in a cohesive stable system a stability that was less likely to be found elsewhere another difference was with the English nobility in places like France and Spain a noble was a noble by blood in England to the contrary only the first born son inherited the title which was a pirage or a lordship other children would become commoners like anyone else at least on paper with no political access to the House of Lords or political office so they had to make their way elsewhere and of course they had the wealth and the land to do so this created stronger economic incentives over political ones or even military ones like in the Roman Empire say where the way to prove yourself and make it as a Roman Aristocrat was through Conquest a large proportion of the English upper class had been demilitarized and depoliticized so they were more likely to turn elsewhere there's some evidence this led to Greater intermingling with commoners than somewhere like France take this quote from Lord hervy uh in 1731 he said we used to sit down to dinner a little snug party of about 30 OD up to the chin in beef V geese turkeys Etc and generally over the chin in clat strong beer and punch we had Lords spiritual and temporal besides commoners Parsons and freeholders innumerable Lord spiritual and temporal meaning political commoners freeholders meaning people who owned their own plot of land so you can see in this whether it's exaggerated or not at least evidence for a bit more tolerance a bit more Commerce a bit more mixing of different classes a bit more transmission of goods and ideas and I think it's here we can find ourselves right in the middle of our story right at the core of the onion forget all of that industry the trains and engines and smog that's in the future but right now in the middle we have this new nent world with new materials and foods and Cottons with a few more Sciences not very Advanced but a few with a bit more tolerance a bit more stability in what you can hold in property all of that is happening around everyone but right now imagine you're an English Lord like this one with hundreds thousands of acres of land like this a few books on early science and not much else really to pursue no root into Political life what do you do you look right where you are beneath your feet at the fields to farming and maybe into the ground for mining so maybe capitalism wasn't born in factories and towns and commerce but actually in the fields there's an assumption that capitalism starts in cities and towns Italy Merchants autonomous Burgers Traders shopkeepers even industrial Manchester conjures images of urban factories and Smog and slow thums and chimneys and clanking chains and the proletariat and Rich businessman and dirty streets all crowded toilets outside sludge everywhere but it should be a clue that before the Industrial Revolution a lot of industrial centers were small towns Villages even I mean in cromford just down the road from where I live where one of the first modern factories was born it's a little village it still is in other words capitalism didn't start in London or Florence remember that significant figure we started with that it took 80% of people to provide the food everyone that eight out of 10 people worked in agriculture growing tending to working on the sustenance the core the basis of life and remember in 16th century Europe that that number hadn't changed really since the Roman Empire as applebe says that all economies begin with food production I think we can safely assume that if 80% of people are involved in agriculture 80% of people's overall thoughts were agricultural imagine a poor harvest followed by a bad winter you have some seed for planting in Spring and a few animals for breeding for the next season but things are getting desperate do you eat the animals do you take a risk that next year's Harvest will be better so you'll need less seed so you could sell them you could eat them even if things were that desperate these were the sort of calculations people would have had to be making all of the time this is the sort of stuff that took up 80 percent of people's mental bandwidth famine was a fact of life scarcity a fact of life time spent between fixing clothes or a fence tending to animals and crops just to secure just enough to survive and often not even that you'd usually eat what came out of the ground as it was picked until around October time but you couldn't really preserve much if anything for the winter you could make some terrible bread or salt and bacon but preserving with no Refrigeration remember for an entire season difficult to say the least this is why the new world and sugar and new resources and materials and crops and animals were so essential to people's changing mental F alities squashes tobacco cacao potatoes corn coffee beans they're all new corn could be grown in wetter places than wheat and you could get twice as much from a corn yield as you could from a wheat yield potatoes could be just kept in the Earth for longer and pulled out as needed there are a few parallels today but I think just a few more options would have had a radical effect on people's mindset on people's mentalities on Breaking Free from that kind of cular rhythm of just possibility being limited to what you do day after day thought follows thought in a very predictable way but it was sugar that really changed things in a kind of unexpected way yes sugar is delicious and sweet and exciting maybe it gave a burst of energy to people help people work longer hours or work a bit more at the time they needed to but the Revolutionary thing about sugar was that it could be used to preserve fruits and vegetables into the winter it could preserve foods that couldn't before be preserved in short Food Glorious Food was on everyone's mind isn't it still let alone when you don't have enough of it and the smallest improvements would save fear of horrible long Winters would save time that could be spent doing lots of other things and of course could save countless countless lives I mean just in this period we're looking at 17th century England relatively Rich one expert wrote that half the population needed some kind of assistance to get through each year think about that half the population let that set our scene and then combine it with the factors we've looked at plus the fact that there was no surom in England what you had instead were big landed Estates owned by one increasingly entrepreneurial upper class with lots of resources behind them rent out land to tenants lots of different tenants sometimes selling it to different people and increasingly mining it too compare this to France with its fast Patchwork feudal and Royal system of Jews and Privileges and tithes and tolls there the best way to get ahead was to secure political office to get a certain privilege for yourself as a nobleman over peasants say orever a merchant to get certain Jews a certain right to a toll from a bridge or a road a certain favor if you're a bit lower down in the hierarchy with a certain Lord or if you are really up there with the King you're looking upwards to get permission to extract from downwards in a really naked way Ellen Wood calls this extra economic or political it might come from peasants working owing you that 300 bottles of olive oil each year for example but it's not from business per se it it'ss above it it's extra economic it comes from your philosophical or theological or military so-called right as a lord in that great chain of being or as a ruler looking after everything this seems completely natural to me if I'm a minor nobleman in this system what are my goals messing around with dirt and seed and animals or getting closer to God to the pope to the king looking setting your sights upwards but this route was more closed off in England instead the route to Improvement was getting more out of those fields out of those workers out of animals and seeds and mines out of those resources what this led to was a culture of improvement if you'd have looked at over your Fields you'd have seen two main things different to today many fewer Hedges and I mean many many fewer and much less of it farmed more of it forested still much of the Farmland had to be left fallow to recover each year so you could only Farm around a third of it at a time and that's the areas that were suitable in the Netherlands it was discovered that instead of leaving land empty you could rotate different crops grains turnips and so on and then the English copied this system and what happened next during this vague Agricultural Revolution was a new approach to productivity loads of different things were experimented with Meadows were flooded to warm the soil and extend the growing season different plants were find to enhance different soils parsnips were find to be able to be used as animal feed throughout the winter so something called up and down husbandry swapped animals with plants each season which meant that the animals fertiliz the soil and then the next crop prop yields were better by the early 1600s the word improver was becoming common in the English language Landis says that Britain's Countryside was being needeed like dough now imagine if someone's really really good at this and then someone next door is not so good at it and another not so good and you're an Aristocrats renting out your patches of land you're going to notice some a few maybe paying on time others not some getting wealthier others not some paying more rent offering more rent others not others struggling in other words land values correlating more and more with the successes or failures of different techniques competition having a greater effect on rent more swapping and trading of both project use and ideas it's here we can see both the economic and the cultural roots of capitalism I think it's important to think about how economics and culture interact here Ellen Wood points to economics writing that by the 16th century capitalist practices were becoming more common in England saying quote the maximization of exchange value by means of cost cutting and improving productivity through specialization accumulation reinvestment of surpluses and Innovation but think about our definition of capitalism that we looked at before let's just quickly remind ourselves accumulation competition profit maximization the quote constant systemic need to develop the productive forces and then add by private individuals or groups and also with markets notice how some of these are of course economic but some really are cultural some are a mix of both and you could argue that all of them are a mix of both that it's impossible to disang economic ideas from cultural ones that you need culture as a kind of carrier of these economic ideas to convince you to do them you need the books for example where you can read about these new methods you need it in the air you need people talking about it in specific ways whether that's at the pub or in official education culture is Central and remember we have that culture of Science and experimentation from Francis Bacon and the Royal Society the idea that things can change new worlds New Horizons renaissan and reformations progress modernity a go going forward not being stuck in this cyclica fixed way on top of this agricultural reformers in England were publishing books and pamphlets of advice this is of course undoubtedly cultural and philosophers like John lck in books we're talking about Improvement as the basis of property locro for example the grass my horse has bit the turfs my servant has CED and the AE I have digged in any place where I have a right to them in common with others become my property all of this was in the air Lo thought that if you mixed your labor you know work with your hands with the land with plants and animals and resources if you make good use of what God provided you own that property from it that was a god-given right this would become a major influence in the American Revolution and while the French revolutionaries didn't draw on lock specifically many of them looked towards England as a model so you have this chicken and egg mix of economics and culture material lives and ideas did one cause the other it's one of those questions that's been debated forever with no convincing answer I think it's more interesting personally to just explore or have it interact dialectically because what is unquestionable is that this powerful new emphasis on productivity was about to change the entire world and this emphasis on improving led to a long and contentious enclosure movement Fields were divided up and hedged this is where you get this Patchwork image of England peasants were kicked off communal land take a look at an old map like this that no longer would exist in the future no longer exists now of course communal rights like collecting wood from forests and growing vegetables and a village plot were taken away and those same traditional rights or practices like collecting wood from that Forest became much more difficult so divided up fenced off this movement was hated by many for wood peasants may have only had these marginal plots and impoverished dwellings that two phrases she uses but they were dispossessed of them nonetheless and a new class of so-called masterless men and vagabonds and vagrants started roaming England in search of more work they were Unchained from the old peasant ways but they had nothing again this is a contentious debate Landis for example argues that rather than creating an army of unemployed vagrants quote the data indicate that the Agricultural Revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labor that indeed those rural areas that saw the most enclosure saw the largest increase in Resident population from 1750 to 1830 Britain's agricultural counties doubled their inhabitants the question of whether this is good or bad is furiously debated and notoriously difficult to answer and it is something we will return to but either way it was the beginning of that new class often seen as integral to the capitalist system the working class wage laborers the proletarian with nothing to bargain with but their own bodies that own labor for would wage labor so Central to Marxism as it's where profit is extracted from by the Bourgeois wage labor is a key component for her but not the key component in the development of all this she argues and I think convincingly looking at all of the evidence these competitive pressures between tenants and land owners and the focus on productivity and Improvement came first either way if we add wage labor to our list it means we have pretty much all of the ingredients for capitalism in place but with that emphasis on improving efficiency and productivity in return for greater gains at the core let's return to our 8020 number that 80 % of people were needed to support 100% of people and that extra 20% were the politicians and the clergy and The Aristocrats and the military men and so on this 020 was still the case in the early 16th century towards the end and into the middle of the 17th century as the Agricultural Revolution grew that number began to shift and by 1800 it was only taking 36% to feed the entire population instead of 80% by then one farming family was providing on average for 60 others and today that number is down to just 3% just imagine that amount of time brain power energy Focus attention and health that's opened up to do other things and as Landis points out this meant England was pretty rich even before the Industrial Revolution started with average salaries a third higher over the course of 50 years between 1700 and 1750 okay there's one more thing we need to look at here so far we've looked at quite General broad societal causes but does this ignore the so-called Great Men theory of history and it's men in particular especially in this period are we forgetting that it's individual people Flesh and Blood doing these things rather than like broad abstract top down Trends in his book on the steam engine William Rosen reminds us that the Industrial Revolution was quote First and foremost a revolution in invention the Agricultural Revolution made England rich but the Industrial Revolution made it super rich and when you consider all of those big inventors we looked at the most influential ones especially looking at the steam engine Savory newcom whats they all had patents on their inventions and a patent is an odd thing it's quite a new idea in history and it's a strange legal cultural philosophical construction patents when you think about them are quite abnormal like quite bizarre they became more common during the Renaissance in the 15th century King Henry V 6 of England granted one for a novel new technique to create stained glass for churches one was granted in Florence for a boat designed to move stones but initially they were few and far between and were mainly a way for a monarch to raise money for themselves by the time we get to the tuders in the 16th century they were granting them for all sorts of things for trade roots and salt and paper and importantly playing cards one thing to remember here is that a patent is a monopoly that you and only you will have the right to trade or sell or do business in this area for a certain period of time in a certain geographic location sometimes it's a level of control from above at the beginning of the 17th century James I then Elizabeth in England were both granting monopolies to presumably well-connected people to control trade and raise money for themselves by the early 17th century monopolies were the norm one person wrote famously that a typical Englishman lived in a house built with Monopoly bricks heated by Monopoly coal his clothes are held up by Monopoly belts Monopoly buttons Monopoly pins he ate Monopoly butter Monopoly currents Monopoly red herrings Monopoly salmon Monopoly lobsters remember this is all going on at the same time more demands for tolerance for different religious beliefs more science more experimentation more trade and commerce more innovation in agricultural productivity there's the Civil War in the middle of the century then the rights-based revolution at the end this period is a crucible of modernity while kings and queens were still trying to control things the idea of innovation and this is why I focused on imagination at the beginning that idea of innovation was in the air in England there was a famous landmark court case in 16002 over those playing cards Queen Elizabeth that's Henry VII's daughter had granted the Monopoly for their sale so one person controlled the entire market for playing cards cards in England it was said this was partly because she didn't like English people lazing around playing cards it distracted them from more important things like uh praying and work I'm not sure how true that is but this resulted in a huge court case led by one of England's most famous lawyers sir Edward KO kooch argued that monopolies were wrong they restricted employment he said too many were granted and most importantly he theorized that they should only be granted if the person they were being granted to had improved on the thing the product The Invention the technique in some way that only then was granting this Monopoly this patent just right kooch won this court case and a few other things happened over the next couple of decades but by 1624 before there was a statute on monopolies it established that patents should only be granted when something was invented by someone or improved upon and shouldn't be used to raise prices and should only last for 14 years they should be limited now think about the time frame here this is 1624 that's 2 years after bacon published his book advocating for an experimental inductive scientific method 1622 Bacon's publishing about science 1624 and you have this idea that you can only Grant a monopoly if you improve upon something the same time you have this culture of agricultural Improvement that's taking off everywhere and then fast forward around 75 years and all of those people involved in building steam engines and experimenting that we looked at have patents this is obviously a distinct progressing culture remember rosen's words thousands of inventions were necessary to create steam power and thousands more were utterly dependent upon it but now let's return to one of them newcom's improving of savory's engine to successfully draw water from mines maybe the first really widespread industrial capitalist invention I have the patent for it here and it's fascinating just to look at and try and understand and really think about all the things this led to that Define our lives today because it's such a on the one hand very simple device like anyone can understand it but on the other hand again it took so long in human history for something like this to emerge and the consequences of it to be appreciated I really recommend watching one of those YouTube videos or um looking at one of those uh diagrams that kind of show you exactly how it works it's really good to get in your head we can see all of this coming together in newom he was engaged with the wider scientific cultural Community he corresponded in this kind of New Republic of letters that was emerging with famous scientists like Robert Hook he was one of the most well-known in England in the day there were lots of popular guides to science floating around even children's guides they were everywhere you could buy them cheaply because printing was getting better and better classes were taught to Artisans and blacksmiths by traveling lecturers so this kind of modern scientific economy was emerging it was very nent newom was a Master with his hands at the Anvil the lathe with all sorts of tools Rosen points to something called a y valve it's a single part of the engine's design and it had to be perfectly precise in shape and weight you had to know a lot about mathematics and volumes and equations and the densities and properties of different metals and steam and water and heat all sorts that you could learn from both these traveling lecturers and also from pamphlets and books but all of it think about this was done without all the modern tools that we have at our disposal Rosen writes that the only way to machine such a valve was by hand and the hands in question had to be as sensitive and as precise as those of a violinist newcom he says had tactile intelligence this takes years of focus Decades of training on the smallest most minute most specific most meticulous details and I think that is key who's going to be doing that when there's not enough food on the table for a start you need a productive eff efficient agricultural system you also need to know about and understand a widespread National problem like Mining and water in mines so for that you need a culture of reading and books and news about the country and for those years of investment in time to pay off you need to know that you'll be rewarded in some way that the risk is worth the time this is where Rosen makes the compelling case that the patent is absolutely crucial newcom could charge them for licenses £300 a year one person did a deal and paid £200 but half of his future profits and there were 100 in use within 3 years even then he wasn't widely recognized most people probably haven't heard of him nor did he die wealthy now I'm not saying and don't think it's just the case that people only do things to profit although that is also obviously true some people do it for the love of science or because it's the right thing to do or because it's going to be useful to the community or there's just a compulsion to do it but you at least need to know that you're going to be able to survive while you're doing something the patent system does that and it also stops and this is really crucial we forget this it stops more powerful people or companies or the government simply taking your Innovation once you've invented it for themselves Rosen points to a combination of quote Innovative culture and quote individuals looking out for their own interests and quote a national interest in Innovation all of this worked dialectically Savory worked in government War factories and workshops because of the government's obvious interest in advances in war machines for example without all of that that huge State Le investment that first engine wouldn't have happened but there was a political culture that developed that said if you have an idea a piece of land some property a way of improving something of doing something that's going to be yours and you're going to be able to benefit from it for a certain period of time and that acted as a huge incentive for people to spend years sometimes Decades of their lives investing in their own set of skills to understand all of this mathematic knowledge and physical knowledge and metallurgical knowledge and chemical knowledge and take the time like uh Rose says to learn the violin in such a meticulous way that you can design these very very precise new instruments that go on to have an outsized effect on the wider economy and culture so we now have all of the ingredients the factors the causes the recipe of capitalism in place what's astonishing is how quickly it was about to to set the entire world on fire land's book title is vocative Prometheus Unchained I think it's a powerful image of what capitalism is and what modernity is it's why Prometheus was such an influential image uh for someone like Mary wolston craft writing Frankenstein the idea of a modern technological scientific monster it's something we still think about today when we think about things like the atom bomb Prometheus Unchained something that's powerful but something that can burn too as we'll see some of the numbers are just staggering to me I didn't realize how staggering before I started really diving into this topic people like to point to their favorite factors that we've looked at and everyone has a different Theory of how they come together but I agree with applebe when she says why not recognize how mutually enhancing all of these elements were we have a constellation of factors in England out of which a new world would emerge a culture of imagination change possibility and Improvement of reformation of looking within and of Toleration of other people's ways of doing things religious but surely that would have filtered down into other things into business and economics of Rights and property and patents in knowing that you can invest in your farm your business yourself your ideas and a single market across the country out of which the Dynamics of maximizing profit accumulating competing and wage labor of individuals and groups not governments and with markets would emerge but how long would a Promethean England [Music] last in Greek mythology Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the gods and was punished for it by having an eagle peeka away at his liver for eternity and it's one of those perennial myths because it really illustrates the kind of tension between having something powerful and then having powerful unforeseen consequences side effects coming from it by the early 19th century commentators were beginning to notice the same Bittersweet contradictions emerging from this new economic system in Britain there seemed to be no doubt to anyone that Britain had uncovered some power ful new secret but Romantic Poets diverse reformers and critics were beginning to lament the effect this Promethean energy was having on some of the more downtrodden the more vagrant the more marginalized of society and increasingly and slowly the colonized and the enslaved too protests took different forms in that early period the lers protested in England against enclosure by leveling literally the new hedge RS and fences that were cutting them off from old communal ways of life and the Lites protested against the new machines they saw as taken their jobs by breaking them after visiting Manchester in 1835 the French Noble and writer Alexis dville wrote from this foul drain the greater stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world from this filthy sewer pure gold flows here Humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish here civilization Works its Miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a Savage but despite all of this Britain's new found wealth was unignorable and enticing it was captivating to much of the world not only did Britain look richer it had as many ships in her Navy as every other Navy in the entire world put together even by 1700 Britain was producing twice as much food as any other country and across the 18th and the 19th century the growth was becoming exponential the figures are incredible in just a single 20 year period in the 19th century think about this just 20 years Steam and iron output quadrupled and in just 50 years between 1800 and 1850 the British population doubled by the end of the 19th century Britain accounted for around half of the entire World's Trade in many major Goods including meat sugar and wheat even today the us only accounts for somewhere around 10% as a comparative figure this tiny Island accounting for half the World's Trade and in such a short amount of time let's take just another short 20-year period between 1850 and 1870 Britain's trade almost tripled and across just a 5-year period in the middle of the century the number of Railway passengers in Britain almost doubled again just the speed the totality the intensity the unignorable nature of this vast quick quick quick change was completely unprecedented and others of course across Europe and across the Atlantic were taking note there was lots of imitation and Industrial Espionage so much so that taking plans for a machine say to another country was made illegal France Germany and the United States in particular were the three main imitators here by 1870 each of them were producing around 1 to 2 million tons of iron for their own machines and Railways however Britain was producing around 6 million and that was half of the world's total of 12 million so 6 million half of the world's total and then the closest three competitors only producing 1 to 2 million that's how far ahead was English men traveling across the continent like the agricultural improver Arthur Young were astonished at the comparative Poverty of other nations like Spain and Portugal and even France the mtic desire to imitate spread across both Europe and America and further a field too but the traffic in economics in culture in politics and ideas was multi-directional too it went both ways many looked to Britain's industry plus France and America's declarations that men and it was mostly men I'm afraid had Universal rights in fact both industry and rights were to many two sides of one modern kind of progressive what was called wigg coin a new ideology as yet unnamed was emerging drawing on the English philosopher John Lock's ideas about property being a natural god-given right and the Scottish Economist Adam Smith's ideas about trade and commerce being natural along with many others as we'll see the very loose idea from them of what we now call a liberal was slowly in the air it was in this period in Hobs bom's words when the few remaining obstacles in the way of the untrampled development of private Enterprise would be swept away some described it and this is a great phrase one that I'll be using a lot of the period of the Conquering Bourgeois the extent of change is also demonstrated by the composition of British Parliament before 1895 so we're jumping ahead a little little bit Aristocrats were always in the majority after 1895 they never to this day would be again Hobs borne's second book in his Trilogy argues that the middle part of the 19th century was the age of capital the age of liberal Triumph as he puts it but things he says were already beginning to change no sooner has they appeared of society was beginning to develop and shift dialectically to the liberal order for example was at first based on this premise that the individual farmer or inventor or businessman could be in control could be a master of his own domain building businesses inventing new machines being rational free and importantly in control a man of the world but already giant unwieldy National bureaucracies were growing science was becoming too voluminous for one person to master even in one field corporations were developing that required huge amounts of raw materials capital investment and management and the state was grow growing with all of it in other words the very edifices and structures that capitalism coming too vast too unwieldy for individual capitalists to control Hobs borne writes combination Advanced at the expense of Market competition business corporations at the expense of private firms big business and large ENT surprise at the expense of smaller and that this concentration implied a tendency towards oligopoly take Lloyd's Bank still one of Britain's biggest until very recently you would have seen it on most high streets it bought out and merged with 164 smaller Banks it ate them up it gobbled them up national financial institutions were beginning to wipe out smaller Community Banks everywhere Department stores were beginning to wipe out local shops economies of scale these big tentacled corporations were making local approaches UNC competitive I'll quote hobor quite a bit in this section because he's really good on this he wrote in most people's minds and in reality capitalism still meant the one man or rather one family owner managed business yet this very fact raised two ser serious problems for the structure of Enterprise They concerned its supply of capital and its management investment and capital required much bigger institutions but the same was true of the management of employees and staff and workers take the burgeoning train lines they are probably the prime example of what's going on in this period as we'll get to they became so big so vast that they obviously needed a large bureaucratic management structure a hierarchy plus a close relationship with investment Banks as JP Morgan in America realized he who controls the flows of capital controls the cost of lending and who to lend to is a very powerful man and Hobs Bor has a great turn of phrase here he says Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the market was becoming very visible Hobs Bor wrate the visible hand of modern corporate organization and management now replaced the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith's Anonymous Market the executives engineers and accountants therefore began to take over from owner managers the corporation replaced the individual take the London and Northwestern Railway company that became dominant in this period by 1890 it employed 65,000 workers it had 7,000 km of tracks and 800 stations of course this was so different to a single person tinkering on an engine and then selling the licenses to it or even one person building a small Railway track to transport goods between Liverpool and Manchester for their own little factories these were huge unwieldy bureaucracies unmanageable by single people they became bigger than they probably ever intended to become at the beginning and to give just a quick good example of uh the economic composition of a country in this period take the Paris stock market in 1856 it lists did 33 Railway and Canal companies 38 mining companies 22 metallurgical companies 11 port and shipping companies seven bus and Road transport companies 11 gas companies and 42 other industrial companies ranging from textiles to galvanized iron and rubber again this is from Hobs borne but you can see these huge raw material and infrastructural companies are becom coming almost bigger than parliaments countries Nations the power of presidents or Kings they're becoming the dominant fact of people's lives of the direction countries are taking as much as these tensions these contradictions were starting to show it was still that ideology of the Conquering Bourgeois the Russian in control that wasn't a dance that was me levers but the in control Bourgeois man that was becoming dominant as the ideology everywhere in Europe and America as well as lock and Smith it took from thinkers like montisi the French thinker the idea that the power of one person was something to fear but could be mitigated through the division of political power so that the executive legislative and Judiciary could each check each other's power could keep an eye on each other it was this that was the response to the most contradictory of liberal questions what if one person when ruler one businessman one entrepreneur one Corporation becomes too powerful too conquering by the 1870s many were adding a scientific string to this ideological bow the survival of the fittest oborne wrote that in the struggle for existence which provided the basic metaphor of the economic political social and biological thought of the Bourgeois world only the fittest would survive their Fitness certified not only by their survival but by their domination Darwinism had and this is not something Darwin himself aligned himself with but Herbert Spencer a kind of prote of Darwin's did provided the foundation for a kind of scientific liberalism in which people supposedly Rose or fell were unequal or to go further were inferior biologically because because of laws of evolution this is what so many in this period believed and we know where that's going to go in the future not too far in the future the idea that individuals and businesses and countries and races would inevitably compete and rise and fall or even become extinct became the dominant liberal ideology for many powerful people people in the latter 19th century it created drives in other countries to catch up with Britain and in Britain it led to anxieties that both America and Germany seem to be powerfully snapping very quickly at their heels and it would eventually lead to Eugenics policies in many countries which would aim in some cases to sterilize or in extreme cases is mass murder those who deem to be diluting The Well of biological racial Purity whether that was other undesirable races or sick and unwell or in some cases disabled people within your own race this came from Darwinism this idea that you needed genetic fitness to be be other countries to beat other people even and it's sometimes forgotten how dominant how powerful how seemingly scientific this was to so many powerful people across this period leading up to the wars we know very well from the 20th century in 1888 to bestell in science fiction novel called Looking Backward set in the year 2000 record that for 1888 capitalists selfishness was their only science railroad magnate Andrew Carnegie who will'll get to very very shortly said of the survival of the fittest that while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual it is best for the race because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every Department one Professor wrote in 1883 that millionaires are a product of natural selection and for now Britain was at the top of that hierarchy there's no better marker for its high point than the great exhibition in London in 1851 Queen Victoria opened the great exhibition in the newly built Crystal Palace in South London 14,000 companies exhibited an endless range of products from new door locks to Diamonds pianos to Ceramics kitchens Foods clothes machines anyone who was anyone was there the great Russian novelist Theodore dooi visited writing that you become aware of a colossal idea you sense that here something has been achieved that here there is Victory and Triumph you even begin vaguely to fear something he continued you feel that something final has taken place here that something has come to an end it's like a Biblical picture something out of Babylon a prophecy from the apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes and he became very skeptical he warned Russians not to follow down this materialistic European atheistic path he said he noticed a principle of individualism a principle of isolation of intense self-preservation of personal gain of self-determination of the eye of opposing this eye to all nature and the rest of mankind as an independent autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to an eye that exists outside itself and he wrestled with these ideas of atheistic eyes moving around materialistically without God and there was a great crisis of Faith the Victorian crisis of faith in this area as Science and Industry dominated as people's lives seem to get better in many cases at least without god without religion through something else the mid-century was like a Hall of Mirrors doeski could look at the exhibits at the great exhibition with a sense of awe as the middle class of Europe all did and the Crystal Palace was a modern Wonder but dooy and others took to the Streets of London too noticing much of the city quote half naked Savage and hungry many from Charles Dickens to Jack London a bit later on noticed the same thing it was becoming an age of EXT Britain looked futuristic While most of Europe especially Eastern Europe still looked as it had 500 years before even in the more advanced European countries like Spain and Portugal there were less than 100 miles of Railway and many liberal Bourgeois types despite living lives never before imaginable we also living with a sense of of fear nowhere could everim vote nowhere was there true democracy as we see it today but uprisings revolutions protests marches demand from the great mob of ordinary people were ubiquitous across Europe there was a bubbling tension that often broke out into very real tension and violence the Conquering Bourgeois had conquered then but they were ruling in an unsteady fear there's a debate that we'll return to over whether the initial wealth undeniably produced by capitalists was widely or even marginally shared whether the emerging working classes and the Vagabonds and the vagrants those that were released from or dispossessed of their land and agricultural work communal land or even land owned or dominated by the feudal Lord the boss the land worked by the tenant farmer whether those people were initially better off the debate I think is a really interesting one and as I said it's ongoing it's contentious too some argue that there were wage in increases but others say that they were only for minority of workers and that those increases were offset by the really harsh working conditions that those workers find themselves in and the living conditions too cramped diseased Urban slum housing industrial accidents on an industrial scale maybe industrial here is going too far but on scale greater proportionate to the growth of Industry to the working in proximity with these big new machines one study and I think this is an interesting way of looking at it because often wages are comparing um apples for oranges depends on the area there are lots of things not captured by wages especially in agricultural work so one study looked at the records of people's height from prison records and found that in this period people actually got shorter suggesting they had fewer calories the perception at the time by most was a negative one Landis says that many Britain would have stopped it in its course or even turned back for good reasons or bad they were distressed inconvenienced or outraged by its consequences they mourned a merry England That Never Was deplored the S and ugliness of the new Factory towns bemoaned the growing political power of Crash parvenu cried out against the precarious Poverty of a ruthless proletariat and take Arnold Toby their very influential 19th century English historian who coined the term Industrial Revolution he wrote We Now approach a darker period a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed disastrous and ter terrible because side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of popism and the degradation of a large body of producers the steam engine the spinning journy the power loom had torn up the population by the roots or take another great historian EP Thompson's more recent work on the English working class he wrote it is neither poverty nor disease but work itself which cast the blackest Shadow over the years of the Industrial Revolution long hours of unsatisfying Labor under severe discipline for alien purposes he wrote a famous Marxist account of the growth of the working class in this period and we have to remember the working class is a new thing the working class is very different to the peasantry different organizational structure different goals different cultures different living conditions different of course economic conditions it was the period when the Romantic poet William Blake had already written of the dark satanic Mills the smoggy idea of a deenan uh chimney Laden Urban scene and Smog and and and and children going up chimneys to clean them and working in factories uh From Dawn till Dusk it's the period when we get this idea of a Victorian smoggy oppressive corrupt London from and so many historians argue this must have come from somewhere while other historians also say that well this is um you know writers and artists and cultural Elites turning their noses up from a distance not understanding the working classes Hobs Bor for example despised this period he says that the condition of the laboring poor was a pooling between 1815 and 1848 and that this was not denied by any reasonable observer in that period the slums of the north of England the periods of unemployment the crisis The Hours worked the dangers the insecurity were all bigger and longer the gluts were than any period before or since take some of these descriptions of crashes and slumps and unemployment textile industry slumps in Bolton in England and rebe in France in the 1840s put as many as 2third of people out of work and this was very common in 1830 for example a member of of the Royal Society Frederick Baker wrote about onethird of our working population consists of Weavers and laborers whose average earnings do not amount to a sus sufficient to bring up and maintain their families without parochial assistance meaning assistance from local officials it's this portion of the community for the most part decent and respectable in their lives which is suffering most from the depression of wages and the hardships of the times another person described a women's March in Manchester in 1842 there were 2,000 women marching and they were quote dreadfully hungry a loaf is devoured with greediness Indescribable and if the bread is nearly covered with mud it's eagerly devoured this kind of disruption these kinds of events that were happening mostly in industrial England but increasingly across Europe Europe and America too were making many of the Conquering Bourgeois very nervous illustrating the sense of fear of the Bourgeois a German scientist wrote in 1847 that quote popism and proletariat are the suppurating ulcers which have sprung from the organism of the modern states can they be healed the Communist doctors propose the complete destruction and annihilation of the exist existing organism one thing is certain if these men gained the power to act there would be not a political but a social Revolution a war against all property a complete Anarchy but as I said there are opposing camps in this debate some showing that wages did rise that regulations slowly came in and corrected for the unprotected unregulated issues that had quickly emerged that housing and plumbing and water and food were all gradually getting better famines were in England at least a thing of the past in one quite new book The historian Emma Griffin argues that it's hard to square the pessimism of the cultural idea of the dark satanic Mills the dezian idea with the actual autobiographies of working people people in the period She says that there are many examples in this period of people writing critically of factories of course but there are many counter examples too the older rhythms of agricultural work in the fields um with tools Sharp Tools um long back breaking were not exactly a walk in the park it was all ful for your health it was long and it could be very irregular whereas factory work was much more in demand much more regular and disrupting that kind of dichotomy between old nice traditional natural ways of living and working in the fields and a new tyrannical bourgea factory system that crushes you a working man in Essex in England remembered that his former farmer boss was somewhat tyrannical ordering me up at 4:00 in the morning and requiring other things which I considered an infringement of my rights I told him plainly I would not submit and took it upon myself at once to become my own master and there were sources from the period that suggest that workers the proletar were thankful for getting jobs in factories or mines when those jobs in agriculture could be just as bad and intermittent one remembered and remember this is a radically new and probably somewhat exciting to many period as new periods of technological innovation are to many today one remembered I was never as happy as I was at that time even Hobs Bor acknowledges that along with the insecurity and the slums and poverty and poor ISM of the very early 19th century the situation improved somewhat at least by the 1860s or or there around when the economic boom provided unemployment in Hobs born's words on a quite unprecedented scale yet he cautions that unlike the middle class the worker was rarely more than a hair's breath removed from the POA and in Prussia for example the end of surom gave peasants land and freedom from having to labor for their lord and pay them Jews at Harvest involuntarily but at the same time just showing how the picture is much more complicated than first appears they could no longer get any assistance from the Lord who often did live locally and often did take an interest of course in the Affairs of the people and the problem on their Estates that they depended on after all if there was a bad Harvest say they lost the right to collect wood the main fuel that they had from the Lord's Forest they lost pasture land that was easily accessible and the Lord often was also obligated literally to help repairing their houses say or the infrastructure and the roads and the bridges all of this kind of thing so I'm not slowly becoming an advocate for a return to the Comforts of feudalism here don't worry I only to point out that there was a different loose and inadequate of course set of practices for welfare and a kind of familiarity and set of expectations that existed in that Shackled Pinn down very local world and also to just give a broad brushstroke snapshot of why it's so difficult to determine whether people were immediately better off it's not just the case of calculating wages which even if you do varied uh uh quite significantly from area to area from from from year to year so historians have a very difficult task understanding and analyzing this period but it's also important to note what's indisputable and what Marx first pointed out that with capitalism slowly then quickly all that was solid melted into air on the other hand take Rosen who it's worth quoting at length here excuse the long quote but with it I think it's important it condenses a lot he says if you examine the years since 1800 in 20year increments and charted every way that human welfare can be expressed in numbers not just annual per capita GDP which climbed to more than $6,000 by year 2000 but mortality at Birth in fact mortality at any age calories consumed prevalence of infectious disease average height of adults percentage of Lifetime spent disabled percentage of population living in poverty number of rooms per person percentage of population enrolled in primary secondary and postsecondary education illiteracy and annual hours of leisure time the chart will show every measure better at the end of the period than it was at the beginning but I think this is a problem with this debate and many other debates like it everyone wants to generalize everyone wants a clearcut answer wants to be told wants to tell you what to think about entire periods people's and lives when the truth is that while many may have slowly improved the lives of these people their health their wages their affluence that happened by fits and starts and extremes so many did well but many clearly did not too one yman might have done well in agriculture before and then had to move into a factory uh and have an awful experience at a local Factory with an authoritarian boss in unsafe conditions long hours and for another person just the town over that might very well be reversed but what's undeniable as Hobs Bor points out that there was a growing significant large and increasingly influential or at least noticeable group that were a hair's breath from the breadline that lived in slums that had children working in factories that worked long pollution ridden dangerous hours for low wages and so on and it was this new group The dispossessed the alienated the proletariat what we now call the working class that was a very new group and so slowly began to organize so the scene is set for a Mexican standoff yes there were a newly powerful Bourgeois class of capitalists new money and yes there were the slowly organized ing proletariat but it's easy to forget that especially across Europe the old aristocracy the old regime was still firmly in places of power and they were trying to balance between the modernizing Tendencies of the Conquering Bourgeois and holding back some of the forces of liberalism and democracy the mob the new Power the working class that they thought would overthrow and destroy everything that they genuinely feared the standoff was the result of several contradictions first even the old Aristocrats and nobility across Europe wanted to modernize they wanted to catch up but they feared that universal suffrage the Democratic expansion of liberal rights everyone getting the vote people they deemed much lesser than them dangerous wild and educated would mean inevitably the end of property it would mean Anarchy this is what they genuinely believed why they feared would the working classes if they got the vote not vote to take everything they'd earned from them why would they not vote to take the houses and the goods and the factories and share it all out why would they not vote to have a great dinner why would the turkeys not vote to get rid of Christmas and here the Bourgeois Z sided with the aristocrats and the nobility they wanted Rights Voting Rights property rights laws that benefited them for themselves they wanted to be in positions of power involved in politics allowed to run the economy the way that they wished but they didn't want it for their lessers why would they for those who supposedly had not bought into society had no propertied stake in the country and so would only vote to take it to destroy it to tear down everything that they'd built so this was the dominant three-way tension across the century and a wave of revolutions spread across Europe throughout the century with 1848 being the height the AP and they all followed a kind of common pattern the Liberals demanded their rights Free Speech constitutional monarchies elections secure property rights being able to have a say in things that affected them regulation colonialism Etc but then they feared the Revolution was going too far to taking their property away from them and given it to the poor and so would halt the Revolution by then siding against the proletariat with the old aristocracy with the old monarchies with the old nobility a good example of this was that unionization or what was called combination was still mostly banned in almost all countries and almost all of these revolutions and there were numerous protests revolutions um uprisings of different sorts from minor to major but almost all of them failed mostly but at the same time the demands the revolutionaries had would eventually be met democratically politically later on so in that sense it was a strange Century it was a century of revolutions revolutions that failed but revolutions that had their demands met eventually by other means to take just one country and one example of how um prevalent this was there were almost 500 peasant revolts in Russia between just 1826 and 1861 when serfdom was eventually abolished Austria's Prince matanic wrote to the Zar of Russia saying the governments across Europe having lost their balance are frightened intimidated and thrown into conf Confusion by the cries of the intermediary class of society metonic would go on to build a vast secret police spy Network that was used to suppress uh insurgence and Revolt and this was a common tactic used by the monarchies of Europe Free Speech would sometimes be granted and then torn Away by the monares especially at times of Crisis like the Napoleonic War when uh in Europe many of the freedoms that had been fought for were temporarily suspended Alexis dville warned we are sleeping on a volcano do you not see that the Earth trembles in new a wind of Revolution blows the storm is on the horizon conservatives in the period clung onto Power by slowly granting rights and widening the franchise as the reform acts across the century in Britain did and almost everywhere this seemed to steadily work but to give an example of just how restrictive democracy was in the period in Britain only one in 30 could vote while the second Reform Act in 1867 increased this to just 8% of the population obviously to many this was nowhere near good enough and so along along with liberals demanding the vote socialism was slowly growing too trade unions were slowly legalized and then grew and grew bigger and bigger becoming more and more dominant in the early 20th century a few began turning to Cooperative socialist and Anarchist ideas but disappointingly for someone like Marx who kept believing the Revolution was around the corner slumps periods of Crisis recession Revolt Panic came thought they were going to blow up into European wide successful Revolution but then went and capitalism continued to recover and grow not only did it recover and grow but it went further and further the Promethean fire was spreading IR oppressively across the globe I think globalization that very modern concept that concept that still defines much of our political conversation is a very complex concept to get your head around definitions point to something like connectedness or interconnectedness what the difference is between connectedness and interconnectedness I'm not so sure but but it's a connectedness maybe a back and forth not just a oneway connectedness that spans the entire globe in a way that hasn't in history before so the connections are Global they go from one side to the other one axis to the other one pole to the other and increasingly a more interl but is that a Accurate Way of defining the change from what's happened in the past because as we've seen there's always been vast trade networks silk and spice roads slave trades and if not globalization something like continentalis that's existed for thousands of years so if we think about globalization as a mentality as about how people experience it experience the global world as connections with places and others on paper possibilities business Concepts and ideas the costs of something somewhere of bringing it to you the logistics of it of who to contact who to know what to read of the exchanges of ideas or the the the culture of thinking about profit that someone in a globalized ized Society can find the price of coal in China say and then compare that with a a cultural evaluation of what pollution means to someone in the Congo say where it has to travel through to do something and then the idea the cost of shipping it across the Atlantic has this mentality even though this sounds very big and Global and modern and vast has it not in some way always existed even if it was on a smaller scale across Europe across a continent say my point is that even though the scale is different what's the difference conceptually ideationally I think the primary differences are these those old connections were at least in large part quite homogenized and stable they might be Christian or Buddhist or in specialized goods from one region to another fish or coal or wood or iron but this new burst of capitalist globalization is of such a different scale that it becomes of a new kind of a new type that it changes what those connections mean and what they can do and how it affects F the people that live under them first through the printing press the railway steam engines ships better roads and postal systems and canals and the telegraph the drive towards information and speed and efficiency of of getting it and spending it and investing in it and raw materials and knowing their properties the quality the seasonal changes say the changes in price the logistical information and how that affects your plans all of this can be spread be used be acted upon much much quicker and at a much greater volume so that many more new things could be done with it all and then second as the globe was thrown together so quickly what one historian calls the great convergence there was sudden quite a large range of inequalities thrown together inequalities in different ways of ideas of cultures inequalities of languages but also of course inequalities of economies inequalities of navies of potentialities inequalities in power Hobs Bor has a good line here he says history from now on became world history this was a period when vast vast quantities of coal and iron grains cotton sugar coffee tea and an ever expanding catalog of other Goods crossed continents by Rail and Oceans by ships for the first time the figures again increased astronomically they doubled tripled quadrupled in a matter of years in a way that was not seen before and just hasn't been seen since either British exports to Australia for example increased from £1.5 million in 1848 to 20 million in 1875 just 27 years later canals were dug roads were laid the world shrank Austria for example added 30,000 mil of roads in just a 20-year period between 1830 and 1850 the US Road Network expanded from 21,000 miles in 1800 to 170,000 in 1850 and the invention of the telegraph probably quietly ironically changed the world more than any other as events and prices and quantities and opportunities and troop movements whatever you can imagine could be suddenly transmitted from two parties in a matter of hours and minutes inad instead of days weeks or even months I remember reading and I can't remember where this was it was a while ago how long it took for the news of the fall of the bastile during the French Revolution to reach different cities in Europe down to Spain and Portugal and then across the Atlantic such a long period and the News kind of reverberated out creating a wave of uh responses rather than today when it just happens immediately instantaneously this is obviously going to have an effect on the different responses in different areas all of a sudden it was all connected instantaneously for a select number of people for a certain number of Elites well positioned people especially in capitals think about this in 1849 there were 2,000 Mi of telegraph wires by 1869 there were over 100,000 miles a Transatlantic cable was laid in 1865 Hobs borne writes that there followed a burst of international cable laying which within five or six years virtually griddled the globe by the 1870s London could reach India in just 5 minutes imagine how unimaginable this would be just decades before just a gener ation previously and how like with those small improvements of the engine with small improvements in Communications you already have in those improvements inherent in it something like a line of modernity through to the internet think about all of those Telegraph operators in a line listening to dots and dashes translating those electrical signals of dots and dashes of mors code laboriously into letters to then get out to the recipients in a way it's very primitive in a way it's very Advanced you can see backwards to kind of the Simplicity of it you can see forwards to something like today something like the internet and by just 1860 someone called Charles wheatstone had invented a machine that did that translation bit automatically just printed out the little message and that was just 20 or so years after the rudimentary dots and dashes electrical signals telegraph was invented and I just find that through line fascinating Hobs Bor says that the world was about to enter the era of electric light and power of Steel and highspeed steel Alloys of telephone and phography of turbines and the internal combustion engine and listen to what US president ulyses S Grant wrote in 1873 as Commerce education and the rapid transition of thought and matter by Telegraph and steam have changed everything I rather believe that the great maker is preparing the world to become one nation speaking one language a consumation which will render armies and navies no longer necessary and as well as Communications and materials this was also a period of the greatest movement in people the world has ever seen vast numbers move not just across the globe immigrating from say Europe to America but also within countries and even in small counties Geographic areas to local cities London for example Grew From a million people to 7 million across the 19th century by 1900 1 million people were entering America each year and then many of them spread out further west think about just one illustrative moment here the Mississippi is a vast long and very very wide in place's River and In 1855 it was bridged now brid bridging Rivers is a problem as old as time or at least getting over them it goes back to you know the Romans in London London in particular if you've ever lived there is a city where you have to think about the transport flows when you're driving back and forth across the temps it's an absolute nightmare because you can only have a certain amount of bridges and bridges are really difficult to build especially in the 19th century and they're a real microcosm of capitalism of everything we've talked about big Capital many many workers very very dangerous trains Iron and Steel and so all of these people moving from Europe moving to America moving out west agriculture on the Western Plains the bridging of the Mississippi can be seen as a symbolic victory of humanity of Science of engineering of capitalism spreading across the globe the victory of man over nature quite literally it's a real symbol of capital being Unstoppable and these kind of multiplying statistics just roll on like a snowball throughout the century in the last few decades before the first world war for example in the 1890s international trade tripled in size and many people by the way see globalization as something not necessarily inherent to capitalism per se but a kind of interlocking uh sister phenomenon you know you could imagine having globalization and you did have globalization in socialist or communist uh countries too or countries where you have a centrally commanded economy but how much it was linked to capitalism how many of those causes it shares how many of the similar patterns it shares at least make them highly highly integrated in this period and how much of it was a result of capitalism you know we can think again about those necessary causes necessary factors and uh contingent ones accidental ones ones that are really important but you could maybe disang a little bit for conceptual analytical interpretive Clarity but how much globalization is linked to capitalism can be seen from a brochure Hobs borne points to to teach English to Polish immigrants in America it was a very commonly used uh brochure of the period And it read I hear the 5 minute whistle it's time to go into the shop I take my check from the gate board and hang it on the department board I change my clothes and get ready for work the starting whistle blows I eat my lunch it's forbidden to eat until then the whistle blows at 5 minutes of starting time I get ready to go to work I work until the whistle blows to quit I leave my place nice and clean I must go home and the point here is that capitalists needed laborers this was a global phenomenon polish immigrants into America were part of the capitalist system so capitalism and globalization here go hand inand and you cannot get better evidence of that than this idea that the most important thing to teach polish immigrants in America is yes how to speak English but more importantly than that how to understand capital istic commands these commands like I hear the 5- minute whistle I don't eat lunch until the whistle blows I only go home after I've left my place nice and clean that these are the dominant uh you know Common bits of evidence that are left to us from the period goes as far as to proving that these things were inherently interl of the same type of the same kind of the same Global capitalist Force now all of this seems quite triumphant the marching trumpets of a triumphant capitalism marching on across the globe modernity inventions technology Bridges and Roads and trains and new ways of producing food and new work new medicine even what some would call still more so than civilization spreading around the world but of course to think of it in that way is to think that the Promethean energy only Built and didn't burn that's a line I think is suitable here from Gandhi who when asked what he thought of Western Civilization beginning of the 20th century replied I think it would be a good idea the search for new markets raw materials investment in navies to protect ports and trade routes and colonies all incentivized a global burst of Imperial Acquisitions it's undeniable that capitalism did build infrastructure and modernized Communications and transport networks spread wealth to some at least across the globe and in some cases even educated but everywhere it did so it did on the bones of natives Traditions cultures and protesters in a short period between 1876 and 1915 around six countries grew to control a quarter of the globe as hobor says Britain increased its territories by some 4 million square miles France by 3.5 million Germany more than 1 million Belgium and Italy just under a million each the USA acquired some 100,000 mainly from Spain Japan something like the same from China Russia and Korea and Portugal's ancient African colonies expanded by around 300,000 square miles Native Americans for example would be slaughtered and squeezed as modernity marched West one American General William Sherman said that the railroad which used to follow in the rear now goes forward with the picket line and the great battle of civilization against barbarism capitalism spread as it looked for land to grow on materials to mine spices to trade textiles and so the rest of the world was introduced to this thing called capitalism at their ports their import export markets or sometimes through Imperial educational institutions that were set up from time to time the British for example set up schools in India to train a select number of Raj administrators Egypt was sucked into the British sphere of influence by its cotton and wheat it was particularly fertile around the Nile and then by the Suez Canal which was strategically important to connect Britain with Asia and the rest of Europe with Asia and China got sucked into this severe of influence through the opium trade most countries especially those that were able and were sucked into the orbit would eventually and inevitably try to emulate the West in this period but where there was resistance where there was an attachment to older ways of doing things it tended to be futile the Chinese were forced to open their markets at the barrel end of British gunboats during the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century the final Cry of the magisterial in the period previous mugal Empire was silenced after a brief Revolt in 1857 the native way of life pushed further west in America and slowly extinguished as a culture as a force as something that controlled vast tracts of land on the continent while something similar happened to the Zulu and other groups as they were forced further into the interior of South Africa and the continent at large the rest of Africa was carved up by European powers over a dinner table in Berlin in 1884 all of these peoples could not resist the force of Western technology there's one common British saying put it whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not the Maxim gun of course was a great industrial innovation of this period something of incredible power in dealing out Death at a speed not again imaginable just a few decades before for you know compare a weapon like this to something like a revolver and then something like a spear or a bow and arrow there were quite literally many massacres while British dominance of the sea led to a general ostensible Pax britanica it hid increasing rivalry between states everywhere an increasing pressure from revolutionaries and nationalists under the yoke of Empires particularly in Central Europe both of which sometimes flared into short bursts of protest or War premonitions of what might come as the sociologist Max vber put it in 1894 the unavoidable efforts at trade expansion by all civilized Bourgeois controlled Nations after a transitional period of seemingly peaceful competition a clearly approaching the point where power alone will decide each nation's share in the economic control of the earth and hence its people's sphere of activity and especially its workers earning potential what he was noticing and what we'll get to is how economics demographics democracies peoples military power all of it was expanding but in a interl way the world was becoming this kind of bureaucratic rational expanding force India is a prime example of what happened in this period too the first voyage of the British East India Company in 16001 returned profits of 200% it and similar European voyages attracted the attention of more and more investors in joint stock companies and the vast subcontinent was rich in things like pepper and Nutmeg and cloves and indigo and textiles and cotton and produced a quarter of the planet's total manufacturing England at the time controlled just 3% in other words India was incredibly Rich compared to England compared to the rest of the West and it was ruled by the wealthy and Powerful Mughal Empire one Emperor commenting on the growth of the East India Company said that the English are a company of Base quarreling people and foul dealers the Mughal were eventually defeated by the East India Company at the Battle of plci in 1757 its Governor Robert Clive was by then one of the wealthiest self-made men in Europe at just 33 years old and by the early 19th century just to take cotton here again as another example the value of India's trade fell from1 to3 million to less than £100,000 while the value of British trade grew by a factor of 16 does that not tell you everything you need to know about this period one Indian complained that the English forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the merchants for a fourth part of their value and by way of violence and oppression they obliged the farmers to give five rupees for goods that are worth but one British governance also overruled traditional Community practices leading to a worsening of things like famines because locals even local rulers knew how to manage and deal with these uh catastrophic but specific local events in much better ways drawing on traditional knowledge in the late 19 century for example the famines were unimaginable there were several in the 18 60s and 1870s in Raj patana a third of the population died in Madras 20% and millions perished across India while East India company business went on as usual the historian William Dal rmle one of my favorite historians on all of this says that in the worst famine year when1 Million worth of goods in today's money was trans transferred from India to London and the historian Mike Davis in Victorian holocausts puts the blame for the extent of the crisis squarely on capitalism he writes the newly constructed railroads lorded as institutional safeguards against famine were instead used by Merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought stricken districts to Central despots for Hoarding in m dra City overwhelmed by 100,000 drought refugees famished peasants dropped dead in front of the troops guarding pyramids of imported rice and something similar happened in Ireland between 1846 and 48 with a famine which was in part caused by food being transported out of the country while people were starving laws prohibited the eating of food from the fields of absentee landlords of course and property laws in this period were notoriously strict there was capital punishment for the theft of property in the past Lords in Ireland or local rulers and communities in India may have responded to the extreme conditions on their land with their surfs who after all provided for them and their livelihoods by providing some level of local Relief by suspending normal processes because of extenuating circumstances for capitalists joint stockholders and government officials the bottom line globally became more important the crisis much more distant but they come to worship the tiny figure who dares to challenge an Empire and they believe him when he says inner Freedom will lead to Outer Freedom the British in India remember this is a company with was likely in some ways to be the most extreme example of capitalist experimentation seen in history even up till now it was for a period almost an entire country run as a business Dar rimple writes it wasn't the British government or the British people that conquered India but an unregulated private Corporation with profit as their sole motive and to those that get annoyed with people looking back at history with a judgmental eye on periods that were very different say even many British at the time were critical one gentleman's magazine article wrote Dy with that rump of unconstitutional power the East India Company the imperious Company of East India merchants and in 1830 parliamentarian James Buckingham declared that the idea of signing over to a joint stock Association the political administration of an Empire people with a 100 million Souls was so Preposterous that if it were now for the first time proposed it would be deemed not merely an absurdity but an insult to the meanest understanding of the realm D rmo calls it the Supreme Act of corporate violence in world history none of this is to claim that there was a kind of systematic explicit very organized and intentional bourge darwinian profiteering ideological Army that led the charge into every corner of the globe but the combination of militarism nationalism social Darwinism and capitalism profit the hunt for raw materials led to what Vladimir lenning called and we'll get back to this the highest stage of capitalism America the new world it had everything the Conquering Bourgeois needed abundant Land Resources A system that imitated the English one taking it even further and while we remember the British Empire as the biggest the world had ever seen an Empire on which the sun supposedly never set what's actually striking in retrospect was how brief British ascendancy really was no quicker than it had Unleashed engines and iron and Industry onto the world two countries in particular were snapping at its heels Germany and America that Great British exhibition in 1851 in many ways symbol ically at least marked a kind of High Point a turning of the tide in British power or at least the confidence that Britain was destined to rule for a long time because quickly everywhere sought to copy and as a footnote here by the way ironically later in 1936 just before the second world war just before the real turning of the tide on paper the handing over of global power from Britain To America that great Crystal Palace it burnt down to the ground it's no longer there I used to live around the corner there's still the foundations of it and some remnants but it's now just a park anyway Switzerland for example had 34 steam engines in 1850 and just 20 years later had a thousand even a small country country like Switzerland was copying very quickly a bigger country like Austria went from around 700 in that period to over 9,000 the famous C steel Works in Germany increased its Workforce from just 72 in 1848 to 12,000 people 20 years later but one country of course was very quickly turning the heads of Europeans are making them very nervous America we build for use and we build in fun joining eyes and hands and brains into knowing teams that bring great dreams to life its growth can be demonstrated with just one figure I think in 1800 the population was around 5 million a century later across our period it had grown to 7 6 million Americans spread out west improving on Farming and Manufacturing and Industry in the same way their cousins across the pond had shown them to only Americans were taking the ideas and going much further in the 1840s 80% of American Iron came from the Iron Works in the Midlands of Britain Sheffield still was world famous but then just a decade later the majority of it instead was coming from American companies it was homegrown steel homegrown metal in 1850 steam power output surpassed Britain for the first time and by 1886 steel output had surpassed Britain too 25 years after the Crystal Palace exhibition Philadelphia held their own the 1876 Centennial exposition the pictures of this are fantastic because they really demonstrate how they sought to mimic the home country but then surpass their older cousins it's another great building of Iron and Steel and glass it really looks like one of the first modern capitalist Cathedrals those images are worth flicking through on Google Images in every way this great centennial 100e celebration of a very new nation surpassed the British in his book on the history of American capitalism a great book by the way I'd highly recommend it it's long it Dives deep into the four ages of American capitalism um it's very well organized and it gives you a sense of the evolution and how capitalism shifts over time but in the book The historian Jonathan Levy writes that the Philadelphia exhibition had the biggest steam engine in the world plus steam locomotives steam fire engines steam Farm engines steam Road rollers and engines for steam ships there were also steam pumps steam pile drivers gargantuan steam forging Hammers and even larger steam Blast Furnace blowers was steam was everywhere and they were innovating like crazy like the British Fair 25 years before tourists politicians and Industrial spies from across the world gaed at American innovation industrial Espionage was very very common skilled Factory workers in Britain were actually uh prohibited from emigrating machines weren't allowed to be exported but some were smuggled out and other spies Drew machines from memory brand after brand began in the late 19th century Campbell Coca-Cola Kelloggs Hobs Bor sums up the innovation in America like this the rewards of innovation and Enterprise were ample and the inventors of the steam ship 1807 The Humble Tac 1807 the screw cutting machine 1809 the artificial denture 1822 insulated wire 1827 to 31 the revolver 1835 the idea of the typewriter and sewing machine 1843 to 1846 the rotary printing press 1846 and a host of pieces of farm machinery pursued them no economy expanded more rapidly in this period than the American even though its really headlong Rush was only to occur after 1860 but again just think of that very short time time frame and how much happened how quickly things grew just one of those the revolver was such an innovation compared to how older guns had to be manufactured and loaded and carried and all the rest of it the typewriter and the sewing machine how much these two single inventions changed entire lines of work and again as we mentioned many smaller side subsidiary Innovations would have followed revolutionizing many other uh parallel Industries but let's once again very briefly head to that place where all economy supposedly begin the fields the soil crops animals agriculture farming here Americans clearly had the biggest Advantage take just 40 years between 1840 and 1880 square footage of farmed land in America tripled just imagine that it tripled in that just generational period in 1849 to 1851 just 3 years 191 patents were taken out relating to agriculture but then just 20 years after that in a threeyear per period 3,000 patents were take just one the most famous something we take for granted something most people probably walk past every day unless you live in a city barbed wire it revolutionized farming by keeping Livestock in place and increasing the number of cows SE or sheep that could be looked after and managed at once again such a small detail completely changed how people approached an entire uh line of work the range and Ranch cattle business of the United States in 1885 noted the average cost per head of the management of large herds is much less than that of small herds uh one of the books I can't remember which one said that this single invention meant that animals were now aord of big Capital livestock became capital for the first time in a way that before they were just kind of money floating walking around on the ranch and now there were huge concentration of wealth that had to be managed like Capital they became the interest of investment and Banks and businessmen one author wrote the world has never seen anything comparable to the surge in agricultural production and that what European miners had done over the span of several centuries the Americans accomplished in little more than a single generation there was a famous book called where to go to get rich it said that if you could get $150 deposit for a mortgage of ,000 which could be paid off by the way in just 6 years you could go west and buy an 160 acre plot on the great PLS now take some of the knock on effects comparable to the knock on effects of the invention of the steam engine America is obviously vast and it would have felt even vaster back then the problem though was getting all of that meat to the people that needed it which was of course much much harder than we imagin it to be today if for example you butcher it out West it's going to go bad by the time it gets East there's no Refrigeration remember and if you don't you have to literally post herds of livestock on cattle cars across the country for days to be butchered where it's needed and that's exactly what happened in somewhere like Chicago and again if we're EMP emphasizing the kind of Confluence of uh Agriculture and livestock and food being the basis of all economies with the history of industrial capitalism and Investment Banking and inventions and the movement of huge populations of people then there's really no better illustration of this no better symbol of this than Chicago it was a great and growing capitalist checkpoint and again the numbers here speak for themselves in 1800 it was a tiny tang with a population of just a few hundred people and then in 1870 70 years later its population had grown to 300,000 people and then just 20 years after that in 1890 the population had grown to over 1.1 million but it wasn't of course just people by 19 114 million animals were meeting their gruesome end in the city the city became a great capitalist Melting Pot of both slums and riches the poet R Kipling visited Chicago and said that its air was dirt it had no Beauty its canals were black as ink and it had Untold Abominations but on the other hand one English farmer in 1886 wrote I have calculated that the produce of 5 Acres of wheat can be brought from Chicago to Liverpool at less than the cost of manuring one acre of wheat in England I find that quote fascinating that because of the forces Unleashed by an English agricultural re ution many many years before it became cheaper to get food from halfway around the world and that in this period the British were then because of the force forces they Unleashed were increasingly looking over to America with uneasiness they were looking over at them doing better than them and providing stuff for them and this is the kind of logic uh of capitalism that we still think about today if Chicago was the great example of the growing Unstoppable capitalist City then no set of figures more aply symbolize both the momentum and the contradictions of growing American dominance and Power in this period than the titans of Industry the robber barons in many ways it's unfair to start with them we should be setting the scene a bit more many have pointed to a unique combination of American uh resources and context and environmental factors with of course the Constitution and the growing population is creating a specific culture that led into all this and that the so-called robber barons a contentious term by the way to some historians take this quote by D phille again uh in 1835 on his trip to America he noted a unique American Spirit writing the European Navigator Ventures on the Seas only with Prudence he departs only when the weather invites him to if an unforeseen accident comes upon him he enters into port at night he Furs apart of his sails and when he sees the ocean white at the approach of land he slows his course and examines the Sun the American neglects these precautions and Braves these dangers dville was noting this again in 1835 just before this period of astronomic growth so traveling around the country he was clearly on to something because between dvi's visit and the turn of the 20th century several American businessmen became recognizable names across America and across Europe tycoons like Andrew Carnegie in Railways and steel John D Rockefeller in oil and JP Morgan in banking I would like to do a real deep dive into these figures one day because they're Fascinating People and studying them really kind of helps you to understand the period and where we are today I can't go into it too much in this already too long history but someone like JP Morgan being connected to these growing corporations in Railways and steel becoming so connected to monopolies really demonstrates how Investment Banking and the trading of stocks and shares grew up in this period and how banking in New York investment bankers became the people who could quite literally pull the strings off on many of the deals because they were the choke points they were the people that everyone had to go through to get the loans as economies of scale grew as it became more efficient to gobble up smaller businesses smaller steel producers so that you could make everything more efficient and that you could do everything with you know single Factory lines or single sets of raw material orders or buying all the land you need um scale all of these deals can be done much more cheaply and so this process of buying up the smaller businesses this process of going to get the cheapest loan you could to expand the quickest you could to beat your competitor as quickly as you could is why someone like JP Morgan became one of the most powerful people on the planet while he was literally America's Banker because in the period America didn't have a central bank and so for the American government to get loans they went through someone like JP Morgan and a lot of the time it was Morgan himself he was probably I'm not sure if this is an exaggeration or not he was probably at the time the most connected man on the planet in fact quite certainly I think the most connected man if you consider the technology he had at his disp proposal the position he had in the world the fact that he wasn't the person building the companies but the man who was organizing relationships talking to lots of people making deals so without overstatement probably the most connected man who had ever lived similar to big Tech social networks today this was a period when single entrepreneurs could build business on a National standardized even global scale for the first time they became the richest people in the history of the world but not without controversy take another of the most famous of them Andrew Carnegie he built Carnegie Steel in 1875 Carnegie steel produced around 20,000 tons of steel just 14 years later it was produced in over half a million tons more than having the cost per ton of production in the process and the quality improved too the weight the track could take the train track that is Rose from around 8 tons to 70 tons again huge improvements in efficiency price and quality and of course the reason steel here uh Grew From 20,000 to half a million in just 14 years goes to show how connected it was to the spread the railways how quickly they spread how much money there was in doing it and as we'll see how there was a bit of hubris in that speed too the robber barons so called still debated by historians and some historians hate that title they were clearly men of intense drive and passion and in some cases charity too like Carnegie and his foundation but the success was brought at the cost of driving down wages monopolizing and price fixing manipulating the young and naive stock market and getting cozy with politicians and lawmakers Jay G even bought the New York World newspaper with the intention of controlling business information and manipulating financial markets even a business magazine um not exactly a Critic of capitalism called financia was critical of railroad magnate Jay gold calling him the most accomplished of all modern criminals pitza said that gold was one of the most Sinister figures that have ever flitted batlike across the vision of the American people and here's a great quote from a US Diplomat that really emphasizes the Conquering Bourgeois ethic of this period in America he wrote of the first influential Rober Baron uh Railroad Man Cornelius Vanderbilt that he has combined the natural power of the individual with the fictitious power of the corporation the famous L seoir of Louis the 14th which by the way means I am the state a kind of um embodiment of absolute absolute monarchy absolute power of Louis the 14th represents Vanderbilt's position in regard to his railroads unconsciously he has introduced caesarism into corporate life he has however but pointed out the way which others will tread Vanderbilt is but the precursor of a class of men who were willed within the state a power created by the state but too great for its control again the sheer dominant the speed of growth even the falling prices of consumer goods in many cases came at a cost in many cases a worse cost than in England the costs were unsafe and unsanitary work conditions and slums downward pressure on wages booms and busts and long periods of unemployment and an American working class that was beginning to organize and strike it led to Violent standoffs not just between Americans and natives as industry and agriculture expanded West but also violent standoffs between the classes Hobs borne writes that in 1865 and 1866 every Rail Road cury iron furnace and Rolling Mill in Pennsylvania was granted statuto authority to employ as many armed policemen as it wished to act as they saw fit the most well-known of these Bourgeois security outfits were called the pinkertons it was a kind of uh detective Private Security Agency and the most well-known of the standoffs was a strike at Carnegie's Homestead still works in 1892 hundreds of Carnegie guards hired by the company fac off against thousands of striking workers ending in a shootout in which the pinkton were defeated but eight people died mostly striking workers in the end the National Guard were even sent in ending the strike it just goes to show how the image of the Wild West was not just a battle between Americans and the natives as they expanded West but also in this kind of lay Fair culture where the businessman and the Cowboy and the adventurer rule out individualistically on their own also extended to Labor Relations also extended to business it was a great libertarian experiment in this period it's incredible how often these violent standoffs happened and just how violent they became in 1892 alone for example state militias were used to end strikes 23 times during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 Chicago descended into chaos and violence a thousand people were sent to jail a 100 people were killed Levy writes that make no mistake by any possible Criterion in the age of capital the United States had the most contentious and violent Labor Relations of any country in the world in the US Then unionization followed a similar if not more violent pattern to elsewhere across the Atlantic securing some slow concessions wage increases regulations battling the corporations and the government sometimes at the same time positioning themselves in between the two and along with mck rakers like idar Bell and Upton Sinclair did managed to focus attention on some of the Shady practices of the everwing corporate Giants in America this battle reached its peak with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 which made monopolies illegal if they controlled the entirety of a single market and this led to a series of Court battles and ultimately in the most famous broke up rockefeller's standard oil into several smaller compan companies the factors that led to the passing of the ACT were price fixing on the monopolistic Railways giving preferential treatment to Big corporations over smaller Farmers using industry dominance to put up barriers to entry manipulating the stock market giving so-called rebates to favored customers to weaken others buying politicians and needing to regulate interstate commerce and then wider cultural public outcry so it was an era of populist and farmer in many cases revolt against big global national corporations the Promethean corporations though were goliaths but the Act was acted upon although the occasions it was acted upon and the ways in which it was used were rare it was only used in the most extreme cases and it was used less so across the 20th century the much more noteworthy Trend was the continuation of what Hobs Bor recognized as the Invisible Hand Smith's Invisible Hand of the balancing of supply and demand across entire countries through hundreds and thousands and millions of businessmen and buyers and sellers becoming instead a very visible hand family run in individual atomized businesses becoming very rare and giant bureaucratic very legible visible codified corporations with sets of practices and rules and accounts and procedures becoming the feature of American Life there some historians now point out though the driving force wasn't necessarily individual greed it was economies of scale in natural monopolies because in the end it was cheaper and more efficient to manufacture mass-produced goods and Railways and iron and oil at scale it was more efficient to do so because it was a kind of super connected system and all of the stock and the necessary infrastructure and the necessary materials could be all bought in b so something like a railway or a network of oil refineries and dispensaries all of this was much more efficient to do at scale so smaller companies would find it more profitable to sell out to the bigger companies to conglomerate than it would be to continue on their own so take something like steel production Levy writes the productive Capital wielded by an organizational scale of us steel were extraordinary the corporation controlled 213 separate factories 41 mines and over 1,000 M of railroad spread out across the entire Northeastern Midwestern manufacturing belt it employed 162,000 individuals mcl's magazine said of us steel that it receives and expends more money every year than any but the very greatest of the world's National governments its debt is larger than that of many of the Lesser nations of Europe it absolutely controls the Destinies of a population nearly as large as that of Maryland or Nebraska and indirectly influences twice that number who could compete with that just think about the scale of that just think about how new it was and how truly different it was to the sort of power structures that had existed in the past all the way back to the Roman Empire a new thing called a corporation in many ways spread out across as Levy says 213 separate factories and that was back then 41 mines even owning thousands of miles of railroads and employing 162,000 individuals these were civil services before the Civil Service existed in the capitalist sector these SE were capitalist bureaucratic Nations these were Nations within Nations as mcl's magazine said more people than smaller nations in Europe and influencing and controlling things in a much more hidden way than people were used to through governments of course governments acted surreptitiously but in many ways the power that they held and the procedures and the structures were quite naked to the people involved you know the court of Henry VII for example the biggest Court I'd imagine of any of the monarchies of Europe or at least one of the biggest maybe uh Louis the 14th the Sun Kings was bigger but even a court like that it was only a few hundred to a few thousand people with a corporation it's a Royal Court on a national and global scale a court where people and managers have to interact with sub managers where one person understanding the engineering of the mindes doesn't understand a problem on the other side of the business the other side of the country it's this strange interlocking new Beast that was starting to spread out across the globe and again who can compete with that size that size has an effect in many many different ways not least the economies of scale that were able to produce things cheaper than opponents but also the social political and cultural influence of powerful businesses being able to threaten smaller companies or even threaten people for going to smaller companies you know if you're signing a contract well you better make sure you come with us you better make sure you buy this from us too and we'll give you that slightly smaller price in the future but don't go to that person in the next time Landis puts it like this that smaller firms in traditional lines were pressed hard by bigger and more efficient competitors many collapsed in spite of all the resistance Ingenuity and sacrifice that old style family Enterprises are capable of the modern managerial approach to business was invented in this period bureaucratic hierarchies of accounting and management and micromanagement Pen railroad for example was the first ever real National Business bureaucracy on a grand scale and at this level it became about stocks and shares and buyouts and financing and loans and the ever increasing extinction of the harder to run individual smaller family business just take a look at the long list of recognizable Brands owned by corporations like Proctor and Gamble or unver or cocacola all of this started in this era and it culminated in what became known as the great merger movement at the end of the century between 1895 and 1904 for example a total of 1,800 firms in America were Consolidated with the help of Bankers like JP Morgan into just 157 corporations and in his book on monopolies historian Charles G writes that the entire period of American capitalism since the industrial revolution has been an unrelenting Trend towards consolidation it's really hard to know when to move on from the American picture in this story this is all obviously very familiar terrain to us we could keep drawing it out to this day and it's interesting how much more recognizable all of this is becoming in this story than the world just 50 or 100 or 150 years before it when we had single inventors inventing the engine or Farmers improving very old traditional methods but I think a natural Pinnacle here is what Levy calls the greatest achievement in the annals of the Industrial Revolution the Ford manufacturing line again one statistic says enough in 1910 20,000 model T's were manufactured by Henry Ford in 1916 just 6 years later almost 600,000 were and they were done so at half the cost if we bring everything together that we've looked at so far from engines to oil to National infrastructure to efficiency and productivity to needing that underlying culture of doing agriculture right having more people freed up from the land to work on other things steel trains bringing it all together a national infrastructure a national set of laws and regulations and a patent system fors factory system and the individual car that's produced by it becomes the peak of it the combination of that entire history and wills it's really hard not to be impressed with the outcome remind yourself of what Rosen said about newcom's focus and tactile ability being like playing the violin how what seems very simple but precise very careful improving of a tiny valve or a or a thread it required so much political and cultural and economic and technological infrastructure and knowledge behind it to build on this tiny little nuanced Improvement otherwise if that wasn't the case we'd have just been doing it since the first day we evolved a brain and fingers recognizable to how they are today and now compare newcom's engine these tiny improvements on the plans of savory's fire engine that you know very understandable uh kind of design based on very basic physics of a of a vacuum and the very basic problem of drawing water from a mine compare that to Ford's Factory 200 years later it took a while but really that's the blink of an eye considering we've been around as a species in that recognizable form evolved is the way we are for around 200,000 years Ford even wrote or had a copywriter write the 1926 encyclopedia britanica entry for mass production it declared that mass production is the focusing Upon A manufacturing project of the principles of power accuracy economy system continuity and speed he essentially took newcom and Watts's attention to the minute details of the engine and WR it large expanding it imagining it imagining that the factory the entire Factory is an engine in the same way that newcom and savory approached the minute details of the steam engine every single process every single line every single screw uh every single job and every single engine or pump whatever it was was standardized so it could be repeated iterated on over and over improved slowly in efficiency by the smallest of adjustments specific machines were even built to bore individual holes whereas other businesses and Engineers were still using standard drills so Ford was producing his own drill so that all of the holes could be exactly the size that he needed standardized across the entire line he was also the first to use electricity on his assembly lines he had a magazine Ford's magazine that told its readers that time is the most valuable thing in the world there small improvements in time and efficiency in how much time is spent producing something means it gets measurably smaller and those measurable units of time saved slowly add up in reducing the cost and before you know it the cost is reduced by half everything was organized on this principle efficiency improvements in productivity this was the period of tailor ISM and the scientific management of employees Fredick Taylor was an engineer and he studied the wasteful movements of people on the factory floor he worked out the best place for tools to be kept and machines to be positioned for the quickest and most efficient access times counting steps measuring distances to the toilet and the lunchroom he employed timekeepers and used stopwatches again the application of the steam engine principle of thinking about the efficiency of the volume and the pressure and how much was needed applied to Flesh and Bones applied to people Ford reduced the production time for a Model T from 12 1/2 hours to 1 and 1/2 hours and of course time saved is cost saved to the same degree at least in estimate this was more than that Philadelphia exhibition America's Crystal Palace moment quite literally because his Factory the Rouge attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists a year Vanity Fair described it as an American altar of the god objective of mass production one other visitor noted that now the machine dominates American Life [Music] but the Great American boom was heading for a great Global bust while financial crisis depressions recessions have long been a feature of economic life the speed and scope of investment under capitalism made them inevitably I think much deeper and longer lasting we've all heard of the Great Depression of 1929 and through the 30s but there were also several warm-ups and I think going into the next chapter these warm-ups are going to tell us a lot in 1873 there was a panic that was the result of Railway overinvestment in America bonds had been sold to finance the railway's construction which which was happening at great speed but construction costs were more than anticipated hundreds of Railways went into bankruptcy along with thousands of businesses with and around them imagine this expanding Railway Network and the KnockOn effects this would have lots of homes and businesses and different cultures and different lives would bubble up around them and all of a sudden be connected to the rest of America and the rest of the world so when the Panic happened banks failed railroad stocks lost almost 2/3 of their value half of railroad companies went bankrupt to closed their doors and 21,000 miles of track were lost left and abandoned the Panic was felt as far as Vienna where the stock market crashed too German shares were hit by as much as 60% and half of the world's blast furnaces shut down I think this is one of the first really Global modern industrial railroad banking crashes where you can see the dominoes tumbling where everything is quite literally connected by Iron track Port steam all the things we've looked at KL Marx was fond of saying that Capal is the result of Capal competing little bubbles of investment that are connected to and in competition with other bubbles of investment now the severity of the 1873 Panic for Ordinary People is debated by historians although it's agreed that it was not as bad as what was to come the crash of 1893 for example shows how truly Global the economy had become that crash involved even more so investments in things like farming in Argentina and a bad Harvest there and overinvestment in property as far away as Australia and runs on banks out of fear in Europe and America which means when everyone goes and takes all their money and gold out of the bank and slowing economies across the world more overinvestment in Railways debates about mining too much silver and ressing the value of currency and the closing of hundreds of banks Across America 1893 was even called the Great Depression but of course now we know an even greater Depression was about to come and steal that name from it there were other panics in 1896 and 1907 some even called the last couple of Decades of the 19th century the long depression but 1929 was going to Eclipse all of them the causes of 1929 and the Wall Street Crash and of all of these crashes and depressions and recessions and gluts and busts are debated and nuanced and complex and you know people don't agree with the hierarchy of causes and the emphasis there are things that are too complicated for our history and that I'm no expert in things like interest rates and the gold standard and Fiat money and federal intervention and silver Mining and Global markets they all having a complex effect but that is one of the points and rather than getting into the nuance and extending this video another 3 hours I think it's really useful to just think about one overarching calls one that makes the most sense to start to help to understand the others and that's the idea of optimism and confidence take one statistic that during the 1920s the number of people in the US Holding stock Rose by a factor of 16 for a start it was becoming much easier to buy stocks they were becoming more common there were more companies issuing them they were advertised more there was magazines and radios and some of these companies were very big some of them very profitable but some of them very questionable in fact historians point to how buying stock in this period had become something of a fashion something of a craze in his history Levy puts it like this by 1929 some 2 million Americans had bought stock in some 770 different investment trusts 3.5 million had opened a brokerage account and as KES would write when the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino the job is likely to be ill done but confidence in the casino was soaring take Ford's General Motors that we looked at one of the biggest companies in the world its profits doubled in Just 2 years between 1925 and 19 19 27 the big capitalist infrastructure corporations like us steel and Rockefeller Standard Oil which have been broken up into smaller companies but were still controlled by Rockefeller they were all booming think about this period The Roaring 20s combine this what we've just looked at with hey quickly things like radios and flashy magazines and fridges and cars was suddenly everywhere advertising was suddenly everywhere electricity was suddenly everywhere this was a period of the birth of true consumerism consumer culture consumer psychology the Sears catalog was born for example you could flick through a multitude of new consumer goods skyscrapers were going up with lifts in them wouldn't you be confident rights stock speculation does seem to have become highly energized activity in which the desires of speculators slipped on and off one liquid security after another stock Brokers advertised nationally over the radio T which an estimated 30 million Americans listened every evening in 1929 however increases in profits were running ahead of increases in wages inequality was widening and widening stock prices were driving Higher and Higher and then suddenly in 1929 poor profits were reported people panicked and in one day Black Tuesday $4 billion of wealth was WIP typed 10% of the US total over 2,000 banks failed in America in 1931 alone World Trade decreased by 65% about quarter of Americans had no money to live on at all and unemployment in some places reached as high as 50% in short it was bad the British Banker montigue Norman wrote To The Head of the bank of France saying unless drastic measures are taken to save it the capitalist system throughout the Civilized world will be wrecked within a year and another Banker looked back and said that the American people just sat there and took it in retrospect it's amazing just amazing either they were in shock or they thought something would happen to turn it around my wife has often discussed this with me she thinks it's astonishing the lack of violent protest especially in 1932 and 1933 and Levy sums it up like this the great bull market of the 1920s was a product of mass communication and mass psychology and was nothing short of a mass cultural spectacle Eide viewers might have noticed something I've just jumped ahead to the crash of 1929 and I'm now jumping back to the rise of Germany and then forward again to the out break of the first Total Global modern industrial maybe capitalist as we'll see war in 1914 now there's good reason I think for playing around with time in this way the buildup to the Great Depression and the buildup to the Great War seem to have something in common both had smaller premonitions smaller crises smaller isolated Wars before them like Sparks before an explosion so the timings might be slightly out of joint but the logic the connections the building towards greater Investments greater mergers greater machines greater weapons greater Empires seem to suggest that rather than being distinct great cataclysms they are connected that they may have have had the same factors the same causes part of that same recipe we've looked at so was capitalism to blame for both it was why that literal metaphor I'm not sure if that's even a thing a literal metaphor but I think it captures this that literal metaphor of the Titanic sinking in 1912 it's why it's so evocative the greatest industrial capitalist machine ever built Global World spanning steam industry bringing speed and of course the hubris all of it heading confidently to a very modern disaster what makes that metaphor even more evocative to my mind is that those ship builders in Britain Whit star and kunard the most technologically advanced scientific industrial companies of their day were looking nervously across to Germany whose own passenger ships and navy were very close in their wake after unification in 1871 Germany had become the dominant force on the continent in the space of three decades German exports Grew From half the size of Britain to becoming larger than Britain second only to America their giant corporations transformed the country in the same way the corporations had in the US companies like thyson in steel Seamans in telegraphy and electronics wiring habber in fertilizers these were huge corporate cartels but this German ascendant this growth of German power of German capitalism of German Commerce and wealth proved I think how malleable capitalism was and is as a system because unlike the more decentralized individualistic individual rights Liberty and freedom approach in America and mostly Britain Germany under bismar first took a much more authoritarian archical approach having a Kaiser with significant executive power with the ability to have his hands on the levers hands on the controls to tell people what to do more to direct the economy more from above bismar called it blood and iron militarism and Industry governments planned Railways and operated many mines across Germany but but they did liberalize the majority of the economy they realized though that if you had a government with a lot of power with a lot of money with a lot of knowledge and information you could direct that you could use that you could invest in a greater numbers and with greater speed than maybe individuals could maybe a little bit like how communist China became more capitalist from a above today directing capitalism making sure it goes in the directions you want it to and again the proof of this working is evident in the ascendancy and evident in the numbers for example Germany's length of Railways had surpassed Britain's by 1875 once again showing how short Brit's ascendancy really was applebe writes once unification was achieved achieved Germany became the industrial giant of Europe bismar had triumphed with his policy of iron and blood against what he rather dismissively called the speeches and majority decisions of his liberal opponents both Germany and America and again this really goes against the kind of Freedom free trade free Commerce narrative that you need it for capitalism to flourish both of them introduced protect IST tariffs and measures to protect their own young industries from British power from British dominance they made sure that British products that were produced so cheaply that you couldn't compete with them were pushed up in price by tariffs and measures so that your own domestic people would be less likely to afford them and would give the young burgeoning trying to catch up trying to copy businesses in your own country the chance to do so kind of keeps money within the country a bit more it stops profits flowing out to Britain Max vber said that they created a closed national state which afforded capitalism its chance for development so by the beginning of the 20th century it was no longer British dominance it was a multi-polar world of interconnected but competing corporations and businesses and Empires and railways and shipping companies and of course militaries Germany had colonies in Africa France and Britain had colonies all across the world and even America had expanded into Hawaii and Puerto Rico and Guam and the Philippines looking more and more despite the protests of some and the denials of many like an une easy Empire Japan of course had modernized too imitating the Western model building trains an infrastructure winning a surprise military Victory against Russia in 1904 and beginning to expand into the Pacific into those islands and into China it was a unique period on the one hand great powers of relatively equal wealth and might spread across the world suggesting coming competition and clashing and War but on the other hand and unlike say something like World War II or the Cold War all of these Powers had reasonably similar capitalist Imperial ideological systems they thought in the same way so could they not coexist the period was like a room of balloons inflating slowly putting pressure onto one another until their edges pressed tightly together the expansion of each threatening all of them to pop we've seen how improvements in one capitalist industry engin say lead to Innovation and growth in others oil metal rubber hundreds more maybe thousands more and then all the service industries that go next to them too or the people you need to feed them and house them and and provide entertainment Maybe but what about tanks Precision Engineering of gun barrels of explosives what about 40 million or so people killed around the world between 1914 and 1918 was that struggle between the great European powers Germany austrial Hungary the Ottomans on one side Britain France Russia and the US on the other even in some calls Somewhere In The Deep history the result of this capitalist system the result of profit seeking of expansion of colonialism linked to the capitalist system linked to profit seeking and businesses looking for new raw materials looking for new markets writing during the first world war Vladimir Lenin interpreted the catastrophe as capitalist powers fighting over global markets later President Eisenhower in the US warned of the growing military industrial complex Hobs Bor for his part thinks the link is pretty obvious imagine you're a German military planner in 1910 all countries had them of course they did they had these strategists thinking about different plans different ways of executing them different scenarios iOS of peace and different scenarios of war and imagine thinking about maybe the biggest question Germany had to contemplate France on the one side and Russia on the other think about both countries attacking at the same time attacking you a country in the middle of Europe surrounded by many other countries in Europe the question the response how potentially to invade France and Russia at the same time is more than any other time in history one that involves understanding thinking through analyzing and controlling Global Supply chains ordering and transporting raw materials not just for your military but for the country to keep the country going to make the Country Strong negotiating thousands of business relationships uh understanding the markets in oil and rubber and steel getting it right getting the information right getting the logistics and the connect thinking about the train lines and the shipping lanes both used to transport troops and goods and materials controlling Telegraph lines postal lines messaging wider Communications in other words War had become even in planning before we even get get to execution a global capitalist business and War of course is the survival of the fittest the greatest the most powerful maybe the wealthiest Hobs Bor who argues that capitalism is a central Factor points out that in all countries there were certain groups pushing for expansion looking for new raw materials and new markets to sell to he writes it was the very process of global capitalist expansion which multiplied tensions within the overseas world the Ambitions of the industrial world and the direct and indirect conflicts arising out of it continuing that the rivalries between the capitalist Powers which led to this division also engendered the first world war and that much of the capitalism didn't cause the war literature amounts to denying facts which were obvious enough at the time and still are Germany resented Britain and France's Global Empires America's reach interests and troops were spreading further across the Pacific as were Japans and and I think this is crucial and often forgotten we usually think of Empire as domination and the extraction of materials like rubber from the Congo or tea from India but 60% of British cotton was exported to India and the East so capitalist Empires were about the control of markets protecting your business interests imposing tariffs shrinking your competitor pie business was so Global that everyone was thinking about what their investment return would be from somewhere halfway around the world so this is inevitably going to lead increasingly to policy makers thinking in this way more and more leaders too that's without getting to genuine imperialists and militarists to take one figure that really shows how much this dominated people's uh thought patterns more than half of all British savings were invested abroad in 1900 that's how important the Imperial mindset was to everyone one British prime minister in 1897 told the French Ambassador that if you were not such persistent protectionists you would not find us so Keen to Annex territories or think about this quote I understood by a world policy merely the support an advancement the tasks that have grown out of the expansion of our industry our trade the labor power activity and intelligence of our people we had no intention of conducting an aggressive policy of expansion we wanted only to protect the vital interests that we had acquired in the natural course of events throughout the world who said that the German Chancellor Bernhard Von buulo in 1900 how can the eventual military Clash the millions of deaths in light of comments like this not be thought of as part of this bigger capitalist story doesn't it seem to fit so naturally into this narrative that we cannot help but see the links the causes Hobs born puts it like this businessmen always inclined to fill the blank spaces on the map of World Trade with V numbers of potential customers would naturally look for such unexploited areas China was one which haunted the imagination of salesman what if every one of those 300 Millions bought only one box of tic tacs and Africa the unknown continent was another this is where causes get interesting Hobs borne makes a compelling and very influential case capitalism runs through everything from the 19th century on so how can it not be a cause how can it not be a factor but as we've learned causes are almost always overdetermined there are many of them and their relevance or their explanatory power or their importance can vary between moment to moment between people between country between uh point of view between subject and many are critical of just pointing to capitalism some for example point to the relative peace historically before and after those big 20th century Wars comparative to any other historical period the 19th century for example was quite peaceful when it came to devastating Global all-encompassing um very important conflicts they were quite few and far between they were quite marginal the post-war period to today has also been described as the long peace although maybe we're seeing cracks in that too and of course here again there are exceptions but they haven't been uh Global crises really and both of course were extremely capitalist periods of History the 19th century and the postwar period so how can we say capitalism is the major cause when it's correlated in other circumstances as the opposite other critics will say yes the two world wars were the worst in history I'll grant you that but that's only because there were more people alive than any other period before to fight and die in them others have said that better technology is a product of modernity and Science and Innovation but not necessarily capitalism and on top of this stock prices on average tend to fall during crisises like Wars so why would capitalists want war some businesses some people might get richer from certain Wars but there's little evidence that businesses in general actually explicitly push for war some Industries might do very well from war of course but many others don't the problem I think is that capitalism becomes so dominant as an explanation that it tends to explain everything and in doing so explains nothing as well and there are two other movements that I think also takes some of the broader blame off capitalists shoulders the first was the growth of nationalism the idea of a people national pride a national struggle competition between groups or at the extreme xenophobia and racism War based on these things preceded capitalism of course it did it's been a rhy for millennia maybe since the beginning of the human species even preceding that when we look at the animal kingdom but this growth of nationalism did become more concentrated as national identity grew especially through Modern media the printing press the spread of national stories National culture national language National ideas gillo princip assassinated the arch dukee of the austr Hungarian Ian Empire France Ferdinand not because of capitalism but because of nationalism he believed in a greater Serbia that Austria was occupying part of was blocking these kinds of beliefs dominated the minds of many groups across Europe beliefs like this National beliefs National identities National rights National God given special uniqueness National Monopoly over a land area National expansionism that it's either you or the next Nation these beliefs dominated the minds of many many powerful groups across Europe and America second related social Darwinism as we've seen it was used by many to justify capitalism itself but social Darwinism didn't come from capitalism the idea that peoples were locked in a biological evolutionary Universal struggle the survival of the fittest was something many people believed to be justified by General observation of the world and by science itself it was a very powerful ideology one German general even wrote a book just before the war that said that social Darwinism indeed ensured by the conquest of inferior races and people war against rival States again this was a reiteration of a belief that in some sense preceded capitalism but was concentrated by a culture of social Darwinism and we have to ask whether that culture is of a different lineage of a different narrative than the growth of capitalism of competition in markets or whether there is some crossover another general of the time believed in the quote biological necessity of War as we've seen many Business Leaders like Carnegie and politicians believed in Social Darwinism too they didn't just believe in it by the way people like Carnegie wrote about it wrote confidently and supportingly of it Morgan did too JP Morgan all of these big figures um you know the robber the Titans the ones that grew the railways were reading this kind of stuff so by the Armistice of 1918 and the great crash around a decade after that and the depression after and all the stuff that came with it the second world war the Nazis fascism if we accept that that first world war and that first Great Depression were events of a kind of a type of a narrative with similar causes if we accept that we can look at them at the same time with each other with this story if we accept that which you know there are different narratives there are different explanations this is necessarily somewhat simplified generalized into a 3 4our narrative that's tried to capture however many centuries it has to be necessarily simplified but if we accept that of a type then hundreds of billions of dollars of destruction of poverty of death bankruptcy of illness of tragedy have been rot across the world in these couple of decades only to be followed in the 30s by a German Nation on its knees hyperinflation the end of the gold standard new ideological forces of fascism and communism and ultimately a capitalist system that by the next round of War looked like it really definitely wasn't going to survive so many people thought that but despite that capitalism came out in the post-war period stronger than ever it was like a had heavyweight boxer on the ropes bruised and beaten pretty much killed but then getting up and emerging Victorious against everyone else but that next part of the story is for another day because by this period by this point by this great final battle by this standing up Victorious capitalism had no doubt conquered the globe this is the most difficult conclusion I've had to think about it's such a totemic unfolding of events that can't really be reduced to a single narrative as much as I've just tried this thing we call capitalism affects so many different people in so many different ways and has so many different manifestations but to start I think the most obvious question has capitalism been a Force for good or bad the way most people approach it I think it's not a good question for one it depends who you are who you were what period it is where you are what you're doing and that's not just a class thing you know it depends on whether you were a worker in Manchester in the 1840s or a peasant in the field in Russia um or a tech worker in Silicon Val like you can cut this problem in so many different ways but if you have to generalize if you're thinking about the odds of being dropped into a life you know before capitalism or now and if we're talking about material well-being you'd obviously be a fool not to pick today and that's not to say that that doesn't come with lots of obvious caveats and it certainly doesn't mean that we live in the best of all possible worlds if anything it and history shows that not only can things change but they very very likely will I think it's also limiting generalizing because as the historian will jant once observed historians tend to talk about the big things the river while ordinary people's lives continue on the banks of the unnoticed historians talk about big Wars and political decisions not about um a housewife doing the washing up and how these things connect is often more important or at least is more insightful than those very big decisions um we've talked about vast infrastructure projects and shipping and train lines and uh decisions to go to colonies or to make war we've talked about scientific institutions and Imperial Conquest but it's hard to get a picture of the grocery shop on the corner of the street it's hard to get an idea of the average businessman a car salesman his daily routine or women's Liberation from the domestic sphere they're moving into work or the impact of a union on as simple a thing as the hour lunch break or the mental health or the literal health of an ordinary worker but when you're talking about a large General story or topic like this without getting into the weeds and going back over each section and dividing the problem up into smaller parts which I think is maybe more important the devil's often in those details but if you're forcing yourself to make General conclusions to summarize you can only really summarize on general terms and I think there are two general concepts we can think about here that play a big part in this story throughout and they're two concepts that I think encapsulate as many of those ordinary lives we've looked at as possible as well as the big questions the political the social the cultural the philosophical ones and they are I think the ideas of freedom and the ideas of change if we think about these two things we can clarify or at least frame um some of the good things that we value from this long historical shift and from that we can see where there are criticisms and why those criticisms hold weight uh to the idea of free freedom in particular of individual rights Freedom as we've seen has been one of the most common justifications for capitalism freedom from being fixed in a feudal great chain of being economic freedom um freedom in Adam Smith's phrase to truck trade and barter the legal freedom to be free from the Monarch arbitrarily taking your property the freedom to live a life in a way not dictated from above not dictated by Authority and even Hobs Bor was salutary here he said the crucial achievement of the two revolutions he's talking about the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution was thus that they opened careers to Talent or at any rate to energy shrewdness hard work and greed not all careers and not to the top rungs of the ladder except perhaps in the USA and yet how extraordinary were the opportunities how remote from the 19th century the static hierarchical ideal of the past however capitalism has a jous face too if it's Freedom that we care about it's also what motivated the colonized to resist capitalist expansion to be free from foreign interference it's what motivated the antitrust movement to fight to be free from corporate domination corporate power and unions to be free from um from punitive contracts and dying with pressure on wages pitting them uh workers against each other what's interesting I think and what's important and points to why it's so powerful is that the value Freedom that people point to as being a merit of capitalism is the very value used to critique it too Carl Marx was maybe the first to notice that even capitalists weren't as free as first appeared they were forced to move to act by competition into a spiral of competitive pressures to compete to grow to innovate to consolidate to reduce wages to buy technology to buy big and bigger plants unless you will go out of business that even the socalled liberal Master of the Universe in control of their own life was not as free as first appeared Ellen Wood puts it like this and I think the language she uses is insightful here she says quote capitalist Laws of Motion the imperatives of competition and profit maximization a compulsion to reinvest surpluses and a systematic and Relentless need to improve labor productivity and develop the forces of production and if capitalists aren't free then what does that say about workers on the other hand it depends how we Define freedom and we're getting into esoteric philosophical territory now but you know we all have responsibilities we all exist in a context that determines what we can and can't do um we'll have reasons for doing things that are beyond our individual Free Will um but I think by freedom in this story in assessing freedoms surely we have to mean the freedom to choose between more options than a different period in history or in a different economic and political system if that's how we think about Freedom then things like free time the availability of consumer goods and food having the resources to choose one's own life goals or Hobbies or having the opportunity to educate oneself all of these things become the factors by which we assess any political or economic system as being good or bad or better or worse than another econom iic or political system to my mind it's obvious that the more expansive this set of freedoms the more expansive this list of ingredients to bake the recipe of a good life the better this kind of language shows that the forces created by capitalism or by capitalists by this new system had some similarities to the ways people were forced to do things in previous periods which leads to the second generalization change or progress or movement or dynamism how things change the history of capitalism shows that capitalism isn't some natural human State unchanging um coming out of our human nature it can be shaped molded changed it can exist and it canot exist and anywhere in between it has different ages different cultures different laws different unions different Technologies it has many many different manifestations many different colors from La a fair to corporatism from colonialism to financialised often these changes have been motivated by people who have felt the effects of a catastrophe crisis slavery colonization poor working conditions who have felt their own Freedom or their Community or their Nation to be diminished by the forces of capitalism and have fought to change it or fought to be free from it to have fought to at least replace say foreign capitalists in their country extracting their resources with business people of their own in that sense the flows of capital around the world with in countries across time periods have been redirected by laws and rules and culture as if those laws rules and culture were seaw walls or dams dividing lines troughs to guide the flow of money to guide the flow of investment of capital National Independence movements kick out or nationalize foreign business workers fight for regulation and minimum wage is governments regulate stock markets or what can or can't be done in Pharmaceuticals or Electronics one really good example of this is in Levy's book and he talks about how the so-called profit motive actually needs further inducements to be directed to be effective why does he say this because the profit motive has in some sense always existed and not always led to capitalism people have in many different ways sought to gain from something a situation that's a story as old as time he says that the structures around it the inducements are the things that have led to the different shapes of capitalism over time and those inducements are many they can be cultural social and political they can be legal they can be philosophical he points to things like the Homestead Act in the 19th century um where the federal government gave out grants for people to have some land out west incentivize people to move west and then you had the Boom in farming you had federal land grants and bond loans for Railways giving out federal land for Railways there are military contracts and investment in different Technologies from the government there's um education boards and the direction of Education the culture of Education there's different tax breaks and that's before we even get to regulation in General so capitalism doesn't sit still it's not static it's not essentialistic it doesn't exist as a natural thing outside of the culture the recipe is a human creation and ingredients can be added or taken away it's why culture the availability of economic social and cultural capital the dispersal where they are in the world in the country how many people they affect how many people have access access to you know social connections cultural ideas education as well as economic capital why these things matter so much and I think lone Geniuses and individualism matter less so as we've seen what there really was in many of these periods were thousands of people with the tools the new physics ideas and ideas more broadly engaging in a scientific method of trial and error which was very new and was dispersed through education initiatives all to improve the myy of processes machines tools um approaches the telegraph for example not invented by one person but by many pretty much simultaneously because it was in the culture because it was the next step in a wider culture of science and was in the education and the textbooks at the time the steam engine as we saw went through the hands of not only those few big well-known figures but quite literally thousands of others who are all making tiny improvements to metal work and screws and um different ideas about pressure and different mining needs and all of these things contributed step by step until one person makes one big leap and I think you know the place where the again the economic social and cultural capital is readily available and widely dispersed is the place where you're more likely to have someone take advantage of it and make the next Innovative leap that's obviously why so much happens in somewhere like Silicon Valley today it's been the relationship between institutions and people that have set the tone for these cultural social and political recipes whether that was the Royal Society and whether it was science whether it was the idea of rights-based governments um the inalienable rights of man and the philosophy that backed that up whether it was the idea the expression the legal backing of something like the patent system whether it was the the fight or the putting into practice of regulations about child labor or antitrust what's clear is that this relationship is almost infinitely malleable change is always not only possible but a requirement of History why should we stop the story here some might say we should continue on we should continue to the New Deal and the postwar boom and neoliberalism the end of unions and multinationals instead of literal imperialism what some people call neo-imperialism Global corporations going out into the world all the way to the '90s in the end of the Soviet Union that would surely be the period when capitalists have truly conquered the world and that might be true but I think that's a story for another day because this is a story that naturally very interestingly for our concepts of capitalism naturally seems to fall into two parts this first period was dominated by reasonably and I use uh reasonably advisably here reasonably simple Newtonian physics machines based on that physics single person inventors mechanical factories that one person could manage family businesses growing International ones England being a nice nation of shopkeepers but by the end of this period all of this has changed single person inventors are replaced by institutional science you know you need a degree in rocket science just to understand one part of physics and mechanics you can't understand everything on your own everything becomes much more institutionalized and complex and everyone needs to specialize in certain areas you get the very complicated beginning of the atomic age where something like relativity replaces the kind of simple approach to physics represented by the figure of Newton in the same way the small family businesses are replaced with massive corporations where people have to special in certain areas the growth of management PR accountant legal different departments different specializations imperialism again a kind of simplistic story of one company going out and dominating quite nakedly um a certain Colonial area that gets replaced with multinationals which in some sense do a very similar thing but in a much more complicated much newer a much more postmodern way when we talk about the issues of capitalism today the frame has changed so much and that's one of the reasons understanding this story is so important we need the right Concepts we need the right chapters we need the right language we need the right analysis to guide us through those changes and to think about how one age of capitalism is followed by the next so we can think about what's coming after what's going to be the story of this Century what I find incredible is the thing that Hobs borne points to that the age of laay fair was actually very brief it was over before the people writing about it and thinking about it even knew it in the 19th century the Invisible Hand of the market had morphed into the visible hand Bureau Ry Finance corporate consolidation big government regulation vast databases and balance sheets and accountant and Analysis and stock markets and Global and personal networks and systems seemingly out of control of any single individual and I think that the next chapter when I get to it will have to be an account of this change what that means maybe the next chapter will have to be how corporatism conquered the world I will get there soon well if you made it this far then congratulations and thank you so much for watching this video videos like this take such a long time for me to prepare from the research to the writing to the recording the research in itself takes you know at least a year really before in the last few months I really really dive into it but it takes a lot of exploratory research understanding the literature and it's just a small team it's grown from me who as I said does the reading and the research the writing the recording and then Paul and Louie who really masterfully put it all together to make it even more entertaining for you to watch but it's a lot and it takes a long time when the economics of YouTube incentivizes content that is a lot flashier shorter surface level and so the competition is getting harder and harder so if you want to support content like this you can and you can get something in return you can get adree and early videos you can get bonus videos you can get access to my uh short course on how I think about history how historians think about history the debates that undergraduates and postgraduates learn about uh in an accessible way and really ground your understanding of History which I think is getting more and more important in this age of kind of increasingly democratizing information you get access to scripts and updates about sources and what's coming up and all the rest of it but yes you get to support the channel too and get your name in the credits like all these incredible incredible patreon supporters uh right now it literally wouldn't happen without them so I've left a link below if you want to support for just a dollar or two you can do that there and you can come along to the patreon and ask me questions and you can give me feedback and you know I'm always trying to improve grow uh get better at Framing and understanding and telling these stories so hopefully I'll see you over there you know if not just like share subscribe leave a comment all the rest of it most of all thank you so much and I can't wait to see you again in another big video I've got some big projects planned for next Year see you then