First Industrial Revolution
HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
SPRING 1998
20 FEBRUARY
THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
DICTIONARY TIME-LINES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this assignment, you should learn to
identify and discuss the following terms:
- Capitalism, Karl Marx, Communism, proletariat, guild, open-field system,
transportation revolution, The "Putting-Out System, The "Factory" System.
You should also have considered the following matters:
- How may one define "Capitalism," and what characterizes a "Capitalist"
society?
- In what way was Karl Marx a Realist philosopher?
- What led to the shift of long-distance trade from the rivers of Russia
back to Western Europe?
- How was medieval agriculture organized, and what were the weaknesses of it
technology?
- What advances in agricultural technology did the medieval peasantry
develop?
- How did the guild system operate and what caused its failure?
- What systems of production and distribution replaced the guild system, and
what were the effects of these new systems on the quality of European life?
TEXT
I would choose capitalism as the second important thing that
distinguished Western Europe from the other civilizations of the Old World. Even
until well into the modern era, the Turks, Indians, and Chinese could, and did,
manufacture far finer rifles than the Europeans. The difference was that the
Europeans manufactured millions of them. Mass production, assembly lines,
interchangeable parts, and other such things were what distinguished the
Europeans from the other civilizations of the world, and all of these things
were a product of Capitalism.
Capitalism is one of those terms that are in common use, but that people
would find it difficult to define. Basically, capital is wealth,
and Capitalism can be defined as a situation in which a person owns
wealth in the form of raw materials and/or the tools for processing those raw
materials into marketable manufactured goods. The person sells his goods and
uses the profit to obtain more raw materials and/or more tools to process that
material. "But," you might say, "that describes practically every economic
activity in existence. How is Capitalism different?" Capitalism differs in that
the person who owns the raw materials and/or tools of production does not engage
in amassing those raw materials or in using those tools but he does own --
completely and absolutely -- whatever is produced with them. The people who do
the work are paid by the man who owns the materials and tools, and that's the
only share of the profit that they are entitled to receive.
Karl Marx, the 19th-century historian/economist who developed
the theories underlying Communism, stated the matter quite simply
when he defined Capitalism as a system in which the means of production are
owned and controlled by the wealthy. Marx believed that Capitalism was an
unstable system, and Communism was based upon his theory that the laws governing
economics were physical laws that could not be changed by human beings (remember
the Realists?), and that the people who did the work but did not share in the
profits -- the proletariat -- would eventually take control of the
sources of raw materials and the means of production by force, and would
establish a new society based upon an economy different from that of Capitalism.
He believed that any human society was a reflection of the economic system it
employed, and this seems like a valid observation. It means that the capitalist
society that evolved in Medieval Europe made it unique in the early modern era.
Let's see how capitalism developed.
In about 1000, the rulers of Kiev had destroyed the Khazar
state to the east of them and, by so doing, removed a buffer that had protected
the Varangian Route of Russian rivers from the peoples of central Asia.
One of these peoples, the Patchinaks (there are various spellings of this
name), settled around 1000 in those lands where the Varangian rivers entered the
Black Sea. The Varangian route was blocked, and merchants began once again to
carry goods from the Baltic to Mediterranean markets by way of the
Seine-Loire-Garonne/Rhone river routes of France. In turn, Eastern merchants in
appreciable numbers began to appear once again in the West.
The western European cities of the Roman empire had been, for the most part,
artificial creations established by the imperial government to centralize legal,
religious, and economic activities. As the empire in the West decline, power and
population began to move from the cities to the countryside. By the tenth
century, many of these Roman cities had been abandoned, or had been reduced to
fortresses, cathedrals, or monasteries with a nearby village, often enclosed by
part of the old Roman wall. Nevertheless, they were still centers of population
and generated a certain amount of traffic. The long-distance traders often found
these locations convenient for breaking their journey, selling some of their
goods, dividing cargo, or even trading with merchants arriving from distant
parts. They often established residences and warehouses (called "factories") in
the villages adjacent to the main administrative center and took the lead in
restoring and extending the old Roman walls to complete the defenses of an
essentially new manufacturing and commercial center. These merchants created a
social life by establishing guilds, an old institution that had
evolved to meet new needs. Originally religious groups that met for feasts on
religious holidays, the guilds had been transformed by the merchants of the time
into corporations providing their members with common defense, the
opportunity to pool their capital, political action groups, and many other
advantages. The merchants' guild took the lead in developing and governing these
new trading settlements. Their great growth came, however, as a result of
development in medieval agriculture.
Medieval farming was not organized as it is at present, with individual
family farm situated in a fenced block of fields, woods, and pasture. In the
year 1000, a bird's-eye view of europe would have consisted of a green sea of
forest with scattered brown islands of human habitation. Each island consisted
of a village surrounded by two large and unfenced open fields. The
village would have had a church, perhaps a larger fortified house of the lord or
his steward, and several huts.
The huts were usually small, and perhaps made of whitewashed sod, or
wattle and daub. They often housed the family's animals also. There would
be one or two rooms, with a loft for storage. The family lived in a single room,
in the center of which was a few flat stones on which the fire was placed. The
roof was thatched, with a hole at the top through which the smoke escaped. There
were probably no windows, and light came in through the smoke hole and an open
door.The floor was dirt, sometimes covered with leaves or rushes. The furniture
was a trestle table, a few stools, and a storage chest or two for whatever
pallets the family might spread on the floor as their beds. Each hut had a
messuage, about half an acre of land for a garden, bee-hives, etc.
Attached.
The huts were sometimes grouped around a central open place, or green, in
which the peasants often grazed their animals. There was usually a source of
water nearby, and a stream might run through the green, perhaps ponded to raise
fish, ducks, and geese. Along the stream grew tall grass that the villagers
mowed regularly to store for winter feed for their animals. Not too far away was
the forest or brush in which the villagers pastured their pigs, gathered nuts,
berries, herbs, and other things, and, when allowed to do so, picked up sticks
and twigs to use as fuel.
The open fields of the village were used to grow grain, usually
wheat. They consisted of a large number of adjacent strips, each about 33' wide
and 660' long, the amount of land that could be plowed in half a day. Each
villager, the lord, and the local church owned several of these strips, and the
strips that an individual owned were located throughout the field. The greatest
labor was that of plowing, and the village would plow and plant and entire field
cooperatively. Since there were no chemical fertilizers or herbicides, the soil
was exhausted quickly, and weeds were a constant problem. To meet these
concerns, the peasants planted only one of their fields each season. The other
was left fallow. The village animals would graze on the weeds, deposit their
manure, and, before the remaining weeds had seeded, the peasants would plow them
under.
Weather was a constant worry. Wet springs could cut plowing time, rot seed in
the ground, and so reduce the harvest. Fall rains could wet the grain before
harvesting and make it impossible to dry and thresh. Production was not great --
seven to ten bushels per acre was considered good, and two or three of those
bushels had to be saved for seed. Part of the peasants' harvest was taken by the
lord as taxes, and part by the church as a tithe, for perhaps a total of three
or four more bushels out of ten. So a peasant might gather as his own only a
bushel or two from each of his strips. A family of four needed about 35 bushels
a year, so families went hungry when there was a harvest shortfall. Most relied
upon their garden to give them some variety in their diet and to save them in
case of a failure of the wheat crop.
During the period between about 800 and 1000, however, medieval peasants made
several innovations in farming that increased production and productivity
greatly. One was the use of horses for plowing. Horses are faster
and have greater endurance than oxen and can be controlled by voice commands,
eliminating the need for an additional man in the plow team to guide the ox or
oxen with a sharp pole. Several innovations were needed to make use of horses,
however: horseshoes to keep the horses' hooves from softening in
the wet earth of plowing time, the horse collar, since horses do
not have well-defined shoulders like oxen, and harnessing. The peasants
developed tandem harnessing, which allowed as many horses as one
had to be hitched to the same vehicle.
This gave the medieval peasants almost unlimited tractive power and made
possible the widespread use of the heavy, or mould-board, plow.
This plow had an iron plowshare that could cut through the earth and a
mould-board that turned the sod over. This made the traditional criss-cross
double plowing of fields unnecessary. The mould-board plow could also plow deep
-- as long as sufficient tractive power was available -- to make more soil
minerals possible, and could plough the heavy but fertile soils of northwestern
Europe.
The peasants started using peas and beans as an alternative
crop to grain. Peas and beans restore nitrogen to the soil, choke out weeds,
provide excellent silage for winter stock feed, and their vines keep the soil
friable and thus make plowing easier. Many villages divided their two fields
into three, and planted them in a rotating sequence of beans, winter wheat,
summer wheat, and fallow. With good planning, this could result in three annual
harvests in place of the traditional one.
So conditions in the West were now favorable to a revival of commerce. The
slow spread of advanced farming techniques. The heavy plow made it possible to
open up the fertile but heavy bottom lands of Europe, and to plow lands with a
single pass rather than the criss-cross pattern the lands demanded of the
scratch plough. The heavy plow required greater tractive power, and the
development of metal horse-shoes, padded horse-collars, and tandem harnessing
made it possible to use horses as draft animals. Horses were not only faster but
were more intelligent than oxen and so did not need the attention of a man
wielding a goad. The peasants discovered the value of leguminous crops (peas and
beans) in restoring soil fertility, and -- although they did not realize it --
improved the human and animal diet of western Europe with the addition of the
relatively high grade of protein provided by peas and beans. The deep plow and
the use of legumes made it possible to change the two-field system, in which 50%
of the arable land was put in fallow each season, to a three field-system, in
which only 33% of the land needed to be in fallow. Agricultural productivity, as
well as production, increased. This led to an increase in the peasant population
at the same time that fewer hands were needed to provide the populations food
requirements. A "surplus" peasant population arose that needed an outlet. Many
of these peasants emigrated to the frontiers of Europe and began to support
western European expansion by populating the lands the warrior class conquered.
Many others turned to developing Europe's "internal frontier" by draining
marshes, as in Belgium and the Netherlands, irrigating dry lands, as in Spain
and parts of southern France, and clearing forests, as in Wales and eastern
Germany. They began to transform Europe's landscape.
Even this was not sufficient to absorb all of the "surplus" peasant
population, and many of them turned to trade and manufacture. Most villages had
part-time artisans, who gained an additional income by working during the winter
to supply the village's need for particular goods and services. As the size and
number of villages grew, some peasant artisans began to work at trades
full-time. This same increase in population led to the need for more distinctive
personal names, and many people took their trade as a second name. Consequently,
modern family names are a living record of the elaboration of the western
European economy. Fletcher, Frenier, Shields, Schild, Spearman, Bowman, Boyer,
Greaves, Sadler and others were engaged in the production of armaments, while
Houseman, Mason, Maurer, Thatcher, Glazer, Turner, Carpenter, Sawyer, Sierra,
and Dauber were in the business of home construction and improvement. Smith,
Schmidt, LeFevre, Faber, Tinker, Plumb, and Ferrier worked in metals. Busch,
Bush, Brewer, Brewster, Aylward, Boardman were in the brewing and bar-tending
business. Arkwright, Cooper, Hooper, Boatwright, Wheelwright, Cartwright,
Wainwright build boxes and barrels, boats, carts, and wagons. Wagner, Chapman,
Packer, Merchant, Marchant, Drover, Dealer, Coiner, Minter were all engaged in
the trading and selling of the products of such artisans. The list can be
extended immensely. When long-distance trade began to flow once again through
Western Europe, there existed a significant, although scattered body of
manufacturers and craftsmen there. An agricultural revolution was underway.
Population began to increase, and some of that increase began to concentrate in
towns and cities and turn their energies to manufacture and commerce.
The presence of a population of artisans and merchants attracted a number of
other specialists such as physicians, apothecaries, teachers, parchment-makers,
scribes, lawyers, cobblers, furriers, butchers, bakers, cooks, prostitutes,
barbers, tailors, and all of the other tradesmen necessary to support an urban
population. Some of these centers developed some specialty of local manufacture.
Centers along pilgrimage roots usually had a large number of shoemakers, for
instance, since pilgrims walked for hundreds of miles along rocky roads and
needed new shoes at regular intervals. The towns of Belgium began to use the
fine wool from the sheep who pastured in the meadows and marshes along the sea
to weave high-grade cloth for export to other towns.
Such industries increased local population still further. The production of
woolen cloth, for instance, required carders (often women), fullers, dyers,
spinners, weavers, printers (sometimes), and merchants. there was also an
increased need for common laborers, and so many relatively unskilled peasants
moved into the "new" cities and towns. These urban centers needed supplies of
both food and raw materials for processing, and the supply of these commodities
transformed peasant society.
Up to this time, there had been little point, from the peasants' point of
view, to producing a surplus except to build up a reserve of food as insurance
against crop failure, marauding war parties, or any of the other dangers of the
time. Neighboring villages, producing the same crops, provided no market for
surplus commodities, and there was little enough to buy even if there had been a
cash market for surplus production. The need of the new and growing cities and
towns for food and raw materials changed that situation completely, and many
villagers now strove to increase their production and to sell their crops in the
urban centers. Some used their profits to commute their labor services. Instead
of spending two days a week in their lords' fields providing two weeks of
plowing, two weeks of harvesting, and in numerous minor services, they paid an
annual rent. Now able to devote their full energies to producing and selling
more than before, such peasants were able to accumulate still more money and to
use this money to purchase the land rights of their less fortunate neighbors. A
class of landless peasants began to emerge that swelled the ranks of the
homeless and jobless poor. The poor moved from place to place, seeking work, and
offered a source of cheap labor for plowing and harvesting that made it possible
to make medieval agriculture still more profitable. The village community no
longer had to support members whose sole contribution was to provide the extra
hands needed at harvest time.
European agriculture became rationalized in this fashion. In some parts of
Europe, the need for raw materials for manufacturing grew so great that local
agriculture could not satisfy that need as well as grow sufficient food for the
population. These areas began to import food and raw materials, and this
stimulated what might be called a transportation revolution, with
the construction of new canals and roads, the dredging of harbors, and the
development of new and more efficient wagons and ships. In time, this
transportation network made it possible for some regions of Europe to specialize
in growing and selling what was best suited for their lands and climate, and
buying and importing the others things that they needed. This led to an
extraordinary development of the European economy, which became based on
regional specialization and the transport of bulk goods for mass consumer
markets.
The basic medieval manufacturing organization was the traditional shop -- a
master and wife, a couple of employees, and a couple of children learning the
trade. The master bought his raw materials, fabricated his product, and sold it
retail. The shop was residence, dormitory, workshop,ware-house, and retail
store. The masters of a given trade in a particular location united into a
guild. The guild served many functions:
Economic
- set quality standards
- prices to be paid for materials and labor and to be asked for finished
products
- set production quotas
- stood surety for loans to fellow members
- pooled capital.
Educational
- maintained educational standards,
- inspected working conditions,
- examined candidates for journey-man and master.
Fraternal
- maintained a burial fund
- cared for widows and orphans of members
- honored the patron saint
- provided representation on the town council
- bailed fellow-guildsmen from jail
Civic
- served in town militia
- provided local fire defense
- maintained a section of the town wall
- took turns at guard duty
- supported local magistrates
- served in local courts
- contributed to the town treasury
- participated in local festivals
- maintained charitable institutions
- hospitals
- infirmaries
- leper hospitals
- charity cemeteries
- poor relief
- care for the aged
- orphanages
The guild system reached a crisis in about 1250-1350. It was non-competitive
and adapted to an expanding economy. After 1250, economic expansion slowed and
the guilds had to face new conditions. The reaction of the masters of many
guilds were
- to restrict admission to master's status
- to reduce labor costs by cutting salaries of journeymen and
- extend the years of apprenticeship
- to lower working conditions
- to reduce civil contributions and charity
- to lower purchase price for raw materials
- to take over work of smaller guilds
- to switch to lower quality, lower cost products
- to establish monopoly areas.
These steps were insufficient in the long run. The guild system was designed
to be cooperative rather than competitive. Any desire for efficiency and profit
was balanced by the acceptance of the goal of a stable economy and concern for
the common good. A significant portion of the profits of the guilds was diverted
to providing social services, but the major limitation of the system was that it
was based upon a number of small businesses and thus could not develop any
efficiency of size. Although the guilds could pool capital, they could not
permit a few individuals to accumulate enough capital to establish large and
"rationally" organized enterprises.
After 1350, markets began to grow smaller, and the powerful long-distance
merchants had to lower their costs in order to compete. They did so by producing
their own goods, by-passing the guilds. There were two major systems of such
"proto-capitalist" production.
The "Putting-Out System
Merchants' agents would rent the necessary equipment to peasant families,
sell them raw materials, and purchase the finished product. This process was
particularly common in the production of candles, clocks, pewterware, stockings,
hats, but most particularly in weaving. This system continued to be common until
the end of the 19th century, and the early parts of George Eliot's (1819-1880)
novel, Silas Marner, offer a good picture of its operation at its height.
The "Factory" System
The merchants would concentrate equipment in a warehouse ("factory"), acquire
raw materials from their own farms or through agents, hire workers for wages
only, ignore any production quotas, and compete rather than co-operate. This
system was used primarily for manufacture consisting of several steps or dealing
with heavy materials. It eventually developed into the factory system
characteristic of the Industrial Era and which is still prevalent in the
post-Industrial age.
The manufacturing guilds fought the development of these proto-capitalist
systems, but were defeated by an alliance of the merchants' and the other
"great" guilds (professional groups such as doctors, druggists, lawyers, gold-
and silver-smiths). Although there were class wars in many towns, the artisan
guilds were unable to compete economically, and so eventually disappeared. Many
guilds persisted for a long time, however, especially those in retail and
small-scale service and repair. It was only with the appearance of shopping
centers and "supermarkets" after World War II that butchers and bakers lost
their professional status, while such groups as plumbers have managed to keep
that status. The professional guilds developed into the American Medical
Association, the American Bar Association, and the silver- smiths and
gold-smiths became the economy's bankers.
The proto-capitalists of the later middle ages did not support civic
services, so urban life deteriorated. The workers' standard of living dropped,
and this reduced their ability to buy the goods they produced. The European
consumer markets grew quite restricted, and this contributed to a general
recession in the fifteenth century. Production was now uncontrolled, and cycles
of inflation and depression became common. More production was moved to the
countryside, and wealth concentrated more rapidly in ever-fewer hands.
Together with the disappearance of the manorial system in the countryside,
the emergence of capitalism altered the structure of society. Peasants and
middle class split into two classes, the proprietors and a proletariat, the
lower levels of which merged with the pauper class. Something of the same thing
was happening among the nobility, where there was an increasing gap between the
squires and the magnates. The medieval structure of social classes was being
replaced by the modern structure based upon economic classes.
ASSIGNMENTS
The foregoing essay is probably sufficient
material for you to digest, and so there are no additional assignments for
today.
This text was produced by Lynn H. Nelson, Department of
History, University of Kansas.
19 February 1998
Lawrence
KS
.
