pratclif.comDURING the years 1850-70 the proportion of western European trade which was purely internal decreased and the proportion which was external and international vastly increased. This change is commonly described, for the United Kingdom, as her becoming `the workshop of the world' – a change which was well on the way by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, but which was to become of supreme importance, both for Britain and for Europe, by 1871. What had been true for the cotton industry in the first half of the century became more and more true for the heavy industries and for the ship-building and engineering industries in the third quarter of the century. Their prosperity depended on imported raw materials or on exported manufactured goods or on both. In general Britain came to rely for essential foodstuffs – especially grain – upon imports. She paid for these imports by exporting industrial products, by shipping and insurance services, and by interest upon her capital investments abroad. Britain committed herself fully to being an industrial state. In consequence she became a crucial factor in the whole economy of the world.
Her chief competitor until 1871 was her traditional rival, France. The Paris Exposition of 1855 matched the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, and showed that French enterprise was far from backward. But the spirit of cooperation which existed earlier between the Bank of England and the Bank of France in face of a common threat of financial crisis was not absent from other fields of economic life. The Cobden Treaty of 1860, negotiated by Michel Chevalier for France and Richard Cobden for Britain, marked the climax of recognition of common interests between the two major western powers. It involved a temporary reversal of the traditional French protectionist policy, which was no less significant than Britain's adoption of free-trade principles in 1846. It reduced French duties on coal and on most manufactured goods to rates not exceeding thirty per cent. In return Britain lowered duties on French wines and brandy. Within the next decade the value of both British exports to France and French exports to England doubled. This began a movement toward creating a large free-trade area in western Europe. As a direct result of it similar treaties reducing tariffs were made by both countries with Belgium. By further treaties with the German Zollverein, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and even Austria, France of the 1860s became for a while the focus of a great European movement for the freeing of international trade. This movement indicates the wider pattern that the economic life of Europe was assuming. It operated in two great zones. One, centring on the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium as the most highly industrialized countries, was now spreading out to comprise the whole of western Europe, including parts of Germany and northern Italy, and even the eastern states of the United States. The other zone comprised the large agricultural areas of southern and eastern Europe, the agrarian regions from which came raw materials and food; it extended eastward to Russia and westward to the western and south United States and South America. It even stretched, through British imperial connexions, to Australia and India.
The chief initial impetus for this extension of economic life had come from Great Britain. In the 1850s many of the railways in western Europe were built by British contractors, partly with British and partly with local capital. In the following decade western European enterprise completed the railroad networks, expanded home industries, and mechanized manufacture. Meanwhile, after the financial crisis of 1857 and the Indian Mutiny of the same year, British interests moved on to the outer zone of raw-material supplies. The great age of British railway-building in India began, financed almost entirely by British capital; and in Argentina and Brazil the first railways were built in the 1850s. With the new links of railroads and, during the 1860s, of ships – which it had become a great new industry of Britain to build – the two zones became more and more closely interconnected. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was the symbol of the demand for quicker transit between the centre and the periphery of this new economic complex. Though it was built with French capital and by French enterprise, more than half the shipping that passed through it was British. Sometimes British and French cooperation took more deliberate forms, as when these countries went to war against the Chinese Empire and in 1860 exacted from it not privileged concessions or separate spheres of influence, but the opening of new ports to world trade and the reduction of tariffs to five per cent. It seemed natural for the powers engaged in making the Cobden Treaty to try to extend the principles of free trade from European to world trade.
Britain, because of her world-wide colonial connexions, set the pace in forging new economic links between the inner and outer zones. After the middle of the century the colonies were turned from remote outposts and bases, difficult of access, into a more closely knit mesh of economic interests. Along with greater readiness to loosen the political controls and the commercial regulations that had previously been regarded as natural bonds of empire, came a closer actual integration of the economic development of the colonies with that of Great Britain. Their economic status continued much the same, even as their political status changed. They remained primarily sources of raw materials and markets for British manufacturers; this division of labour was even extended as the influx of British capital investment joined the flow of British manufactured goods. This development, in turn, changed the whole focus of British capital investment and narrowed its geographical spread. In the first half of the century capital had flowed out to the whole world but little to the colonies; in the third quarter of the century it concentrated increasingly in the colonies. In 1850 about one third of England's foreign investment was in America, the rest mainly in Europe. In 1854 the total everywhere is estimated to have amounted to about £300 million; by 1860 it totalled £650 million. By 1868 more than £75 million had been sunk in Indian railways alone; and in 1870 well over a quarter of the total of over £750 million was invested in the loans of colonial governments. At the same time the balance of British imperial interests in general had shifted since 1830. The old colonial empire had centred mainly on the North Atlantic – in Canada and the Caribbean, and in strong commercial and financial connexions with the United States. With the growth and consolidation of British power in India, Ceylon, Burma, Australasia, and the South Pacific, such ports as those of West Africa, Cape Colony, and the chains of intermediate islands formed stepping stones on the route between the North Atlantic region and the Indian and Pacific Oceans, By then, too, the West African trading posts were growing into large colonial territories, the Cape was becoming the springboard for immense expansion northward, and on the western shores of the Indian Ocean lay a corresponding chain of British possessions. In the South Pacific what had been mere footholds in Southern Australia and Northern New Zealand were fast becoming a solid continent under British control.
The old commercial assessment of the value of colonial territories was itself undergoing change. They were valued less for their own commerce and more as guarantees of a world-wide trade, keeping open the supplies and markets of the world to British manufactures; as points of strategic advantage and strength; as offering opportunities for investors, missionaries, and emigrants; as providing national prestige in an era of intensifying nationalist rivalries. Special local commercial advantages in the colonies themselves now seemed of much less importance, and so the old Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660, which had excluded foreign ships from the carrying trade between Britain and her colonies, were repealed in 1849. Greater freedom of trade and shipping was encouraged, and the establishment of responsible self-government on the lines that Lord Durham had adumbrated for Canada was encouraged elsewhere. The Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865 gave a general assurance of internal self-government to all the colonial legislatures; new constitutions for New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania were set up in 1855; and in 1867 the British North America Act opened the door for the federation of all the Canadian provinces except Newfoundland.
The growth of Europe's whole population, combined with the relatively slight improvements in agricultural production, meant that Europe as a whole, and particularly western Europe, was becoming dependent for its corn on sources extending beyond the granaries of eastern Europe. In normal years France could feed herself. The German states, in aggregate, had a surplus of corn for export, as had eastern Europe, including Russia. As of old the surpluses of the whole Vistula basin still went down-river to Danzig in the Baltic; from there much was imported to western Europe, particularly Holland, which had for long had to import grain. Some Russian wheat came from the Black Sea and found its way on to the European market. But after the middle of the century more and more corn came from the American continent and from Russia. Here were the boundless new supplies needed to feed Europe's enlarged population.
France, like Britain, got most of her raw cotton from the United States, and cotton imports made the fortune of Le Havre as a port. During the Second Empire, France's exports tended to exceed her imports, and she was sending capital abroad heavily. But this was for the first time, and most of it went into railways, canals, mines, and government bonds. Internally, there was great concentration in the control of certain industries, most notably in iron. The famous Comité des Forges was founded in 1864, and its interests were extended into Belgium and Germany. Great families like the Péreires and the Foulds controlled large sectors of national industry and business. French colonial possessions were increasing too, though less spectacularly than Britain's. Algeria had been completely taken over by 1857. Though its products were too similar to France's own for it to serve the same purposes as were served by Britain's colonies, it became a good market for French cotton goods. Tahiti and the Ivory Coast had been added, even before 1850, and the Second Empire sent expeditions to Peking in 185960iand to Syria in 1861, explorers to West Africa, and new settlements to Dahomey and the Guinea coast. New Caledonia was occupied in1853, and after the capture of Saigon in Indochina in 1859 three provinces in Cochin-China were annexed and a protectorate was established over Cambodia. In these ways France, like Britain, became indisputably a world colonial power, with national interests straddling both the inner and outer zones of the world economy. She differed from Britain in that her colonies were not used primarily for settlement, being mainly (apart from Algeria) tropical or semitropical in character; and her industrial development, no less than her geographical position, anchored her firmly in Europe.
Until the 1860s Belgium was the only European country to keep pace with Britain in industrial growth. In her resources of coal, iron, and zinc she was particularly fortunate, and she enjoyed, as did Britain, the advantage of the early establishment of iron and engineering industries. By 1870 she, too, had adopted a policy of free trade as regards the import of food and raw materials. By that date her own mineral resources of iron and zinc were becoming exhausted, but she remained a manufacturing and exporting country because she had the technicians and skilled workers, the industrial plant, enterprising management and business organization, and good communications. She exported heavy equipment such as machines, locomotives, and rails, as well as lighter goods such as glass and textiles. In the 1860s she was exporting capital for the construction of railways in Spain, Italy, the Balkans, and even South America. On balance she was, like Britain, a heavy importer of food, particularly wheat and cattle feed. After her separation from the Netherlands, Belgium lacked colonies until she acquired the rich territory of the Congo in the last quarter of the century.
The Netherlands, however, kept its profitable connexions with the Dutch East Indies and ranked as one of the chief colonial powers. The Dutch spread their rule over the three thousand miles of the archipelago of the East Indies, and exploited it by a form of forced labour whereby farmers had to deliver fixed amounts of certain crops as a kind of tax. A freer system was introduced only after 1870, though no moves were made in the direction of greater colonial self-government. Although much less industrialized than Belgium, the Netherlands was strong in particular industries, including its traditional trade of ship-building. Commercially, it was an entrepôt for such colonial products as coffee, tea, sugar, and the traditional spices.
Despite important differences of emphasis between them, the western states of the United Kingdom, France, and the Low Countries were all sharing in a broadly similar process of economic change. Together they formed the most intensively industrialized core of the European economy. They were exerting a strong influence upon the growth of central and eastern Europe. But as the chief maritime powers they were looking increasingly outward to the oceans of the world across which sailed their shipping and their emigrants, their raw materials and foodstuffs, their manufactured products and capital investments. They stood balanced between an economic and political pull inward to continental Europe, and a commercial and imperial pull outward to the other continents of the world. Their interests were being reoriented. Trade among the European states remained both large and important. Although French coal production trebled between 1850 and 1870, much of her coking coal for iron smelting came from Britain and from Westphalia in Germany. This was paid for by exporting French silks and wines to Britain and Belgium. For Britain the export of coal became important only after 1850. The five million tons she exported in 1855 were only two and a half per cent of her total exports, and went mostly to France, Germany, Russia, Denmark, and Italy. Of her very much larger exports of cotton goods at that time, one quarter went to Asia, mostly to India. Another very good customer was the United States, which supplied her with most of the raw cotton she needed. But by 1860 the destinations of British cotton goods had shifted. Asiatic and African customers were taking as much as one half of them, and they were to take still more in the course of time. For France and the Low Countries, too, overseas trade was becoming a more and more important sector of their commerce.
The south-western states of Spain and Portugal, and the north-western states of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, shared somewhat less directly and drastically in this burst of industrialization and overseas expansion. Whereas the Scandinavian states had no colonial connexions but were expanding their industries, the Iberian states made little industrial progress but had colonies of some importance. Spain held the Canaries, and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Portugal held the scattered Atlantic islands of the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde; since 1848 she had occupied the area of Angola on the West African coast, and in 1857 she settled a European colony at Mozambique on the East African coast; in India she still held Goa. But both Spain and Portugal, despite the richness of their mineral deposits of iron, lead, copper, and other metals, developed these industries very slowly. They were handicapped by a shortage of good coal, scarcity of capital, and lack of technical skill and equipment. Both were predominantly agricultural and remained backward in techniques. There were large peasant risings in Castile, Aragon, and Andalusia in 1840, 1855, 1857, 1861, and 1865, caused by the breakup of common lands and extreme rural poverty. Sweden and Norway, in sharp contrast, underwent an industrial revolution between 1840 and 1860, under the benign rule of Oscar I, and foreign trade grew almost in proportion. A policy of free trade was adopted in 1857. Norway shared in this prosperity and her trading interests were more widespread and even more important than those of Sweden. Denmark – the Denmark of Hans Christian Andersen – stood economically as well as geographically midway between central Europe and north-western Europe.
The homogeneity of western Europe as a whole derived not only from this common pattern of economic change and maritime expansion, but also, to an increasing extent, from a common direction of political tendencies. Liberal and democratic ideas were fermenting more vigorously because they were less impeded by irredentist nationalism than in central or eastern Europe. Save for Norwegian desire for independence from Sweden, which was blunted by the new prosperity, and the thorny issues of Schleswig and Holstein, which bedevilled Danish-German relations and impeded Danish economic development, western Europe already enjoyed political unification and national independence. On this basis there was growing up a new machinery of government, a closer interrelation between state and society established by new methods of administration and of social organization.
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Mis à jour le 09/01/2018 pratclif.com