The most significant event of the last 300 years? Americans, prone to patriotism, will pick our country’s revolution back in 1776. Others might say secularization, the African diaspora, the decline of Islam’s caliphate, or the Westernization of the East.
Ever competitive with all these choices is the Industrial Revolution. In 1700, world population and living standards—such as we can measure them—were a small fraction of what they came to be. There certainly was no mass middle class, and while theoretical mathematics was advanced, technology was occasionally brilliant but never summed to anything.
World population, which had been growing at imperceptible rates for centuries, started up the exponential curve in the 18th century, leaping from 600 million in 1700 to 1 billion in 1800 to 1.5 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.
A profound number of these many people were prosperous. GDP—admittedly, a cumbersome and ex post facto statistic—grew 2.5 times faster than population from 1700 to 1900, and then 4.5 times faster from 1900 to 2000.
This was the original “hockey-stick” graph. There were more and more people, and millions upon millions of them were getting richer, after a sleep of centuries.
If ever there was a sphere of doers, it was those who made the Industrial Revolution. The writers, that recondite lot, who addressed themselves to it were spectatorial and ran the gamut from bemused (Booth Tarkington), opposed (Thomas Carlisle), to worked-up (Karl Marx).
It took all the way up to his initial heyday, in the 1950s, for the Industrial Revolution to gain in David S. Landes, who died in August at the age of 89, a historian who both took it seriously for what it was and had the rhetorical gifts to tell its story.
As Brad Delong, the Berkeley economist, said last week, there remains no better summary as to what the Industrial Revolution was than the forty pages that begin Landes’s history of the Industrial Revolution, The Unbound Prometheus (1969). One thing these pages did was set the very definition of the Industrial Revolution. Namely:
“The heart of the Industrial Revolution was an interrelated succession of technological changes. The material advances took place in three areas; (1) there was a substitution of mechanical devices for human skills; (2) inanimate power—in particular, steam—took the place of human and animal strength; (3) there was a marked improvement in the getting and working of raw materials, especially in what are now known as the metallurgical and chemical industries.”
We have stuck with this (along with Landes’s addition of a fourth element on the next page: new forms of labor organization) since 1969. Machines for skills, machines for power, the use of raw materials, with human ingenuity now available for other things.
The secret to the Industrial Revolution (which at its outset was mainly a British phenomenon), as Landes wrote, was its ability to sustain “cumulative change.” Without question, the Latin Middle Ages (let alone Islam and the East) had produced ideas and technology with alacrity. But only beginning in Britain around 1750 was the technological chain engaged. Since that point, we have been able to build on technological advances again and again.
This is the basis of, the reality behind, an exponential curve, as Newton explained at the time. A straight line represents new change, with the old changes discarded. An ever rising line represents everything old lifting up the new to ever greater heights. In its very curvature, our technological progress over the last several centuries is a tribute to all the forbearers. Hence it was essential that the Industrial Revolution at some point find a historian equal to its magnificence.
Landes’s capacity for identifying the telling anecdote in the pageant of the Industrial Revolution was a thing to behold. His Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1999) begins with the story of Nathan Rothschild of Frankfurt who was suffering from a certain kind of boil in 1836. Rothschild kept summoning doctors from concentric circles around Frankfurt until he was calling in doctors from all of Germany, all of Europe, the whole world. Finally the man died. A century and a half later, children in the poorest parts of earth would go to clinics to get this sort of boil resolved, as a matter of routine. And at the time, Nathan Rothschild was the richest person in the world.
“And so the man who could buy anything died, of a routine infection easily cured today for anyone who could find his way today to a doctor or a hospital, or even a pharmacy,” wrote Landes. Here was a historian who could communicate the force of the Industrial Revolution in words.
To be sure, there had been masters of the tongue who had taken up the Industrial Revolution before, but most of these were in the ambit of Marxism. Lest we forget, Marx himself was a rather incredible stylist, especially gifted at invective, and could hurl insults of unusual creativity (against “the bourgeoisie”) for pages on end. This was the main tradition of rendering the Industrial Revolution in prose. The other tradition was the measured prose of the academic article, these unmercifully stacked with equations beginning in the 1940s.
Landes walked into this field in the 1950s having acquired a cosmopolitanism from his learning Japanese and French in World War II and a stint at the conversationalist Society of Fellows at Harvard. By writing well, he was able to bull through a profession increasingly relying on mathematical symbols to try to get its point across.
Landes’s most beloved book remains his history of watchmaking and clocks, Revolution in Time (1983), which is both a history of one of the oldest of all technological industries and one that played a central role in starting and sustaining the Industrial Revolution. For as Landes proved, without the advance and application of timekeeping devices, the new labor modes of the Industrial Revolution would have never had a chance.
Landes was great friends with Bernard Lewis, another giant of latter 20th-century scholarship, and Lewis will remark that in the Middle East, it rather dims the mood when one is punctilious, when one is on time. It makes it seem that one lacks interest in spontaneity and the manifestness of life’s beauty.
Landes understood the arguments (the cultural ones stronger than the economic) against the Industrial Revolution, but was able not so much to counter them as to let the benefits of economic modernization speak on their own behalf. It was a privilege for me to serve as his teaching assistant some twenty years ago as he composed The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and all of us who set pen to paper on the matter of economic history owe a debt to the man who styled the Industrial Revolution like no one else.