The Development of Modern Europe Volume II

James Robinson, Charles Beard

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781537817316
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

When, in 1792, the Austrian and Prussian armies had advanced toward Paris with the object of freeing Louis XVI from the restrictions placed upon him by the National Assembly, the French, roused to fury, had deposed and executed a ruler who was convicted of plotting with foreign powers to maintain his authority. In 1814 the allies placed on the throne the brother of Louis XVI, a veteran emigre, who had openly derided the Revolution and had been intriguing with other European powers for nearly twenty years to gain the French crown. Yet there was no demonstration of anger on the part of the nation, no organized opposition to the new king. The French were still monarchical at heart and had quietly submitted to the rule of Napoleon, which was no less despotic than that of Louis XIV.

THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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THE GROWTH OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND COMPETITION: IMPERIALISM

During the first half of the nineteenth century, England stood easily at the head of all the nations of the world in the output of her mines and factories and the vast extent of her commerce. She had laid the foundations for this supremacy during the eighteenth century, when she gained the control of India and Canada and certain important islands, and in the early part of the nineteenth century, when she secured her interests in southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. This expansion enabled her to reap the full advantage of her new machinery, which had so marvelously increased her power of production. No invading armies had harried her fields, burned her shipping, or sacked her towns. Indeed, the wars from which the Continent suffered, usually served to increase rather than lessen England’s prosperity, owing to the demand they caused for the products of her looms and foundries.

Under these circumstances the annual trade of Great Britain, including exports and imports, rose from about one hundred and thirty-five million dollars in 1798 to over five hundred millions in 1850. She was already supreme on the seas in Napoleon’s time, and her mercantile marine steadily increased in order to distribute the goods which she produced to all parts of the earth.

The other nations were far behind her in all these sources of commercial strength. Napoleon’s efforts to render the Continent independent of England and her colonies had failed; there was not a single steam engine in France in 1812, and it was not until after Napoleon’s fall that France set herself seriously to compete with England by the introduction of machinery. Germany was less favorably situated than France, since it had for years been the main theater of long and devastating wars. It was not a united nation, but a collection of practically independent states which were divided, previous to the development of the Zollverein, by high tariff duties, and embarrassed by a great variety of coinage. Italy and Austria suffered from similar disadvantages.

The United States of America, now so formidable in every market of the world, had in 1815 a small and scattered population. Its interests were almost exclusively agricultural, and although its ships enjoyed a considerable carrying trade on the high seas, its people lacked the capital necessary to develop the immense natural resources of the country and thereby become a serious menace to the manufacturers of the old world.

In considering the development of commerce and industry since 1815 it is necessary to distinguish between the manufacturing which is carried on within a country to meet its own demands, and the production of commodities destined to be sold at a profit to other countries. For example, the cotton manufacturers of Manchester or the cutlery makers of Sheffield might conceivably content themselves with supplying the English demand; or, on the other hand, they might devote their attention principally to meeting the needs of South Africa, Australia, or China. During the Middle Ages, although there was some commerce, most production was carried on for domestic consumption. Gradually, however, international trade has taken on larger and larger proportions and has now become one of the most striking characteristics of our present civilization. The introduction of machinery in England naturally led her manufacturers to lay more and more stress upon foreign trade, since they could readily produce a great deal more than they could sell at home. The progress of industry on the Continent and in the United States has produced exactly the same result, and the nations of the earth have now become rivals in their eagerness to secure as large a share of the world’s markets as possible.

Closely connected with this prodigious expansion of commerce has been the development of the means of transportation and communication. The discovery that steam could be used to carry goods cheaply and speedily to all parts of the world has made it possible for the manufacturer to widen his market indefinitely, and has, in fact, made the world one great market place. The problem of applying steam to navigation had occupied inventors long before Fulton made his celebrated experiment on the Hudson River in 1807. Toward the close of the seventeenth century it was suggested that a piston engine could be used to drive wheels for the propulsion of vessels, and in 1707 steam was actually applied to propel a small model boat on the Fulda River in Germany. During the eighteenth century a number of inventors in England and America turned their attention to the development of this idea. In 1736 Jonathan Hull took out a patent in England for the application of steam in propelling ships, and some years later two Americans made several demonstrations of the practicability of steam navigation.

The honor of making the steamship a success commercially belongs, however, to Robert Fulton. In the spring of 1807 he launched his Clermont at New York, and in the autumn of that year the “new water monster” made its famous trip to Albany. Transoceanic navigation began in 1819 with the voyage of the steamer Savannah from Savannah to St. Petersburg via Great Britain. The trip to Liverpool was made in twenty-five days, sails being used to help the engine.

Within a quarter of a century steamships began to replace the old and uncertain sailing vessels, and to-day they compose two thirds of the net tonnage of the world’s merchant marine. In 1840 the great Cunard Steamship Company inaugurated its transatlantic service, and since that time there has been a steady development in the number of navigation companies, as well as of steam vessels and their capacity for speed and freight. The Great Western, which startled the world in 1838 by steaming from Bristol to New York in fifteen days and ten hours, was a ship of 1378 tons, 212 feet long, and had an indicated horse power of 1260, with a daily consumption of 36 tons of coal. The Lusitania, launched in 1907, has a gross tonnage of 32,500 tons, engines of 68,000 horse power, is 785 feet long, and carries a supply of over 5000 tons of coal for its journey across the Atlantic, which lasts less than five days.

So highly developed were the marine engines at the end of the nineteenth century that “a small cake of coal which would pass through a ring the size of a shilling, when burned in the compound engine of a modern steamboat, would drive a ton of food and its proportion of the ship two miles on its way from a foreign port.” According to another calculation, half a sheet of note paper will develop sufficient power, when burned in connection with a triple-expansion engine, to carry a ton a mile in an Atlantic steamer. So it has come about that the cost of carrying a year’s supply of breadstuff for an English workingman’s family from Minneapolis to Liverpool is less than his average wage for one day. The turbine engine, in which the power of the steam is more advantageously applied than in the older piston engine, is being introduced in the newer ships such as the huge Lusitania and the Mauretania. These engines promise greater speed and economy than the type they are displacing.

It is now possible to make the journey from Southampton to New York, three thousand miles, in six days or less, with almost the regularity of an express train. Japan may be reached from Vancouver in less than thirteen days and from San Francisco, via Honolulu, a distance of five thousand five hundred miles, in less than seventeen days. A commercial map of the world shows that the globe is now crossed in every direction by definite routes which are followed by innumerable freight and passenger steamers passing regularly from one port to another.

The East and the West have been brought much nearer together by the piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, which formerly barred the way from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. In ancient times a canal connected the easternmost mouth of the Nile with the Red Sea, but it had been permitted to fill up with sand, so that when Bonaparte was ordered by the French Directory to consider its reconstruction, he and his engineers found few traces of it. The advantages of a canal had long been fully realized before the great French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, gained permission from the ruler of Egypt to organize a company to undertake the work. The line of the ancient canal was abandoned, and the great trench was dug in an almost straight line from Port Said, on the Mediterranean, southward for a hundred miles to Suez on the Red Sea. After ten years of work the canal was opened to traffic in November, 1869.

In 1884 a new International Commission of Engineers was appointed, which decided to enlarge the canal so as to enable steamers of greater size to pass through it. It is now used by an ever-increasing number of vessels; in 1905 over five thousand took advantage of it, thus avoiding the detour of thousands of miles involved in rounding the Cape of Good Hope. An agreement among all the leading European powers provides that the canal shall be open at all times for war ships as well as merchantmen, but no act of war shall be permitted in its neighborhood.

The Isthmus of Panama offers an obstacle to trade which has for years been the object of discussion and negotiations. In 1872 President Grant appointed a commission to consider the construction of a canal, but nothing was done until 1881 when de Lesseps, encouraged by the flattering success of his first venture, succeeded in organizing the Panama Canal Company in France and work was actually begun. But the efforts to obtain the necessary funds for completing the costly enterprise led to widespread bribery of members of the French Parliament, which was disclosed in 1892. This scandal was followed by the dissolution of the French company. In 1902 the Congress of the United States authorized the President to purchase for forty million dollars the property in which the French investors had sunk so much money. Arrangements with the republic of Colombia for the construction of the canal by the United States having come to naught, the state of Panama, through which the line of the proposed canal passes, seceded from Colombia in 1903, and its independence was immediately recognized by President Roosevelt. A treaty in regard to the canal zone was then duly concluded with the new republic, and after some delays the work of the French company was resumed by the United States and is now progressing rapidly.

Just as the gigantic modern steamship has taken the place of the schooner and clipper for the rapid trade of the world, so, on land, the merchandise which used to be dragged by means of horses and oxen or carried in slow canal boats is being transported in long trains of capacious cars, each of which holds as much as fifteen or twenty large wagons. The story of the locomotive, like that of the spinning machine or steam engine, is the history of many experiments and their final combination by a successful inventor. Wooden tracks had been extensively used in the eighteenth century for horsecar lines, and in 1801 Parliament authorized the construction of such a railway from Wandsworth to Croydon,—a distance of nine miles. Many years before a French inventor had demonstrated the possibility of using steam for locomotion by constructing a road wagon driven by a small engine. Other inventors were at work on the problem and thus smoothed the way for the triumph of George Stephenson.

This distinguished inventor, the son of a poor English miner, although deprived through poverty of an education, taught himself how to read and write. He began work at the mines early in life, and being impressed with the difficulties of hauling the heavy wagons of coal and iron ore, he determined to apply to this purpose the steam engine which Watt had brought to such a degree of perfection. In 1814 he built a small locomotive, known as “Puffing Billy,” which was used at the mines, and in 1825, with the authorization of Parliament, he opened between Stockton and Darlington, in the northern part of England, a line for the conveyance of passengers and freight. About this time a road was being projected between Liverpool and Manchester, and in an open competition, in which five locomotives were entered, Stephenson’s “Rocket” was chosen for the new railroad, which was formally opened in 1830. This famous engine weighed about seven tons and ran at an average speed of thirteen miles an hour, -a small affair when compared with the giant locomotive of our day weighing a hundred tons and running fifty miles an hour. Within fifteen years trains were running regularly between Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, and at the close of the century Great Britain had twenty-two thousand miles of railway, carrying over a billion passengers annually.

The first railway was opened in Germany in 1835, but the development of the system was greatly hindered by the territorial divisions which then existed. It was in the great state of Prussia that construction went on with the greatest rapidity, largely under government ownership and control. Some of the lines were built directly by the government and others were later purchased by it. This policy has been continued, and at present by far the greater part of the German railways are owned by the imperial or by state governments, only something over three thousand miles out of over thirty-four thousand miles being in private hands. In Austria-Hungary, also, the majority of the lines are owned or operated by the government.

The first railway in France was built in 1828, but owing to the timidity of investors the development was slow. Five years later the government took up the project of connecting Paris and the principal cities by railway lines, and after prolonged debates it guaranteed in 1840 the interest on the investment required in the construction of a line from the capital to Orleans. Two years later the government agreed to furnish about one half of the capital necessary to build a vast railway system throughout France, leaving the work of construction and operation largely in the hands of private companies. As a result of this intervention on the part of the State, there are three types of railways in France: those which have been largely financed by the government but are operated by private companies; those which are entirely private; and those owned and operated by the State. When Louis Philippe ascended the throne of France in 1830 there were only thirty miles of railway in the country; in 1860 there were four thousand miles; and in 1904 over twenty-four thousand miles. Of the total mileage only about one twelfth now belongs to the government, but according to the terms of the franchises all the French railways will eventually revert to the State.

Not only is Europe bound together by a network of nearly two hundred thousand miles of railway, but railway construction is rapidly advancing in Africa and Asia, preparing cheap outlets for the products of western mills and mines. As we have seen, the Trans-Siberian road has connected Europe overland with the Pacific, and Russia has also pushed lines southward toward Persia and Afghanistan; British India has almost thirty thousand miles, and China about three thousand miles of railways. Even Africa has fifteen thousand miles, most of which is in Egypt, Algeria, Tunis, and the British possessions. Before long, trains from Cairo to the Cape will rush through the jungle lands which were first penetrated by the white man in Queen Victoria’s reign.

Quite as essential to the world market as railway and steamship lines are the easy and inexpensive means of communication afforded by the post, telephone, telegraph, and cable. The English “penny post” is now so commonplace as no longer to excite wonder, but to men of Frederick the Great’s time it would have seemed impossible. Until 1839 in England the postage on an ordinary letter was a shilling for a short distance. In that year a reform measure long advocated by Rowland Hill was carried, establishing a uniform penny post throughout Great Britain.

The result of reducing the rate of postage for letters to this nominal sum exceeded all expectations in vastly increasing the frequency with which people wrote to one another, and to-day the British post office, including the telegraph department, employs two hundred thousand persons, and handles two billion letters a year. Other European countries have followed the example of Great Britain in reducing postage, and now the world is moving rapidly in the direction of a universal two-cent rate. Already a letter can be carried from Basutoland in South Africa to Montreal, Canada, for two cents in less time than it took news to cross the Atlantic when Queen Victoria came to the throne.

No less wonderful is the development of the telegraph system. Great Britain now has over fifty thousand miles of line owned and operated by the government, transmitting nearly ninety million messages annually. France has about one hundred thousand miles of line, over which fifty million messages annually pass; and Russia has twice the French mileage of wire, carrying twice the annual number of messages. Moreover, distant and obscure places in Africa and Asia are being brought into touch with one another and with Europe. China has now fifteen thousand miles, connecting all the important cities of the empire and affording direct overland communication between Peking and Paris. The wonderful network is spreading into Africa, -the French, German, and British possessions being already well equipped. In October, 1907, Marconi established regular communication across the Atlantic by means of the wireless system of telegraphy discovered some years before.

The Industrial Revolution which enables Europe to produce far more goods than it could sell in its own markets, and the rapid transportation which permits producers to distribute their commodities over the whole surface of the globe, have combined to produce the modern competition for foreign markets. The European nations have secured the control of practically all the territory occupied by defenseless peoples in Africa and Asia, and have introduced western ideas of business into China and Japan, where steamships now ply the navigable rivers, and railroads are being rapidly built.

The process of colonization and of westernizing the oriental peoples has been further hastened by the anxiety of capitalists to find advantageous investments for their surplus wealth. The profits of industry pile up so rapidly that stock companies are everywhere formed to develop railroads and mines in backward countries. Great Britain alone is said to have about ten billion dollars invested abroad; one fifth of Russian industrial enterprises are financed by foreigners, who are also to a considerable extent constructing the railroads in China. The Germans supply the money for large banking concerns in Brazil, Buenos Ayres, and Valparaiso, which in turn stimulate industry and the construction of railways.

These two powerful forces -factories seeking markets and capital seeking investment -are shaping the foreign and commercial policies of every important European country. They alone explain why the great industrial nations are embarking on what has been termed a policy of imperialism, which means a policy of adding distant territories for the purpose of controlling their products, getting the trade with the natives, and investing money in the development of natural resources. Sometimes this imperialism takes the form of outright annexation, such as the acquisition of the Philippines by the United States, or of Togoland by Germany. Again it assumes the form of a “protectorate,” which is a declaration on the part of a nation to the effect that, “This is our particular piece of land; we are not intending to take all the responsibility of governing it just now; but we want other nations to keep out, for we may annex it sooner or later.” Sometimes imperialism goes no farther than the securing of concessions in undeveloped countries, such as foreigners have obtained in China or citizens of the United States in Mexico; but such concessions are a fruitful source of annexations, especially when the interests of investors are not thoroughly protected by the government that grants them franchises. So one is enabled, by understanding clearly the needs and methods of modern business, to follow intelligently the process by which European powers are revolutionizing the ancient civilizations of China and Japan and taking possession of the continent of Africa.

The way for imperialism had been smoothed by the missionaries. There have always been ardent Christians ready to obey the command, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark xvi. 15). No sooner was a new country brought to the attention of Europeans than missionaries flocked thithe...

Table of contents

• EUROPE AFTER THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA
• THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
• REVOLUTION OF 1848 IN FRANCE
• REVOLUTION OF 1848,—AUSTRIA, GERMANY, ITALY
• THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY
• FORMATION OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE AND THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN UNION
• THE GERMAN EMPIRE
• FRANCE UNDER THE THIRD REPUBLIC
• POLITICAL REFORMS IN ENGLAND
• SOCIAL REFORMS IN ENGLAND
• THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• TURKEY AND THE EASTERN QUESTION
• THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY