World History: Capitalism and Socialism

Today we're looking at two ideas which have shaped the world today: capitalism and socialism. We looked briefly at these ideas when we looked at the Industrial Revolution, but we will expand on them today. Some form of capitalism and socialism have existed for centuries across the world: Joyce Appleby joked that historians of capitalism have stated that it started repeatedly since the Roman Empire; Peter Marshall has stressed how ancient Daoism and Buddhism can anachronistically be described as leading themselves into being anarchist; and the Zapatistas in contemporary Chiapas, Mexico have stated that their socialist policies are in continuation with indigenous practices. This is important to bear in mind as today we'll largely be looking at the development of modern capitalism and socialism - this leads us to a focus on Europe and North America. However, when I can, I want to expand this to look at developments in capitalism and socialism outside the Euro-American world. Before we begin, I also want to preface this post by stating that I am a socialist, so I will likely be more critical of capitalism than some other histories which you might read - such as Appleby's history of capitalism referenced in this post.

From Mercantilism to Modern Capitalism

A French seaport in 1638 during the height of French mercantilism

A basic definition of capitalism is an economic and political system where trade and the way goods are produced, the means of production, are in the hands of private owners. This is a broad definition and describes many societies throughout history, and one of the main forms which this took was mercantilism and merchant capitalism. Merchant capitalism, in particular, we have seen throughout the World History series, and could be found in most regions of the world - especially India, China, and Japan. Mercantilism, meanwhile, is a form of capitalism which aims to see the maximisation of a state's exports - trade and consumption was seen as finite, so it was believed that to survive you needed a monopoly on trade. This led to the formation of large companies, as it was a safer investment for wealthier individuals to own shares in a company than entirely rely on your own capital as in the past. A major mercantilist in England, Thomas Mun, was influential in the formation of the English East India Company (EIC), and similar ventures opened with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Hudson Bay Company in Canada to name two prominent ones. Mercantilism required state intervention in order to protect trade, so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries protectionist policies were implemented to edge out competitors, and there were even wars - especially between the English and Dutch. However, by the late-eighteenth century mercantilism started becoming routinely criticised. The best known critic is that of Adam Smith. Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher, and was highly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment which led him in 1776 to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith did not live in a vacuum: it is no coincidence that his ideas of liberty were being repeated by other economists as American revolutionaries and Thomas Paine were calling for political liberty. In Wealth of Nations Smith broke from traditional narratives that humans were unpredictable and capricious, instead he argued that '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'. Smith argued that the 'invisible hand' of the free market should govern economics; states should take a backseat and allow the supply/demand generated by markets, caused by human purchasing power, to govern economies. It was human nature to naturally lead to productivity and the best market solutions.

Adam Smith

Smith based his writings on economic developments in Britain since the 1600s, and this leads us back to a discussion we had when we looked at the Industrial Revolution, why did modern capitalism emerge in Europe? Max Weber argued that it was due to the 'Protestant work ethic' - this falls apart when we look at the rapid industrialisation of Japan in the 1870s. Modern, industrial capitalism primarily emerged in Britain and the Netherlands for several reasons. The first is weakened monarchical power - the long history of republicanism in the Netherlands and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Britain resulting in the execution of Charles I gave their respective parliaments more power. This prevented possible restrictive laws on markets from being passed, and gave non-royals the ability to forge legislation - it is no coincidence that the UK and US quickly adopted aspects of Wealth of Nations. Changes in the countryside played a great influence - crop rotation and new crops from the Americas, like potatoes, allowed more crop production and population growth. Due to increasing crop yields this drove down the price of food which allowed people to have greater ability to purchase goods. In England, the Enclosure Acts, which Karl Marx placed great emphasis on for the formation of modern capitalism, placed common land in the hands of private owners which, in turn, forced tenant farmers off of land and into urban areas. Britain's easy access to coal, and the high numbers of waterways in the Netherlands and Britain allowing for easier transport, allowed for industrialisation to take place. The first chapter of Marx's Kapital explains well how this promoted the origins of industrial capitalism. He uses the example of a coat being made of 20 yards of linen, but is worth double due to the value of labour. As the factory owner owns the means of producing the coat they keep the profit after the value of the goods and labour has been taken out. To maximise profit you have to reduce the value of labour without overproducing - he uses diamonds in this case, they are valuable as they are hard to get, but if they were common their price would decrease. Mechanisation made the production of commodities faster and easier reducing the hours needed to produce our coat, so factories emerged to house the machinery and increasing urban populations created a workforce to work in the factories. Finally, modern capitalism could not exist without the exploitation of colonised peoples - as argued by David Landes, industry needed slavery. Britain and the Netherlands were deeply involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade and imperialism through the EIC and VOC. Raw materials could be produced abundantly and cheaply in India, Indonesia, and the Caribbean, and the colonised regions opened up markets for the selling of finished products.

The Capital Revolution

In 1848 Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that the new capitalist, bourgeoisie class 'has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations...It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades'. Wherever capitalism touched it greatly changed. The most notable example is the impact on the environment. Lands completely changed as they were uprooted for mining and construction - the construction of the Suez Canal managed to link two of the major seas. The burning of fossil fuels warmed global temperatures putting us, unfortunately, on the current path to climate catastrophe - smoggy cityscapes became common in late-nineteenth century art. Before 1811 the peppered moth in England was white, but soot from chimneys in northern England made the trees appear darker so they rapidly evolved to be black. Thanks to deindustrialisation since the 1970s these same moths are returning to their whiter colouration as trees are less sooty. Capitalism created new industries and made older ones more profitable creating demographic shifts. In Britain, cities like Glasgow, Birmingham, and Manchester dwarfed older seats of power, so much so, that several acts had to be passed in parliament redistributing where parliamentary seats were. Gold rushes in South Africa, California, and Australia saw booms in population as people rushed to make a fortune from gold, or from miners. In Australia 'bushrangers' preyed upon prospective gold miners, and some have become subject to folk legend, like Nat Kelly. These regions saw other demographic changes. California saw an influx of immigrants from China and Mexico, and Australia from Germany and China which today influences the demographics of the regions. Africans started moving to the cities, and in the South African gold mines different ethnic groups started interacting, and new ideas of sexuality even emerged. New groups, the bourgeoisie, started supplanting traditional elites. Although new capitalists in Japan were often from poorer samurai families, and intermarriage between poor samurais and wealthy merchants had happened before 1868, Japanese conservatives in the 1870s and 1880s feared capitalism believing it was disrupting the Confucian order of the country. There was a push and pull between old elites and the new: Prussian Junkers in Germany remained influential until World War Two but ceded ground to new industrialists; and while British aristocrats balked at the idea of allowing steel magnate Andrew Carnegie into their 'circle' they had to begrudgingly marry their children to American industrialists and allowing a Jewish banker, Lionel de Rothschild, into the House of Lords in 1858. However, this did not stop the Rothschilds from being subjected to intense antisemitic attacks - a topic for when we look at racism in a future post.

Japanese women in a basket weaving factory

The bourgeoisie were not the only class to emerge thanks to capitalism - there was also the working class. We see different cultures and identities emerge consequently. Prior to industrialisation, women could find some form of emancipation thanks to textile works - they could make their own textiles in their home. The factory saw the means of production taken out of their hands which limited their agency. We will explore the idea of 'separate spheres' more when we look at the origins of feminism in a future post, but it is important to reference it here. This was an idea, primarily in Europe and the US but it was also adopted in Japan, that there were two spheres: the public, of work and politics dominated by men, and the private, of the home and family dominated by women. This was less the case for working class women - working class women, and children, regularly worked in factories or other industries. In 1882, women comprised three-quarters of textile workers in Japan, and these figures were replicated across industrial societies. Factory life was hard regardless of age and gender - to save costs owners allowed poor and dangerous conditions to flourish. Injury and death was common, and reformers largely focused on child and female labour when criticising poor working conditions. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York burnt down killing 146 garment workers, of which 123 were women, which caused outrage and the laws passed in order to improve work conditions. Women were not passive in this. E. Patricia Tsurumi has discussed how women resisted sexual abuse and poor work conditions through go-slows, strikes, running away (over 60% of Kanebo mill workers between 1905 and 1915 did so), and singing insulting songs: The owner and I are like spinning machine thread/ Easily tied, but easily broken. 

New Cultural Worlds

Carnegie Hall in 1910

An emergence of a new class with purchasing power created a new and exciting world. As argued by Eric Hobsbawm, the home 'was the quintessential bourgeois world, for in it...could the problems and contradictions of his society be forgotten or artificially eliminated'. The domestic sphere emerged to ensure that the home remained central in society - this is especially prevalent in Japan when Meiji reformers after 1868 cast the nation as one family. In Britain, Christmas was redeveloped to be about family just as much as Christ; Christmas trees, songs, and dinners were meant to symbolise the warmth of the family. The public, both bourgeois and working, looked to Queen Victoria - firmly out of political life the royals served as something to emulate, so the German Prince Albert introducing the German tradition of Christmas trees to his family was adopted by everyone. Wealthier women could work before marriage in clerical employment, but they were expected to give this up when they got married. It is notable that these women also became reformers. City life was seen as breeding sin, vice, and poverty, so they formed organisations to tackle this. The Women's Christian Temperance Movement in the US is a good example. The first suffragettes, like Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK, were also moneyed women, and they aimed to use their position to gain the vote. Clothing has always been used to signify class, and capitalism continued this trend. However, new consumption allowed those who could afford it to dress like the wealthy. This was even the case at the fringes of capitalism. Jean and John Comaroff have discussed how, before colonial rule, Tswana royals in southern Africa controlled access to European clothing and wore it to meet with Europeans. Entertainment could now be purchased. Poor and wealthy went to shows, sometimes together to the scandal of society, and holidays emerged. The Rokumeikan in Japan became a scene where elite could sip drinks and do the waltz combining European and Japanese formal wear. New and old elites started making contacts for the first time - aristocrats had to allow nouveau riche into their circles, and they became the patrons of culture. Andrew Carnegie sponsored the construction of venues, like Carnegie Hall, and even expeditions to discover dinosaurs. 1916 saw oil tycoon John Rockefeller become the first billionaire, and financier J.P. Morgan, supposedly, joked that, when asked how much it costs to own a yacht, replied 'if you have to ask, you can't afford it'.

Empire and Capitalism

Khama III, Chief of the Bamangwato and Sir Albert Spicer, London Missionary Society Treasurer

Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin famously stated that imperialism was the final stage of capitalism, Hannah Arendt argued they marched hand in hand. Regardless, empire and capitalism were intrinsically linked. Colonial rule saw the economies of colonised societies to geared towards the export of raw materials and the import of finished goods - as late as the 1950s Britain tried to make nut production the crop of Tanganyika in east Africa. Although it is an exaggeration to say that Britain broke the thumbs of Bengali textile weavers, Britain did break Bengal's textile production to prevent competition. As we saw when we looked at British rule in India, key parts of the Indian continent was converted to the production of raw materials, primarily cotton, in what Romesh Chandra Dutt in 1902 described as the 'drain theory'. Britain had prevented the development of an Indian economy 'draining' it of resources. This had devastating direct consequences. When crops failed, as they were prevented from growing crops on land for cotton or saffron, it created devastating famines - a tenth of Orissa's population died in the 1865-6 famine, 3.5 million died in Madras and a million in Mysore in the devastating 1876-8 famine. While capitalism prevented famines during crop failure in Europe, it made it far worse in India. Capitalism was often used as a way for colonial expansion - Britain used opium to edge its way into China, and Britain and France used loans to Egypt in order to enforce their hegemony, and the US used companies to oust governments in Central America. Meanwhile, Leopold II of Belgium formed a company to rule the Congo for him. Today's Democratic Republic of the Congo has its shape due to traders setting up stations along rivers to best monopolise rubber and ivory. The Congo Free State, similarly, saw some of the worst atrocities in colonialism where Congolese were brutally enslaved, beaten, and killed in order to extract resources. A leather whip, the viboko, became the symbol of Belgian rule as Congolese were forced to work over 80 hours a week in poor conditions. Elsewhere, there were hopes to bring the colonised into a capitalist market. The work of the Comaroffs is especially interesting in this regards. The London Missionary Society (LMS) in southern Africa particularly tried to introduce consumerism, linking consumerism to Christian faith. Tswana were encouraged to buy European clothing as a sign of faith, and Tswana, in turn, adapted it for themselves - children and unmarried women wore pre-Christian clothing and wore European later. I want to discuss this more in our next World History post as we've just scratched the surface of colonialism and imperialism here.

The Origins of Modern Socialism

Marx and Engels

Conditions created by capitalism, although it brought benefits, it also brought intense suffering. Poverty, disease, and alcoholism were just some of the problems which capitalism either caused or accentuated. There were reformers who hoped to relieve the poor, such as York confectioner Seebohm Rowntree, but others rejected socialism entirely. Instead of private individuals owning means of production workers should own it - this was socialism. As we've already mentioned, some form of socialism have existed in some form across the world and history - Peruvian Marxists have argued that the Inca were 'feudal communists' as they did not use markets. Regardless, the first of the modern socialists emerged with the 'Utopian socialists' like Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri de Saint-Simon, although George Lichtheim describes them as 'doctrinaires' instead. These socialists argued that self-governing communities should be formed based on egalitarian ideas - Fourier is believed to have coined the term 'feminism' and advocated for homosexual emancipation. However, utopian socialists were later criticised by a new generation of socialists for being utopian. The most notable of these were the 'scientific socialists' of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels in particular in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) argued that utopians created new ideas with no practical way in achieving them, whereas 'scientific socialists' looked at real world conditions and developed theory from there. Marx was born into a German Jewish family (which converted to Christianity to avoid antisemitic laws), and had a long history of radical politics. He was influenced by philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel and adapted his ideas of dialectical materialism. Human history was a conflict of classes driven by ideas, a thesis combats and antithesis before reaching a synthesis which, in turn, forms its own antithesis. Engels was the son of a German factory owner, and became upon seeing the horrific conditions of his father's Manchester factory became radicalised. Mary Burns, an Irish worker in his father's factory, greatly influenced his views, and in 1845 wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marx and Engels became close friends and regularly worked together joining the Communist League. Inspired by the 1848 revolts Marx and Engels wrote their most influential piece - The Communist Manifesto - setting out their ideas in a way for workers to easily access.

In France, a different theorist emerged called Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who rejected the idea of the state entirely - Marx and Engels had advocated the proletariat, the producing class, seizing the state in order to bring about socialism. In 1840 his text What is Property? declared that 'Property is Theft', and that rejecting property and state could the proletariat be liberated. He declared, as well, that he was an 'anarchist', but, unlike later anarchists, he believed that markets could exist under socialism. Also, he was very antisemitic and sexist, so much so that he was denounced by many other anarchists, although he did state that 'In my ideal society I would be guillotined as a conservative'. Meanwhile, a Russian theorist, who became involved in the 1848 Czech Rebellion, made his way to France - Mikhail Bukanin. Bukanin was influenced by Proudhon but rejected the idea of having a market in any form. Louis Blanqui, meanwhile, controversially argued that a small cabal should take control of the state to aid the working peoples. Despite their clashes, Marx and Bukanin helped form the International Workingmen's Association, better known as the First International, in 1864 uniting all socialists and trade unions in order to plan out revolution. However, it was deeply divided and women were barred until 1865. In 1867 Harriet Law became the first female member, but she remained its only female member.

The Paris Commune

1871 proved to be the most important year in leftist history. Louis Napoleon declared war on Prussia but was roundly defeated and abdicated leaving France in disarray. The peoples of Paris rose up, and a crowd of women marched upon the local barracks seizing cannons and weapons. Leftist journalist Louis Delescluze and Polish officer Jaroslaw Dabrowski were elected to lead the newly formed Paris Commune. Proudhonists, Blanquists, libertarian socialists, and scientific socialists made up the ideology of the Paris Commune, and this is shown by their policies. Guillotines were symbolically burnt to show a break with the violent French Revolution, the Church and state were declared to be separate, the Louvre was turned into a arms factory, the Vendome Column depicting Napoleon was torn down, and workers given control over companies. Women were integral to the Commune where Louise Michel became one of the most influential figures in the revolt, and the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés was formed by socialist bookbinder Nathalie Lemel and Russian exile Elisabeth Demitrieff. The Women's Union demanded women's education, divorce, suffrage, and an end to capitalism. The Commune was very international - French, German, Russian, Spanish, and even Algerian individuals joined together in protecting the Commune. However, when the French Third Republic got together intense street fighting began and the Commune was brutally crushed. Afterwards, the First International became heavily divided over why the Paris Commune failed. Marx in The Civil War in France (1871) argued that the communards were too quick to dismantle the state, if they had taken it over they could have better defended themselves. Meanwhile, anarchists like Bukanin argued that it failed as they left too much of the state intact - no one took over the Bank of France which then funded the French army. Marx kicked the anarchists out of the First International, and since then the left has been divided between Marxists and anarchists. Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck commented that 'Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!'

Developments with Socialism after 1871

A collection of Japanese anarchists including Osugi Sekae and Ito Noe

Anarchism and what would become Marxism would continue to develop after 1871. Marx and Engels continued expanding their ideas - Engels released his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Marx would eventually release his very influential Das Kapital. Marx's ideas were always changing and he rejected the term 'Marxism' as it implied that he had the answers - he believed people should start with his ideas. Marx and Engels were also keen to dispel cult of personalities which occasionally cropped up. However, the rift with the anarchists was never healed and anarchists were barred from the Second International when it was formed in 1889. Anarchism similarly developed - a Russian aristocrat Peter Kropotkin - would become the most influential anarchist thinker helping influence anarcho-communism, and Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta helped influence anarcho-syndicalism. Marxism and anarchism went beyond their roots with European male thinkers as new thinkers and activists applied their ideas to new situations. For example, Russian Marxist Alexandra Kollontai blended Marxism and feminism, and is seen as the founder of Scandinavian feminism for her activism in the region during World War One. Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin in Germany would try and combat sexism in the labour movement, and try to apply class emancipation to the suffrage movement. Across the world activists blended local ideas with new ideas - Peter Marshall has argued that Mohandas Gandhi was even inspired by anarchism. Swami Vivekananda reinterpreted the Bhagavad Gita to craft it as a libertarian text which future anarchists, like Aurobindo Ghose, would build upon. Japanese censors prevented the translation of Marxist texts, but Kotuku Shusui managed to escape censors by translating anarchist texts - it took until the 1920s for Lenin to be translated into Japanese! Kotuku asserted that anarchism fit with Daoism and Zen Buddhism helping form the paper Heimin. Feminist Ito Noe was an influential writer for the paper Bluestockings calling for female and class emancipation. In the 1920s the anarchist movement was brutally crushed, Ito was strangled in prison, so Marxism replaced anarchism, but, even today, the Japanese Communist Party has strong anarchist leanings. In 1905 the influential 'One Big Union' the International Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in Chicago. Founded by figures like Irish socialist James Connolly, Jewish thinker Emma Goldman, and 'Big Bill' Haywood, among others, it was inspired by anarchist thought to unite the labour movement. Russia was a site of both Marxist and anarchist movements, but the most significant figure to come from this was Vladimir Lenin. A history of secret societies due to state repression influenced what would become Marxist-Leninism. Lenin argued that the workers had to be guided by a revolutionary vanguardist party, as Lenin would succeed in establishing the Soviet Union Marxist-Leninism would become the dominant Marxist thought among twentieth-century communist parties.

Conclusion
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been greatly shaped by the clash between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism broke the old feudal world and forged a new revolutionary system, but, in doing so, created suffering for the masses. Socialism emerged as a force to resist and liberate the masses. Joyce Appleby argued that capitalism was a cultural system just as much as an economic one - as we have seen this is accurate. Capitalism formed new identities and cultural practices, as argued also by Marx and Engels the means of production forms a superstructure which all things in society comes from. Equally, socialism developed its own culture - as seen in the Paris Commune egalitarian and emancipatory ideas influenced a desire to emancipate workers and women. The anarchist-Marxist divide continues to divide the left - they even fought one another during the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars. These ideas continue to shape our lives today, and many of the debates we have now have been argued for the last century and a half. When we see a pop-up ad on the internet its origin lies back with Adam Smith in 1776, and the means to critique it with Marx.

The sources I have used are as follows:
-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (London: Abacus, 1975)
-Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010)
-Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (New York, NY: MetaLibri, 1776/2007)
-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Penguin, 1848/2015)
-Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, (London: Redwood Press, 1887/1971)
-Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, (London: Progress Publishers, 1880/1970)
-John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
-George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970)
-Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
-T.C.W. Blanning, 'The Commercialization and Sacralization of European Culture in the Nineteenth Century', in T.C.W. Blanning, (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 120-147
-E. Patricia Tsurumi, 'Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan', History Workshop, 18, (1984), 3-27
-Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, (London: Fontana Press, 1993)
-Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, (London: Verso, 2015)

Thank you for reading. Next time we will look at imperialism and colonialism, and how that affected colonised peoples. For other World History posts we have a list here. For future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

World History: The Industrial Revolution

Today on World History we're looking at perhaps the most important event in human history, and possibly was most vital in creating the world we live in today: the Industrial Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm characterises the Industrial Revolution with the French Revolution as the 'Dual Revolutions' which would shape the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thanks to this a series of very important words were coined, or adapted, to describe the new world including: industry, industrialist, factory, middle class, working class, capitalism, socialism, aristocracy, scientist, engineer, proletariat, utilitarian, statistics, sociology, ideology, and journalism. Quoting Hobsbawm 'To imagine the modern world without these words...is to measure the profundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848, and forms the greatest transformation in human history since the remote times when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the state.' Within a century areas of the world became primarily urban over rural, and the world's environment physically changed. The Industrial Revolution is seen as starting in Britain but there is a big question: why?

Why Britain?

Someone in the eighteenth century would not imagine that the Industrial Revolution would begin in Britain. China had a long history of steel and coal mining, canal construction and even paper money; India's economy had a thriving cotton industry; and (as identified by Hobsbawm) both France and the German lands had a longer history of scientific and economic institutions, like the Ecole Polytechnique in France or the Bergakademie in Prussia. Rhinelanders in the 1300s had learnt to smelt iron and blast furnaces had been used since 1600. Hobsbawm argued that industrialisation didn't require advanced physics to happen - James Watt's steam engine had used knowledge of physics that had been known for a century, and its relatively simplistic operation means that it is still used today.  There has been a contentious debate about the origins of industrialisation in Britain which in the past included a misreading of the Asian economies, or the argument that something was 'unique' to Britain - 1905 Max Weber, one of the 'founders', of sociology argued that a 'Protestant work ethic' led to industrialising. However, this doesn't explain why it can be seen as starting in Britain and not Saxony or Prussia. Pat Hudson described it best, you cannot pick one factor as to why industrialisation began in Britain. A mix of reasons have been put forward and historians generally agree that a mixture of these allowed the emergence of industrialisation ranging from British laws and economics to empire to geographic luck. 

David Landes has identified two key factors enabling industrialisation in Britain: a favourable environment and resources. The resources is key; Britain had mines full of steel and especially coal in Wales, Scotland and northern England, including where I am from, Yorkshire. Importantly, the coal was close to the surface which made it accessible. Furthermore, Britain had many navigable rivers and, naturally being an island, a coast which allowed efficient movement of resources before the emergence of railways. His environmental arguments are heavily Eurocentric, however, but they do partially explain how industrialisation emerged. An absence of tolls, relative domestic stability, a relatively liberal market economy encouraging property rights, and laws allowing the quick emergence of companies helped influence rapid industrialisation. Hobsbawm and Hudson have also stressed Britain's colonial empire as influencing industry. A slave based economy in the Caribbean funnelled riches back to an elite in Britain who could then invest it, and the Caribbean accounted for 12% of English output between 1748 and 1776 alone. Demands of the Caribbean encouraged greater production. Hobsbawm focuses particularly on the British in India, and Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta have also focused on India. In the early 1700s Indian produced most of the world's textiles and had a vibrant export economy. Indian cotton production dwarfed the British production in Lancashire so to compete Britain needed to produce more, however, Indian wages were a fraction of what British wages were. In 1725 a labourer in London could earn a wage worth around 11 grams of silver per day compared to Delhi who earned barely 2 grams a day. Why Britain had such high wages is heavily contested, but the reason why it is important to bring it up is because normally if you wanted to increase productivity you hired more people. However, that would mean paying more high wages so new ways to increase productivity were needed. Although there are stories of East Indian Company officials breaking the thumbs of Bengali textile workers to break the Indian cotton industry - the story itself is likely a myth or mistranslation but Britain did 'deindustrialise' India to prevent Indian competition with British textiles. Finally, Hobsbawm places emphasis on the Enclosure Acts (1760-1830). Marx, and Hobsbawm as a Marxist, viewed the Enclosure Acts as being the birth of modern capitalism. Previously, unlike on the continent most of English land was communal or was 'common' where anyone could use it. The Enclosure Acts allowed individuals to buy this common, and largely unproductive, land which forced peasants to move from said land. As a result, this made a supply of labour readily available in new industries - especially cotton.

The Rise of Industrialisation

A spinning jenny

The exact origins of industrialisation in Britain are just as heavily debated as their origins. J.M. Roberts descried it best saying 'The men of the 'Industrial Revolution'...stood on the shoulders of innumerable craftsmen and artificers of pre-industrial times who had slowly built up skills and experience for the future.' However, the general consensus was that it took until after the Napoleonic Wars for industry to make a truly 'revolutionary' impact on society and economics. Weaving is a key industry which spearheaded the emergence of industrialisation - wages were relatively high and weavers, both men and women, could do it at home. Most of Britain's textile industry was in the North, especially in Lancashire. Albeit it was exhaustive and reliant on urine to bleach fabrics - that is until the creation of the flying shuttle in 1733 by John Kay. Previously four spinners were needed to use one weaver, now they only needed one. The flying shuttle allowed the creation of 'spinning jenny' (jenny being an abbreviation of engine) by James Hargreaves in 1764. By this time the East India Company now started ruling land in India allowing England to import a lot more cotton (1,755,580 kg in 1764 alone) so Hargreaves created the jenny to produce eight to twelve spools - later improvements allowed the jenny to produce up to 120 spools! It was so productive that other cotton manufacturers soon copied Hargreaves' design so he sued them - this would be a common trend throughout industrial history. By the time he died in 1776 over 20,000 spinning jennys were in operation across Britain. However, the yarn produced was fairly thin so in 1767 Richard Arkwright's water frame was invented to produce thicker yarn, and resulted in the rise of the factory as we would recognise it. The water frame needed water to work so naturally could only work in one area; factories had existed for a long time and in the early 1700s served as a way to keep workers together. Now factories served to house machines, and keep workers in one place. In the 1770s Samuel Crompton's spinning mule and Edmund Cartwright's power loom mechanised weaving - now thousands of pounds of cotton could be woven by only a few individuals. At its height Lancashire had over 50,000,000 spinning mules.

A drawing of Stephenson's Rocket

How were these mechanised looms powered? Water and rivers were a clear power source -watermills had been existence since ancient times across the world so why change a perfected system? However, not everywhere was next to a water source so different methods were needed. Thus, the steam engine came about. Linking to another aspect of the early industrialisation Thomas Newcomen in 1712 developed the steam engine, although steam engines had existed in some form long before then, in order to pump water from mines to access more coal, and sulphur. It formed a cycle - coal was burned to produce steam which powered the steam engine which was used to drain mines to access more coal. In 1776 Scottish engineer James Watt, whom the watt is named after, improved upon Newcomen's engine making it more efficient (although his first engine was huge being over 24 foot tall and had a danger of exploding) and we haven't really changed his design. Watt's steam engine has really been re-adapted over the next two centuries and we still use the design in everything from nuclear power to industrial boilers. Iron, especially cast iron, was always needed and slowly regions were adopting coke instead of charcoal in smelters, but to do so they needed more coal. A cycle was created: iron was needed so coal was mined which needed steam engines, which also needed coal, and to make steam engines one needed coal. Soon enough they all came together to create transport: Robert Trevithick in 1804 managed to create the first steam locomotive, ironically to move iron from the Penydarren Ironworks, in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. In 1825 George Stephenson created the first railway for passengers, and the Liverpool-Manchester railway was opened in 1830. The US also innovated: as early as 1807 Robert Fulton (who also made the first submarine) managed to combine boats and steam to traverse the Hudson. Two years later the first steamboat went to sea. The Age of Steam had started to arrive.

Industrialisation Across the World

So far we have just discussed Britain but industrialisation happened across the world and continues to do so today. Europe used the colonised world as a way to get resources so prevented any large-scale attempts to industrialise these regions until after the Second World War. We'll discuss a few different regions now as most areas tried to industrialise in some way. Quite a few places, though, did bring in British engineers to help their industrialisation. 

Belgium

Belgium was the first state on the continent to start industrialising - it even started before its independence. By 1873 Belgium produced half as much iron as France and in 1850 consumed a lot more; in 1850 it consumed 90 pounds per inhabitant compared to 56 pounds in the US, 37 pounds in France, and 27 in Germany. Wallonia, the French-speaking south, had similar conditions to northern England, Wales, and Scotland - rich deposits of coal away from the traditional mercantile wealthy areas. Belgium did in twenty years what took Britain sixty: centres of industry like Liege, Seriang, and Charleroi produced tonnes of iron, zinc, coal, glass, and wool. Liege soon surpassed historic Ghent as Belgium's wealthy wool hotspot. It is not an exaggeration to say for its size and population Belgium became a leading industrial power, and the establishment of the Belgian Congo allowed the metropole to exploit the raw materials of the Congo in some of the most brutal example of colonialism in Africa. Wallonia quickly developed a vibrant trade union and socialist movement, so much so that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in Brussels.

Germany

A painting of the town of Barmen in the 1870s

Industrialisation was not even in Germany as it was not a unified state until 1871. Industrialisation was strongest in the coal and iron rich Ruhr - by 1870 there were towns of over 1 million inhabitants. However, industrialisation was difficult - the three dozen entities all had different laws and policies, many states were hostile to urbanisation, and the power of junkers (landed aristocracy) in Prussia meant they were hostile to anything which would diminish their power. Industrialisation happened anyway. Reorganisation of agriculture allowed excess food production causing migration to the cities, the Zollverein economic union removed economic tariffs between the German states, the north (and Ruhr) had many available raw resources, the banks were powerful so could invest, and railways were soon linked to security. Under Otto von Bismarck the state even intervened to aid industrialisation and soon Germany became a major steel producer. Quickly coal production boomed - Ruhr coal output rose from 2.0 million short tons in 1850 to 22 in 1880 to 60 in 1900. It has been joked that Prussia, the state which largely unified Germany, was 'an army with a state' so naturally industries benefiting the army - like railways, shipping, and munitions - received favourable treatment. A big reason why Prussia was victorious over Austria in 1866 was because Prussia had an overwhelming industrial (and economic) advantage over Austria. 

The US

Building the Erie Canal

In the US industrialisation was heavily tied with the emergence of the market economy. In 1800 over 90% of Americans were rural whereas today this figure is the exact opposite. As Americans moved across the Appalachians they became increasingly isolated and were entirely reliant on their local communities. From 1800 to 1830 New England and North Atlantic states chartered more than 900 companies to build roads, and in 1806 Congress authorised the paving of a National Road from Maryland to the Old Northwest. Then Fulton managed to create the steamboat which revolutionised travel in the US. Now someone could travel from New Orleans to Pittsburg in a fraction of the time, and in 1825 the Erie Canal was completed connecting the Great Lakes to New York. Between 1787 and 1860 the central government spent around $60 million building canals, roads and harbours as individual states spent even more. The US would remain localised until after the Civil War but already communities were becoming increasingly less isolated. In 1844 Samuel Morse developed the telegraph which allowed messages to travel across an entire continent in minutes - within sixteen years 50,000 miles of telegraph lines were planted. In 1828 the first national railway was built between Baltimore and Ohio which would allow the US to truly be connected. By 1860 the railways covered 30,000 miles, more than the rest of the world. However, these railways, telegraphs, and industry were largely located in the North giving them an immense strategic advantage during the Civil War. There was also a dark side to American industry (some of which we'll discuss later). By the 1790s slavery was on its last legs in the South; it could not compete with foreign cotton production and tobacco farming had decimated the soil. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which efficiently separated the seed from the cotton. It was now possible to efficiently grow cotton on a large scale which unfortunately saved slavery. The US even briefly reopened the Atlantic slave trade to accommodate an expansion in slavery and Native Americans were forced from their land in the South to make more land open to slavery. Similarly, railways allowed westward expansion which caused the displacement and genocide of Native Americans in the West.

Japan

Japan is an amazing case. In a decade Japan went from a society which has been described as feudal to an industrialised one. Since the early 1600s Japan had isolated itself from the European world but it faced a crisis when the US arrived and showed their strength against samurai armed with 200-year old muskets. How could Japan be so humiliated by this new state? In 1868 a group of young samurai overthrew the government in the name of the emperor in the 'Meiji Restoration'. The new leaders of Japan wanted to ensure that their state would not face the same fate as China - torn apart by rebels and foreign powers. Industrialisation was part of that, and they wanted to avoid what was happening in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire (which we'll get to). In 1871 Japanese officials were sent to the US and Europe in the Iwakura Mission to observe what was happening and learn how to utilise European sciences. The new Meiji leaders rejected foreign loans only taking one - to build an eighteen-mile railway line between Tokyo and Yokohama. By 1877 64 miles of railway had been constructed. Like the US Japan was eager to construct telegraph poles so by 1877 2,827 miles had been constructed. That same year a rebellion broke out, the Satsuma Rebellion, which rejected the Meiji reforms - like the US Civil War they were roundly defeated as the Meiji leaders could better organise thanks to railways and telegraphs. Of course, textiles were quickly became industrialised and capitalism emerged. 

Egypt and the Ottomans

The Suez Canal

From 1839 the Ottoman Empire, and the semi-independent Egypt, had tried to Westernise after seeing their humiliation during the Napoleonic invasion. Part of this was an attempt to industrialise. Across the Empire and Egypt schools based on French models were opened as well as small scale factories. These were especially prevalent in Egypt which had an extensive cotton economy - during the US Civil War Britain turned to Egypt for cotton and exports rose from 918,000 sterling in the 1850s to just over 10 million sterling a decade later. Egypt's crowning achievement, however, was the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. Both looked to Japan as how to quickly Westernise, but Japan looked to them to see how not to Westernise. Egypt and the Ottomans were heavily reliant on foreign loans for their projects which resulted in giving over many key assets to Europeans. Extra-territoriality became common, and British and France used their loans to even take land from the Ottomans. As Britain comprised 80% of ship traffic through the Suez Canal in 1880 they were very keen to exert influence over Egypt - a revolt in 1881 gave Britain the excuse to invade and turn Egypt into a de facto member of the Empire.

The Second Revolution

Historians see the Industrial Revolution being split into two with a second starting in the second half of the nineteenth century - Hobsbawm characterises this as the 'Age of Capital'. What we often think of when we think of the Industrial Revolution comes from the Second Revolution. Steel has been seen as the industry which kicked off the Second Revolution; the development of hotter and more efficient furnaces in the 1850s and 1860s allowed greater quantities of steel to be produced from molten pig-iron like never before. The influence of early capitalism is disputed with the First Revolution but it cannot be denied in the Second. The Krupp family in Germany made a fortune from steel and coal production; the first US giant industrial companies like US Steel emerged; and Japanese zaibatsu (business conglomerates) dominated the political scene. The stock exchange now touched every aspect of everyday life so when a crash happened - like in 1890 - it could destroy the world economy. Oil tycoon John Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire in 1916. Many of the later industrialised countries, like Germany and Japan, did so as part of the Second Revolution. States were even willing to take part - Japan, Germany, Russia and even China saw state-sponsored industrial policies. Chemical and petroleum became the new dominant industries - Rockefeller became a millionaire thanks to oil. This Second Revolution became entwined with Empire. Africa's raw resources were one reason why Europe greedily carved up the continent and Britain formed what would become BP to monopolise Iranian oil. 

Industry and Society

Industry changed society more than any other movement since the development of agriculture. A general trend to urbanise is a common theme throughout world history but it skyrocketed thanks to industrialisation. In 1800 London, Paris and Berlin had populations of 900,000, 600,000, and 170,000 but by 1900 their populations rose to 4.7 million, 3.6 million, and 2.7 million. The same year Glasgow, Moscow, Vienna, and St. Petersburg also had populations exceeding a million. Industrial areas like the Ruhr in Germany or my own home of Yorkshire in England developed significant urban populations. In the cities a new urban class emerged - the working class. We still see the legacies of class divisions to this day. Workers from the Netherlands brought a nursery rhyme to my home town of Doncaster in the 1970s and the nursery rhyme resonated with the locals so much that it is taught in Yorkshire nurseries today:

Wind the bobbin up, Wind the bobbin up/Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap/ Wind it back again, Wind it back again/ Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap/ Point to the ceiling, point to the door/Point to the window, point to the door

Increasing efficiency in food production, the development of medicines, and fertilisers allowed life expectancy to increase although urban conditions, especially from the 1860s limited their potential. Industrialisation wasn't always well received. Luddism, a 'quasi-insurrectionary' movement according to E.P. Thompson, is an interesting example. Thanks to the Napoleonic Wars production needed to be increased which brought more mechanisation upsetting labourers - their jobs were now at stake. In Nottingham in northern England in 1811 industrial weavers were destroyed and the movement spread across Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. Those attacking machines and burning mills were nicknamed Luddites, believed to be named after Ned Ludd who attacked two machines in a rage in 1799. This fear of being replaced by automation was not limited to this period, there would be the Swing Riots in the 1830s, or Britain and it really continues today. There was also opposition to industrialisation from elites. The emergence of an urban, industrial class threatened the authority of the landed elite and conservatives - in Japan several leaders opposed capitalism as it was believed to undermine 'Confucian values'. 

Children were regularly used in factories as labourers

Gender and the family was changed during industrialisation. Child labour was common across the industrialised world and in the mills of London children were expected to work with dangerous machines. It was not uncommon for children, or their parents, to be missing fingers or even limbs thanks to volatile machinery. The first child protection societies emerged to campaign against children working in these factories. Women also took part in manual labour despite the enduring stereotype that factory work was 'man's work'. Wages were low and families needed as money as they could. Of course, women's role in the working class shifted over time, place, class, and ethnicity. A working class Italian woman in Chicago would not be out of place in a factory but a married Japanese woman in Tokyo would be. It was common in Japan for society to expect a woman to leave manual labour when they married. In 1882 women were three-quarters of workers in textile factories so they were integral to the textile industry, but often they have been portrayed as submissive. Women could resist bad work conditions through various ways ranging from running away, 63-67% of mill hands in Kanebo between 1905 and 1915 did so, to work stoppages and strikes, and even singing. One song has the lyrics: The owner and I are like spinning machine thread/ Easily tied, but easily broken.

Capitalism and Socialism

I won't go into too much detail about this as I plan to do an entire World History post about capitalism and socialism. Modern ideas about capitalism and socialism emerged thanks to the Industrial Revolution - Hobsbawm sees the rise of capitalism as being tied to industrialisation. Previously, the non-aristocratic wealth owners in Europe and Asia had been merchants but the emergence of the factory allowed the industrialist to become the wealth owner. Vast concentrations of wealth in one factory now could allow an owner to become far wealthier than any merchant. As we saw in Japan capitalism directly threatened the old order - now individuals with no relation to traditional landed elite could hold power. Britain is a prime example of this clash. Several reform acts had to be passed to reflect the growth of cities like Manchester and Glasgow who had fewer seats in parliament compared to several rural areas with populations of less than five. British capitalists were also in favour of free trade which came to blows with its opponents with the Corn Laws - these laws were designed to protect British corn by imposing tariffs on foreign imports of corn and largely benefited the traditional landed elite. Even when the Irish Potato Famine killed a million, and it was clear that foreign grain was needed fast, parliament dragged its feet in repealing the Corn Laws. 

Marx and Engels: The 'Fathers of Communism'

Modern socialism emerged as a criticism of capitalism. Conditions in cities and factories were appalling everywhere - ghettos allowed the spread of disease, to save money factory owners would skip safety procedures and dock wages, and urban poverty was widespread as factory owners earned millions. Not all pro-worker movements, like the Chartists in Britain, were socialist and some socialists even rejected the new urban world, like Charles Fourier. Particularly in France socialists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon started advocating that workers were the real producers, not the industrialists, and should therefore own the means of production. The most important figures to emerge from this thought are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - the 'Fathers' of Communism. Marx was the son of a converted Jewish family who worked as a journalist as Engels was the son of a factory owner in Manchester. When it was the anniversary of Marx's 200th birthday I discussed their ideas, which you can read about here, so I will summarise them. Like Proudhon, they believed that workers were the true wealth producers being exploited by the capitalists and should rise up to eventually form a classless, moneyless society. Over the years their ideas have inspired others, like Rosa Luxembourg and Vladimir Lenin, and also been challenged by other members of the Left, such as by anarchist thinkers. The clashes between capitalists, socialists and aristocrats would come together in the Revolutions of 1848 - a topic for another day.

Criticisms of an Industrial World

Orphan Oliver and the workhouse in Dickens' Oliver Twist

There has always been an urban-rural divide, and this shall be seen when we look at the 1848 Revolutions. The poor living conditions instantly generated criticisms from a wide range of figures ranging from revolutionary socialists to Christian evangelists (and sometimes there were Christian socialist evangelists). Modern charity emerged as poor relief for the urban working class and the Salvation Army was formed in 1865 to 'save' London's working class. The city was seen as a corrupting influence - it is no mistake that most American prohibition groups targeted the city as a place where alcoholism corrupted. Women had their agency stripped from them in popular rhetoric; they were reduced to caricatures of the seductive prostitute luring 'good' men into sin, or innocent and pure figures being ruthlessly exploited and abused. Romanticism emerged looking back to an idealised pre-urban past. In Japan the rural samurai and peasant were restructured to represent the ideal Japanese lifestyle, and European writers tried to show the horrors of the present. The orphan Oliver is abused and cast out into the cold streets of London in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1839), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) showed the horrors of what modern science could bring. These ideas had long lasting ramifications. J.R.R. Tolkein blamed the horrors of the First World War on industrialisation and it is reflected in The Lord of the Rings: the hellish and industrial Isengard and Mordor releases its corrupted armies threatening the ideal rural Shire. When we looked at the Little Ice Age we looked at how global temperatures rose in the 1800s ending the Ice Age - it rose thanks to humans, not natural means. The Industrial Revolution's immense release of carbon dioxide and monoxide into the atmosphere which warmed global temperatures and unfortunately that trend has sped up. The Revolution brought humanity into modernity, but it also killed the environment.

Conclusion

The Industrial Revolution is undoubtedly the most important event in history since the adoption of farming. Now, most of humanity lives in cities and the reason why you can read this is because of the Revolution. Modern economies, politics, and societies emerged thanks to the Industrial Revolution. However, it set in motion the factory system which harmed millions up to this day - sweat shops differ very little to the factories of the 1860s. The pollution created by industrialisation has continued and increased, and world leaders are reluctant to act. Industrialisation brought us our current lifestyles but it might kill us. From the air we breathe to how to travel and how we eat the Industrial Revolution has shaped it all - for better or for worse industrialisation has touched us all.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-J.M. Roberts, The New Penguin History of the World, Fifth Edition, (London: 2007, Penguin)

-Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution, (London: Edward Arnold, 1992)

-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, (London: Abacus, 1962)

-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (London: Abacus, 1975)

-David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Second Edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

-Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, 'Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India, and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850', IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc, (2005), 1-44

-E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (London: Penguin, 1963)

-Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Fourth Edition, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2014)

-Marius Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)

-E. Patricia Tsurumi, 'Female Textile Workers and the Failure of Early Trade Unionism in Japan', History Workshop, 18, (1984), 3-27

-William Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, Sixth Edition, (Philadelphia, PA: Westview Press, 2016)

Thank you for reading and I hope you found it interesting. Next World History we will look at the revolutions which swept Latin America bringing independence and look if they were really revolutionary. For other World History posts please see our list, and for future blog updates please see our Facebook or catch me on Twitter @LewisTwiby.

Karl Marx: 200 Years On

May 5 1818 Karl Marx was born. Over the next 200 years his ideas would greatly shape how people would view and shape the world. I myself am inspired by Marx's ideas. With the exception of a brief period in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in eastern Europe his ideas have been seen as the most, or one of the most important, by people across the world. The BBC radio show In Our Time in 2005 asked its listeners to name their most influential philosopher and with 27.9% of the vote Marx was voted the most influential with the second being David Hume at 12.7%. Today we'll look at three aspects of Marx. First, we'll look briefly at his life. Second, we'll look at what he believed. Finally, we'll look at his legacy.

Marx: A Brief Biography

Marx's Birthplace

Marx was born into a formerly Jewish family in Trier, then in Prussia's Rhineland province. His mother, Henriette Pressburg, was a Dutch Jew whose father had been a rabbi and his father, Herschel Marx, was a lawyer. After the defeat of Napoleon Trier came under the control of conservative Prussia who started enforcing a law barring Jews from public office. As a result Herschel converted the family to Christianity and adopted the name Heinrich over his Yiddish name. Although Karl's relations with his mother was always fractious he adored his father with him always carrying a photo of Heinrich, later even being buried with a photo of his father. Karl was the third of nine children with him becoming the eldest son when his brother died in 1819. Heinrich and Henriette were heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, and until 1830 Karl (and his siblings), were home schooled by Heinrich and when they went to school they were taught by a humanist. In 1835 he started at the University of Bonn before being transferred to the University of Berlin which saw him engaging with more radical, liberal philosophy joining the Young Hegelians in 1837. Inspired by the recently deceased Hegel they used his views on dialects, mixed it with leftist discourse and then used it to criticize society. This would bring Marx into conflict with the state for the first time - socialism would become strong in Germany but Prussia itself was very conservative. Marx was forced to submit his thesis, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, in 1841 to the more liberal University of Jenna as his more conservative professors at Berlin thought it too controversial. Throughout his time at Berlin he made friends with fellow Hegelian Bruno Bauer who helped influence his views. The two around 1841 had become atheists and had debated forming an atheist journal.

While at university Karl also became engaged. One of the most important people in his life was his wife, Jenny von Westphalen. Four years his senior she was extremely well-read and got on well with Marx with them getting engaged in 1836 with them finally marrying in 1843. This was aided by the fact that he had obtained his PhD and started writing in 1842 for a radical socialist paper, the Rheinische Zeitung, in Cologne. It immediately came under Prussian scrutiny - Marx said that 'our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear' - and Russia even banned it! 1843 he and Jenny moved to Paris where Karl started writing for a Franco-German paper, German-French Annals, which was largely staffed by German exiles. However, another key figure in leftist ideology worked there as well - the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. It was in Paris that he had his first daughter, Jenny, and he met his closest friend - Friedrich Engels. Both had adopted communism by then - in 1845 Engels wrote one of his landmark books The Condition of the Working Class in England - and the two became extremely close. They were so close that Engels would often bail out Marx and even wrote Marx's surviving children into his will. That same year the Prussian king convinced the French Interior Minister to ban another of Marx's papers and exiled him to Brussels.

An Original copy of the Manifesto

The next ten years were both the worst and best years of Marx's life. While exiled in Brussels he visited England for the first time with Friedrich, saw the birth of the rest of his children, formed the Communist League, and published some of his best known works. One of the most important was The German Ideology, written with Engels, which set out their views on historical materialism. In 1848 a series of revolutions swept across Europe of which many soon adopted socialism. During this time Engels and Marx wrote their most important book: The Communist Manifesto. Short with little specialized language its aim was to introduce the proletariat and working classes to the idea of communism and bring about revolution. However, the Manifesto was soon banned by several states (it took until the 1870s for it to get popular), and the 1848 Revolutions were soon ended by reaction and as Marx had used his own money to fund Belgian revolutionaries he got exiled once again. After a brief stint in Cologne Marx and his family moved to London in 1850. During the early 1850s the rest of Marx's children were born and would tragically die. Thanks to TB and general sickness only three (Jenny, Laura and Eleanor) of his children would make it to adulthood. This would destroy Marx and he never recovered from the death of his children.

A barricade during the Paris Commune

While in London Marx continued writing and once again became a journalist, this time for the New York Daily Tribune. On the side he would organize socialist meetings with Engels and continue developing his ideas. Shortly after Lincoln's election he even wrote to him to tell him how much he admired him. He even left the Tribune in 1863 when the paper abandoned abolitionism in favor of supporting a quick peace with the Confederates. Although Marx did hold sexist views he also taught his daughters around this time to remain independent and only marry if they wanted to do so. In 1864 the First International was formed. This was an attempt to bring together leftists around the world to organize the workers of the world and Marx soon became very influential in it. However, a split emerged in the International which became accentuated after the 1871 Paris Commune. During the tail end of the Franco-Prussian War the Parisian people rose up and established a commune based on sexual equality, universal suffrage, and socialism - something which excited Marx. It was soon crushed through a variety of means. Marx believed that the Parisians had started dismantling the state too quickly and that was why it was defeated whereas Mikhail Bakunin argued instead that they reason it was defeated was due to the state still existing. This can be seen as the first major split in modern leftist thought with those supporting Marx being known as Marxists whereas Bakunin's followers became known as anarchists. During the International Marx's joint most famous book was published: Das Kapital. I should rather say the first volume was published - volume II was published in 1885 and Engels published volume III after Marx's death in 1895. Kapital set out Marxist theory on economics outlining the differences between a capitalist and communist economy. 

On December 2 1881 Jenny, at the age of 67, died after years of liver cancer. The loss of Jenny hit him badly and the sickly Marx could not handle it. Only his friendship with Engels, his daughters and finishing Kapital could keep him going. He was hit even harder by the death of his daughter Jenny at the age of 38 in the January of 1883. Losing two of his loved ones and his own illnesses took the life out of Marx. Eventually on March 14 1883 he passed away. At his funeral Engels said: On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think. He had been left alone for scarcely two minutes, and when we came back we found him in his armchair, peacefully gone to sleep—but forever.

Marx's grave today

Ideas

Talking about Marx's ideas can be difficult as many times they have been 'strawmanned' just because of how confusing they can be. Marx's opinions changed over his life and he often showed nuance in his views. For one, Kapital normally takes the individual out of history but in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon he places much emphasis on individuals, in this case Louis Napoleon. Marx himself was inspired by Enlightenment figures, like Kant, who placed emphasis on individuals. Today we'll just cover the basics. A key aspect of Marxist theory is how he treated sociology and history as a science and with that came historical materialism. This looks at how human societies develop over time and by looking at trends in such societies you can compare them. Marx argued that these societies can be determined by their mode of production which is how labor and means of production (how good end up being produced). These broad modes are hunter-gatherer, 'Asiatic', ancient/antique, feudal, capitalist, socialist and finally communist. He never really spoke of how a society transfers from one system to another and Marx did change his view. In the 1850s and 1860s despite opposing British rule in India (although at times Marx had a racist streak in him) he argued that it was a necessary evil to allow Indians closer to socialism. In 1881 writing to Russian leftist Vera Zasulich he did say that it was possible for Russia to skip capitalism to go straight to socialism. Furthermore, he argued that the mode of production offered a base for a superstructure which in practice was a society. For Marx, (and Engels), everything in society from power to the media to the family were thus determined by the mode of production.

Most of Marx's writing is based on capitalism and socialism. It is important to state as well that Marx did not invent socialism and communism - these ideas predate Marx with communism being coined by Victor d'Hupay in 1777. Instead he and other contemporaries simply shaped our current understanding of it. Marx defined capitalism as a ruling class, the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production and used a laboring class, the proletariat, to produce goods. Surplus value, profit, was then given to the owner - like a factory owner for example. This is contrasted with a socialist or communist system where workers, or the state, own the means of production and surplus value is split equally between them. Marx also saw what was happening in contemporary society and now has been said of predicting the future: Marx argued that automation was inevitable. However, in Marx's view this was more because the tools of production are communally owned and that machines replacing people would allow them to do their desired ambitions. Everything was to fit into this economic system. For one, Marx argued domestic abuse and treating wives as property was inevitable under capitalism - a capitalist in his view saw their wife as another tool to be exploited leading to abuse. Marx believed that as the interests of workers and owners were different this would lead to a class war which would establish socialism. However, he argued that false consciousness prevents this. This is an idea where the ruling group makes the lumpenproletariat (non-conscious workers) believe that society is fine. Here the famous line 'Religion is the opiate of the masses' came into play; Marx viewed the revolutionary potential of religion being changed to keep the masses in line. The last part of Marx's ideas (although he did not coin the term) I want to mention is the dictatorship of the proletariat. When Marx used this he did not mean a dictatorship in the typical sense. This instead was just a system where the proletariat rules.

Legacy

The October Revolution - the first successful Marxist revolution

Marx's legacy cannot be overstated. Marxism has influenced millions around the world in ways unthinkable. The most obvious example is the formation of Communist parties across the world which either brought to power Marxists (as in Russia and Cuba) or greatly changed the country (as in India and the USA). The Communist Party of the USA before the Second Red Scare were deeply involved with the Civil Rights Movement, such as CPUSA defending the Scottsboro Boys, and many key figures in American society were influenced by socialism. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were partially inspired by Marxist thought and at university Martin Luther King did read Marx - although he was more inspired by the Bible than Marx. Marxists have been deeply involved with women's liberation and anti-caste measures in India and Marxists were very involved with the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa; in his autobiography Nelson Mandela mentions how much he was influenced by Marxism. Many national liberation movements were influenced by Marxism as well including Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam - the US in the 1950s lamented that they couldn't support nationalists in Europe's colonies as many were communist. Socialist agitation in many countries, including the UK, were important in establishing unions, minimum wages, workplace safety measures, and even universal healthcare. One thing the British are universally proud of is the NHS - the publicly owned health care system. Today four countries have communism in their constitutions - China, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Cuba is now famous for its healthcare system, the amount of doctors it has and its high literacy rate. Marxism did develop a dark side. The horrors of Stalin and Mao, for example, lead to the deaths of millions. Many of the criticisms of Marxism lie with these examples.

British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that Marx is the first word not the last and his ideas have been repeatedly altered and adapted. Vladimir Lenin expanded on Marx to cover imperialism and his view on the dictatorship of the proletariat would be that of the vanguard party. Many of the criticisms that Marxism is authoritarianism stems from Lenin's vanguard party which did lead at times to dictatorships - as with the USSR under Stalin. Rosa Luxemburg (who influences my own political views) disagreed with Lenin arguing instead that the vanguard party would lead to authoritarianism and that elections via soviets should happen. Antonio Gramsci would expand on Marx's false consciousness with the idea of hegemony - he argued that culture also was used to prevent revolution and that it had to be changed if socialism could be achieved. His ideas proved very popular as Marx's modes of production and superstructure did not explain racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Marxist theory has greatly shaped academia. We see less emphasis on 'Great Man Theory' due to Marxist historians emphasizing 'history from below' and certain branches of history, such as feminist history, originated thanks to this. Post-modernism originated to criticize Marxism and other meta-narratives which has in turn inspired Marxist academics to look at their own research. Post-colonialist Gayatri Spivak is one such example of this. 

Conclusion

Regardless if you agree with Marx or not his writings have greatly shaped the world over the last century. Despite a brief period in the 1990s with the collapse of the USSR Marx's theories have remained deeply influential in many ways ranging from academics like Vere Gordon Childe (who coined the term Agricultural Revolution) to the Naxalites currently active in India to thousands who take part in May Day parades. Marx was far from perfect and his views were often flawed but they've inspired millions. Those who have been inspired by him have done horrific things but also many good things. No matter your position on his views it cannot be doubted that Marx and Marxism have been highly influential.

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

The sources I have used are as follows:

-Jonathan Sperber, Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, (New York: 2013)

-Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, (London: 2016)

-Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, (London: 1975)

-Eric Hobsbawm, 'Marx and History', New Left Review, 143, (1984), 39-50

-Harvey J. Kaye, The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History, (New York: 1992)

-S.H. Rigby, 'Marxist Historiography', in Michael Bentley, (ed.), Companion to Historiography, (London: 1997)

-'Marx', BBC In Our Time

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