Niall Ferguson by Civilization: The West & the Rest

Author:Civilization: The West & the Rest [West, Civilization: The & Rest, the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General History
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2011-03-02T15:00:00+00:00

In that sense, it might make more sense for historians to talk about an Industrial Evolution, in Darwin’s sense of the word. As the economists Thorstein Veblen and Joseph Schumpeter would later remark, nineteenth-century capitalism was an authentically Darwinian system, characterized by seemingly random mutation, occasional speciation and differential survival or, to use Schumpeter’s memorable phrase, ‘creative destruction’.27

Yet precisely the volatility of the more or less unregulated markets created by the Industrial Revolution caused consternation among many contemporaries. Until the major breakthroughs in public health described in the previous chapter, mortality rates in industrial cities were markedly worse than in the countryside. Moreover, the advent of a new and far from regular ‘business cycle’, marked by periodic crises of industrial over-production and financial panic, generally made a stronger impression on people than the gradual acceleration of the economy’s average growth rate. Though the Industrial Revolution manifestly improved life over the long run, in the short run it seemed to make things worse. One of William Blake’s illustrations for his preface to Milton featured, among other sombre images, a dark-skinned figure holding up a blood-soaked length of cotton yarn.* For the composer Richard Wagner, London was ‘Alberich’s dream come true – Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog’. Hellish images of the British factory inspired his depiction of the dwarf’s underground realm in Das Rheingold, as well as one of the leitmotifs of the entire Ring cycle, the insistent, staccato rhythm of multiple hammers:

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