A People's History of the World by Chris Harman

Author:Chris Harman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

Chapter 1

The world of capital

Capital had stamped its imprint everywhere in the world by 1900. There was scarcely a group of people anywhere whose lives were not being transformed by it – only the ice deserts of Antarctica, the most remote forests of the Amazon and the valleys of highland New Guinea still awaited those apostles of capitalism, the European explorers with their cheap goods, Bibles, germs and hopes of unearned riches.

The impact of capital was not the same everywhere. In many parts of the world it still meant the age-old application of muscle and sweat, now directed towards profit-making for faraway capitalists rather than local consumption. But in western Europe and North America mechanisation spread to ever-wider areas of industry, transport and even agriculture.

The industrial revolution a century before in Britain had been concentrated in one branch of textile production – cotton-spinning. Now every conceivable form of manufacturing was revolutionised and then revolutionised again – soap-making, printing, dyeing, shipbuilding, printing, boot and shoe-making, and paper-making. The discovery of how to generate electricity and the development of the filament bulb created a new way of producing artificial light and prolonging working hours (Bombay’s first textile strike was a reaction to this). The invention of the electric motor opened up the possibility of driving machinery at some distance from an immediate energy source such as a steam engine. The typewriter revolutionised procedures for business correspondence, and broke the monopoly of male clerks with long years of office experience. The invention of the telegraph and, at the end of the 1880s, the telephone enabled both production and warfare to be coordinated more easily over long distances – as well as allowing people to keep in touch more easily (Engels had a telephone in his London home shortly before his death in 1895). The rise of the factory was matched by the relentless spread of the railways, bringing remote regions into close contact with cities. Coal mines proliferated to feed the ever-growing demand for fuel of the railways, factories and steamships. Iron and steelworks the size of small towns sprang up, with towns beside them for their workers.

The growth of one industry encouraged the growth of another. The people of the cities, mining villages and steel towns had to be fed and clothed. The first agri-industry developed as grain from the previously ‘unopened’ prairies of the American Midwest, beef from the Argentinian pampas and wool from Australia were shipped thousands of miles. This in turn encouraged the development of new ways of storing and preserving food. Growing cities required some means of getting people from where they lived to where they worked. Capitalists who believed they could make money by running horse-drawn ‘omnibuses’, building tram systems or even digging underground railways did so – and where they would not undertake such tasks, local municipalities often would. The middle classes of the mid-nineteenth century had been willing to tolerate the poor living in overcrowded squalor and dying of disease or hunger. But by the

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