14.1: Big Changes

One of the most vexing questions for historians is: how does one explain the simple fact that Europe controlled a staggering amount of territory all around the globe by 1900? The old Eurocentric viewpoint indicated something unique about European culture that gave it a competitive edge globally. Popular among Europeans was openly racist and chauvinistic, it claimed that European civilization was the bearer of critical thought itself, of technological know-how, of piercing insight and practical sense. All other civilizations were, in this model, regarded as either hopelessly backward or stuck in a previous stage of cultural or even biological evolution. The explanation was self-serving and inaccurate. This inflated view and dominance were extremely short-lived. The technological lead lasted for less than a century.

In about 1750, the Industrial Revolution began in England, and took almost a century to spread to other parts of western Europe. The process began in earnest around 1830, and reached maturity by the 1850s and 1860s. In turn, European industrial power was overwhelming in cocompared to the rest of the world, except the United States starting from about 1860 - 1914. After that, Europe’s competitive edge began a steady decline, one that coincided with the collapse of its global empires after World War II.

A more satisfying explanation for the explosion of European power has to do with energy. For about a century, Europe and, eventually, the United States, had almost exclusive access to what amounted to unlimited energy in the form of fossil fuels. The iconic battles toward the end of the century between rifle-wielding European soldiers and the people they conquered in Africa and parts of Asia were not just about the rifles. They were about the factories that made those rifles, the calories that fed the soldiers, the steamships that transported them there, the telegraph lines that conveyed orders for thousands of miles away, the medicines that kept them healthy, and so on, all of which represented an epochal shift from the economic and technological reality of the people trying to resist European imperialism. All of those inventions could be produced in gigantic quantities thanks to the use of coal and, later, oil power.

Many historians have taken issue with the term “revolution” for an event that was a slow evolution at the time. There is no question that the changes industrial technology brought about really were revolutionary. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally transformed almost everything about how human beings live, perhaps most strikingly including humankind’s relationship with nature. Whole landscapes can be transformed, cities constructed, species exterminated, and the entire natural ecosystem fundamentally changed in a relatively short amount of time.

Likewise, “the” Industrial Revolution was really a linking together of distinct “revolutions”. Technology started it, but the effects of those technological changes were economic and social. All of society was eventually transformed, leading to the phrase “industrial society,” one in which everything is in large part based on the availability of a huge amount of cheap energy and an equally huge number of mass-produced commodities (including people, insofar as workers can be replaced). To sum up, the Industrial Revolution was as momentous in human history as was the agricultural revolution that began civilization back in about 10,000 BCE. Even if it was a revolution that took over a century to come to fruition, from a long-term world-historical perspective, it still qualifies as revolutionary.