Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History

The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom.

One of the finest of those memorials is Manchester Town Hall. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse (whose other masterpiece is the Natural History Museum, London), the Town Hall is decorated with murals by Ford Madox Brown, a painter who enjoyed depicting moral and historical scenes. The Manchester murals tell the story of the city’s history through some of its most-celebrated events. One of these is the occasion in 1753, legend has it, when machine-breakers raided John Kay’s home to try to destroy his invention, forcing him to run for his life.

John Kay came from near Bury in Lancashire where he worked as a reed maker. Reeds are combs used to hold apart the crosswise threads (or ‘weft’) in a weaving loom. Until John Kay came up with his invention of the Flying Shuttle weavers used their hands to pass a shuttle containing the crosswise threads across the downward thread (or ‘warp’) on their looms. Building up pieces of cloth in this way was time-consuming. Weavers always had to change the position of their hands, and two or more of them were needed to make pieces of cloth bigger than the span of an individual’s arms. There was also a lack of consistency. The quality of each piece of cloth depended entirely on the skill of its weaver. Kay simplified the whole process by automating the movement of the shuttle. He put it on wheels and mounted it on the edge of the loom’s comb, allowing it to run quickly in a completely straight line between two spring-loaded boxes at either end. In this way a single weaver could make pieces of cloth to any size required by giving the shuttle a quick flick with a piece of string attached to a stick that sent the mechanism flying back and forth across the loom. Suddenly one weaver could make much more cloth than he could before and build it up on his own to any size required. The productivity of the weaving industry was dramatically increased.

At the time Kay was viewed as just another clever man with expensive ideas.

Kay went on to invent several other pieces of equipment that were used to improve the efficiency of the textile industry, but he does not appear to have made any money out of any of them. He seems to have been a rather difficult and quarrelsome individual. He tried to charge hefty royalties for his Flying Shuttle, but manufacturers either refused to pay or simply copied his invention. Kay went to France to try his luck there, but ran up against the same problems as he had at home. His genius for invention does not seem to have transferred to the world of business and his death in France in about 1780 went unrecorded. Only time has given him his place in history. While he lived he was viewed as just another clever man with expensive ideas.

His ideas, and many of those that followed, such as Richard Arkwright’s Spinning Jenny, helped create the Industrial Revolution – described by the historian E. J. Hobsbawm as ‘the most important event in world history’. Britain was perfectly placed to lead it. During the second half of the eighteenth century, at the same time as industrialisation began to increase, large parts of its agricultural land fell into the hands of only a few landlords. The Enclosure Acts created a system of large estates farmed by tenants or smallholders who no longer owned the land themselves. The peasant class, like the one in France that played an important part in the French Revolution of 1789, did not exist in Britain. Farming had succumbed to the power of the market. The country was a nation of traders – or ‘shopkeepers’ in Napoleon’s famously dismissive phrase – where labour moved comparatively freely to support each new commercial opportunity. The textile industry provided many of these. The Industrial Revolution was built on the colossal expansion of the manufacture of cotton, as Britain became its biggest exporter throughout the world. The mill became a symbol of both prosperity and despair, the scene of many famous Victorian novels about life in Britain in the nineteenth century. Coketown in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is typical. It had, he tells us, ‘a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye’, and in the mills where ‘the hands’ worked long, cramped and unhealthy hours, ‘the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness’. Dickens, writing ten years after Engels published his book about the working classes, echoed his concern for the state of Britain’s labouring poor, although he probably would not have agreed with Engels’s observation that the result of its exploitation had to be ‘a revolution in comparison with which the French Revolution, and the year 1794 (the year of the Great Terror), will prove to have been child’s play’.

That revolution eventually happened, but in Russia, not Britain. The country managed to absorb the surge in population and prosperity that the long cycle of industrialisation created. By the second half of the nineteenth century, many British writers and thinkers had come to realise that it had resulted in an unequal distribution of wealth that needed reform. The economic historian and passionate social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, whose book The Industrial Revolution was highly influential when it came out in 1884, set the tone when, talking about the working classes in a lecture in London, said, addressing them directly:

We – the middle classes, I mean not merely the very rich – we have neglected you; instead of justice we have offered you charity, and instead of sympathy we have offered you hard and unreal advice … You have – I say it clearly and advisedly – you have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously but if you will forgive us, nay whether you will or not, we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.

Such highly emotional and deeply felt calls for a change helped alleviate the social distress that accompanied the nation’s riches. The Victorian Age was often harsh and hypocritical, but it was fuelled by a determination for improvement as well.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s commercial supremacy around the world was beginning to face strong competition as other European countries began to catch up. After the end of the First World War in 1918, although Britain still called itself an empire, its problems were predominately national rather than global. But the Industrial Revolution continued, and is still continuing. New forms of energy – oil, gas and nuclear – have replaced steam. In our own time, the microchip has transformed our whole world of technology. If this sprawling, never-ending march of mechanisation can be said to have a beginning, it can be found as well as anywhere in John Kay’s simple invention which, as the bulky memorial to him in his home town of Bury observes, ‘quadrupled human power in weaving and placed England in the front rank as the best market in the world for textile manufactures’. Unveiled in 1908, the thirty-four-feet high monument is testament to the pride Bury feels for its famous son who died in France, though no one knows quite when, and is buried, though no one knows where.

CHAPTER 7

The Foundation of Oil City, Pennsylvania 1859

In 1859 the world’s first commercially successful oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The world discovered a commodity that would become one of the most valuable it had ever known.

In the late 1850s a former railway conductor called Edwin Drake turned up in the small community of Titusville, Pennsylvania in the United States. He had been sent there by a speculator who wanted him to see if oil could be extracted from the rocks in the area. Local farmers had complained for years that oil seepage polluted their wells. If its source could be located and extracted it could turn out to be a lucrative business opportunity. The speculator, James Townsend, had seen a report from a Yale University chemistry professor which said that oil, once refined, could be used for lighting, lubrication and other purposes. Townsend seems to have liked running his investments on a shoestring. The story goes that he only hired Drake because as a former employee he had a free pass on the railway.

Drake used his steam engine to drill for six days a week.

For the best part of a year Drake experimented with ways of trying to get to the oil, including using the money from his backer and his associates to buy a steam engine to bore down into the rock. They decided against giving him any more advances once he had spent the equivalent of $2,000 without any results – so Drake pressed on with funding the exploration from his own savings. Throughout the summer of 1859 he used his steam engine to drill for six days a week. When water flooded his borehole he drove down an iron pipe to protect his drill. On 27th August, at a depth of nearly seventy feet, he found what he had been looking for. Oil bubbled up to meet him: the world had discovered a new supply of fuel.

Oil bubbled up to meet him [Drake]: the world had discovered a new supply of fuel.

The Pennsylvania oil well was the first successful commercial enterprise, but drilling for oil had already begun on the other side of the world. Russian engineers had started sinking wells ten years earlier on the Aspheron Peninsula near Baku in Azerbaijan. In 1846 they reported to the Tsar that they had been successful, but development thereafter was rather slow. Imperial permission for drilling more wells was not given until more than twenty years later when Azerbaijan began to grow into a huge oil-producing area. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia was competing with the United States as the world’s biggest producer of oil: in 1900 it was producing 11.5 million tons a year compared to America’s 9.1 million, but after the Bolshevik Revolution, oil production was diverted to domestic needs. The market, and the money that went with it, was left to America.

As is often the way with these things, no money found its way into Edwin Drake’s pocket. He eventually retired with a pension of $1,500 a year. Others, however, became fabulously wealthy as they learned how to own and distribute the vast reserves of oil that lay beneath the American continent. In the same year that Drake found oil in Pennsylvania, two young ambitious businessmen, John D. Rockefeller and an Englishman called Maurice Clark, opened a wholesale trading business a hundred miles away from Titusville in Cleveland, Ohio. Four years later, with the American Civil War still in full force, oil had turned the region into a fuming and disreputable place, thick with oil leaks, bars and brothels, known locally as ‘Sodden Gomorrah’. Rockefeller, a stern Baptist and anti-slavery campaigner, stayed out of the war for fear of losing his business. ‘Those vast stores of oil were the gifts of the great Creator,’ he said later, without adding that he was determined to turn the Lord’s benevolence to his own advantage. He set up an oil-refining business with Clark and several other associates, and on 14th February 1865, exactly two months before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated following the defeat of the Confederate Army, bought out his partners for $72,500. ‘It was,’ he recalled, ‘the day that determined my career.’ Within four years, helped by an economy that had started to grow again in a country at peace at last, Rockefeller was running the world’s biggest oil-refining business, producing ten percent of its output. At the age of thirty he changed his company’s name to Standard Oil.

Oil became a vital ingredient in national survival.

Rockefeller was not the only entrepreneur to recognise the value of oil. In 1864, a young Scotsman called Andrew Carnegie who had made money by building sleeping cars for first-class travel on the railways, invested $40,000 in a Pennsylvania oil well. The huge profits he made provided him with the foundation of a business empire on a similar scale to Rockefeller’s. Carnegie eventually made most of his money from iron and steel, though it was oil that set him on the road to enormous wealth. Rockefeller always stuck with oil, first forming a cartel with the railroad companies to control distribution and, when public protest forced that to disband, simply buying out his rivals. By the end of the nineteenth century, Standard Oil was the biggest private business corporation the world had ever seen. In 1911, the United States Supreme Court ruled that its existence contravened anti-trust legislation and ordered that it be broken up. Standard Oil metamorphosed into household names such as Mobil, Exxon, Amoco and Chevron. John D. Rockefeller, no longer an active corporate executive but still a major shareholder with holdings in all of these new companies, became even richer.

Oil was not the ‘driving’ energy of the world when Rockefeller’s huge corporation was broken up. Its main use was for lighting and lubrication –Vaseline was one of Standard Oil’s most successful products – and although valuable it was not seen as an essential part of a nation’s strategic needs. Coal was the fuel that drove the steam engines that kept manufacturing and transport on the move. But as the First World War developed and the motor car and the diesel engine came into use, oil became not just a commodity that made money, but a vital ingredient in national survival. It was Britain, a country without any oil of its own, that first recognised the importance of securing and maintaining oil supplies.

In May 1908, a British engineer called George Reynolds was looking for oil in Iran. Rather like Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania nearly fifty years before, he had been sent there by an English millionaire, William Knox D’Arcy, who had bought the country’s oil concession from the Shah. Armed with his pipe, pet dog and pith helmet, and sustaining his work force with supplies of cider and library books, Reynolds was one of those indefatigable Englishmen who never chooses to give up. Money was running out, conditions were becoming intolerable and he was about to be called home, when he found what he was looking for. His employers founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which, by 1912, had built the world’s largest oil refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf.

In 1914 the British government, prompted by Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty was determined to modernise the Royal Navy by moving it into oil-fuelled technology, secretly took a majority share in the company. Oil now lubricated the national interest. In 1951 the republican government of Iran nationalised the country’s oilfields, but fearing that it might align with the Communist East rather than the West, in 1953 the United States sanctioned the CIA to support a military coup that returned the Shah to the throne. Oil had also been discovered in Saudi Arabia, in 1938, and then in other parts of the Middle East. After the Second World War republican regimes that were hostile to Western interests came to power in countries such as Egypt and Libya. To defend their interests, America and Britain threw their support behind the old established kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The West’s crucial dependence on oil has kept it closely involved in the politics of the Middle East ever since.

The enormous wealth created by the discovery of oil became an important issue for the two men who had first gained most profit from it. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were probably the two richest men the world has ever known. As businessmen they were ruthless, sometimes prepared to bribe or threaten to get their way: the expanding world of American commerce was a cruder place than it is today. At the same time a greater awareness of the responsibilities of wealth was beginning to appear. In 1894, the US journalist and progressive reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, who attacked Standard Oil for its business practices, published a book called Wealth Against Commonwealth in which he observed: ‘Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.’ In an attempt to head off such stinging and potentially damaging criticism both Rockefeller and Carnegie poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public works. In Rockefeller’s case the money went to Chicago University, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today Rockefeller University), and the General Education Board that announced it would teach children ‘to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way’. In 1913 he and his son established the Rockefeller Foundation that remains one of the richest charitable organisations in the world. Carnegie too used his money to encourage education. His grand scheme was to fund the opening of libraries, and between 1883 and 1929 more than 2,000 were founded all over the world. In many small towns in America and in Britain, the Carnegie Library is still one of their most imposing buildings, always specially designed and built in a wide variety of architectural styles. In 1889, Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth first published in America and then, at the suggestion of Gladstone, in Britain. He said that it was the duty of a man of wealth to set an example of ‘modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance’, and, once he had provided ‘moderately’ for his dependents, to set up trusts through which his money could be distributed to achieve in his judgement, ‘the most beneficial result for the community’. Carnegie believed that the huge differences between rich and poor could be alleviated if the administration of wealth was judiciously and philanthropi-cally managed by those who possessed it. Rich men should start giving away money while they lived, he said. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.’

The names of Rockefeller and Carnegie live on through the philanthropic trusts their money endowed, permanent reminders of the wealth generated by oil and steel. In Azerbaijan, where the oilfields once competed with and might have overtaken their American counterparts, they remember another philanthropist. Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the son of a shoemaker, went drilling for oil on rented land near Baku. In a repetition of what happened in other parts of the world, his partners gave up and sold him their shares. In 1873 he struck oil and became one of the richest men in Imperial Russia. He could neither read nor write, but used his money to build schools and theatres and to help pay for the pipeline that still brings water to the city of Baku from the Caucasus Mountains a hundred miles away. When the Red Army reached the city in 1920, Taghiyev’s house was seized. He was allowed to live the last four years of his life in his summer cottage not far away, but his second wife was not so fortunate. She died in poverty on the streets of Baku in 1938. The Bolsheviks turned his splendid residence into the Azerbaijan National History Museum, which is what it still is today. The fortunes of the world’s first oil tycoons were very different. In capitalist America their wealth was their greatest protector: in Bolshevik Russia it destroyed them.

CHAPTER 8

The Treaty of Versailles 1919

The Treaty of Versailles formally brought the First World War of 1914–18 to an end. Its terms had the effect of making a defeated Germany feel impoverished and resentful. In trying to build a world of peace it laid down foundations that would lead to another war.

In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice was signed that ended the fighting of the First World War. Barely a month later, on 10th December, 75,000 soldiers of the German army marched back into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, a socialist politician who was the new Chancellor of the nation. ‘Welcome to the German Republic,’ he shouted. ‘Welcome home. You should march home with your heads held high. Never have men achieved greater things.’ Warming to his theme, he continued: ‘Your sacrifices have been unparalleled. No enemy has conquered you.’ With those words the mood of the new Germany was born. It was an undefeated country that had either been sold out by conspirators in its own ranks or was suffering from difficulties imposed by the punitive terms of an unfair treaty. The Kaiser’s Fatherland was not just a memory. It still existed. It could rise again.

The Kaiser’s Fatherland still existed … it could rise again.

Ebert was facing a situation that was in danger of running out of control. He and the other moderate socialists that he led, had supported the war as a necessary patriotic measure. He had not wanted to see the end of the monarchy and felt that the proclamation of Germany as a republic following the Kaiser’s abdication had been premature and needed to be ratified by a nationally elected assembly. But he was overtaken by events. By the time he addressed the first meeting of Germany’s new national assembly the following year, 1919, the German Republic was a fact and the country’s mood of resentment more entrenched. To maintain power he needed to respond to it. Germany’s enemies, he told the assembly in his opening speech, were seeking ‘to indemnify themselves at the cost of the German people … These plans of revenge and oppression call for the sharpest protest. The German people cannot be made the wage slaves of other nations for twenty, forty or sixty years.’ His remarks were met with loud applause. Ebert wanted above all to create a true democracy in his defeated homeland – but the task he faced proved hopeless. In the end the German people looked to the right-wing parties to redress their sense of grievance. Within fifteen years, the Nazis had assumed power, democracy died and Europe was on the road to war once more.

The victorious Allies who met in Paris at the end of the First World War wanted above all else to destroy German militarism. They also wanted to establish world peace, rearranging the fragments of disintegrated empires in a way that would ensure the future happiness and prosperity of their subjects. The task they faced was immense and probably impossible. The Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary had arisen out of the old Holy Roman Empire established by Charlemagne in 800 AD, and, in various forms, governed the whole of central and Eastern Europe for centuries. The Hohenzollern Empire of the German Kaiser, the Allies’ main enemy, had used its Prussian base to unite the German states during the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a formidable military machine intent on expansion and conquest. These two great engines of state had collapsed and the people they had once governed were looking for new, democratic freedoms. The Allies recognised these ambitions, but they also wanted to punish the aggressor. Graciousness in victory is the greatest of all political virtues but it requires a degree of altruism unusual in human beings. At Versailles the Allies’ understandable desire for punishment outweighed their careful consideration of the future and undermined the hopes of those who thought they had been liberated from imperial control.

Bismarck and the Creation of the German Empire

On 18th January 1871, German princes gathered in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. They had come to witness the crowning of the Prussian King, Wilhelm I, as Emperor of a newly-formed nation – Germany. Before 1871, Germany was a patchwork of independent states over which Austria exerted the predominant influence. But German nationalism was growing. In 1848 revolutionaries demanded unification, offering the Prussian King the imperial throne. He refused, worried that it would lead to military intervention from Austria. But as Prussia’s military, diplomatic and economic power grew, the whole idea of unifying Germany without Austria started to become a real possibility.

The principal architect of this extraordinary achievement was a skilful and loyal diplomat called Otto von Bismarck (1815–98). During the 1850s he became convinced that unification could be achieved in Prussia’s interests. When in 1862 he was appointed Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Prussia he began to employ astute diplomacy blended with timely military intervention to secure his ends. With the assistance of two Prussian soldiers, Albrecht von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke, the army was reorganised into an impressive fighting force. In 1866 it defeated the Austrian army at Königgrätz, east of Prague. This enabled Bismarck to annex the north German states including Hanover, Frankfurt and Saxony. France, frightened of being encircled by the growing power of Prussia, declared war in 1870. Prussia pounced. Having defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck wasted no time in negotiating with the leaders of the southern German states to complete unification.