Chapter VII

INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION


IN THE PRESENT state of historical knowledge, any solution of the enigma of industrial society must be largely conjectural. This means that it must be subject to revision, perhaps total revision, as our knowledge is extended by further historical research. It does not mean that one conjecture is no better than another. That it rested on a sandy foundation of "conjectural history" was one of Veblen's favorite jibes at the classical tradition, and in this case as in so many others the criticism is implied but not developed. The same is true of the jibe at the "taxonomy" of orthodox price theory. A taxonomy is a classification, and there is nothing bad a priori about classification. The point is that the word "taxonomy" has been most extensively used by botanists among whom it is understood to refer particularly to the taxonomic exercises of Linnaeus and his predecessors whose classification of the plants has had to be almost totally revised in the light of modern knowledge of the morphology and physiology of plants because it was based on external observations of gross structures. Veblen made his meaning clear to the perspicacious reader by other jibes of an even more explicitly botanical and Linnaean character, but these also have been shrugged off as mere epithets. In the case of "conjectural history," the fault, obviously was not with the fact that the historical reconstructions of the classical economists were conjectural. With his conjectures on the "savage" and "barbarous" stages of culture, and on the role of the "dolicho­blond" in history­­ bad guesses, based on nineteenth­century anthropology, by which sympathetic students have been embarrassed ever since­­ Veblen was least qualified to object to the use of conjecture in historical reconstruction. The real basis of his jibe at the "conjectural history" with which classical political economy was buttressed was not that it was guesswork but that it was bad guesswork, based not on historical knowledge however fragmentary but on assumptions with regard to the price system, the role of capital, and the order of nature including human nature, for which a historical background was invented ad hoc. Or rather it was a legend dressed up in scientific language­­ a tribal myth, glorifying the ancestors, and on that account, perhaps, surviving undetected into the age of Reason.

We are still unable to state as a matter of scientifically demonstrated fact just what the forces were which resulted in the appearance of an industrial economy, first in western Europe and then in America and so throughout the world. In the field of history, indeed scientific demonstration is extremely limited and consists largely in establishing the authenticity of contemporary records, reducing the discrepancies among them with regard to dates, names, and to a still more limited extent the nature of the recorded events, and so on. This is why historians declare that it is not their business as scientists to assign causes to any social developments nor even perhaps to characterize such developments. Nevertheless it is with regard to social developments, their nature and causes, that we seek enlightenment; and if we can obtain answers to our insistent questions only by conjecture, then with conjecture we are obliged to deal.

Even so, our conjectures need not be wholly uninformed. Though certain historical knowledge is still extremely limited, it is vastly ampler today than two centuries ago. This is notably the case in the field of economic history. More work has been done in this field during the past generation than resulted from all previous efforts put together, in part certainly because of general dissatisfaction with the conjectures of the past; and with surprising unanimity modern researches testify to the extraordinary magnitude of the industrial revolution. History, it seems has a way of disconcerting social dogmas. When Arnold Toynbee first popularized the phrase "industrial revolution," he was a very young man and he was lecturing not to academic classes but to audiences of workingmen. More orthodox economists have done their best to qualify the importance of industry as a prime­mover in economic change by limiting the industrial revolution to a brief moment between a supposed "commercial" revolution and a conjectural later stage of "finance capitalism;" but more and more research exhibits more and more convincing evidence of an industrial process identical and continuous with that described by Toynbee and extending at least throughout modern times. This body of fact is something with which any conjectural reconstruction must now reckon.

Another has resulted from the labors of the medievalists. The civilization of medieval Europe used to be described as static. The institutions of feudal society were thought to have crystallized into a stable, not to say rigid, structure; and the medieval mind was conceived to have been fixed in a groove of dogma, utterly subservient to the pronouncements of Aristotle and the doctrines of the Church. This was the view of the humanists who were engaged by the end of the fifteenth century in a struggle to free themselves from medieval shackles, a view which later generations, sympathizing with this effort, have therefore perpetuated. But it is a view which we now know to have been false. Why after all, were those shackles so easily cast off? Apparently they were not so strong as was supposed in early modern times. Even chronology betrays the conventional belief. This epoch during which for so long a time European society was thought to be stable was briefer than the occupancy of North America by European peoples; and during this brief period tremendous changes occurred. Most important of all, this age in which European society was so fully "integrated" and "self­realized" was immediately followed by the greatest convulsion in the whole of history, a strange outcome for a period of such complete stability. The truth is­­ and it is a scientifically demonstrated fact if there is any such thing anywhere in the field of history­­ the middle age was period of ferment, pregnant with imminent and fundamental change; in short, the true parent of the industrial revolution.

Even pre­history is much better known at present than it was in Veblen's day. Not only is the continuity of the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean region much more fully known today than half a century ago, primitive culture also is far better understood, including the continuity of ancient civilization with neolithic culture. What Veblen saw, through all the imperfections of the anthropology of his youth, that modern civilization is necessarily continuous with that of primitive man and is not understood until that continuity has been appreciated, is now far more completely substantiated than it was in the nineteenth century. To a far greater extent than ever before, anthropological studies enable us to see why and how later civilization is conditioned by earlier civilization, how the industrial revolution itself extends back to include even primeval man.

Indeed, the mystery of industrial revolution resolves itself into three related enigmas which must all be solved together or not at all. The first and most immediate is the question, why did the industrial revolution occur in western Europe and in modern times? Why not in China, or in ancient Greece? What forces were operative in the modern European situation which were not operative elsewhere and at other times? Granted the inventions occurred which altered the material framework of society, why did they so occur? This first question­­ for it is a single question­­ assumes another. It assumes that something or other was going on in western Europe, or perhaps the world, by virtue of which pre­industrial European society was the matrix of industrial revolution. What was this? To external appearance the civilization of medieval Europe was not utterly unlike those of China or of the ancient world; nevertheless it must have been effectively different in some respect directly related to the later burgeoning of industrial revolution. What was this difference? In what way was pre­industrial European society endowed with the capacity of parenthood of industrialism? Behind these questions there lies still another. In our speculation concerning other possible routes of industrialization we raise the question of China or ancient Greece. Why not the Dyak culture of central Borneo, or the Ainu culture of northern Japan, or that of the Andaman islanders? Apparently the parent civilization from which industrial society sprang was itself of a very special character, one of but few in the history of civilization. What was this character, and how was it related to the development of that condition which we have called the "parenthood" of industrialism? When and why and how did the first cleavage occur in the development of culture of which industrial society was the end product?

Whether these questions can ever be answered with scientific certainty, our reflections concerning them are greatly assisted by the knowledge which modern researches have afforded, and this is true with regard to each of the three. If we proceed chronologically and deal first with the one which goes farthest back, we find that the anthropologists have a technological answer to the question why a certain type of civilization should have appeared in certain areas which was capable of becoming the matrix of later industrial developments as other cultures were not. It must not be assumed that there is any manifest destiny by which all cultural development is guided in this direction. Such an assumption would run afoul of the drift fence which anthropologists have set up to guard against just such teleological ways of thinking. There is no one line of cultural evolution along which all peoples are moving. We must not and need not assume that life in settled communities is "natural" to man. It would be just as reasonable to make a contrary assumption on the basis of the persistence with which men in settled communities seek to "return to nature" when opportunity affords. Rather it was a specific event in the lives of certain peoples which had this result for better or worse.

This event was the discovery or invention of agriculture. Even here we must not assume too much. As Thurnwald has pointed out, there is an indefinite number of different kinds of agriculture and agricultural communities. It was the discovery of wheat, twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, and the development of the practice of cultivating cereal food which had the significant effect of stabilizing settled communities. The effect was not primarily spiritual or even social in any vague or general sense. It has been remarked that agricultural peoples seem quite commonly to develop characteristic superstitions and magic rites based on the reproductive cycle of the grains on which they are so dependent, and that these seem to produce theocratic social systems of a singularly onerous kind. But it can hardly be supposed that these practices formed the basis of the later developments which we seek to trace. Nor should it be supposed that the practice of agriculture stimulates the technological "faculty." What is does lead to is the accumulation of technological materials. When people stay put in any particular locality things accumulate, and the accumulation of the physical instruments and materials of living constitutes a forcing bed of technological development.

No doubt this tendency is at work everywhere. But there are certain regions in which the configuration of the earth has made continued occupancy possible over very long periods of time with correspondingly formidable technological development. It has long been apparent that certain areas have been the scene of such developments: the Nile and Mesopotamian valleys; the Indus and Ganges valleys; the Yangtse and Huang­Ho valleys; and valleys of Central American and the Andes. In other regions agricultural occupancy has been more intermittent and more limited; in still other, virtually nonexistent. Thus the European plan was not the scene of development of any "great" (i.e. continuous and extensive) civilization contemporaneously with these other regions, although it is one of the most fertile areas on earth, probably because in was not protected by natural barriers of mountains and desert and jungle as the others were. It is not that the geographical character of the "cradles" of civilization" in any positive sense "determined" the cultural developments which took place there. Certainly it need not be supposed that neolithic man, foreseeing the future over thousands of years, cannily selected the regions in which great civilizations might materialize. Rather the geographical configuration of the different localities acted as a limiting factor. In some regions, like the European plain, exposure inhibited development; in others the unearned increment of natural barriers permitted development to occur. What occurred­­ the substance of the process­­ was a long­continued accumulation of technical contrivances and materials with the development, inevitable under such circumstances, of the progressive series of techniques which we call civilization.

This development was of course continuous with the technical achievements of primeval man, upon which the discovery of agriculture itself was posited. In this sense the industrial revolution is continuous and goes back to the coup de point, not to mention the techniques of using fire, the domestication of animals, and all the rest. But however continuous, the emergence of the industrial economy has not been without event; and perhaps the first great cleavage by virtue of which the possibility of later development was narrowed down to not more than four great culture areas was the one here under discussion; and if so it is significant that this first cleavage has already been interpreted in technological terms.

The next problem is that of the circumstances which further narrowed the field not only to one of these four areas but to a particular region within the general field of Mediterranean civilization, that of Western Europe. What is it in the culture­history of western Europe that is unique? This region was the residuary legatee of thousands of years of civilization in the Mediterranean area, but so were many others. The Nile and Mesopotamian valleys are still inhabited. Wherein does western Europe differ from them? When the question is put in terms of these alternatives part of the answer is obvious at once. Of all the regions in which Mediterranean civilization flourished in ancient times, Egypt and Mesopotamia are the oldest and western Europe the youngest. Indeed the difference in age is so great­­ running to thousands of years, or several times the age of the younger member­­ as to demand consideration. But although the solution to the problem may be a function of age, it is not a mere matter of chronology.

Western Europe was in the most literal sense the frontier region of Mediterranean civilization. This has been seen most clearly, perhaps, by the great Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne. A frontier is a penetration phenomenon. It is a region into which people come from another and older center of civilization, bringing with them the tools and materials of their older life, their cereal plants and vines and fruit trees, their domestic animals and accouterments, their techniques of working stone and wood and their architectural designs and all the rest. They also bring their immemorial beliefs and "values," their mores and folkways. But it is notorious that the latter invariably suffer some reduction in importance under the conditions of frontier life. Existence on the frontier is, as we say, free and easy. meticulous observance of the Sabbath and the rules of grammar are somehow less important on the frontier than "back home."

While this is true of all frontiers, the difference is greatly accentuated by the presence of a considerable population, indigenous to the region, to whom the whole culture­system of the invaders is more or less completely foreign. The discrepancy between the civilization of Caesar's Rome and that of pre­Roman Gaul was not as great as that between Winthrop's England and pre­British Massachusetts, and perhaps as a consequence the Franks were assimilated whereas the North American Indians were not. But we must guard against supposing that Frankish assimilation was complete. Modern Europeans are accustomed to think of ancient civilization as "their" civilization at an earlier stage; but this is true only with great reservations. Neither "Hellenism" nor Hebraism" was indigenous to western Europe. Both were foreign importations, doubtfully assimilated by the "natives" for many centuries. For example, throughout the "dark" ages of western Europe when literacy was extremely rare and the ancient classics were almost unknown, the education of upper­class children of Byzantine civilization included memorizing the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modern educators may rejoice in this "emancipation," and as we shall see there may be good grounds, at least from the point of view of industrial revolution, for general rejoicing. The point is that western Europe was a frontier in which ancient culture was only partially installed.

The importance of this reservation is even further emphasized if we consider it in terms of the religion of the Western peoples. Ever since the Crusades the Western nations have considered themselves the defenders of the faith until it has been forgotten that it was not originally their faith. Of the many cultural elements which have been blended in Christian theology­­ the original Hebraism, the trinitarian syncretism and neo­Platonic mysticism of Egypt, Indo­Persian Mithraism, and all the rest­­ none originated in western Europe. Furthermore the conversion of some of the Western peoples to Christianity was so tardy and the persistence of pagan elements, such as the spring fertility rites of the May­pole and the Gothic cult of the tannenbaum, was so strong that the church continued to be greatly exercised over the residue of paganism in its midst until quite recently. This, it is now established, is the reason for the singular asperity, continuing even in the American colonies, of the measures taken against witchcraft. In addition it must be recalled that Mohammedanism was securely established in Europe itself, just across the Pyrenees, throughout the middle ages; and that it was much more a world religion and a vehicle of culture than Christianity.

To recall these facts is not to question the importance of Christianity in the history of the Western peoples. Historians have always made much of the church as a unifying element in feudal society, and justly so. But for this unifying element the Western peoples might not have achieved any sort of cultural unity. But our concern is with industrial evolution and from this point of view the church must be recognized as the spearhead of institutional resistance to technological change. Under the leadership of the church, feudal society opposed and interdicted all the great innovations of which industrial society is the outgrowth; but that opposition was ineffective­­ from the point of view of industrial evolution­­ happily so­­ and its ineffectiveness was due not to any pronounced difference of temper and intent which might be conceived to distinguish Christianity from other creeds but rather to the fact that it was after all an alien creed which bore much less heavily upon the Western peoples than did Islam upon the Arabs, Hinduism upon India, or Confucianism upon China. When we are tempted to think of the church as the quintessence of medieval civilization we should stop and ask ourselves which, after all, was the more significant symbol of European culture, Saint Thomas or his contemporary, the Emperor Frederick II ?

This aspect of the case of European civilization comes to focus in the popular enigma of the fall of Rome, that favorite topic of moralists and debating societies. In his most famous phrase Gibbon attributed it to "the triumph of barbarism and religion;" the French and Russian revolutions have inclined others to explain it in terms of the spread of "Bolshevism"; and all the while the truth is that the Roman Empire did not fall. As J. B. Bury succinctly pointed out, the empire of which Rome had for a time been the capital persisted without a break for a thousand years after the date which Western historians have agreed to consider as its end. Throughout this time it was what it had always been, the Hellenic empire of the Mediterranean culture area. The amazing perversion of the plainest of historical evidence by which Western historians have represented Odoacer as having brought the ancient empire to an end is a compound of two characteristically European provincialisms. One is the habit of regarding western Europe as the sole successor and inheritor of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," and the other is a historic aversion to Byzantine civilization carried ultimately to the point of refusing to credit its existence. It was western Europe that fell, not Rome. Modern historical scholarship has at last recognized this fact and so has made it possible for us to understand the two respects in which the civilization of western Europe was unique.

The culture of western Europe was technologically continuous with that of the whole Mediterranean area, and it was also institutionally discontinuous. Gaul was a fully occupied Roman province for a period as long as that during which Europeans have inhabited North America, and during this time the whole technological accretion of thousands of years of ancient agricultural civilization was introduced into Western Europe. At the end of this time­­ the date is of course indefinite since the process was very gradual­­ the tie of empire was severed. Never again was western Europe brought under the aegis of Mediterranean empire. The institutional deposit of ancient civilization was not completely obliterated. But historians are now generally agreed that the severance was all but complete. The feudal system which emerged from the institutional chaos of early centuries was in large measure a native growth, and even the Christian church underwent a very substantial transmutation from the proletarian cult of early Roman days to the feudal hierarchy of the papacy. Most of the Hellenism by which later European culture has been suffused and most of the influence of Roman law upon later European jurisconsults were medieval importations, "rediscoveries" of our cultural ancestors made with the help of Byzantine codifiers and Mohammedan philosophers. The actual experience of the European peoples was that of a frontier community endowed with a full complement of tools and materials derived from a parent culture and then almost completely severed from the institutional power system of its parent. The result was unique. It is doubtful if history affords another instance of any comparable area and population so richly endowed and so completely severed. That western Europe was the seat of a great civilization in the centuries that followed was due altogether to that endowment no important part of which was ever lost; that it was of all the great civilizations of the time incomparably the youngest and, the least rigid, less stifled than any other by age­long accumulations of institutional dust, more susceptible by far than any other to change and innovation, was due to that unique severance. Almost certainly it was this composite character which made the civilization of medieval Europe the parent of industrial revolution.

The actual process was a true case of cross­fertilization. The fault line between medieval and modern European civilization is marked by a series of immense cultural eruptions. This fact and even its importance have always been recognized. In spite of the inhibition of their scientific methodology historians have never been able to wholly to resist the temptation to rhapsodize over the series of world­shaking innovations by which the transition from medieval to modern times is punctuated. No list is definitive, and it is entirely possible that innovations of the first magnitude still escape our observation. But some are so obvious as to appear on every list. Thus no one doubts the importance of the invention of printing, of gunpowder, of the compass and astrolabe, of the symbol for zero, of the mill wheel and the clock. It was this series of inventions and discoveries and an indefinitely long series of lesser but related ones that set up the process of which industrial revolution was the consummation.

These master inventions and discoveries signalize a third process without which in all probability the industrial revolution could not have occurred. For the analysis of this process the case of printing is most serviceable for a number of reasons. No other invention outranks printing in the importance of its effects; in its actual history no other is better known; and no other presents a clearer case of cultural cross fertilization.

The actual invention of printing from movable types took place in one of the industrial towns of northern Europe­­ perhaps Mainz, perhaps Haarlem, perhaps both and also others­­ about five centuries ago. The specific device with which Gutenberg and the other contestants for the honor are credited was that of type­molds for casting metal types to be used interchangeably. Considered as a manifestation of inventive genius this device is so very simple as to constitute something of a mystery. Why should the invention of so simple an apparatus be regarded as a turning point of history? The obvious answer to this question is in terms of its effects, and this is the one that is most commonly given. But this only multiplies the mystery. Why should such a trifling invention have had such prodigious effects? If we say only that it made printed material available on a much larger scale than previously, we run the risk of imputing modern habits and motives to the fifteenth century. Who wanted printing to be available on such a scale? Should we imagine the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to have eked out a miserable existence complaining bitterly all the while over the injustice which deferred the invention of printing to the fifteenth? Clearly something more than availability is at issue; and that something is related to a further mystery. If the type­mold was such a simple device (as it was) , why should it not have been invented very much earlier, even in ancient times, perhaps? The ancients cast metal­­ why not types? To be sure, the art of printing did not exist in any form in the ancient world. It was developed in China over a period of many centuries and introduced into Europe probably in the thirteenth century (that time which was so singularly free from cataclysmic disturbance!) probably by the agency of Mongol conquest. (that military exploit which was so utterly devoid of cultural significance). But why did the Chinese, ingenious as they were and familiar with the arts of casting metal, nevertheless fail to invent type­molds? It will hardly do to attribute this failure to the ancestor­worshiping stupidity of the Chinese at the very moment when we are crediting them with the development and perfection, with certain limits, of an art which all the philosophers and scientists of the Western world had failed to achieve at all.

The answer, it is now generally agreed, is to be found not in Chinese character but in the Chinese language. That language, or family of languages, is non­alphabetical. In recent years, under the insistent pressure of the industrial West, a sort of "basic" Chinese has been developed; but classical Chinese involves the use of a vast number of distinct ideographs, a number so large as to make interchangeable types of doubtful value. Without doubt this is the reason why Chinese printers have continued to carve their texts from wooden blocks even down to the present time.

In this connection it is interesting to speculate on the possible relation between the Chinese written language and the origin of printing. The problem of textual purity is peculiarly acute for the Chinese. During the Han dynasty, which was contemporaneous with the Roman emperors, an organized effort was made to establish correct readings of the then ancient classics, and these were carved on stone blocks to which ever after scholars would refer for authentic versions of disputed passages. It became customary to assure authenticity by taking pressings, an elementary form of the practice of modern archaeologists of taking photographs of every inscription. This practice was one, at least, of the forerunners of printing, perhaps the chief one; and if so, the character of the Chinese language may have played a crucial part in the development of an art in China for which the West produced no counterpart.

In the West, however, the character of the written language was utterly different. It is supposed that the Phoenicians may have been the first to use a phonetic alphabet, but the practice spread in very early times to all the written languages of the Mediterranean culture area. Western Europe having been colonized by the Romans, its languages were reduced to the Latin alphabet (with Procrustean effects from which school children still suffer) . Thus the region into which the Chinese art of printing was introduced in the thirteenth century was one in which only a small number of graphic symbols were made to serve all the needs of literature. Such being the case, it was inevitable that the types for these symbols should be used interchangeably. The invention of Gutenberg was "bound" to occur sooner or later as a function not of Western inventive genius but of the character of the things which had thus been brought together. The two centuries or so which elapsed before the invention actually did occur may be taken as an index of the apparent triviality of the Chinese art. The Western world was at this time not unliterary. It had its own methods of recording and transmitting worthy writings, methods with which (our feelings to the contrary notwithstanding) it felt no general dissatisfaction. Paper had been introduced into the Western world from China some time before and by a different route, and its availability to the printers of the fifteenth century is another tool­combination of vast importance; but its importance was not felt by the scholars of the medieval world who regarded it as a distinctly inferior material. Hence the first uses of printing were of a singularly frivolous character, not at all indicative of any felt need for the improvement of the art. The invention of printing from movable types­­ whatever its consequences may have been­­ was itself the result of the conjunction of the technology of duplication with that of phonetic symbolism, and this conjunction was the result of a culture­contact which occurred as an incident to Mongol conquest in the thirteenth century.

But however striking, the case of printing is by no means unique. The same process is also illustrated almost as dramatically by the development of the sailing ship. Here, too, the consequences are prodigious. At one moment Europeans are no more involved in the affairs of other peoples than other peoples are in theirs. (This, it may be noted in passing, is probably the reason for the present disposition, of people who find the modern world disturbing, to idealize the medieval world as one in which these disturbances were happily absent. It is true, for whatever it may be worth, that medieval society was more completely self­contained than European society has been since that time.) At the next moment Europeans are circumnavigating the globe, intruding upon every continent an to a continually increasing degree meddling with the affairs of every other people.

Here too, the actual process is singularly obscure, and subject to outrageous misinterpretation. Just as in the case of printing we are a little too inclined to think of the invention as the necessary preliminary to the dissemination of economics textbooks, or the Saturday Evening Post, in that of shipbuilding we have been very much inclined to explain "the age of voyage and discovery" as the necessary preliminary to world trade, in the first instance with the Indies. Because the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453 and because Columbus is known to have cajoled Isabella with talk of the riches of the Indies half a century later, we have concluded that trade with the Indies was an economic necessity and that the Turks had interrupted it. Only recently has been demonstrated that the Turks did no such thing. Apparently the explanation of those exploits of voyage and discovery which has been taught to several generations of school children was a sheer fabrication, a case of historical conjecture of the sort historians have learned to shun.

Even more preposterous is the supposition that fifteenth­century mariners were the first who were bold enough to sail out of sight of land, since we know that Phoenician sailors brought tin from Cornwall before the time of Homer and that their tales of Scylla and Charybdis represent a conspiracy in restraint of trade; but in this case an important fact lies behind the legend. The Mediterranean is a sea to be treated with extreme circumspection not because of navigational difficulties (we forget that even the ancients could read the stars, as our word "cynosure" ought to be a perpetual reminder) but because it subject to sudden and sometimes prolonged calms. This is why sail was supplemented by oars from ancient times continuously right down to the nineteenth century and the introduction of steam power.

It was this circumstance which dictated the design of Mediterranean shipbuilding. The Mediterranean Sea dictated the use of oars, and the use of oars dictated shallow draft (except for warships which did not carry cargoes ) . The arts of shipbuilding and fitting underwent continuous development in the Mediterranean culture area from very ancient times right on down through the middle ages, with the result that the ships which plied this sea were the largest and sturdiest and best rigged in the world. But they were virtually confined to the Mediterranean not only by the short voyages which the use of oars and consequent necessity of carrying stores for a large crew necessarily imposed but by the fact that their shallow­draft design ruled them off the oceans. Such ships were unfit for voyages exclusively under sail because for this purpose a ship must be able to sail into the wind. Mediterranean ships were unable to do this. The reason for this limitation, it has been pointed out, was not ignorance of the art of tacking but the propensity of shallow­draft ships to make leeway when sailing into the wind. On this account Mediterranean mariners were perfectly justified in their fear of venturing out upon the stormy Atlantic.

Meantime, however, the Vikings were crossing the Atlantic in ships much smaller and, excellent as they were, much less sturdy than those which prevailed throughout the Mediterranean. This was possible because their ships had been evolved for use on a stormy sea and were therefore clinker­built and of (relatively) deep draft. Their sails and rigging were rudimentary compared with the standard Mediterranean equipment; but lacking oars they developed the "steerboard," which was quite unnecessary to the oar­propelled galleys of the Mediterranean.

The ships which began to cross the oceans toward the end of the fifteenth century were a combination of these two types. We do not know exactly how or when or where combinations occurred. Perhaps it was in the shipyards of the coast of the Bay of Biscay, where Viking culture flowing down met Mediterranean culture flowing up. Even so, a considerable time elapsed before the meeting was fruitful; but this may serve to emphasize two points: that the combination was not deliberate and had no special "end" in view (such as the Indies) , and that a ship is not one simple device but rather a mass of culture traits, so that combination would almost inevitably be the slow function of a general cultural amalgamation and general technological development. But it seems to be a fairly safe conjecture that the age of voyage and discovery was a function of ships, that the ocean­sailing ships were the result of a combination of different types of earlier devices, and that the combination occurred as a result of culture contact.

Similar analysis of other notable discoveries and inventions of this early modern period produces similar results. The magnetic needle was introduced from China but combined with navigation in Europe. The astrolabe, forerunner of the sextant and quite as important as the compass whether or not Columbus used it in 1492, was introduced from Islam but adapted to navigational use in Europe in 1485. Historians have always recognized the importance of gunpowder as an agent of social change. Some even say point­blank that gunpowder destroyed feudalism. The history of this invention is more than usually obscure. It may have been an independent product of the alchemy of Roger Bacon. But since an identical substance is known to have been used many centuries earlier in China for ceremonial purposes (and on that account perhaps never combined with the techniques of war) , and since the Byzantines had developed the war­technique of pouring mixtures of sulfur, quicklime, and other materials from a siphon, it is possible to conjecture that the Chinese ceremonial powder became gunpowder when it was combined with the Byzantine siphon, which thereupon became a cannon. Certainly the Hindu­Arabic numerals including the symbol for zero, invention of which has been called the most important innovation of the age, were introduced from Islam, presumably by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa in 1202. The clock has been called the master­pattern of all subsequent expedients in the field of power­driven machinery, but it was probably an adaptation and development of a still more elementary power transmission, that of the windmill and water wheel, probably introduced from Asia Minor by the crusaders.

It is the analysis of cases such as these that supports a third conjecture with regard to the inception of the industrial revolution in Europe. Not only was western Europe the recipient of the technological accumulations of thousands of years of ancient agricultural civilization, the development of an independent culture on the European frontier of ancient society coincided with a period of old­world culture­contact and culture­diffusion which was equally unique. Even in ancient time some slight contact existed between the Mediterranean area and the civilizations of India and China, but these contacts were inconsequential in comparison with the eruptions of the middle ages. The rise of Islam effected contacts along the southern water route from China to Spain from which Europe obtained paper, the decimal system, a renewed acquaintance with the ancient classics, Arabian science, and how much else we can only conjecture. The Crusades have always been known to have had a secular and even economic importance probably outweighing their religious significance. But that importance cannot be measured in trade. If, as seems to be the case, the windmill and water wheel were introduced into Europe by returning crusaders, the whole subsequent development of Europe was affected. The eruption of the Vikings was almost certainly responsible for the development which ushered in the age of voyage and discovery. Mongol conquest brought printing from China.

These contacts multiply the importance of the frontier character of European civilization. Had they been deferred for another thousand years, those qualities of feudal society which the humanists so greatly emphasized­­ the tendency to institutional rigidity and cultural ancestor­worship­­ might very possibly have prevailed to such an extent as to render Europe as impervious to contact­­stimulation as were the other great civilizations of the day. For all those contacts were necessarily bilateral, or multilateral. To note the most specific and perhaps the most significant instance, Islam also had its chance to develop Chinese printing. But whereas in Europe the fulminations of divines against the heathen art were without important effect, in Islam the prohibition of any "graven image" contained in the Mosaic code which Islam shares with Christianity was taken so literally as to exclude even the Chinese style of printing from carved wooden blocks. It was this state of mind and feeling which, prevailing all along the line, inhibited the free use of "heathen" arts in each of the older civilizations and so prevented the occurrence of tool­combinations which was potential in each cultural area. Modern Europeans have inclined to take great credit to themselves for not being ancestor­worshipers as so many other peoples are. The truth is that the disposition to venerate the ancestors is endemic in all civilization and is felt most strongly by those who have the most ancient ancestors, such as the Chinese and the Byzantines (who, perhaps, died of it ) . It is felt least by frontiersmen; Australians, western Americans, and in their day medieval Europeans.

In medieval Europe it was felt least by townsmen not because of any peculiar spiritual quality of urban residence but because the townsmen had sloughed off their ancestors. As Pirenne so graphically puts it, they were deracines, uprooted men. This is the paradox of the medieval towns: they grew up in feudal society but they were never of it. Pirenne remarks in one of his most luminous passages that the towns were from the first a function not of local society but of world trade. As such they were the inevitable medium of Jews and Syrians as well as European foreigners; but in spite of this the greater part of their population was always drawn from the local countryside. They were of course dependent for their living chiefly on the produce of the local countryside, and they were centers of manufacture and craftsmanship upon which the local countryside depended. In emphasizing this point in another passage Pirenne seems almost to contradict his earlier declaration. But such is the nature of the paradox. The runaway serfs who populated the medieval towns ceased to be feudal serfs and became declasses, eventually a "middle class" class, not a part of the feudal order at all. It is another significant case of technological continuity and institutional discontinuity. Technologically, the medieval towns were a functional part of the community; institutionally; they were distinct.12 Their closest ties were with each other and with the outside world.

Hence the effect of culture contact was concentrated in the towns. there, where representatives of all the arts and crafts were closely assembled and where all the apparatus of all the trades was concentrated, new devices from the outside world were brought into close contact with all the tools of the Mediterranean tradition. Nothing could have been more favorable to combination. It has already been noted that the invention of type­molds for printing from movable types could have been made only with the conjunction of the arts of the metal worker. such instances could be indefinitely extended. For example, the use of metal types requires a change of ink. Throughout the ages the Chinese have used a water­medium ink for printing form wood blocks, but water will not spread evenly on metal surfaces. Little note is taken of this crisis in European civilization in the conventional histories of printing, the writers of which only remark that this circumstance lead to the use of an oil­medium ink. But how did it lead? Such a statement recalls a remark which appears in a well­known manual of European economic history to the effect that the early European villagers found the long­shared plow best adapted to breaking the tough sod. Where did they find it­­out in the woods? The truth seems to be that other contemporary denizens of the same north­European towns, Van Eyck by name, fine artisans in paint, had invented "a new method of painting" which at first they had closely guarded, so that it was just beginning to be known in the northern towns by Gutenberg's time. This "new method" was the use of linseed oil as a medium. The use of flax reaches back to the very earliest periods of civilization, but apparently the use of the oil of the flaxseed as a medium for paint, and so for printer's ink, began with the Van Eycks. This incident is a beautiful illustration of the technological continuity of the "fine" and the "useful" arts, and an equally clear case of the function of the medieval towns as forcing beds of technological development. For the performance of this function the towns of medieval Europe were qualified by three interrelated sets of circumstances: they were technological concentration points; they were semidetached from the institutional structure of feudal society; and they were in the most direct contact with the outside world where a process of hemispheric culture diffusion was going on.

From this point onward the character of the industrial revolution is unmistakable. Modern European society is an outgrowth of the process which was going on in the medieval towns. It is urban and "middle class" in that functional sense, and the whole process is one of social change induced by technological development. Since Arnold Toynbee's analysis of the dramatic events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries no one has ventured to deny that the steam engine and the power loom were vehicles of social change; but is this any less true of gunpowder and movable type? What does one mean by saying that gunpowder destroyed feudalism? Cannon made feudal castles obsolete and since cannon and their ammunition are direct products of heavy industry, they brought the supreme coercive power of the modern state to focus in the centers of heavy industry, as it has been ever since. Furthermore the development of musketry and small arms shifted the center of gravity of a whole society by putting a weapon more lethal than the noble's sword into the hands of the common man, one which can be used with deadly effect by persons who have not spent their entire youth mastering the art of homicide. We have forgotten what firearms meant to common citizens because we have almost forgotten the feudal aristocracy; but our ancestors remembered. Not for nothing does the American Bill of Rights guarantee to all citizens "the right to bear arms." Rights are governmental; but before any such right could exist there must have been bearable arms; that is firearms.

The case of printing is the clearest possible exemplar of industrial revolution. The invention of printing from movable type had the immediate effect of extending the art of reading and writing to the whole community. Written languages which employ phonetic symbols are relatively easy to learn, incomparably easier that the Chinese written language. Throughout the ages the only barrier to general literacy in the West was the scarcity of materials. The invention of printing made written­language materials not only cheap but very common. The output of the presses in the six decades between Gutenberg's invention and the close of the fifteenth century has been estimated in millions. This can mean only one thing. In the course of two generations a whole community had learned to read.

The importance of the invention of printing derives from this result. It was by no means limited to the field of literature. The spread of literacy did greatly facilitate the spread of ideas, and this may well have been one of its most important effects; but it was by no means the whole effect. That was nothing less than the transformation of the essential character of the community, a transformation which had its incidence upon every aspect of life. Certainly its political effects are beyond exaggeration. No doubt Mr. H. G. Wells has exaggerated the political importance of newspapers, but in doing so he has only made the newspaper the symbol of a much more general intercommunication of which democracy is perhaps the political expression­­ without which certainly, popular government is limited to units the size of the Greek city­state or the New England town meeting.

Democracy is of course more than intercommunication. It involves enlightenment; and enlightenment is more than the transmission of information. It involves subtle changes of attitude. Such changes of attitude were among the most portentous consequences of general literacy. Much has been made of the fact that the Bible was among the first products of Gutenberg's establishment. This is a fact of very great importance, but its significance is quite different from what is generally supposed. To the Community at large the Bible had been a mystery throughout the ages. The veneration in which it was held was due in large part to this circumstance, as doctors of the church well understood. Its publication was opposed by the church for this reason, and rightly ­­ as events have amply proved. From publication it was but a step to higher criticism. The separation of church and state, which is one of the most fundamental expressions of the democratic attitude, was itself a consequence of the progressive secularization of Western civilization of which the printing press has been far and away the most important agent. It is easy to maintain sacred fictions in a community to whom every letter is an occult symbol; in a community to whom the printed word has become a common tool, no fiction is shielded from the scrutiny of the people, not even the divinity which hedges kings.

But the importance of literacy goes far beyond even the political life of the Western peoples. It is a commonplace of economic history that business enterprise was transformed. This change has been imputed to the "spirit" of modern capitalism which in turn has been attributed by Sombart and others to an access of "rationality" on the part of early modern business men. But the business men of early modern times can hardly be supposed to have experience an access either of cupidity or of intelligence. The only demonstrable change was one of tools. At this point as at many others­­for example, in the development of science­­language and ciphering cross­fertilized each other. Bookkeeping involves both. The invention of double­entry bookkeeping­­ another great technical innovation of the time­­constituted a tremendous advance in the technology of business organization. Their mastery of this instrument of strategy and tactics gave business men an enormous advantage in the struggle for power in which they were engaged. It even provided them with the ideology of the financial power­system. The concept of capital itself is only a sublimation of the system of notation in which every aspect of the life of the community can be reduced to an entry in a ledger. The "spirit" of modern capitalism was itself a product not of printing alone but of the industrial revolution of which printing was so significant a feature.

Most important of all, however, was the effect of printing upon industry. For purposes of "total war" what is called "functional literacy" has only recently been defined as "ability to read simple printed directions." This is the most important kind of literacy because it conditions the industrial effectiveness of the whole community. The most important inscriptions of modern industrial civilization are those which read, "Danger: Live Wires," and things of similar import. That is, written language is a tool which combines with all other tools fundamentally modifying their accessibility and functioning effectiveness. The functional illiterate is excluded from the whole industrial process. He remains a vestigial peasant in an industrial community. Or, to put it the other way, literacy transformed a community of peasants into a community of industrial workers.

The case of printing thus illustrates the climactic characteristic of industrial revolution. It has often been remarked that the difference between industrial and pre­industrial civilization is not a matter of using mechanical devices but rather of the use of machines to make machines. Or the same thing is put in terms of invention, thus it is not the occurrence of inventions that distinguishes modern civilization but the organization of society to bring this about. The primary instrument for such organization is literacy. If anything so subtle can be dated at all, it should be dated with reference not to the steam engine but to printing.

This transformation of the community includes much more than literacy. Among other things it includes the physical framework of existence. One of the most important­­ and most neglected­­ aspects of the industrial revolution is the revolution in housing which took place in early modern times. Economic historians have much to say about "the domestic system" of manufacture, but with their usual pertinacity they conceive this system almost exclusively in terms of ownership and control, not in terms of physical shelter. But industrial operations require shelter, not only because the tools and materials of industry suffer by exposure to the elements but even more because the level of efficiency which even the simplest handicraft operations exact from their workers is higher than that required of peasants and can be obtained only by provision of a certain degree of shelter. The general introduction of stockings and night clothes is often cited as indicative of the changes brought by industrialization, and in this connection such things are usually treated merely as comforts or even perquisites. The sheer energy­sapping brutalization of medieval (and earlier) life has now so far been forgotten that we no longer realize that perpetual chill and improper sleep are crippling. It is in this sense that the domestic revolution of early modern times made an indispensable contribution to the general industrial process.

We know little about it, but we do know that three innovations in domestic architecture distinguished the houses which became the scene of "the domestic system" of manufacture: Flues, glazed windows, and closed plumbing. None of these existed in any pre­industrial community except in rudimentary forms. Each had its own industrial background of stone masonry, glass manufacture, and metalworking; and each had its remoter cultural sources in earlier and more rudimentary devices. All were developed by the artisans of the medieval and early modern towns so as eventually to make possible the predominantly indoors civilization of the industrial economy.

Little as we know about the transformation of Western civilization, there are many elements in the process which are as well known and as significant as those which have been mentioned, of which, however, the present discussion can take no account. For it is in no sense a history but rather an analysis of the nature of the process of industrial revolution. But enough has been said to indicate that what we know of this process clearly identifies it as an industrial revolution in the strictest interpretation of the phrase: a series of social changes, affecting every aspect of life, in which "mechanical invention" plays a decisive part.

We know that the meaning of the conventional phrase "mechanical invention" must be broad enough to include pure science and fine art, both of which interact continuously with mechanical invention in the narrower sense, and we know that such interaction is no new thing. The introduction of the Hindu­Arabic numerals, for example, was surely no less important to science than to business and to craftsmanship. Indeed, scientists almost begrudge Leonardo Fibonacci his commercial interests. Science (astronomy) endowed industry (navigation) with the astrolabe; but industry (optical glass) presented the same science with the telescope.

We also know that this process­­ the series of social changes in which technological innovation plays a decisive part­­ has been going on in essentially the same fashion throughout modern times. The "revolution in coal and iron" and the "revolution in textiles," to cite the familiar phrases, were no more industrial than the invention of printing or the building of ocean­going ships; nor were the social consequences of these earlier innovations less significant or far­reaching than those of the steam engine and the power loom. The French antiquarian, Lefebvre des Noettes, is credited by Pirenne with having established that a "revolution in transport" occurred in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to which the conventional phrase is no less applicable than to railway building.

Thinking in terms of the classical tradition, economists have done their best to attribute this whole process to the institutions of capitalism. But that beautiful hypothesis is now being upset by brutal facts. An understanding of technological processes is sufficient to establish the reverse. It is already clear that technological innovation played the decisive part in establishing the institutions of capitalism. By making industry paramount in modern life, the industrial revolution has made the captains of industry powerful. Power is certainly important. The process of institutional adaptation to technological change is therefore tremendously important as well as subtle and complicated, and special attention must therefore be given to it. But before this can be done it will be necessary to consider the nature of that other, ceremonial aspect of behavior in terms of which the institutional system and its changes must be understood.


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