History concepts and contexts

¶ … industrialization that started in the early eighteenth century and in Britain and swept first Europe and then spread through North America and then most of the countries of whole world by the turn of the twentieth century completely changed the life style of the human kind. Domestic and international relations adapted to a new order that set the tone for globalization in an era that brought along better, faster and more effective ways of transportation, increased the migration of the working force to a level never seen before in the history of humanity and forced nations to change their policies regarding international relationships. Some historians considered that the technological changes produced by the invention of the steam engine and the mechanical means of production that were set in place in manufactories to name only a few created the opportunity for an industrial revolution to take place.

The debates over the benefits and the disadvantages brought along by the industrial era in the early eighteenth century continue today among historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other scholars and scientists concerned with the topic. Beyond certain indisputable facts that indicate the level of development western countries and their trading partners reached through industrialization, there is the problem of other parts of the world that remained behind and did not benefit at all from the radical changes the industrialization produced in the early nineteenth century.

Ray Kiely tackles the subject of industrialization from the point-of-view of development, progress and growth and analyses the pros and cons of the phenomena of industrialization in this context, in his book Industrialization and Development: A Comparative Analysis. His analysis of the literature based on the topic of the industrialization, from both sides provides an overview of the debates over its positive aspects and more especially, it provides an interesting point-of-view related to the policies used as a result of the industrialization and their results on the generations to come.

Most scholars agree that industrialization cannot be analyzed out of the context of social and political change. Looking for the sources of industrialization, Kiely quotes Eisenstadt as one of the theorists that considered the British model one that could be replicated all over the world: "Historically, modernization is the process of change toward those types of social, economic and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America from the seventeenth century"(Eisenstadt, cited by Kiely, pag. 25). The common denominator: technological advancement of the production means and transportation applied differently in the European countries, where it first started and spread. The particularities of each country made the modernization model uneven and produced imbalances that led to dramatic outcomes by the early twentieth century. Clive Trebilcock points out that cultural, political and social differences as well as human and material resources created disproportionate differences between countries and classes: "clearly enough, industrialization did not possess the same value wherever it touched. A machine-shop in Budapest did not possess the same significance as a machine-shop in Birmingham or Berlin. Despite the outward similarities, industrialization in Europe was a phenomenon of very variable pace and intensity, offering radically different prospects of wealth and power as it crossed frontiers and resource areas" (Trebilcock, 1). The decline of imperialism and the end of a colonial system produced changes on the world map as well as shifts in power and domination, producing the need for new strategies. The United States became to rise economically, providing an industrial Eden for those who were escaping famine in their home countries. Some European countries concentrated exclusively on their domestic growth and problems brought by the shortening of the working force though the aging of the population, while others concentrated on the recovery of past imperial glory, craving for world domination. As emphasized by Trebilcock, by the beginning of the First World War, after having overcome their lag before Great Britain, Germany and on the second place, France, came to join the British among the most important economic European powers. Other countries, like Russia, the Habsburg Empire, and Italy moved slower toward modernization and development. The rapid pace of industrialization came upon the slower pace of the feudal socio-economic relations that were still very much in place in certain parts of these regions. Spain and Hungary remained among the last to overcome the feudal era thanks to the industrial change, by the outbreak of the First World War (Trebilcock). Considering the different levels of intensity the industrialization came to have during the eighteenth century and up until the First World War and the variations in the way modernization and a global trade system manifested in different parts of Europe, an industrial revolution may be considered an exaggeration in terms of its achievement at a continental level. "it is obvious that nothing so monolithic as 'an industrial revolution in Europe' occurred in the nineteenth century. The experience of industrialization was most certainly not uniform between countries; instead, there was an immense variety of growth rate, technological advance, and managerial expertise" (idem, 2). Feudal and Capitalist societies coexisted for a while after the industrialization phenomenon spread in Europe, producing inequalities and major differences not only between nations, but also between different regions of the same country.