Industrial Revolution Showdown: France v. Germany v. United States
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2024
- 🌍 Explore the diverse paths of industrialization in this deep dive into the European landscape and the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Historical Method Man guides us through the unique approaches of France, Belgium, Germany, and the U.S., shedding light on their economic, technological, and social revolutions.
🇫🇷 France, the second nation to industrialize, navigated through a tumultuous political revolution, influencing its egalitarian industrialization. Command economy, state-sponsored labor movements, and educational reforms were pivotal in shaping France's unique journey.
🇧🇪🇩🇪 Belgium and the German lands, incorporated into the French Empire, adopted similar models. From state-sponsored infrastructure projects to advanced education, witness how these regions transformed from feudalism to industrial powerhouses.
🇺🇸 Across the Atlantic, the U.S. took a different route. Discover how economic isolation, high tariffs, and corporatist strategies paved the way for the U.S. to become a key player in the Second Industrial Revolution.
🚀 Embrace the complexity of history and understand how state intervention played a crucial role in making industrialization more efficient and people-focused. As we unravel the past, let's challenge conventional notions and explore the multifaceted nature of progress.
🔍 Dive into the nuances of history and join the conversation. Which country's approach to industrialization fascinates you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
🔗 #IndustrialRevolution #History #EconomicTransformation #EuropeanHistory #USHistory #StateIntervention #CommandEconomy #EducationalReforms #TechnologicalRevolution #HistoricalAnalysis #RevolutionaryEra #FeudalismToFactories #ComparativeHistory #HistoricalMethodMan #HistoryLovers #EducationAndInnovation
If you liked this video, please check out the supercut on the Industrial Revolution in Britain: ua-cam.com/video/-HgDEb5Fkuw/v-deo.html
If you want to see who I am and what I do for work as an historian, check out this video: "Fulbright Student Research Abroad in Morocco"
ua-cam.com/video/_gZRxPJKkzs/v-deo.html
If you have any questions, please ask below, and I will do my best to research and cite a proper reply.
At 9:56. Again, the history proves you wrong. The U.S. was able to get the capital to industrialize not because it was an "isolated economy." Far from it. The U.S. was very plugged into the world economy, as a huge exporter of raw materials, especially agricultural products like wheat, tobacco and cotton. Americans got their capital to industrialize through the massive revenues they gathered from agricultural exports. In fact, it was "King Cotton" that drove the first Industrial Revolution in New England, as the manufacturers of the region imported cheap Southern cotton that they then turned into very cheap textiles that could compete with expensive foreign textiles from Europe. (Made expensive due to those tariffs.) Even more importantly, rich Southern cotton and tobacco planters were the first big investors in New England textile factories.
These New England manufacturers, in turn, accumulated the capital to then invest in railways, the other huge engine of industrialization. The extremely fast expansion of the railways in the U.S. from 1835 to 1860 is what allowed the U.S. to then leapfrog the nations of Europe with industrial technology. That's because covering 1.5 million square miles of North America with the largest railway network in the world by 1860--making anything in Europe look puny and under-resourced--required a tremendous amount of technical and logistical knowledge. The Civil War and exploding immigrant population just added fuel to this fire, allowing the U.S. to become the largest industrial nation by 1880 or so, outstripping even the likes of the U.K.
As for state contracts, that was never a big thing in the U.S. until the Civil War. Before the Civil War, the U.S. federal government had a tiny budget. Yes, it did spend on Samuel Colt guns and the like. But this was a small drop in the giant bucket of the U.S. economy pre-1860. The U.S. government could not spend that much on state contracts even if it wanted to. What drove U.S. industrialization was bringing agricultural products to the markets of Western Europe (hence all that railroad building between 1830 and 1860), and the investment capital gathered from the massive export revenues earned from those agricultural products.
Hello, I will respond to this specific comment when I have some more time to provide a proper response. What you are saying makes sense to me.
great information as usual loved it
Glad you enjoyed it
Prussia and later on the German Empire did not need to sponsor terror as much as France because they had the New World (Americas) as a pressure valve to send people that did not fit their national goal. Today there are more German American than any other group. German diaspora did not limited itself to the US of A and there are significant German population in Brazil, Argentina and Canada. Your video is great by the way ;)
Thank you very much for your observation. This reasoning seems to make sense to me. The state violence in France was a continuity from the state violence of the Reign of Terror that continued through the Napoleonic era. In the German context, the "forty-eighters/48ers" (supporters of the failed 1848 revolutions) generally fled to the Americas. While one could easily argue that exile informed by political persecution is state terror, this is of a lower level than that experienced in France during this industrial era.
@@HistoricalMethodMan The idea that the political violence of XIXth century France derives directly from 1793 is very debatable. Both the society and ideals of 1848 were very different from the ones of "the" Revolution, although it was mobilized as a symbol by both revolutionaries and conservatives (and still is today, to some extent).
I agree, the link is more indirect and also historiographical, I’d amend.
00:03:59 education and science
00:05:12 german science and industry
Great Information! I remember learning about this in school!
Thanks, I hope I made a compelling argument in this one. The Industrial Revolution is a favorite topic of mine.
Would you like any interesting reading recommendations on it?
At 1:27. If you look at the historical record, it was Belgium that was the second nation to go through the Industrial Revolution. Mostly because there were no laws that prohibited the formation of large industrial corporations in Belgium. By 1815, Belgium was bursting with factories. France was maybe 3rd or 4th, following Prussia. Why? The French prohibited railways of any sort until 1842. That was because the French had just finished constructing a marvelous and complex canal system connecting the nation, and vested interests didn't want brutal competition from railways. So railways, and all the industrial development that come with them, were outlawed. Prohibiting railways in effect retarded the Industrial Revolution in France until the law was lifted in 1842. That's when France shot up in terms of industrialization.
It had nothing to do with the command economy--which only existed in France during the height of the French Revolution from 1790 to around 1795. That's when industrialization in France was at its lowest point, mostly due to the terrible political instability that discouraged investment from entrepreneurs and foreign investors. Education also had little to do with industrialization--Britain industrialized successfully while it had a very outdated formal educational system centered on exclusively educating the aristocracy and Anglican clergy. France only managed to get really going with industrialization after 1815, when political stability finally settled over the land and the investment environment became favorable. And it really got going only after 1842, when railways were finally legalized, along with the giant corporations that encourage railway manufacture and construction.
In all of these nations, I'm using the textile industry as the marker of initial industrialization. This was the first industry to industrialize across the board. The second industrial revolution s marked by the use of railroads, not the first.
Well done my friend
Thank you! Cheers!
Comparing France, Germany and the U.S., eh? With regards to the Industrial Revolution, France lost in comparison to those two nations. Germany ended up in the middle. And the U.S. crushed the other two to smithereens. This all has to do with population, so the number of available industrial workers. France only managed to squeeze out 8 million extra people, going from 30 million in 1800 (the most populous nation in Europe, and therefore the most economically powerful) to 38 million in 1914. French governments were constantly worried about this because, well, they knew France would get crushed eventually if babies weren't being made. Germany went from 25 million in 1800 to 67 million in 1914, a mighty impressive run-up of 42 million extra people. But the U.S. was the victor, going from a measly 5 million in 1800 (or 1/6 the size of France) to 98 million, or just short of 100 million, by 1914. That is a whooping 93 million extra people. That's why the U.S. smashed everything in its path and France was left in the dust with regards to the Industrial Revolution.
Hello, I'll be responding to your comments, which I thank you for making, one by one and in turn.
If we're talking population as the metric of success, then your argument is certainly true. However, the complexity-craving historian in me questions whether population and GDP is the truest marker of success. In terms of political economy, yes, it makes perfect sense. However, the number of people does not tell the much harder to quantify story of quality of life.
In England, from 1800 to 1900.
20,000 Waterwheels declined in number.
Windmills declined in number.
The Englishman Thomas Newcomen's 1500 Atmospheric Pumps disappeared.
The Scotsman James Watt's 500 Steam Powered Engines increased to 10,000,000!!!
Through that, total available Power increased by between 1400 and 1500 times!! A percentage increase of between 40,000% and 50,000%!!
This WAS the Industrial Revolution!
It was a Power Revolution.
And it was all due to only one Invention.
James Watt's Invention of the world's first PRACTICAL Steam Powered Engine.
It was nothing to do with Spinning and Weaving technology.
Spinning and Weaving technology led the first industry to industrialize (textiles). While I do not deny your evidence, it would be useful to look at the timeline. The inventions you mention come earlier than the 1800s.
This video was not about the British Industrial Revolution, but my other Industrial Revolution videos are.
8:29 probably missed to add the graph. Otherwise a very informative video.
Yes, this was a mistake in editing. In short, the tariff rate just before 1820 was
Great video, starting to wonder what the ending meant? because it almost seems as if you try to market Prussia as a communist utopia
Thanks for asking for clarification. Prussia was by no means a communist state. It was also by no means a utopia. However, it was not 'free-market' capitalism that led to its transformation like in Britain. One of the myths I attempt to dispel in this video is that free-market capitalism, as Adam Smith outlined, was the strategy of these three industrializing states. Instead, they all had large interventions of the state in planning the economy.
As for why I would most prefer to live in industrializing Prussia, as opposed to the others (if I had to live in any industrializing state, which does not sound particularly fun), it's because of how the state commanded the economy to focus on education without state violence. Compared to the others, this was the most regulated instance of industrialization, and it was successful, transforming the nation rather quickly.
I hope that clarifies the aim of the ending and my argument within it.
@@HistoricalMethodMan I am all for "for the people by the people" just poking a bit of fun. You make great stuff, ill hit that sub button 😉
Hehehe, thanks for the sub! I really love doing this channel as a side project to my regular history gig (:
Industrialisation is not the Industrial Revolution.
Industrialization has been in existence for 2000 years or more, and has gradually been increasing over time with the development of science and knowledge.
The Industrial Revolution was a leap in Industrialisation which occurred after James Watt's Invention of the first PRACTICAL Steam Engine.
I was surprised myself when I looked at the numbers.
500 Steam Engines in 1800 to 10,000,000 in 1900.
Divide 10,000,000 Steam Engines by 20,000 Waterwheels and you get a multiplication of 500 times in total Power output for the country!!
And you don't need a river of flowing water for each one either.
The only totally new Invention at that time was James Watt's Steam Engine. It had never existed before.
( Newcomen's Atmospheric Pump is not a Steam Engine, despite all those people claiming it is. No doubt, to claim the Invention. It is a big Invention after all ! ).
Great information, thanks for sharing!
I know that you went into this with your end conclusions already well decided in what you think to have been good or bad in that last section of the presentation and that's well and fine, of course it would of be a height of arrogance on my part to expect to turn you aound from what's clearly been a strong sentiment of yours about planning being a way to go but all the same I think you shouldn't be so didactic about on how industry emerged and staking them as nakedly better. How these things played out are only defined in part by how a govt of an area wants for it to go. America was (and still is) a more disparately peopled landmass which before & during industrialization had been slanted for raw export in exchange for the furnished goods of Europe. If you are not in yankeeland/new england where all the industrialization actually took root and propogated from then so much of the urban spawl and unsexy tertiary factors of industry in France/Germany/england wouldn't have been present. Large pools of otherwise unemployable urban youth, proximity of furnished products to an insatiable consumer market, readily available mechanical specialists everywhere and robust secondary transports outside of rail.
A comparison more alike to the Americans situation and in comparable times would've been the Argentinians and tsarist/soviet industrializations where so much of the same command and control idealism when in practice were an absolute strangulation on the very industrializations they were trying to manifest. Both should have been made spawling industrial if their trajectories were even half as prosperous as in America and they were in their best of times as the sparks of a industrialization began kicking off carrying expectations/fears of being continental conquering powers in the making that just never fully manifested. I would highly recommend a skim over of 'Basic economics" by one Thomas Sowell.
It is so very key to always keep experimenting and improving, see what works best, combine it with what works best from other contexts and continually fine-tune the system.
Good economy is as much about an adapting to your to context as anything and the models you described with france and germany would have been abysmal failures if applied in the usa like trying to serve an undercooked egg.
Hello, thank you for your comment!
In short, I'll put my cards on the table for the goals of this paper. I took an undergraduate course with Dr. Jeff Horn, modern European historian and expert on the French and Industrial Revolutions, on the Industrial Revolution.
This script comes from a the final, the prompt was:
What were the benefits and drawbacks of the models of industrialization developed in France, Belgium, the German lands and the United States? Which of these transitions to industrial society would you have preferred to live through? [Note: this is a two-part question, but 3/4 of your answer should be on the first part.] (5 pages)
I feel comfortable sharing this question because this course runs once every five or so years (my undergraduate was a small institution with an even smaller history department).
This was an argumentative paper, and I chose to lean into the idea that (A) Free market capitalism was specific to the British Industrial Revolution and (B) Industrialization had a large influence of the state in these three contexts.
Many sources come from Dr. Jeff Horn's secondary readings, as well as a pretty standard reading list. Horn's books include:
- The Industrial Revolution: History, Documents, and Key Questions (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016)
- Economic Development in Early-Modern France, 1650-1800: The Privilege of Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2015, paperback edition 2017)
- Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution (MIT Press, 2010; reprinted 2012);
- The Industrial Revolution (Greenwood Press, 2007); edited (with Leonard N. Rosenband and Merritt Roe Smith)
- The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830 (MIT Press, 2006, paperback edition, 2008)
The essays that influenced my argumentation the most were:
- Cole and Filson, eds., British Working Class Movements: Select Documents 1789-1815, 3-14, 74-77, 85-110.
- Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, 5-22 and Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites, 69-109
- “Testimony Gathered by Ashley’s Mines Commission,” - The Sadler Committee Report on Child Labor.”
- Horn, “Leads and Lags: Competing with a Dominant Economic Power,” 85-94.
- Emile Zola, Germinal.
- Hounshell, “The American System of Manufactures in the Antebellum Period.”
This shows where I got much of my evidence for the argumentation from.
I will respond to the content of your comment once I have a little more time this week. I am finishing History PhD applications and am also teaching, so I'm a very busy boy. This channel is merely a side-project.