Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

TOWARDS AN INDUSTRIAL WORLDevents other than agrarian catastrophe. This fact, incidentally, had themost far-reaching political consequences. The rhythm of change inindustrial and non-industrial areas diverged between 1780 and 1848*.The economic crisis which set fire to so much of Europe in 1846-8was an old-style agrarian-dominated depression. It was in a sense thelast, and perhaps worst, economic breakdown of the ancien rigime ineconomics. Not so in Britain, where the worst breakdown of the periodof early industrialism occurred between 1839 anc * ^42 for purely'modern' reasons, and indeed coincided with fairly low .corn-prices.The point of spontaneous social combustion in Britain was reached inthe unplanned Chartist general strike of the summer of 1842 (the socalled'plug riots'). By the time it was reached on the continent in 1848,Britain was merely suffering the first cyclical depression of the long eraof Victorian expansion, as also was Belgium, the other more or lessindustrial economy of Europe. A continental revolution without acorresponding British movement, as Marx foresaw, was doomed. Whathe did not foresee was that the unevenness of British and Continentaldevelopment made it inevitable that the continent should rise alone.Nevertheless, what counts about the period from 1789 to 1848 is notthat by later standards its economic changes were small, but thatfundamental changes were plainly taking place. The first of these wasdemographic. World population—and especially the population of theworld within the orbit of the dual revolution—had begun that unprecedented'explosion' which has in the course of 150 years or somultiplied its numbers. Since few countries before the nineteenthcentury kept anything corresponding to censuses, and these in generalfar from reliable,! we do not know accurately how rapidly populationrose in this period; it was certainly unparalleled, and greatest (exceptperhaps in underpopulated countries filling empty and hitherto underutilizedspaces such as Russia) in the economically most advanced areas.The population of the USA (swollen by immigration, encouraged bythe unlimited spaces and resources of a continent) increased almost sixtimes over from 1790 to 1850, from four to twenty-three millions. Thepopulation of the United Kingdom almost doubled between 1800 and1850, almost trebled between 1750 and 1850. The population of Prussia(1846 boundaries) almost doubled from 1800 to 1846, as did that ofEuropean Russia (without Finland). The populations of Norway,Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and large parts of Italy almost doubledbetween 1750 and 1850, but increased at a less extraordinary rate* The world triumph of the industrial sector once more tended to make it converge,though in a different manner.t The first British census was that of 1801; the fir&treasonably adequate one, that of 1831.169