Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONgoods already had the momentum of a landslide. Between 1816 and1850 something like five million Europeans left their native countries(almost four-fifths of them for the Americas), and within countries thecurrents of internal migration were far vaster. Between 1780 and 1840the total international trade of the western world more than trebled;between 1780 and 1850 it multiplied more than fourfold. By laterstandards all this was no doubt very modest,* but by earlier ones—andthese after all were what contemporaries compared their age with—theywere beyond the wildest dreams.IIWhat was more to the point, after about 1830—the turning-point whichthe historian of our period cannot miss, whatever his particular fieldof interest—the rate of economic and social change accelerated visiblyand rapidly. Outside Britain the period of the French Revolution andits wars brought relatively little immediate advance, except in the USAwhich leaped ahead after its own war of independence, doubling itscultivated area by 1810, multiplying its shipping sevenfold, and ingeneral demonstrating its future capacities. (Not only the cotton-gin,but the steam-ship, the early development of assembly-line production—Oliver Evans' flour-mill on a conveyor-belt—are American advancesof this period.) The foundations of a good deal of later industry,especially heavy industry, were laid in Napoleonic Europe, but notmuch survived the end of the wars, which brought crisis everywhere.On the whole the period from 1815 to 1830 was one of setbacks, orat the best of slow recovery. States put their finances in order—normally by rigorous deflation (the Russians were the last to do so in1841). Industries tottered under the blows of crisis and foreign competition;the American cotton industry was very badly hit. Urbanizationwas slow: until 182& the French rural population grew as fast as that ofthe cities. Agriculture languished, especially in Germany. Nobodyobserving the economic growth of this period, even outside the formidablyexpanding British economy, would be inclined to pessimism;but few would judge that any country other than Britain and perhapsthe USA was on the immediate threshold of industrial revolution. Totake an obvious index of the new industry: outside Britain, the USAand France the number of steam engines and the amount of steampower in the rest of the world in the 1820s was scarcely worth theattention of the statistician.* Thus between 1850 and 1888 twenty-two million Europeans emigrated, and in 1889total international trade amounted to nearly £3,400 million compared to less than £600million in 1840.172