Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONindustrial power in the late 1840s was no doubt larger than that of allother continental European countries—she possessed as much steampoweras the rest of the continent put together—but she had lost groundrelatively to Britain and was about to lose it relatively to Germany.Indeed, in spite of her advantages and early start, France never becamea major industrial power comparable to Britain, Germany and theUSA.The explanation of this paradox is, as we have seen (see abovepp. 69-70), the French Revolution itself, which took away with the handof Robespierre much of what it gave with the hand of the ConstituentAssembly. The capitalist part of the French economy was a superstructureerected on the immovable base of the peasantry and pettybourgeoisie.The landless free labourers merely trickled into the cities;the standardized cheap goods which made the fortunes of the progressiveindustrialist elsewhere lacked a sufficiently large and expandingmarket. Plenty of capital was saved, but why should it be invested inhome industy? 19 The wise French entrepreneur made luxury goodsand not goods for mass consumption; the wise financier promotedforeign rather than home industries. Private enterprise and economicgrowth go together only when the latter provides higher profits for theformer than other forms of business. In France it did not, thoughthrough France it fertilized the economic growth of other countries.At the opposite extreme from France stood the USA. The countrysuffered from a shortage of capital, but it was ready to import it in anyquantities, and Britain stood ready to export it. It suffered from anacute shortage of manpower, but the British Isles and Germany exportedtheir surplus population, after the great hunger of the middleforties, in millions. It lacked sufficient men of technical skill; but eventhese—Lancashire cotton workers, Welsh miners and iron-men—couldbe imported from the already industrialized sector of the world, and thecharacteristic American knack of inventing labour-saving and aboveall labour-simplifying machinery was already fully deployed. The USAlacked merely settlement and transport to open up its apparently endlessterritories and resources. The mere process of internal expansion wasenough to keep its economy in almost unlimited growth, thoughAmerican settlers, Governments, missionaries and traders already expandedoverland to the Pacific or pushed their trade—backed by themost dynamic and second largest merchant fleet of the world—acrossthe oceans, from Zanzibar to Hawaii. Already the Pacific and theCarribbean were the chosen fields of American empire.Every institution of the new republic encouraged accumulation,ingenuity and private enterprise. A vast new population, settled in the178