Although the consensus is that the Industrial revolution is said to have taken place in 1759, the events that led to it began at least two centuries or even more before. It is therefore more of an evolution because the processes associated with it’s grounding went on for a long time before and after that date. It can even be said that it is still going on for good or ill as the case may be.
What separated capitalism from all that came before it is the use of machines which have become increasingly sophisticated. Before the coming of capitalism, man had succeeded in many parts of the world in creating many wonderful artefacts which were traded round the world. These goods were produced by master craftsmen who had learnt the secrets of production over many years. These goods were perfectly fit for purpose but could not be produced in sufficiently large quantities to be made available to a large portion of any group of people. We may now think of the dazzling civilisations of Egypt, Sumeria, Babylon, Greece, Rome and others around the world. Museums are full of the wonderful things produced by these civilisations and we cannot but marvel at them. What we forget as we marvel at these priceless artefacts is that the vast majority of those who lived in those civilisations had little or no access to those wonderful things as only those at the very top had the wherewithal to purchase those products of human ingenuity and dexterity, some of which were brought over vast distances often under difficult and or dangerous circumstances. For example the silk produced in China came to Europe through the famous Silk Road in small quantities at such a price that only the very rich could afford to buy them. The same could be said of the spices, gun powder, cotton materials and other such things which added spice to the lives of the rulers and the movers and shakers. The vast number of the members of the vast under class were strictly excluded from partaking in these riches. They lived, suffered and in time, died unsung, leaving nothing to those coming in their wake.
The first revolution that put man on the path of development was the agricultural revolution. This is what made it possible for surpluses of food material to be built. This is what made it possible for the class of dedicated artisans to emerge and produce materials which were designed not just to support life but enhance it through the production and utilisation of luxury items. The continued appreciation of items of sheer luxury is shown by the riches which even now, accrues to the purveyors of luxury items.
Before we had these surpluses virtually everyone was a farmer and nothing else. In many parts of the world the agricultural revolution led to the formulation of laws which supported the growth of agriculture and human civilisation. In this period of time, life jogged on, changing only a little over the centuries. This was until human linear projection was violently shot into another orbit precisely on the twelfth of October 1492 when a small band of Europeans led by the Italian, Christopher Columbus in three small ships blundered into an island in the group of islands we now call the Bahamas. By doing so, they changed the trajectory of human history for ever.
It is pertinent to ask why Columbus was blundering around in that part of the world at that particular point in time. The answer is that he was looking for a way to get to India by sailing west. A few decades before, in 1453 to be exact, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern portion of what remained of the once mighty Roman empire fell at last to the Ottoman Turks who at that time had the most powerful army in that region. The capture of Constantinople was said by the Muslims to have brought the Crusades which had begun more than four centuries before to a close, at least for that era. The Turks were Muslims and were determined to prevent Christians from getting to Jerusalem, the piece of real estate that was fiercely contested by the two groups over close to four torrid centuries. In capturing Constantinople, the Muslims now had an unassailable position and could do whatever they wanted. And what they wanted at that point in time was to block access to Jerusalem with the added bonus of cutting off access to the trade routes to the East. They duly did so thereby barring European access to all the luxurious items which the Europeans had become more or less addicted to. To go back to the subject of the Crusades. It can be said that another leg of the Crusades was brought to an end when the British captured Jerusalem to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I on Christmas day 1917. The aftermath of that capture is still being felt in the Middle East where the Israeli state created when in fulfilment of the Balfour declaration, part of Palestine was turned into a Jewish state with tragic consequences for Muslim Palestinians. An example of history being an unending process, albeit with numerous twists and turns.
After centuries of learning to sail on the rather tranquil inland sea which is the Mediterranean sea, the Europeans were at that time ready to tackle the unknown that the Atlantic ocean represented and could cast their eyes on sailing west.
Before that time there was no compelling reason to sail west from Europe and nobody bothered to do so. But, because the overland route to the east was closed, some crazy Europeans started thinking that since the earth had been unequivocally determined to be round, it was at least theoretically possible to get to the East by sailing west. Yes, whilst this thinking was on the face of it correct, their ignorance of just how big the earth was made sailing west to get to India a mad cap idea. Now we know that a vast continent, the largest ocean in the world and half the width of Asia separated Europe from India by sailing west, the possibility of reaching India by sailing west was incredibly stupid and never likely to happen. In this case, ignorance was certainly bliss. Columbus did not get to India even though he tenaciously held on to the belief, to the end of his life that he did but all he did was to show to the world that another world existed, the New World that was going to be ruthlessly exploited for the next five and a half centuries right down to the present. Without the opportunity that this exploitation presented to the world, it is most unlikely that there would have been an Industrial revolution, at least not in 1759.
As soon as Columbus set foot on the New World, he set the tone for what was in store for the inhabitants of that region by stealing needed food supplies from them and kidnapping those of them who had ventured onto his ships. Those captives were described as Indians because Columbus was sure that he had indeed reached India, were taken back with their captors to Spain to begin a trend which survived for four hundred years. Unknown to everyone at the time this marked the beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade even though the direction was going to be overwhelmingly east to west.
The Columbus expedition was a commercial enterprise from which a profit was not just expected but demanded. The crowned heads of the houses of Castile and Aragon whose recent amalgamation had brought about the joint kingdom of Spain had reluctantly commissioned the voyage of discovery which was to enrich the new kingdom. Subsequent voyages undertaken by various conquistadors showed that the newly discovered lands had excellent potential for exploitation. The explorers immediately set about mining the newly discovered lands of their treasures in a way that had never been seen in human history. This is because all the indigenous people inhabiting the newly discovered lands were turned into slaves in situ. The Spaniards were convinced that there was a great deal of gold and other precious minerals to be dug up from the soil of their newly discovered territories and wasted no time in tearing up the soil in their quest for gold. But first, they destroyed civilisations which were at least at par with anything that existed in Europe at the time. They achieved this objective with their far superior weaponry and their use of horses which their opponents had no knowledge of nor any experience with. But their most destructive weapons were the diseases they brought with them on their bodies. Many population studies have been conducted to try to put a figure to the number of people who lived in pre-Columbian America but estimates have varied so wildly that it is difficult to quote any of the numbers available with any degree of confidence. What is clear however is that the population of that area was reduced by as much as ninety percent. This made it possible for the Europeans to claim that the land was empty of people when they arrived to colonise it in the largest wave of migration known to human history.
There is overwhelming evidence that before the coming of the Europeans to the Americas, the indigenous peoples had not only domesticated a wide variety of food plants but had developed the agronomic techniques to grow them extensively. Thus the whole world owes the global access to tobacco, cassava, cocoa, potato, squash, several varieties of corn, tomato, peppers and other plants which were brought over to the Old World and grown widely as commercial crops. Many of these crops are now the mainstay of food production in many parts of Africa including Nigeria where cassava has become a staple and cocoa a very significant cash crop even if we don’t partake of the pleasures of consuming chocolate. A quick look at the above list will confirm the debt owed to the New World in terms of the food we eat and cultivate for sale in this part of the world today. The importance of this phenomenon goes far beyond food availability. Even though this is very important, the importance in the context of this article is that these crops played a vital role in triggering or at least catalysing the agricultural revolution which has been recognised as being a prerequisite to the Industrial revolution of 1759.
- To be continued.: It’s time for a rethink
