Hugh Williams - Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History

There is one other sad footnote to the history of the Dutch East India Company. The man who had been its chief architect, Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, became a victim of his country’s religious struggles. The majority of the Dutch people were Calvinist, believing in John Calvin’s stern form of Protestantism. This taught that God elected those he wanted to serve with him in heaven: man’s fate was predestined. By following God’s law he might hope to be elected, but there was no guarantee of this. We know from our own time how this sense of being entirely in God’s hands adds strength to a political cause: in seventeenth-century Europe it helped fuel the Dutch revolt against their Spanish masters. Oldenbarneveldt and his followers came to believe in a more moderate approach than that which Calvin decreed, arguing for a greater degree of religious liberty. This brought them into conflict with powerful elements in Dutch society, and when Oldenbarneveldt decided to raise a militia to help protect the peace in his home province of Holland, his enemies pounced. He was already unpopular for supporting a truce with Spain and the Dutch Stadtholder, William the Silent’s son, Prince Maurits, ordered his arrest. In a trial that was a mockery of justice he was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed at the age of seventy-one in 1619. ‘Is this the wages,’ he asked, ‘of the thirty-three years’ service I have given to the country?’

Today we can still look at him in the portrait by Michiel van Miereveld who, like his great contemporaries Rembrandt and Frans Hals, painted the men and women who led the Netherlands in its golden age. He looks towards us, serious, intelligent and sombrely dressed, a white ruff the only splash of brightness in a picture of unbending resolution. He showed his countrymen how the wealth of the world could be theirs for the taking. It was a lesson they learned with enthusiasm.

In 1733 John Kay patented an invention called the Flying Shuttle. It transformed the cloth-weaving industry, the first of a train of events that came to be known as the Industrial Revolution.

In the early 1840s a young German called Friedrich Engels was despatched to Manchester to work in a family business. His father hoped that the experience would relieve him of his radical tendencies, but it had the opposite effect. In 1845, Engels published a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which has survived ever since as one of the great classic texts of socialist theory. In it he argued that the Industrial Revolution had transformed the lives of the English working classes. The workers’ pre-industrial condition, he wrote, was ‘not worthy of human beings’: labourers could barely read or write and existed in a state of docile obedience to the so-called superior classes. ‘Intellectually,’ he said, ‘they were dead; lived only for their petty, private interest; for their looms and gardens; and knew nothing of the mighty movement, which beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind.’ They were woken from their submissive torpor, Engels argued, by the invention by James Hargreaves of the Spinning Jenny in 1764; this was the year that Engels took as the moment the Industrial Revolution began. Though it is true that large-scale industrialisation in Britain did not begin until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the process really started much earlier – in 1733, when John Kay invented the Flying Shuttle.

Britain led the way in the Industrial Revolution and its history is essentially the history of Britain from the last years of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. It was a revolution because it transformed everything. It changed people’s lives – where they lived, how they worked and how they were organised. It changed the status of the nation, catapulting Britain into a great power that dominated world trade. Most importantly, it changed attitudes, ultimately creating a working class that demanded proper involvement in the affairs of the state in return for its role as an essential engine of prosperity. Britain today is a country that, aside from London, is built around its great industrial cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast and Glasgow. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this structure was very different. The main provincial centres were York, Exeter, Bristol (because of its importance as a port), Norwich and Newcastle. When the Industrial Revolution got under way, most of these places, all ancient cathedral cities and big market towns with a long history of being at the centre of their communities, began to lose their influence as factories and the jobs that went with them grew up elsewhere. Many new towns grew tenfold during the course of the eighteenth century. Manchester had a population of 10,000 in 1701 which grew to 84,000 by 1801; Liverpool increased from 6,000 to 78,000 in the same period; and Birmingham from 7,000 to 74,000. By the middle of the nineteenth century the population growth had accelerated even more: Liverpool’s stood at 443,000, Manchester at 338,000 and Birmingham at 296,000. York had only 40,000 people, Exeter and Norwich less than that. Between 1750 and 1850 the axis of regional life in Britain swung and settled in a completely new position.

This great cycle of change was unique in Europe. In other countries, particularly France, the German states and Belgium, industrialisation followed the British lead and there was expansion and rapid growth. But it did not have the same effect of disrupting the influence of those countries’ traditional urban centres. In Britain this experience was intensified by the realisation that steam power could be used for transport as well as manufacturing and the age of the railways began. From the 1840s new railway companies sprouted up all over the place. Like the emergence of the internet in our own time, the railway network became the epitome of achievement, a vital ingredient in a modern, aspiring society. The big difference was that railways, like the pulsating new towns they connected, required civil engineering on an enormous scale. Bridges, embankments, sidings and warehouses littered the countryside, while in the towns splendid new stations were built alongside other gothic monuments of civic self-confidence – town halls, libraries, museums and churches. The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom. But like all booms it eventually went into decline, leaving behind the people it had lured into its success and the buildings that accompanied its astonishing growth. It took barely two generations for a vision of the future to be seen, built, celebrated and lost. Today Britain’s ‘industrial heritage’ is a central part of what the nation is. The memorials of the Industrial Revolution are a formidable reminder of lost wealth, almost as precious as the thing itself.

The Industrial Revolution was like one long, relentless, burgeoning economic boom.

One of the finest of those memorials is Manchester Town Hall. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse (whose other masterpiece is the Natural History Museum, London), the Town Hall is decorated with murals by Ford Madox Brown, a painter who enjoyed depicting moral and historical scenes. The Manchester murals tell the story of the city’s history through some of its most-celebrated events. One of these is the occasion in 1753, legend has it, when machine-breakers raided John Kay’s home to try to destroy his invention, forcing him to run for his life.

John Kay came from near Bury in Lancashire where he worked as a reed maker. Reeds are combs used to hold apart the crosswise threads (or ‘weft’) in a weaving loom. Until John Kay came up with his invention of the Flying Shuttle weavers used their hands to pass a shuttle containing the crosswise threads across the downward thread (or ‘warp’) on their looms. Building up pieces of cloth in this way was time-consuming. Weavers always had to change the position of their hands, and two or more of them were needed to make pieces of cloth bigger than the span of an individual’s arms. There was also a lack of consistency. The quality of each piece of cloth depended entirely on the skill of its weaver. Kay simplified the whole process by automating the movement of the shuttle. He put it on wheels and mounted it on the edge of the loom’s comb, allowing it to run quickly in a completely straight line between two spring-loaded boxes at either end. In this way a single weaver could make pieces of cloth to any size required by giving the shuttle a quick flick with a piece of string attached to a stick that sent the mechanism flying back and forth across the loom. Suddenly one weaver could make much more cloth than he could before and build it up on his own to any size required. The productivity of the weaving industry was dramatically increased.