Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

To her supremacy in these spheres, won in the period before 1815, Britain added new spheres of dominance in the period after 1815. These arose from her early achievement of the Industrial Revolution. This was applied to transportation and communications as well as to industrial production. In the first it gave the world the railroad and the steamboat; in the second it gave the telegraph, the cable, and the telephone; in the third it gave the factory system.

The Industrial Revolution existed in Britain for almost two generations before it spread elsewhere. It gave a great increase in output of manufactured goods and a great demand for raw materials and food; it also gave a great increase in wealth and savings. As a result of the first two and the improved methods of transportation, Britain developed a world trade of which it was the center and which consisted chiefly of the export of manufactured goods and the import of raw materials and food. At the same time, the savings of Britain tended to flow out to North America, South America, and Asia, seeking to increase the output of raw materials and food in these areas. By 1914 these exports of capital had reached such an amount that they were greater than the foreign investments of all other countries put together. In 1914 British overseas investment was about $20 billion (or about one-quarter of Britain’s national wealth, yielding about a tenth of the total national income). The French overseas investment at the same time was about $9 billion (or one-sixth the French national wealth, yielding 6 percent of the national income), while Germany had about $5 billion invested overseas (one-fifteenth the national wealth, yielding 3 percent of the national income). The United States at that time was a large-scale debtor.

The dominant position of Britain in the world of 1913 was, as I have said, more real than apparent. In all parts of the world people slept more securely, worked more productively, and lived more fully because Britain existed. British naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and the Far East suppressed slave raiders, pirates, and headhunters. Small nations like Portugal, the Netherlands, or Belgium retained their overseas possessions under the protection of the British fleet. Even the United States, without realizing it, remained secure and upheld the Monroe Doctrine behind the shield of the British Navy. Small nations were able to preserve their independence in the gaps between the Great Powers, kept in precarious balance by the Foreign Office’s rather diffident balance-of-power tactics. Most of the world’s great commercial markets, even in commodities like cotton, rubber, and tin, which she did not produce in quantities herself, were in England, the world price being set from the auction bidding of skilled specialist traders there. If a man in Peru wished to send money to a man in Afghanistan, the final payment, as like as not, would be made by a bookkeeping transaction in London. The English parliamentary system and some aspects of the English judicial system, such as the rule of law, were being copied, as best as could be, in all parts of the world.

The profitability of capital outside Britain—a fact which caused the great export of capital—was matched by a profitability of labor. As a result, the flow of capital from Britain and Europe was matched by a flow of persons. Both of these served to build up non-European areas on a modified European pattern. In export of men, as in export of capital, Britain was easily first (over 20 million persons emigrating from the United Kingdom in the period 1815-1938). As a result of both, Britain became the center of world finance as well as the center of world commerce. The system of international financial relations, which we described earlier, was based on the system of industrial, commercial, and credit relationships which we have just described. The former thus required for its existence a very special group of circumstances—a group which could not be expected to continue forever. In addition, it required a group of secondary characteristics which were also far from permanent. Among these were the following: (1) all the countries concerned must be on the full gold standard; (2) there must be freedom from public or private interference with the domestic economy of any country; that is, prices must be free to rise and fall in accordance with the supply and demand for both goods and money; (3) there must also be free flow of international trade so that both goods and money can go without hindrance to those areas where each is most valuable; (4) the international financial economy must be organized about one center with numerous subordinate centers, so that it would be possible to cancel out international claims against one another in some clearinghouse and thus reduce the flow of gold to a minimum; (5) the flow of goods and funds in international matters should be controlled by economic factors and not be subject to political, psychological, or ideological influences.

These conditions, which made the international financial and commercial system function so beautifully before 1914, had begun to change by 1890. The fundamental economic and commercial conditions changed first, and were noticeably modified by 1910; the group of secondary characteristics of the system were changed by the events of the First World War. As a result, the system of early international financial capitalism is now only a dim memory. Imagine a period without passports or visas, and with almost no immigration or customs restrictions. Certainly the system had many incidental drawbacks, but they were incidental. Socialized if not social, civilized if not cultured, the system allowed individuals to breathe freely and develop their individual talents in a way unknown before and in jeopardy since.

The United States to 1917

Just as Classical culture spread westward from the Greeks who created it to the Roman peoples who adopted and changed it, so Europe’s culture spread westward to the New World, where it was profoundly modified while still remaining basically European. The central fact of American history is that people of European origin and culture came to occupy and use the immensely rich wilderness between the Atlantic and the Pacific. In this process the wilderness was developed and exploited area by area, the Tidewater, the Piedmont, the trans-Appalachian forest, the trans-Mississippi prairies, the Pacific Coast, and finally the Great Plains. By 1900 the period of occupation which had begun in 1607 was finished, but the era of development continued on an intensive rather than extensive basis. This shift from extensive to intensive development, frequently called the “closing of the frontier,” required a readjustment of social outlook and behavior from a largely individualistic to a more cooperative basis and from an emphasis on mere physical prowess to emphasis on other less tangible talents of managerial skills, scientific training, and intellectual capacity able to fill the newly occupied frontiers with a denser population, producing a higher standard of living, and utilizing more extensive leisure.

The ability of the people of the United States to make this readjustment of social outlook and behavior at the “ending of the frontier” about 1900 was hampered by a number of factors from its earlier historical experience. Among these we should mention the growth of sectionalism, past political and constitutional experiences, isolationism, and emphasis on physical prowess and unrealistic idealism.

The occupation of the United States had given rise to three chief geographic sections: a commercial and later financial and industrial East, an agrarian and later industrial West, and an agrarian South. Unfortunately, the two agrarian sections were organized quite differently, the South on the basis of slave labor and the West on the basis of free labor. On this question the East allied with the West to defeat the South in the Civil War (1861-1865) and to subject it to a prolonged military occupation as a conquered territory (1865-1877). Since the war and the occupation were controlled by the new Republican Party, the political organization of the country became split on a sectional basis: the South refused to vote Republican until 1928, and the West refused to vote Democratic until 1932. In the East the older families which inclined toward the Republican Party because of the Civil War were largely submerged by waves of new immigrants from Europe, beginning with Irish and Germans after 1846 and continuing with even greater numbers from eastern Europe and Mediterranean Europe after 1890. These new immigrants of the eastern cities voted Democratic because of religious, economic, and cultural opposition to the upper-class Republicans of the same eastern section. The class basis in voting patterns in the East and the sectional basis in voting in the South and West proved to be of major political significance after 1880.