Igor's Blog

Union Soldiers Accepting A Drink by Eastman Johnson, 1865

I recently finished reading ‘Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist’s Inquiry into Western Technology’ (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. As is usual, it took me a long time to finish reading this book because I have a tendency to slowly read dozens of books simultaneously in my free time. When I was reading the book, I was a little disappointed to find out that the author didn't write more about the American Civil War than he did. Of course, the book isn't about the American Civil War but about Western technology. Still, I had a little hope that the author would get into why the civil war began and how it began. I still don't know much about the civil war, and this is why finding out more about it has been on my mind for some time. Carroll Quigley also had almost nothing to say about the civil war in his books. In ‘Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time’ (1966), he wrote that the East united with the West in order to defeat the South. That is all. Of course, this too isn't surprising because none of his books are about the civil war. The American Civil War and what happened in the United States in the 19th century began to interest me only about several years ago. Until very recently, I hadn't owned any books about the civil war, but, some days ago, I took the next step and acquired a list of the books about the American Civil War that got published in the 1970s. After I finish reading these books, I plan to also get some books about this subject that got published in the 1980s and in earlier decades. Of course, finding out about the American Civil War isn't a problem because many books have been written about the subject in past decades. And many films about it have been made too. The United States produces a lot of stuff, and there have been no big political upheavals in that country in the 20th century. Therefore, acquiring many quality works about a subject like the civil war isn't a problem. Anyway, in this post, I will continue to quote from the fourth chapter, titled 'England as the Workshop of the World', and I will begin quoting from the sixth chapter, titled 'The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership', from Adams's book. "The initial phase of the Industrial Revolution was an age of textiles, preeminently cotton. The mechanization of weaving continued longer, but the direction was well established by the early 1840s. Already getting underway by that time was a subsequent phase, deserving to be identified as an age of railroads and steel. England still led the way at first in both of these respects, the high-water mark of its supremacy appropriately celebrated in the great Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851. As we shall see, however, there were already hints of what was to come that ruffled the triumphant complacency of that occasion. American success in the beginning to master interchangeable-part manufacturing technology, bursting into public consciousness at that exhibition, was immediately troubling to only a few. But by the 1870s, the threatening significance of new initiatives elsewhere could no longer be denied. The increasing bargaining power of skilled workers, as for example in holding back the acquisition of new, ring-frame spinning technology to replace the now-obsolescent mule, kept labor costs uncompetitively high. England found its industrial leadership increasingly subject to cost-competitive challenges emanating from continental Europe as well as North America. Although it was not apparent to anyone at the time, Britain’s trend of growth in industrial output had begun to slow already by the mid-century. More significant, and probably also unnoticed, were declines in the rate of growth of total factor productivity that began somewhat later. According to the estimates of C. H. Feinstein, “while in 1870 GDP/hour worked in the United States was only 90 per cent of the British level, by 1890 it was 5 per cent and by 1913, 25 per cent, higher. Over the period 1870-1913, American total factor productivity growth appears to have been about three times the British rate… J. G. Williamson, noting growth in skills per worker over 1871-1911 at only 70 per cent of the American rate, concluded that “it may well be said that the ‘failure’ of British industry in the late nineteenth century can be laid to the doorstep of inadequate investment in human capital… compared to her main competitors in world markets.” Of course aggregates like these, as we noted earlier, tell only part of the story. Accordingly we will touch briefly on a few specific features of the epoch of gradual decline that began in England during the last third of the nineteenth century. Its most general, seemingly almost inevitable, characteristics have been well summarized as follows: “Unlike many of their international competitors, who had access only to much more confining markets, Britain’s international marketing structure meant that British firms could get enough orders of similar specifications to reap economies of long production runs, and had a large enough share in expanding markets to justify investments in (what were then) up-to-date and increasingly capital-intensive plant and equipment. But the tables were turned by the spread of tariff barriers and indigenous industrialization.” A second aspect of decline has been perhaps too sweepingly characterized as “entrepreneurial failure.” It involved an apparent unreadiness “to confront institutional constraints innovatively.” If the objectives of this study were extended to include all aspects of international competition for industrial leadership, detailed attention would need to be given to the steps by which ascendancy in the field of organic chemicals and dyestuffs passed to Germany in the later nineteenth century. But briefly to summarize, the heavy chemical industry was initially one in which Britain had been dominant. Its lead was based in part, however, on enormous caustic soda manufacturing capacity using the LeBlanc process. This may have been unwisely retained in Britain after having been superseded in terms of cost and efficiency by the introduction of the Solvay process on the European continent. Careful retrospective analysis has indeed tended to confirm that this was “costly conservatism… profit-losing attachment to continuity and… reluctance to admit a major mistake.” The argument on this point is complex, however, and the rationality of historical hindsight may not accurately reflect the balance of factors involved in actions and decisions at the time they were made. Initially introduced from France in 1818, there were terrible deficiencies in the alkali industry based on the LeBlanc process that became “the chemical industry” in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Extremely wasteful of materials and labor, it was also a source of serious atmospheric and soil pollution and a direct threat to human health. By contrast, the Solvay ammonia-soda process, while more capital-intensive, was at least 40 percent less costly, required only more readily available raw materials, and was environmentally much more benign as well. That much is clear. Yet it is also true that British manufacturers made some progress with process improvements and with shifting their emphasis to the conversion of former waste materials into useful by-products. They may have felt a heavy responsibility, too, not only for the enormous capital tied up in existing plant but for the livelihood of forty thousand employees. Perhaps even more complex, but also no less suggestive of management weakness, was Britain’s failure to retain the advantage of its initial priority in synthesizing an aniline dye from coal tar residues in 1856. Henry Perkin, the brilliant young discoverer, had even followed up this achievement within little more than a year by making arrangements to produce the dye on a commercial basis and almost instantly finding a ready market for it. Perkin’s was a largely serendipitous discovery, and his greater achievement lay in overcoming costly, technically deficient engineering obstacles to the production of a mauve dye. The synthesis of alizarin, in which Germany won the race by hours in 1869, led more directly to a wide family of further discoveries and had a much greater economic impact in its own right. More important still, it demonstrated that the newly emergent field of structural organic chemistry could be deployed in the pursuit of commercial success. Only by German industry was the lesson quickly grasped that “the secret of commercial success lay in continuous chemical research.” Already by 1873 Britain’s decline in the field was evident, and by the late 1880s Germany had completely seized the lead in organic chemicals. Recruiting few salaried managers and relying on outsiders for marketing, British firms were equipped to exploit potentialities of neither scale nor scope. Vigorously investing in both of these directions, a handful of German firms reduced the price of a kilo of dye from well over 100 marks in the early 1870s to 23 marks in 1878 and then to 9 marks by 1886. By 1913, in consequence, out of a world total of 160,000 tons of dye, Germany produced 140,000 and Britain only 4,400. Nor was comparative performance much different in pharmaceuticals, films, agricultural chemicals, and electrochemicals. And by 1913 also, two-thirds of the electrical equipment machinery made in British factories had been developed not in its own research laboratories but in those of Siemens in Germany and General Electric and Westinghouse in the United States. As Anthony Travis has shown, this was more nearly a cause than a consequence of the subsequent passing of scientific leadership. Germany’s emergence as the dominant power in the dye industry had its roots in business principles that are hauntingly familiar to students of Japanese economic performance today. They included careful study and detailed improvement of the English technology that was initially copied; a greater readiness to assume the risks consequent upon long-term investment; greater effectiveness in meeting the needs and tastes of diverse foreign markets; and painstaking insistence on maintaining product quality. The British empire, as well as its areas of traditional industrial strength, seemed to promise higher returns with fewer risks. On the other hand, “the German investors, as latecomers on the industrial scene, had to look elsewhere for new opportunities and found them in domestic industries based more heavily on scientific research and newer technologies.” In a word, Perkin and his British contemporaries simply “did not build the organizations that could manage the resources needed to do this kind of work, so the world’s leading textile-producing country lost its dye industry.” The Civil War defines the beginning of a new watershed in American economic and technological history, a thunderous entry upon the uncharted landscape of modernity. In an unexpectedly sanguinary, all-out struggle, its logic and momentum forcefully submerged, without entirely displacing, earlier, regionally concentrated opposition to growing national integration. Similarly anticipated by few at the outset was the abolition of slavery. Meanwhile, having made a major contribution to victory, the North’s superior industrial base and logistical mastery helped to precipitate a confident new, national pursuit of international industrial and technological ascendancy. So much is common knowledge. Most historical accounts of this great national turning point concentrate on the gathering political tensions that led to it, the conduct of military operations, and the impacts on the South of the era of Reconstruction that followed. However, more relevant for our purposes were the ensuing extensions of national authority by statutory enactment and constitutional amendment. With the Confederacy’s defeat, strict constructionists and advocates of the primary rights and powers of the states had permanently lost key citadels of their strength. So of primary concern here are a different set of outcomes, focused primarily instead on the victorious North. The contrast is overdrawn, but is also not without some underlying accuracy, between the plantation-based leadership of the South that retained an important national role only until the war and the more complex and dynamic amalgam of business leaders, a growing industrial work force, and the yeoman farmers of the North and West. In particular, the general-welfare clause of the Constitution, its favorable implications for federal government initiatives previously encountering entrenched opposition and hence largely unutilized, now could take on a more active meaning within the coalition that formed the Union and retained its primacy after the Union victory. Commencing over a sectional clash that had dominated and constrained political life almost since the founding of the Republic, the Civil War thus had the ironic effect of helping to clear the way for the requirements of a modern industrial state. The reduced importance of traditional sectional balances meant that the federal government’s intervention and assistance could be more openly sought as an investment in national unity and economic growth that would benefit all groups in society. With population rapidly flowing into national territories that had bridged the continent, increasingly urgent needs could be federally addressed for a more effective fabric of administration and communications. As an enormous railroad transportation grid rapidly materialized, the prospect of an integrated national market of unprecedented size was sure to stimulate correspondingly ambitious plans for industrial and commercial growth. Although Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures had been simply ignored by the Congress when it was submitted in 1791, his far-sighted advocacy of affirmative support of industry by a strong national government thus began to receive a belated measure of vindication. Along with the historic legislation associated with the emancipation of slaves, the 37th Congress passed a series of measures embodying this outlook. Considered together, they may well deserve the label “revolutionary.” Common to these measures was a readiness to treat portions of the vast public domain in the still largely unoccupied West not as a permanent asset but as a strategic resource – using land grants as an incentive to attract new settlers, new schools, and the railroad-building activity that would ultimately tie the nation together. The Morrill Act that led to the establishment of land-grant colleges carried with it the seed of federal support for research as well as education in the field of agriculture. Also established in 1862, with some of the same objectives, was the Department of Agriculture. Its duties included acquiring and diffusing “information on subjects connected with agriculture in the most general and comprehensive sense of that word, and to procure, propagate, and distribute among the people new and valuable seeds and plants.” Before long those responsibilities would require the assistance of a staff of scientists to assist in carrying them out. As Hunter Dupree observes, “Although opponents could and did invoke states’ rights against federal scientific activity, the outbreak of the Civil War had ruled in favor of Alexander Hamilton’s interpretation of the general-welfare clause as clearly as it presaged the triumph of Hamilton’s vision of an industrial nation. No doubt the exigencies of the war effort contributed at least a greater sense of urgency to both of these undertakings. With military recruitment, able-bodied farmers declined substantially in number. Nevertheless, “northern farm production continued its consistent increase even as the war progressed.”