The print edition of History Today has a short article with a BIG myth-breaker.
The Industrial Revolution of the 1700s was more about finance than industry.
Industry’s share of Britain’s overall economy went from 36 percent in 1600 to 41 percent in 1700, then stayed around 35 percent through the 1700s. No net change. Services rose steadily from 23 percent in 1600 to 42 percent in 1850.
The overall economy was growing during those centuries, but the proportion of industry didn’t change. Instead, the role of trade and exports grew at the expense of agriculture, putting more control in the hands of sellers and bankers who provided credit for trade. Britain grew less food and imported more, especially from the plantations in America that were sponsored by the same traders and bankers.
Britain offshored its food to low-wage foreigners in the same way that we currently offshore our industry to low-wage foreigners.
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This ultimately transformed Britain into a highly financialized instrument of imperial investment and control. The state played a major role in promoting trade and financialization through protectionism, military intervention, and by creating and supporting institutions that guaranteed the credibility of a vast international and national credit and investment system.
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This piece is another example of the dramatic difference between history and other academic subjects, which I’ve been enjoying lately. For 30 years historians have been smashing the myths created by those same international stock and bank systems. Since 1700 we’ve been INSTRUCTED that peasants were miserable and starving under the whip of feudal lords, while employees of modern sweatshops have “rights” to “vote” and “quit.” In fact peasants had more freedom and VASTLY more self-government than any modern “citizen”.
Other “social sciences”, and many of the hard sciences, are working FOR Deepstate, helping to propagate the current fashions in Climate and Diversity, developing new military and social weapons, and training CIA torturers.
Why are historians able to tell the truth? They do have tenure but they DON’T depend mainly on federal grants. When you compete for federal grants you MUST support military interventions and current bureaucratic fashions.
Later: No, the more important difference is Britain vs US. The more open-minded historians are British. The same distinction shows up in hard sciences like neurology. Most of the original research comes from China or Italy or Britain. We’ve been locked into Deepstate tyranny since 1946. Other countries tend to have non-competitive funding for research, where each facility gets a fixed annual amount regardless of current political and Wall Street fashions.
EXPERIMENTATION REQUIRES STABILITY.
This leads to a question worth asking. Do we hate Russia and lie about Russia for the same reason that we hate the feudal system? Russia was never Endarkened. It retained the feudal system of mutual obligation, later rebranding it as the Soviet system. Russia didn’t have a stock market, so it didn’t suffer the booms and busts of stock control. Russian peasants were more individualistic than Americans, as Ford found when he tried to set up a factory there.
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Personal sidenote: I’m really appreciating History Today. At first I wasn’t sure if it was worth the price, but the more I read the more I like. Every article is carefully written, and many of them break standard myths from various angles. It also satisfies my hunger for old-fashioned newspapers with Features. At the back of each issue is a crossword puzzle and a list of Footnotes. These aren’t APA style bibliographies, but words picked from each article with an often light-hearted bit of historical background on each word. The magazine is printed in Britain, not Korea, at a mid-sized printing plant in an old building in Bourne.
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