The Making of a Global World
The nineteenth-century world economy
Explain how a world economy formed in the nineteenth century and who paid for it.
Three flows. Economists describe three kinds of movement in the world economy:
- trade: mostly goods, like cloth or wheat;
- labour: people migrating for work;
- capital: money invested over long distances.
In the 19th century all three grew together and changed people's lives more deeply than ever.
Britain's Corn Laws. As Britain's population and cities grew, grain prices rose. Under pressure from landowners, the government restricted grain imports through the Corn Laws ('corn' here means grain). Industrialists and city people, angry at high food prices, forced the Corn Laws to be scrapped. Then cheap imported food flooded in; British farming could not compete; land lay idle and thousands of farm workers moved to cities or emigrated.
A chain reaction.
- Food got cheaper in Britain, so people ate more and imported more.
- Land was cleared in Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia to grow food for Britain.
- Railways linked the farms to ports; harbours were built; homes and settlements came up. That needed capital (from London) and labour.
- Labour was short in America and Australia, so people migrated: nearly 50 million Europeans went there in the 19th century; about 150 million people worldwide left their homes.
By 1890, a global agricultural economy existed. In India too, canal colonies in west Punjab turned semi-desert into wheat and cotton fields for export. World trade multiplied 25 to 40 times between 1820 and 1914.
Technology: meat on ice. Railways, steamships and the telegraph changed everything. Take meat. Until the 1870s, animals were shipped alive from America to Europe: they took up space, fell ill or died, so meat was a luxury. Refrigerated ships changed this: animals were slaughtered in America, Australia or New Zealand and shipped as frozen meat. Meat got cheaper, and Europe's poor could add meat, butter and eggs to their bread and potatoes. Better living at home also built support for imperialism abroad.
The dark side: Africa carved up. Trade brought prosperity to some, but loss of freedom and livelihood to colonised peoples. At Berlin in 1885, the big European powers completed the division of Africa among themselves; that is why some African borders run dead straight, as if drawn with a ruler. Explorers like Stanley mapped Africa with guns and local helpers, helping the conquest.
Why Africans would not work for wages. Africa had plenty of land and livestock, and few goods to buy, so people rarely needed wages. Europeans wanted African land and minerals for plantations and mines, but could not find workers. So they forced them:
- heavy taxes, payable only by working for wages;
- inheritance laws changed so that only one family member could inherit land, pushing the rest into wage work;
- mineworkers locked in compounds.
Rinderpest: the cattle plague. In the late 1880s, infected cattle brought from British Asia to feed Italian soldiers in Eritrea carried rinderpest into Africa. It spread west 'like forest fire', reaching the Atlantic coast in 1892 and the Cape five years later, killing 90 per cent of the cattle. With their cattle dead, Africans lost their livelihoods. Planters, mine owners and colonial governments took control of the cattle that survived and used it to force Africans into wage work. Control over cattle helped Europeans conquer Africa.
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