Page 266 - Encyclopedia Of World History

616 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood.
Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in
metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. • Karl Marx (1818–1883)

person rose about 50 percent in 300 years. The critical The staggering quantities of energy thus made avail-
constraints were in the area of agroforestry and energy. able, combined with a wave of other technological inno-
Broadly speaking, all the basics of human life—food, con- vations, ushered in by far the greatest surge of intensive
struction materials, clothing fiber, and energy—came growth in human history—one that has continued for
either from vegetative growth (grain, lumber, cotton or roughly 200 years thus far, gradually spreading from a
flax, firewood) or from plant-eating animals (meat, few pockets in Britain and elsewhere in Northwestern
leather, animal locomotion), which meant from the com- Europe to much (though not all) of the world. While
bination of land, fresh water, and sun. Supplies of these global population has risen a bit over 500 percent since
could not be increased on demand, creating difficult 1800, economic output has risen over 4,000 percent;
trade-offs: More farmland, for instance, meant less forest, industrial production may have risen 10,000 percent
and thus less lumber and firewood.The result, in several since 1750.About half of all economic growth in human
of the most productive places in the world, was a serious history, as best as it can be measured, has occurred since
energy shortage, which placed limits on economic 1950. Since that growth far exceeds the growth in land
growth. and labor inputs, most of it is a combination of addi-
tional capital inputs and intensive growth: technological
The Industrial Revolution and institutional changes that make labor, capital, and
The solution to this energy shortage was the development land use more efficient. It is very hard to measure the
of fossil fuels: first coal (and to a lesser extent peat) and effects of capital apart from technology, since so much
later oil and natural gas. While coal, in particular, had capital enters the economy in the form of new machines,
been used to some extent in many places over the cen- but there is no doubt that much of this prodigious
turies,Great Britain was the first society to use it on a truly growth is intensive. The development of far more sys-
massive scale for its everyday needs. A number of factors tematic natural sciences has led to a steady stream of new
contributed to this. First of all, Britain had lots of coal, productivity-enhancing technologies. In earlier eras, by
much of it very conveniently located.Second,it was badly contrast, technological change usually came in the form
deforested relatively early, making the switch to coal (and of single innovations or small clusters, and exhausted
to stone for building) imperative. Third, technological itself when a boom in the innovative industry created a
developments,especially in metallurgy and precision bor- shortage of some particular material. (Improvements in
ing, facilitated the development in England of the world’s metallurgy, for instance, often led to such massive defor-
first economically viable steam engines,which were essen- estation that the metalworks ran out of fuel.) And the
tial to pumping water out of the coal mines. Without advantages in military and political power that were
steam power, it has been estimated, British coal mining conferred by industrialization were so great that govern-
could not have expanded beyond its level in 1700; instead ments everywhere tried to change their institutions to
it multiplied sevenfold by 1815, and almost 100-fold by facilitate economic growth. Indeed, gross national prod-
1900. Coal mining elsewhere grew even faster in the late uct per person is probably the single most widely used
nineteenth century, albeit from a smaller base.And in the index of the success or failure of societies in today’s world
twentieth century, the increased use of oil and natural gas —even though this measurement was invented only in
—fuels barely used at all before modern times—has the twentieth century, and most economists would agree
made possible even more staggering increases.The aver- it is only a very rough measure of human welfare.
age human today uses ten to twenty times as much For all the diversity of technological changes involved,
energy as he or she did before the Industrial Revolution, much of the story of post-1800 growth is that of the fos-
and in rich countries, the figure is higher still. sil fuel revolution in its many applications. It surfaces as