Page 213 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1514 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Those who exercise power always arrange matters so as to give their tyranny
the appearance of justice. • Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695)

Harris, D. R. (Ed.). (1996). The origins and spread of agriculture and pas- Engines
toralism in Eurasia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. of Change
Kiple, K. (Ed.). (1993). The Cambridge world history of human disease.
New York: Cambridge University Press. But at first the biggest improvement for most people
McNeill, W. (1976). Plagues and peoples. Garden City, NY: Anchor was not industrial at all. Rather, food supplies increased
Press.
Smil,V. (1994). Energy in world history. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. enormously in Europe due to the rapid spread of potato
Wrigley, E. A. (1969). Population and history. New York: McGraw-Hill. cultivation after 1763, when all the principal govern-
ments of the continent set out to imitate the Prussians
who, fifteen years before, had pioneered official efforts
to persuade peasants to plant their fallow fields with
Progress potatoes. Potatoes meant more work, since they had to

be hoed in summer to remove weeds. But as long as
rogress originally meant moving cross country toward enough hands could be found for that task, potatoes
Pa chosen destination and derives directly from Latin. multiplied the amount of food European fields could
Progress toward individual betterment was a derivative produce without diminishing the grain harvest in the
meaning that entered English in the seventeenth century, slightest. This, together with use of turnips and other
most famously with John Bunyan’s book, Pilgrim’s fodder crops as a parallel alternative to fallowing, radi-
Progress (1678). But the idea that society as a whole cally diminished age-old risks of famine and provoked
might also progress was slower to emerge. To be sure, two centuries of population growth for humans and for
ever since 1492, when Europeans first began to sail their domesticated animals.That in turn assured a sup-
across the oceans, advances of geographical and mathe- ply of people, horses and cattle for intensified cultiva-
matical knowledge accumulated rapidly. Scientific pro- tion in the European countryside, and soon provoked a
gress became obvious by 1687, when Isaac Newton pub- surge of migrants looking for wage work in burgeoning
lished mathematically formulated laws of motion, making industrial towns.
eclipses as well as more ordinary movements of sun, Economic expansion thus became self-sustaining;
moon, planets—and even cannonballs—predictable. and as new styles of farming and new forms of indus-
Writers like the French scientist, Bernard de Fontenelle try spread, the daily experience of almost everyone in
(1657–1757) concluded that progress of knowledge western Europe began to change in obvious ways.
was real and might be expected to continue indefinitely These novelties soon began to affect the entire world as
into the future, but unchanging laws of nature meant that well. Not all changes were for the better. Living condi-
human society as a whole would remain much as before. tions in crowded industrial cities were often horrible,
As long as most people lived just about the same way and alternating patterns of boom and bust meant inse-
their parents and grandparents had done, any other opin- curity for all and inflicted severe suffering on unem-
ion would have seemed absurd. But beginning about ployed wage earners. But new possibilities and cheaper
1750 a cluster of changes began in Great Britain and goods were just as real. Think, for example, of what it
western Europe that historians later called the Industrial meant for ordinary persons—especially those with
Revolution. The central feature of that revolution was small babies to swaddle and keep more or less clean—
expanding the output of useful goods by using inanimate when, as the utopian socialist Robert Owen tells us in
forms of power—first falling water, then coal and steam, his autobiography (The Life of Robert Written by Him-
then electricity—to drive large,often complicated machines. self, 1920), in 1858 the cost of cotton cloth in England
As a flood of useful things began to come from such had shrunk to one seventieth of what it had been sixty
machines, human lives in western Europe began to years before when he started work as a teenager. Dur-
change unmistakably, and sometimes for the better, as ing that same life span, steam railways, introduced in
cheaper manufactured goods became available. 1825, drastically cheapened and speeded up overland