The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History

Part 7 demonstrates the political impacts of wealth concentration. The text first draws attention to the role of the rapid growth of trade and cities in emboldening wealthy merchants and landowners to challenge monarchy as the basis of politics. In emphasizing this dynamic, the authors establish that economic factors were responsible for shifts in power dynamics. This sets the stage for their discussion of the Industrial Revolution and its role in granting greater power first to Britain and then to other industrialized nations. Britain’s initiation of the Industrial Revolution enabled it to outcompete other countries in the production of textiles, metals, and ships, which shifted many countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas to land-intensive food and fiber production. The net effect of the economic factors and revolutionary climate was a power shift:

The web permitted the sudden spread of industrial knowledge and technology, which some countries exploited as they recast their societies and economies. But elsewhere the challenge of industrialization proved too strong, or provoked self-strengthening programs that divided the elite against itself, bringing low once mighty empires (248).

With this quote and other evidence throughout the section, the authors build on their opening assertion that the Industrial Revolution “permitted a basic change in the human condition, equaled in importance only by the transition to agriculture many millennia before” (213). The Industrial Revolution, however, seemed to have an effect opposite to humans’ transition to agriculture. Whereas agriculture transformed roving groups to settled communities, the Industrial Revolution stimulated mass migration due to the concentration of wealth and opportunity in certain areas. Although industrialization was like the transition to agriculture in that it locked people into new and more laborious lifestyles, the former shifted people away from the natural rhythms of days and seasons, altered the role of gender and familial connection in work responsibilities, and separated the means of production from ownership of product. These profound shifts demonstrate that the preponderance of capitalism created an entirely new world.

The authors’ analysis places the origins of capitalist production in earlier systems of labor. At first, the demand that early industrialization created expanded to forced labor systems in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, Egypt, the Indian Ocean islands, and West Africa. However, later industrialization rendered forced labor insupportable by the era’s economic logic. This suggests that wage labor in fact grew out of forced labor, constituting a more viable means to support the growth of capitalism and the concentration of wealth to the hands of a few elites. The transition from forced to wage labor stimulated new intellectual and political currents, specifically Marxism and Communism, which constituted critical challenges to the dominance of the capitalist ethos in the globalized world. Together, the abolition of forced labor, the consolidation of capitalism, and the rise of Marxism/Communism illustrate that economic considerations were a critical factor in altering the human condition and power dynamics in the globalized world of the late 18th and 19th centuries.

The text illustrates how these economic factors were key players in the emergence of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of global politics. As wealthy merchant and landowning classes circulated ideas about the legitimate authority of government (i.e., consent of the governed), these ideas forged a sense of national solidarity among those who could be convinced that the “state embodied the will of the people” (227). This new form of secular religion, nationalism, “conferred greater power on those states that could marshal it in their service” (228) and weakened states “where populations were too diverse” (228). Therefore, the transition to containing politics within the nation-state was a relatively easy shift among unstable European societies that were already accustomed to shifting loyalties based on commercial and political interests and the linguistically and culturally homogenous Japan. In places where more variety and traditionalist attitudes prevailed, like Africa, the Habsburg Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, consolidating a nation-state unit proved more challenging. Thus, nation-state containment of politics, nationalism, and a greater ability to wage war (due to industrialism) were significant aspects of Europe’s success in colonizing Asia and Africa as well as later threats to the cosmopolitan web, which are discussed in depth in Part 8.