6.2 The Spread of Industry Throughout Europe

In 1851 Britain showed off its industrial lead at the Great Exhibition in London, held in the Crystal Palace, a giant hall of iron and glass. Visitors from around the world saw British steam engines, power looms and locomotives. Britain's lead rested mainly on private initiative: engineers, inventors, investors and banks, working under a Parliament that represented commercial interests. Parliament even granted cash awards to some inventors, such as £10,000 to Edmund Cartwright in 1809. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 (6.9) showed how much influence industrial and commercial interests had gained.

Continental countries had a disadvantage and an advantage. The disadvantage: the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) had disrupted trade and investment for a generation. The advantage: they could copy British machines and hire British engineers instead of inventing everything themselves.

Because private capital was scarcer, continental governments did more. They built or planned railroads, set tariffs, funded technical schools and sometimes gave banks and companies special privileges. This is a key contrast: British industrialization was mostly private and unplanned, while continental industrialization often had state sponsorship.

Railroads were the great engine of the spread. George Stephenson's locomotive the Rocket won the Rainhill Trials in 1829, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830 as the first intercity line with regular steam-powered passenger trains. By 1850 Britain had more than 6,000 miles of track.

Railroads did three things at once. They cut the cost and time of moving goods, creating national markets. They created huge demand for coal, iron and later steel. And they needed so much money that they pushed the growth of banks and joint-stock companies. On the continent, governments usually planned the networks: Belgium's state-built line from Brussels to Mechelen (1835) is usually counted as the first steam passenger railway on the European continent, and a French law of 1842 had the state prepare the routes while private companies ran the trains.

Before 1834 the German Confederation was a patchwork of states, each charging tolls on goods crossing its borders. The Zollverein, a customs union led by Prussia that took effect in 1834, removed those internal tariffs and set a common tariff toward outsiders. Austria was left out. That decision mattered later: it tied the smaller German states economically to Prussia, a step toward Prussian-led unification in 1871 (7.3).

The economist Friedrich List argued in The National System of Political Economy (1841) that young industries in a country like Germany could not survive head-to-head competition with Britain. He called for protective tariffs to shelter these infant industries and for a national railroad network. His ideas challenged the free-trade liberalism of Adam Smith and influenced German policy later in the century.

By 1850 a band of industry ran from Britain across northern France and Belgium into the Rhineland and Saxony, while much of Europe still lived on the land. Where farming methods stayed old-fashioned and a few landlords owned most of the land, peasants were often in debt, short of land and at risk of hunger. The bad harvests of the “Hungry Forties” hit much of Europe, and Ireland is a grim example: when potato blight struck in 1845, about a million people died in the Great Famine and over a million emigrated. In eastern Europe, serfdom tied peasants to estates and kept internal markets small, which is a major reason Russia lagged until emancipation (6.6).