The Triumph of Big Capitalism and the Transformation of the Western World

If after 1850 one can speak of the triumph of “Big Capitalism”, it is because Europe enjoyed exponential economic growth because of the dramatic expansion of pro­duction and trade volumes, rendered possible by scientific progress and, more specifically, the appearance of new technical developments that radically altered the conditions of everyday life in western societies.

17.2.1 The Inventions That Changed the World

The Industrial Revolution which started in the middle of the eighteenth century (Pollard 2002, 12-20), with discoveries such as the steam engine,^{[966] [967]} which utterly transformed industry and transport, was complemented, intensified and accelerated by what has been called the Technical Revolution, or Second Industrial Revolution (Boyns and Edwards 2013, 167-203), which began about one century later^[968]

(we shall restrict the use of the term “technological” to what is happening in our own era)^[969] and brought about more change in every way than the world had experienced in the previous two millennia (Trebilcock 1981, 1-20). From the perspective of constitutional history, this “Technical Revolution” was a key force behind the spectacular strengthening of European nation-states and their power in the nineteenth century.^[970]

The list of inventions—such as the light bulb, phonograph,¹¹ photo­graphs¹² and the cinema,¹³ the telegraph, telephone, radio and, later,

¹¹ Both devices were the work of genius Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), who patented more than 1,000 inventions (Adair 1997), among them the phonograph (1878), which allowed for recorded sounds to be played back for the first time, and the light bulb (1879). By the turn of the century, this latter invention allowed cities to light their streets all night, significantly improving public safety.

¹² In the field of images, the first photograph had been taken by France’s Nicephore Niepce (1765­1833) in 1826. His countryman Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) commercialized the process for the obtaining of photographs, or daguerreotypes, in 1839. However, maybe, Henry Fox Talbot’s 1835 calotype should be listed as the first preservation of a camera image. About their genius, and rivalry in the quest to produce the world’s first photograph, and the couple of contentious decades during which early photographers fought over patents and their merits, see Watson and Rappaport (2014). Photog­raphy would be popularized by Georges Eastman (1854-1932) who in 1888 created the Kodak machine, which dramatically simplified the process of taking pictures; his motto was “you press the button and we do the rest” (Brayer 2012, 59-72). History’s first small, portable camera soon hit the market: the Brownie (Brayer 2012, 204-205). In 1899, Eastman unveiled the Celluloid film for his Kodak still camera, an idea he had replicated from inventor Hannibal Goodwin, whose inventions made him a multimillionaire, not only shared profits with his employees, but donated huge sums to charity.

¹³ Soon after would appear the figure of the cinematographer (from kinema, meaning movement and graphein, meaning record or register). It was only one of a series of simultaneous artistic and technological breakthroughs that began to culminate at the end of the nineteenth century. Thomas Edison is often credited with inventing the first motion picture camera in 1891 with the Kineto- scope; his ideas are a culmination of many theories and advances toward the construction of a camera-like device that captured motion beginning in the seventeenth century, with the magic lantern. On December 28, 1895 at the “Salon indien” of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris (Popple and Kember 2004, 23-44), history’s first film screening took place thanks to the invention developed by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere. Their father, Antoine, saw an example of Edison and Dikcnson’s peep-show Kinetoscope in Paris during one of his travels and encouraged his sons to devise an apparatus that would take and project moving pictures, stating “You can do better. Try to get the image out of the box”. Within a few months, they had produced a successful prototype of the Cinematographe, which were not only a camera but also a printer and projector as well (Gaudreault et al. 2012, 13-118). The first film to be projected for an audience was “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory”, which lasted six and a half minutes (Lanzoni 2002, 29-30). The seventh art had been born [The first six are: (1) Architecture (2) Dance (3) Sculpture (4) Music (5) Painting (6) Literature]. Curiously, Photography entered as the eighth art, after film. Incidentally, the poster promoting the film, featuring history’s first definition of a cinematographer, is priceless: “This device, invented by Mr. Auguste and Mr. Louis Lumiere, makes it possible to pick up, through a series of instant tests, all the television^{[971] [972]}—is truly impressive and allows us to fathom the extent to which the lives of westerners changed forever.

developed,^[974] while the combustion engine made possible the emergence of cars and aircraft.^[975]

Extraordinary progress was also made in medical science, which benefitted from advances made by scientists in the fields of Chemistry and Biology, including, for instance, a water filter devised by Charles Chamberland that prevented the contrac­tion of many diseases, dramatic progress in asepsis and antisepsis (the keys to the prevention of hospital infections), the emergence of vaccines (Louis Pasteur, Edward Jenner), and progress in surgical techniques, revolutionized by the emer­gence of anesthesia^[976] in the United States.

17.2.2 Demographic Expansion and the Concentration of Urban Populations

Thanks to medical advances and increases in the standard of living, Europe experienced dramatic exponential demographic expansion, the population of the Continent tripling between 1840 and 1914. In this regard Germany is worthy of special note, in 1880 recording the astronomical figure of 37.5 births per 1,000 people.^[977] The problem was that this population increase essentially affected urban areas.

The technical breakthroughs made in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century directly affected the means of production. As a result of mechanization, greater quantities of goods were produced, of better quality, and at a lower cost. The tradeoff was that machines completed the tasks formerly performed by men, leaving many farmers in rural areas without work, who were forced to move to cities to find jobs in the factories that began to sprout up around urban areas (Hohenberg and Lees 1996, 179-214).^[978]

As a result, cities grew uncontrollably. In England, undoubtedly the world’s most economically developed country in the nineteenth century, the urban popula­tion shot from a quarter of the population in 1831 to two-thirds in 1870. To varying degrees, urbanization affected all of Europe in the same period. In 1814, the number of cities with populations of more than 50,000 was 46 (the largest at the time being London, which had not yet reached one million). In 1914—only 100 years later— there were 179 cities with populations of over 100,000 inhabitants, three of which (London, Paris and Berlin) exceeded two million. In the United States, urban growth was even more spectacular. The most illustrative case is that of Chicago, which went from being a mere town in 1830, to a city of 100,000 in 1850, to a metropolis of three million people in 1914.^[979]

17.3