The World 4th Blog

    Fat made the nineteenth century world work. It supplied calories for human consumers and greased the machines of industrialization. But the fat crisis was part of a bigger picture: a revolution in the sources of energy that kept human society working. How people responded to the crisis is the subject of Chapter 23: industrialization, new ways to release energy and new uses for it. The following three chapters, Chapter 24, 25, and 26, will cover the major consequences of industrialization, new forms of imperialism, and the effects of industrialization on society and politics.
    Global health declined as a result of food production and population growth. As people got more crowded together, new eco-niches opened for disease. Improvements in long range communications made it easier for disease to spread. In 1917-1919, an influenza pandemic killed more than 30 million people worldwide. Famine killed at least 4.3 million people in India in 1876-1878. Rural populations were also prone to ecological disasters. Although food production soared in global terms, its effects were unevenly distributed. In the nineteenth century, famine was worse than ever before. Political neglect made the effects even worse, especially in the territories of large empires under distant or indifferent rulers. In some ways, the most successful crops of the period - the most prolific, the most nutritious - ensnared customers in over-reliance on them. Beyond question, the greatest extension of the frontier of food production happened in vast open lands of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Australia, and North America. Grains soon became more important than meat, as wheat and maize replaced the native prairie grasses. The change could not have happened without industrial technologies. Steel plows turned the sod. Railways transported grain. Houses built from precision milled lumber and cheap nails spread cities in a region where most construction materials were unavailable. Repeating rifles destroyed vital links in the earlier ecosystem: the buffalo herds and their human hunters, the Native Americans. Grain elevators appeared in 1842. Harvesting machinery enabled a few hands to reap large harvests. Wire enclosed farmland against buffalo and cattle. Giant mills processed the grain into marketable foodstuffs. In 1862, the Homestead Act made land in the West available to settlers at nominal prices. By the 1900, 500 million acres of farmland had been added. Similar changes occurred in other grasslands. By 1900, Argentina, which had been a net importer of grain in the 1860s, was exporting 100 million bushles of wheat and maize a year. Canada also became a major grain exporter. Fertilizers increased productivity, too. In Europe, farmers kept their fields constantly productive, alternating beets or turnips with clover or alfalfa, which renew the soil by recycling nitrogen. Turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes, kept cattle alive throughout the winter, generating more manure. Food no longer ad to be produced near where it was eaten. In industrializing areas, agriculture declined.
     The economic consequences of militarization were, perhaps, even more significant. Wartime logistics generated innovations in production, supply, and communications. Huge production lines, for instance, first appeared in state bakeries that produced dry bread for navies. These bakeries inspired the factory system of production that was necessary for large scale industrialization. Fossil fuels ignited industrialization. Peat and coal were the first to be extracted from the ground on an unprecedented scale. Oil followed (and, in the twentieth century, natural gas). Iron and steel were inescapably part of the picture. Fuel compensation and production leaped. Japanese coal production had always been modest, but it rose from 390,000 tons in 1860 to 5 million tons in 1900. Increases of similar order of magnitude occurred in Belgian and Spanish coal mines over the same period. The most productive coalfield in the world was already that of South Wales in Britain. Machinery in use in Britain by the 1830s, for instance, could produce in 135 hours the same amount of cotton that took 50,000 hours to spin by hand. Industrialization happened earliest and fastest in regions where labor was relatively expensive: in Europe and Japan, where the size of the workforce was smaller than in China and India; or in the United States, which, despite the huge increase in its population, was still seriously underpopulated in the nineteenth century.
    Population increase contributed to increasing demand, but so did the multiplication of sources of wealth - the new resources unlocked from the soil, the enormous expansion of financial institutions, the growth in the money supply as governments took on increasing responsibilities and minted cash to pay for them. Industrial technology represented, for its early witnesses, the triumph of imagination over nature. Admirers of mechanization saw it as a romantic - a perspective we have lost today. The first successful experiment in steam locomotion was carried out in 1804, when Richard Trevithick carried 10 tons of iron along 9 miles of track in Britain. Although the web of railways was densest in industrial regions, the rails also stretched across vast distances of the unindustrialized world, delivering to ports and factories ingredients for the machines to turn into saleable goods and food and drugs to keep the workers at their tasks. The first line  across the American continent opened in 1869. Jamsetji Dorabji Naegamwalla was the most successful of all. He was an illiterate carpenter in a British run dockyard when, in 1850, he realized the potential of the railways. He employed thousands of Indians and a handful of European engineers, ensuring the smooth running of the operations the government confided to him by getting to know his men and boosting their morale by his constant presence on the job. The development of steam powered shipping kept pace with that of the railways. In 1807, the first commercial steamboat, built by Robert Fulton, navigated the Hudson River, traveling 150 miles upriver from New York City to Albany in 32 hours. The first transatlantic steam service began in 1838. Electricity began to rival steam power in some applications. In the 1830s and 1840s in England Michael Faraday in demonstrated the possibilities of electric lighting. The biggest contribution arose from one of his first gadgets: an electromagnetic induction machine, made in 1831. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain, Spain, Italy, and Belgium all doubled their steam driven industrial capacity. France and Russia tripled theirs. In what is now the Czech Republic, capacity grew fivefold, and Germany's capacity multiplied sixfold. Industrialization helped shape what remains, on the map, a conspicuous feature of the moder world: a zone of densely clustered industrial cities from Belfast in northern Ireland and Bilboa in northwest Spain to Rostov and St. Petersburg in Russia. The patchiness of industrialization, in short, was essential to industrializations's success.
     As a result of the gigantic wealth gaps between classes, class wars have been going on since the first class system was made. Most of the time the wars start out as revolts because the lower classes want land, maybe a roll in government or politics, or more importantly freedom from being slaves. Industrialization increased the wealth gap between classes tremendously. Workers who worked on railroads, coalmines, etc did not receive a profit for their labor, instead the aristocrats made all of the money. Urbanization occurred as a result of industrialization. People moved closer to factories so city sizes increased as well as the populations. This had a positive and negative effect on the cities. Maybe the worst effect of the increase in city size was the horrible living conditions for the poor.
    During class we discussed nationalism: something that can be shared culturally, economically, politically, and biologically. Nationalism had a big role in politics because armies consumed a very large amount of the taxes. The armies would use this money to buy new weapons which would in turn make them stronger. Therefore nationalism had a positive and negative effect also because it made the armies stronger but it made the bloodshed that much greater.
   In the videos, I Still Call Australia Home and Can You Hear Us, there is great pride behind the songs towards their homeland. Even if one person doesn't agree with everything their government's views or priorities they take immense pride in singing their national anthem, its like saying this is my home and I am proud to be a citizen of this great country. Its crazy how much music can bring everyone together, i feel like if it wasn't for music the world would not be as close an understanding as it is today. In the Can You Hear Us video they show a group of people all gathering together to watch a rugby game, pretty much like every single American does on sunday and monday nights, it brings people together to bond and get along instead of fighting.
   The next to videos were, Secrets of the Manor House and Albany: Business Women. The Manor Houses of Great Britain were full of wealthy aristocrats and politicians, sort of like the Estate's the Americans had in the South. Servants also lived in the houses as well which introduced a class system in the houses. The system went like this : housekeepers, butlers, maids, valets, footmen, housemaids, and kitchen maids. Servants would only make about $50 a year while the aristocrats would spend millions of dollars on unnecessary things. With these new times alot of Englishmen moved over seas with hopes of new and better opportunities. Albany: Business Women tells us that between 1830 and 1885 2,000 women ran businesses. Its interesting to see what was happening to the lives of women compared to those during this time in England. Queen Victoria might be the best example, ever since she was 18 she was ruling over the largest Empire of the world and women from 17 to 70 were running shops by themselves pretty much. There was a big change since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was men who were working and making the profit while the women were staying at home cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children. Once women were in the workplace it was very common for them to see their husbands as useless and worthless. Women now have places in politics and soon we might even have a women president. It really shows how hard they fought and how far they have came from the housewife with no say in anything.
    Industrialization may have had one of the biggest impacts on the world. Without it there would be no trains, boats, or pretty much anything that requires an engine or metal. If industrialization never happened the world would still be one where you need a horse and carriage to get to places you need to go and there wouldn't be nearly as much jobs out there as there is today.