Historical Forces

Some historical forces: ideas, material forces, social forces, institutions, technologies

“Whoever last saw the Prussian Rhineland, Westphalia, the kingdom of Saxony, upper Silesia, Berlin and the seaports in 1849 found them unrecognisable in 1864. Everywhere machines and steam power had appeared. Steamships gradually replaced sailships… the railways multiplied in length many times. In the dockyards, collieries and iron works there prevailed an activity of the kind that the ponderous German had previously thought himself utterly incapable.” - Engels

Between 1815-70, some powerful forces drove change in Germany.

1. Prussia’s / Germany’s population grew rapidly (OP p.9):

   • The population of the future Reich grew from ~25 million in 1817 to ~35 million by 1848 (p.103); from 23.5 million in 1816 to 38 million in 1864.
   • Prussia’s population grew from 10.3 million in 1816 to 16 million in 1846 (>50% in 30 years) and then about 20 million by 1866 (roughly doubled 1815-66).
   • Rate of growth 1815-66 was ~60% in the future Germany versus ~70% in Britain, ~50% in the Austrian Empire, and 34% in France.
   • Growth was faster before 1847-48 than 1848-66 (Hamerow). JS gives slightly conflicting figures but on p73: ~22m 1816 to 35m by 1850, a 60% increase (41m 1870).
   • In 1850, the future Reich and France had roughly the same population (~35 million), but by 1910 Germany grew to 65 million while France only reached 39 million.
   • This growth in Germany was despite large emigration, especially 1846-55 — 1.5m 1841-60 and 800k 1861-70, ~90% from west of the Elbe — driven by the decay of artisan trades, competition from overseas grain growers, the end of US Civil War, more conscription in Prussia (Hamerow).
   • OP: Two big factors were declining legal restrictions on employment and marriage, and the declining power of the guilds[^1].

Snapshot population statistics for 1820, 1841, and 1866

	1820	1841	1866
Habsburg Empire	25.5	30.7	34.8
German Austria	9.5		12.0
Prussia	11.7	15.1	19.5
Germany	13.9	16.4	18.3

Notes: The figures for Austria and the Habsburg Empire were reckoned for 1821; for Prussia and the remaining German lands for 1822. This does not include the Italian provinces of Lombardy and Venetia.

In this context, ‘Germany’ refers to the Bund minus Prussia and Austria.

2. More land under cultivation, population urbanised. OP (p103):

   • the area of land under cultivation rose from 56% to 69% 1800-1864 (JS misquotes some of these figures).
   • JS: 1850 23% of England lived in cities >100k; France 5%; Prussia 3%; Austria 3%; Russia 2%. Evans: in 1850, the proportion living in towns and cities was: 50% Britain, 20% Italy, 15% France, 11% Germans, 8% of Austrians and Bohemians.
   • OP: 1852-71 the number of cities in Germany with a population over 100,000 grew from 26 to 48 and there was an internal migration ‘without parallel in German history until 1945’. (Berlin was <200k in 1815, 330k in 1840, 408k in 1846, 763k in 1870, 1.1m in 1880 and more than 2m in 1914, so roughly 2X in 30 years then 5X from mid-century to 1914, so ~10X from 1815-1914.)
   • By the 1860s the number of people working on agriculture had fallen to ~50%, 28% in mining and manufacture. Hamerow: while German population overall 1815-71 grew 63%, it was 43% in countryside, 260% in municipalities; 1815 >90% German population lived in countryside, 1856 ~70%, 1871 64%.
   • About 1.4m employed in Zollverein factories in 1861, ~4% of population. Urbanisation dissolved agrarian tradition, encouraged the spread of new ideas including democracy and socialism, and favoured manufacture, commerce and finance. Bismarck said in autumn 1870 while starving Paris into surrender, ‘Where there are so many people close together, individual qualities can easily cease to exist, they intermix. All sorts of opinions arise out of the air, out of hearsay and repetition, opinions which have little or no foundation in fact. But they are spread through newspapers, public meetings, conversations over a glass of beer, and then they become fixed, indestructible… That is the case in all big cities’ (Busch, p213: Mass belief, mass superstition, stupidities, absurdities.)
   • The proportion of workers in agriculture fell from 55% to 38% and in industry rose from 24% to 34% from 1850-1900 (?Pflanze vol3?).

3. Growing agricultural productivity:

   • Abandonment of legal restrictions on sale of noble estates (1807) and a growing export trade (particularly to UK after end of the Corn Laws in 1846) accelerated the shift from subsistence to capitalist agriculture.
   • Agrarian depression 1817-30 forced many gentry to sell estates.
   • Growing use of fertilisers after 1850.
   • Machinery and crop rotation spread and encouraged consolidation in larger estates. Many landowners (including Bismarck) diversified into things like timber, breweries, paper mills and the income from such things gave landowners (including Bismarck) capital to invest in railways and other shares.
   • Grain production nearly doubled 1822-64.
   • OP: agricultural productivity rose 1815-65 by ~135% while population rose by ~60%.
   • Clark (1848): more land cultivated and productivity growth meant Europe’s food supply roughly doubled 1815-48, i.e grew faster than population.

4. Some historians write food prices rose from 1830s to 1860s, pushed by growing population and urban development. Clark (1848, p37): food prices fell 1815-50 but there were some important surges. Higher production and higher land prices for four decades until the 1860s seemed like a normal feature of life. The Junkers became pro-free trade as it meant cheaper imported manufactures and they did not fear foreign competition (things changed from the 1870s). Hamerow (i, p57): 1830-70 ‘the relative value of agrarian production declined steadily while that of manufacture was close to doubling’. Prussia was second most industrialised German state after Saxony. Even after big changes, in Prussia aristocrats made up 68% of the biggest proprietors with > 1,000 hectares. In 1861 65% of officers were noble, 86% of generals and colonels. Similar for the top officials and diplomats. (Evans: 1806, under 10% of officers were non-noble; by 1913 it was 70% including nearly half generals and colonels. In Silesia the 11 biggest landowners owned 20% of land.)

5. Better transport, railway boom:

   • In 1810 it took Tsar Alexander 42 hours to get from St Petersburg to Moscow by horse; in 1833 Tsar Nicholas lowered the record to 38 hours. Across Europe 1815-1848 transport improved. Roads were built and improved. Canals were improved and connected rivers (e.g a new canal network around Berlin in the 1830s-40s enabling cheap coal from Britain to be transported to the city).
   • After the inventions of Trevithick and Stephenson the self-propelled steam-powered locomotive was viable. In 1830 the Liverpool-Manchester line opened in a ceremony attended by the Duke of Wellington. Within 20 years there were 7,000 miles of railway in Britain. In 1847 a quarter of a million people were engaged in British railway construction and this drove brick and iron production. Britain provided much of the capital, technology, and skills for Europe to build railways.
   • Railway construction began in Prussia from 1835. Joint stock companies were first allowed in 1838. The boom of 1842-6 was driven by subsidies and guarantees. In 1840, there were 185km of railways in Prussia, 1,100 by 1845, and 1,400 by 1847. A total of 30,000 km were built between 1835-1875. The network in Germany doubled from around 6,000 km to 11,000 km between 1850-1860 and then to 18,600 km by 1870.
   • After 1850, railway building was considered ‘the chief engine of industrial growth’ (OP). It drove the growth of coal, iron ore, pig iron, machinery, and connected industries. Railways made Berlin a center of communication between east and west, and it became a hub for banking, bourse, and machine manufacture.
   • Prussia bought 51 British locomotives in 1841, 124 between 1842-1845, but by the 1850s, almost all new Prussian locomotives were built in Germany. Krupp grew rapidly supplying axles and crankshafts.
   • Clark noted that the French rail network grew from around 3,200 km in 1851 to 16,500 km in 1869.

Spread of railways in selected countries (Length of line open in kilometers)

	1840	1860	1880	1900
Austria-Hungary	144	4,543	18,507	36,330
France	496	9,167	23,089	38,109
Germany	469	11,089	33,838	51,678
Italy	20	2,404	9,290	16,429
Russia	27	1,626	22,865	53,234

Railways (kilometers in operation)

	Austria-Hungary	Prussia	Germany
1841	351	375	683
1847	1,048	2,325	4,306
1850	1,357 + 122	2,967	5,856
1860	2,927 + 1,616	5,762	11,089
1865	3,698 + 2,160	6,895	13,900
1870	6,112 + 3,477	11,4601	18,876

Note: The figure for Prussia in 1870 includes new territories annexed in 1867. Source: The figures for Prussia are compiled from Fischer 1982, Wehler 1995, Mitchell 1973, and Mitchell 1978.

6. The Zollverein increased trade and Prussian power:

   • German mercantile tonnage grew threefold 1835-70. In the 1860s Prussia accounted for nine-tenths of all coal and pig iron, two-thirds of iron ore, and almost all steel and zinc produced in the Zollverein. Two-thirds of all steam engines in the Zollverein were in Prussia.
   • Businessmen started thinking about potential gains from further political integration — uniform weights and measures, common currency, common codes for commercial law and banking etc.
   • Hamerow: Imports to the Zollverein grew by a factor of four or five 1850-69, far ahead of population growth. 1850-70 the number of savings accounts in Prussia grew from 278,000 to ~1million. The value of foreign trade grew 50% 1850-60.

7. Industrialization accelerated especially in the Rhineland. Output of pig iron rose over 13x (to 2.2m tons) and coal 11x (to 36m tons) 1840-73. (Barclay: coal output up 180% 1850-60). The construction industry boomed in expanding cities.

Industrial production (measured in £ millions)

	Germany (1871 territory)	Austria (excluding Hungary)
1800	60	50
1820	85	80
1840	150	142
1860	310	200

Per capita production 1840 (measured in Gulden)

Economic sector	Zollverein	All Austria-Hungary	German and Italian Austria	Hungary and Galicia
Agriculture	46.3	27.6	29.3	25.6
Handicrafts (Kleinbewerbe)	15.2	3.6	5.6	1.7
Industry	8.1	4.0	6.2	1.9
Total	70.0	35.0	41.0	30.0

Sources: Lutz 1985: 89.

Table 8.6 - Key Industrial Outputs in 1870 (millions of tons)

	Austria	Germany
Coal	6.3	23.3
Steel	0.02	0.13

Note: Almost all coal and steel production in Germany was in fact on Prussian territory.

Source: Mitchell 1978: 188-9,223 and Fischer 1982: 64.

8. The Telegraph Spread 1837 Samuel Morse patented the electromagnetic telegraph. By 1850 there were 620 miles of telegraph wires in France. News spread faster, so riots did too.

9. Prussia’s Army Improved The size gap between Prussia’s and Austria’s armies shrank while the quality gap grew as Prussia spent more per soldier, more on training etc.

	Austria	Prussia
1850	434,000	131,000
1860	306,000	201,000
1866	275,000	214,000

Note: Prussia’s ally, Italy, had in 1866 an army with a paper strength of 233,000.

Source: Flora 1983: 251.

10. Ideas about laissez-faire economics, the benefits of free trade and English liberalism spread.

11. Corporatism and status lost ground to capitalism, class, and pressure groups. Clark: wherever traditional rights over land, wood and water shifted to more modern forms of commercial ownership, communities responded with protests, illegal use, attacks on officials.

12. Kantian rationalism lost ground to Romantic ideas of the Volk that would merge later in the century with social Darwinism.

13. Literacy and media. Literacy (reading and writing) rates in Prussia in 1850 averaged about 85%, in France reading was 60%, and in England reading and writing ~50% 9 (Gawthrop, ‘Literacy Drives in Pre-Industrial Germany’, in Robert F. Arnove and Harvey J. Graff.). By 1900, fewer than 5 in 1,000 Germans were illiterate (Abrams) but few continued in secondary schooling: just 8% of under 14s had completed secondary schooling in 1910. The wealthy continued to grammar school and university. In 1890, fewer than one in a thousand university students were the sons of workers. The number of Prussian newspapers grew 1824-69 from 845 to 2,127. Berlin accounted for about a third of the total German press run of ~300,000 daily in early 1860s. Most dailies were liberal. Censorship relaxed in Prussia after 1841.

Education (Figures in 1,000s)

	Primary school pupils	Secondary school pupils	University students
Austria- 1840	1,365	20.5	8.6
Austria 1860	1,656	36.7	8.0
Prussia 1840	2,224	123.0	11.6
Prussia 1860	2,778	172.9	12.4

Notes: Excluding the Hungarian half of the Empire. it is difficult to believe that in 1860, when the populations of Prussia and Cisleithian Austria were approximately the same (about 18 million each), Prussia had about five times as many secondary school pupils, and yet only about 50 per cent more university students. Two possible explanations are that the secondary school statistics for Prussia (grammar schools) which are sometimes included in the figure for ‘higher education’

14. Prussian state finances were much healthier than Austria’s.

Public Expenditure

Millions of Thalers	Austria	Prussia
1857	262.8	122.8
1867	668.0	171.0
1870	299.0	212.9

Note: The exchange rate was about 6.8 Prussian Thalers to 9.6 Austrian Gulden.

Source: Ferguson 2000: 123

15. Growing nationalism.

16. Hegel’s idealism spread the idea of the state as a moral force. Whereas in the rest of Western Europe morality continued to rest on Christianity and natural law, for German idealism it was identified with the state and the ruling power.

17. Romanticism spread and revived medieval ideas and aesthetics.

18. Romantic conservatives pre-1848 saw Austria, Prussia and Russia as united against France and ‘Revolution’. After 1848 Austria and Prussia were struggling for mastery in Germany. The experience of 1848 made many liberals fearful of the socialist mob. The Crimean War shattered the Holy Alliance and state interests increasingly dominated the principle of conservative solidarity. The Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the unification of Italy, and Napoleon’s alienation of Britain and Russia 1862-3 created dynamics that allowed Bismarck to disrupt hostile coalitions. Austria-Russia, Austria-France, France-Russia, Britain-France, Britain-Russia — all these potentially dangerous alliances for Bismarck were hard to make happen and Bismarck did his best to keep these relations strained/broken.

19. How would Prussia’s economic growth affect its international position and the dominance of the old aristocratic political institutions (crown, cabinet, bureaucracy, army, church, gentry)?

Net German domestic product shifted from agriculture to industry:

• 1850-4: 45% from agriculture, forestry, fisheries; 20% from industry and handicraft production.
• 1870-4: 38% and 30%.
• 1900-4: 29% and 34%.

In Britain 1815-50, there was a huge expansion of the cotton trade. Britain imported cheap raw cotton grown in India then exported finished products globally. Production was overwhelmingly in the north of England where mountain streams powered water-wheels driving looms. In 1860 Britain produced about twice as much coal as all Europe combined and Britain produced about 60% of all pig iron in Europe. Before and after the Napoleonic wars Britain tried to ban export of technology but it didn’t work. Entrepreneurs used spies and bribes. From the 1840s there was a shift to licensing. British workers and entrepreneurs visited the Rhineland and realised the potential of coal there.

Friedburg (The Weary Titan)

• Early 1870s UK exported more than US & Germany combined.
• 1870-1914 US & Germany growing more rapidly than UK.
• In steel and pig iron output US overtook UK in 1880s and Germany by ~1905.
• 1870 UK produced three times more coal than Germany (#2), by 1914 they were roughly equal.
• After 1870 US & Germany outcompeted UK in new fields: electrical, chemicals, machine tools.
• 1870-1914 UK share of world manufacturing production fell from 32% to 14%; Germany rose from 13% to 16%; US grew from 23% to 36%.
• By 1895-1900 there was a lot of UK public debate about competition from Germany & US.

Evans:

• Mid-century a quarter of international trade passed through British ports.

• More than half British trade was carried in British ships which generated invisible earnings.

• 1910 40% of tonnage of ships engaged in world trade was British.

• Screw propeller invented by Ressel, patented 1827. 1845 Isambard Brunel built screw-propelled ship for Atlantic, SS Great Britain.

• Textiles were 60% of British exports 1850, a third in 1913; metals and engineering up from 18% to 27%.

• Coal output in Ruhr: 2m tons in 1850, 12m 1870, 60m 1890, 114m 1913 (nearly 3x France).

• 1862 Krupp installed the first Bessemer furnace (named after English inventor), improved 1869. Krupp bought other firms and acquired iron ore mines. Employed 12k in Essen 1874, 3x bigger than a decade earlier.

• 1870 Germany and France produced about the same pig iron. In 20 years Germany produced double France.

• 1870s-80s French economy hit by phylloxera which devastated vineyards.

• In France half the workforce were in agriculture and forestry in 1850 and 40% in 1900. In Germany it fell from 60% to a third. In Britain it fell from 22% to 9%

• Industrial production doubled in Russia 1860-80 then again by 1891 and again by 1900. But in 1914 manufactured goods were just 8% of exports. Russia produced a tenth the coal and half the steel of Britain.

• UK industrial production grew 3% since 1820s but slowed to 2% after 1880. Productivity in coal mining fell to just half that of America by 1914. American typewriters and sewing machines, European dairy equipment, Hungarian roller mills invaded UK markets. Growing cartels in Britain to deal with international competition. Mergers led to big brands: Vim cleaning products, Cadbury chocolate.

• Britain fell behind Germany in chemicals and electrical engineering. Edison figured out how to use Faraday’s discoveries. In 1882, Edison opened the first steam-powered electricity generating station on Holborn viaduct in London. Soon electricity was used to power trams, underground railways, and home appliances. Siemens and BASF grew. German universities produced more technical talent. Germany overtook Britain in productivity in the steel industry 1870-1914.

• The total of people in the public service and professional sector in England and Wales was ~200k in 1850, up to 560k in 1890. The number of lawyers increased from 16k in 1850 to 22k in 1890. The number of engineers rose from 900 in 1850 to 15k in 1890. There were 130k clerks in 1870, 460k in 1900 with an average salary of ~£150-80 in 1870. In 1867 Britain, of the 10m with an independent income, 50k earned over £1,000 p/a, 150k £300-1000, 2m up to £300, and 7.8m <£100.

• Throughout the century, progress against diseases like smallpox and cholera; falling death rates; falling birth rates. From 1800 to 1913 in England it fell from 38 live births per 1k population to 24; France 33 to 19; Germany 40 to 28. Russia was 51 in 1850, 43 in 1913. Population of France from 30m in 1800 to 40m in 1910; Britain from 20m to 45m. German Empire was 65m by 1910.

Comparison Between Austria and Prussia

	Austria	Prussia
Population (millions)	37.5	19.3
Percentage labour force in agriculture	70	45
Grain production (million tons)	0.7	0.8
Fixed steam engines/millions horsepower	3,400/0.1	15,000/0.8
Coal production (millions tons)	5.7	12
Pig iron production (tons)	460,000	850,000
State revenue (millions of Thalers)	292	240
State debt (millions of Thalers)	1,670	290
Military spending (millions of Thalers)	51	45

Source: Lutz 1985: 330 Table 8.10 - Between a number of states in 1850

State	Railways (km)	Raw Iron (1,000 tons)	Cotton Spindles (1,000)	Steam Power (1,000 PS)
Habsburg Empire	1,579	130	1,400	100
Great Britain	10,660	1,975	18,000	1,290
Germany (1871 territory)	5,839	215	900	260
France	3,009	525	4,500	270
Belgium	855	214	400	70
Russia	618	232	350 (1843)	70

Source: Matis and Bochinger 1973: 117.