Many factors that were internal and important to the
rise of industrial capitalism in western Europe. When asked why capitalism as
we know it started in England and not somewhere else, on can handwave about the
English Genius, but there were historical and geographical reasons that
capitalism started in England.
One of the geographical reasons was that there are several
rivers that are short and spread to the sea. This is important because the moving
force for a lot of factories was a waterwheel that was driven by consistent
water flows, and there was a huge belt that ran around this central axel that
drove the machinery that was needed to make the division of labor work. The
other geographic reason is that there was a lot of coal, and it was easy to get
to. This was important because even though there were a lot of rivers, the
development of the steam engine made coal resources necessary, but if you
wanted to build a factory you were not limited to riverfront property.
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Photo by Artem Bali from Pexels
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One historical reason that Capitalism as we know it
started in England was that there was a class of people who were available to
work these machines. The enclosure acts helped push people off the land. So
that there was a reciprocal relationship between industrialization and
enclosure. Machines made people less necessary, and with enclosures there were
more people available to build and work machines.
How does one take these historical precedents as a
guide-post for how to organize your economy then? Well, for one, geography is
huge. One of the reasons that Singapore is now lauded as an example to emulate
(see England wanting to be the “Singapore of Europe” post-Brexit) is not just
because it has free-market tendencies, but because it is strategically located,
with up to a quarter of global trade passing through the Straits of Malacca
(Fessenden). Though geography and access to resources is important, they are
not necessary – for example, Switzerland has been able to build its
manufacturing base despite being a landlocked nation in the alps, with its own
cultural barriers, being a meeting point for French, German, and Italian
cultures. But resources are not the secret either, since the resource course
and Dutch disease are both well documented, where focusing on one resource
limits your economy and makes your currency vulnerable to outside forces. It is
also, on its own, not something any country can change. How would it be
possible to take South Sudan and put it in a more convenient place?
The more salient issue is the one about
industrialization. As we have seen in Engels writing on the Manchester of his
day, the housing for internal immigrants was poor, in that it was not built for
people, but as for animals. We can see the same thing when we read about the
conditions of the working class in Lagos of today or the smog of old Mumbai.
One thing that a developing nation could do is to look at its urban planning
and infrastructure, so that as the economy developed in some sort of big push
as Rosenstein-Rosen’s idea of development (168) the people who were drawn from
the unproductive rural subsistence agriculture into the industrializing urban
center, they would have the mental and physical capacity to work productively
and add to the nation’s wealth instead of magnets for do-gooder NGOs to come and
lament their plight without making any real structural change. This planning is
something that has worked for the Chinese state. Though the western press
periodically sees writing about the “Ghost Cities” of China and hand-wringing
about overdevelopment, the Chinese party has done a good job in moving the
urban population from worrying about developing country problems to worrying
about industrializing country problems.
Works
Cited
Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development.
London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Fessenden, M. (2015, February 24). See
Shipping Traffic Move Through Straits Around the World. Retrieved from
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-shipping-traffic-move-through-straits-around-world-180954399/
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