made people more dependent on hard work in cities, to support increasing numbers of capitalists. Peasants were forced to the city through the break up of common lands, an act known as enclosure. Legal emancipation of the serfs tended to take from them more than it gave. For example, in Prussia it provided for freedom from forced labor, but took away a serfs lands, common land, and Lord’s assistance. Without these customary rights they couldn’t make it, either starving or selling their land for pittance to business sharks, so they migrated and struggled to get work in the city. As factories started moving in, industrialism dumped the artisans that had helped create it. The skilled laboring poor were separated from their employers physically, moved out of the buildings they used to share, developing class hatred, city ghettos and numerous revolutions. For conservative thinkers associated with royal and church classes, reason became the culprit for both revolutions, industrial and social. It was with this group that the Enlightenment developed a bad reputation: they supposed that revolutions were caused by the wrong thoughts. The Age oe Capital (I848~I873>. The last of the revolutions of “the springtime of the peoples’’, in 1848, ended with the election of Napol6on 111 by a France that didn’t want to be the revolutionary vanguard anymore. While in most countries absolute monarchies were restored, Napol6on III instead embarked upon the first mass public relations campaign. The middle and working classes, liberalism, nationalism, and democracy were now permanent issues on the political scene. The challenge for Napol6on III was to make this benefit the upper classes and those in power. This became easier as Capital was engaged in an unprecedented global expansion. For some twenty years a few people actually began to believe that capitalism might be “the end of history’’. That notion didn’t last long. The British industrial revolution swallowed the French political revolution, and the wealthy, self-confident Bourgeois ceased to be any kind of revolutionary force. From a spot on the fringes of business liberalism, socialism finally moved to the front-stage in revolutionary activity. But revolution was less likely to be successful while the Profitsfrom the cotton industries went to the new Railroads. In 1858, Punch scoffs at a plan to build one over water, as if “capital does not get sunk rapidly enough into railways". Despite lip-service to freedom, the heyday of capitalism (1848 to the 1870's) was an age when it was considered perfectly naturalfora “man of talent" to take advantage of workers who were not seen asfully evolved human beings. economy was in an upswing. During this shortage of opportunity Marx wrote the first volume of Das Kapital. The wealth Europe extracted during this global expansion made for the heyday of absolute monarchy in the Hapsburg, Prussian and Russian empires. National governments grew more complex, supporting business but developing their own interests and momenta. The railway, combining iron and coal, opened the world to capital, and everywhere except the US, trade protectionism disappeared. The US and Australian gold rushes opened up the entire Pacific to shipping, migration, and exploitation. With this expansion, internationalism moved to the forefront of ideas, resulting in the universal postal union (1875), the internationalist movement in labor, and attempts at world languages like Esperanto. But world economic unification increased dependence and interaction among nations, accentuating national territorialism and competition over markets and resources. This helped drive national ethnic unifications, such as in Italy and Germany. Primary education began to expand, as did technical schools and scientific training. The point of science in schools was not to produce great scientists, but to create competent technicians for industry: the mass-production of engineers. Oil begins to be used for chemical synthesis by the end of this period, resulting in synthetic dyes (mauve was first), photography and explosives. Mass-production of machinery takes off in the US, and the first device that was the result of modem scientific inquiry, the telegraph, becomes pervasive and transforms journalism. Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2 Page 45
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