Full Steam: The Journey of Humanity by Oded Galor - PDF

# Full Steam The classic images of the Industrial Revolution are gloomy and sombre: a cluster of textile factories with thick black fumes rising from their chimneys, set in stark contrast to the once-idyllic English countryside, along with small children engaged in gruelling manual labour in pollut...

# Full Steam The classic images of the Industrial Revolution are gloomy and sombre: a cluster of textile factories with thick black fumes rising from their chimneys, set in stark contrast to the once-idyllic English countryside, along with small children engaged in gruelling manual labour in polluted and precarious urban environments. Such representations have been engraved into our collective imagination by authors such as William Blake and Charles Dickens, but they distort the essence of this unique period. After all, if the factories that polluted the air and rivers were the core of the Industrial Revolution, why was it there and then that life expectancy surged and infant mortality plummeted? If the effect of the Industrial Revolution was to transform cheerful farmers into miserable day labourers, then why have farmers around the world been migrating into major industrialised towns ever since? And if the Industrial Revolution, at its core, was about child exploitation, why did legislation banning child labour and establishing primary schools appear during this era, of all times, and in the most industrialised regions and nations, of all places? The fact is that industrialisation lent this revolutionary period its name since it was its most novel and glaring characteristic, but to fully grasp the implications of the Industrial Revolution it is important to realise that industrialisation itself was secondary. In the words of the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey: "The Industrial Revolution was neither the age of steam, nor the age of cotton, nor the age of iron. It was the age of progress." ## Acceleration of Technological Development The progress of this era took various forms, of which one is most obviously connected to the phenomenon of industrialisation: a stunning acceleration of technological development, the likes of which had never been seen in recorded history. Each of the inventions that emerged in this period deserves a place of honour in the technological annals of humankind. The nearly unfathomable surge in the pace of technological advancement had been gathering pace since the Age of Enlightenment, and over the course of the next few hundred years the number of significant inventions that emerged in Europe and North America exceeded all of those developed previously by human civilisation over thousands of years. The technological landscape in these regions was utterly transformed. The appearance of this veritable tsunami of ideas in such a short time and in such a limited geographic region is even more remarkable. But once again it is impossible to identify a "jolt" or single invention that catalysed the wave. From the eve of the Industrial Revolution throughout its various phases, Britain's economic productivity improved gradually and continuously. From a distance, it may appear to have happened overnight. In fact, it took significantly longer than the lifespan of any individual. This accelerated development was not exclusive to industrial technology. Science also advanced at great speed across the European continent, while art, literature and music similarly benefited from an unprecedented flourishing of talent and new genres. This was a process that in fact began during the seventeenth century, when the leading philosophers in Western culture started to depart from the ancient traditions of Greece and the Church to pen engrossing treatises on the nature of humankind and the world. Nonetheless, one of the most important inventions of the period was indeed an industrialising one. The steam engine, designed by the British ironmonger Thomas Newcomen, entered commercial use in 1712. It had a fairly simple and banal purpose: to pump water out of coal mines a complex task that demanded a significant workforce back in the eighteenth century. This novel technology was further advanced in the years 1763-75 by the Scottish engineer James Watt who adapted the engines for the operation of factory machinery, proliferating its commercial use. The repetitive operation of the steam engine might seem as uninspiring as the content of the first written documents in human history Sumerian tablets recording ordinary business deals and tax rates, around 3400 BCE. Those writings, however, fired the starting gun of a process that within a few thousand years would lead to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, the Arabian Nights, Virgil's Aeneid, Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Hugo's Les Misérables and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Meanwhile, the Newcomen steam engine set in motion the technological leap that, in just 250 years, would allow the Soviets to launch sputnik into space and the Americans to land humans aboard Apollo 11 on the moon. The textile industry was the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution, the high-tech sector of its day. A pantheon of British inventors — most notably John Kay, Richard Arkwright, James Hargreaves, Edmund Cartwright and Samuel Crompton — designed sophisticated machines that automated much of the textile manufacturing process. Automation slashed the hours of labour needed to produce each roll of fabric, reducing the price of finished garments and enabling poor families in Europe and its colonies to purchase clothes of a superior quality. Initially, the new machines were operated with water wheels in factories built next to rivers and waterfalls. Yet the advent of the steam engine liberated the industry from its dependence on running water and enabled the development of industrial towns across Europe and North America, although proximity to coal mines remained necessary. But technological development also revolutionised the construction of large-scale structures more generally, as well as transportation by land, sea and air. This began in the early eighteenth century, when the ironmonger Abraham Darby invented a new and cheaper method of smelting iron ore, encouraging the widespread use of this metal and ultimately the construction of bridges and skyscrapers. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the inventor and industrialist Sir Henry Bessemer developed a cheap and rapid method for production of strong and supple steel. Improvements in the iron and steel industries led to the development of new and transformative cutting and processing tools, which had a significant impact on a variety of industries, and contributed to the rise of steam locomotives, which in turn dramatically reduced travelling times across long distances. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the journey from New York to what would soon be Chicago lasted nearly six weeks, but by 1857, the railway had shortened the trip to just two days. The steamboat likewise reduced travel distances and time across the seas, liberating maritime trade from its reliance on the winds, and vastly accelerating the pace of globalisation. This period saw other breakthroughs in the field of communication. The American inventor Samuel Morse built the first commercial electromagnetic telegraph in 1844; within only three decades, the world's main arteries were lined with telegraph wires, and messages could be transmitted across seas and oceans in a matter of minutes. In 1877, another American inventor, Thomas Edison, unveiled the phonograph, the first audio recording device in history, and two years later he invented the incandescent light bulb — or perhaps more accurately, he improved the bulb invented by his predecessors. While switching on his light bulb, Edison proclaimed, "We will make electric light so cheap that only the rich will burn candles," underlining the broad impact of this innovation. Edison then founded the world's first commercial power station in New York in 1882, following which electrical power was quickly adopted across an array of fields and gradually replaced the steam engine in factories. The late nineteenth century also witnessed the invention of the internal combustion engine, which soon allowed automobiles to supersede the horse-drawn carriage as an ordinary method of local transportation. This partial list of innovations does not do justice to the plethora of advances in the practices of chemistry, agriculture, woodwork, mining, canal-digging and in the production of materials such as concrete, glass and paper; nor to the long list of other groundbreaking inventions such as the bicycle, the hot-air balloon, the industrial production line and the elevator (which made the construction of skyscrapers practical); nor does it begin to touch on the host of novel financial instruments that evolved to fund these ventures. Virtually every field of human endeavour was radically transformed during this age of innovation. The transformation in technological power of European nations and the US swung the balance of power across the globe. The change was so rapid that it caught even technologically developed societies elsewhere off guard; lacking the resources to resist European military power, their native populations were subjected to oppression and exploitation. In particular, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty, who decided in 1839 to ban trade with British merchants who had flooded China with opium, quickly discovered that China's creaking imperial navy was no match for a small fleet of British gunboats, driven by steam engines and shielded with steel armour. Britain's victory in the First Opium War (1839-42) was especially ironic given that both the gunpowder and steel plating that reinforced its battlefield advantage were produced with technology that had originated in China centuries earlier. A decade later, technological advantage allowed the US Navy under Commodore Matthew C. Perry to coerce Japan into signing an agreement that ended more than two hundred years of isolationism. This outcome triggered a series of power struggles within Japan's ruling elite, between those who supported the ancient order and those who recognised the technological power of Europeans and Americans and the need for dramatic reforms. This internal conflict ultimately ended with victory for the forces championing technological, social and industrial progress. They promoted the Meiji Restoration — the termination of Japan's feudal system of government and the restoration of the imperial power which transformed Japan into an economic and military powerhouse. Dramatic innovation and rapid change became hallmarks of the way in which Europeans and their North American descendants thought, operated, dined, dressed, spent their leisure time, viewed works of art and culture, and of course butchered each other on blood-soaked battlefields of the Napoleonic wars and the American Civil War. Meanwhile, the ideas propounded by European philosophers, writers and scientists during this era radically revised collective conceptions of human nature, society and the cosmos. Among some social circles, it became a mark of status to be educated, up to date on the latest ideas and debates, and to be able to express enlightened views about, say, The Communist Manifesto, Victor Hugo's latest novel, or Charles Darwin's sensational theory about the origin of species. But the fundamental characteristic of this era — namely, the acceleration in the rate of innovation — had a more profound impact on education than merely turning it into a cultural commodity among the middle classes and the elites. It placed it centre stage in the process of economic development. Arguably, in fact, this transformation of education was more significant and lasting than the mechanisation of manufacturing, for it transformed education's very purpose — and brought it for the first time to the masses. ## Education in the Pre-Industrial Era For most of human history, formal education was available only to a small, privileged section of society. As early as in the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian civilisations, children of elites learned to read, write and perform basic arithmetic tasks in order to prepare themselves for occupations such as scribes, priests and for a range of administrative positions. They were also frequently introduced to astrology, philosophy and theology, for the sake of spiritual and cultural enrichment and as an entry pass into the intellectual strata. When education was provided to wider sections of society, it served primarily cultural, religious, social, spiritual and military purposes. Education in ancient Persia, Greece and Rome, for example, was aimed largely at cultivating obedience and discipline with intellectual and physical training geared towards cultural, religious, and military ends. In contrast, Confucian and Buddhist education was devised to inculcate the virtues of morality, respect for elders and good character, as these were seen to be the foundation of social harmony. The education systems advanced by monotheistic religions, meanwhile, were designed to cultivate faith, morality, adherence to and fulfilment of the religious laws and the transmission of these values across generations. In particular, one of the earliest mass education systems, the Jewish cheder — formed more than 2,000 years ago — was designed to educate boys as young as four years old, so as to enable them to fulfil their religious obligation of reading the Torah and to enhance their faith, morality and ethnic identity. Similar religious institutions subsequently emerged in the Muslim world, as well as the Christian, especially in regions influenced by the Protestant Reformation. Nevertheless, in none of these systems was the development of skills that would be useful for adult professional occupations a primary consideration. Literacy rates over most of human existence were insignificant. Estimates from the Middle Ages, which are primarily based on the proportion of people who could sign their name on various documents, point to rates below 10 per cent in countries such as China, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, and even lower levels elsewhere in Europe and across the globe. But in the centuries leading up to industrialisation, as Europe started to make strides in technology and trade, the importance of education began to intensify. As early as the Renaissance, European civilisations were markedly more technologically sophisticated than other contemporary societies. Among their major inventions in the pre-industrial era were the printing press, the pendulum clock, the eyeglasses, the telescope, the microscope, and countless improvements in agriculture and seamanship. By this time, for reasons explored in the second part of the book, other civilisations that had previously outpaced Europe in technological development, including the Chinese and the Ottoman, had started to lag behind, and in the few centuries after the year 1500, the world's most advanced technology became virtually indistinguishable from European technology. This technological divergence was reflected in a widening literacy gap between Europe and the rest of the world. The extent to which Gutenberg's printing press affected literacy rates — or indeed economic growth in Europe — remains debatable; what is undisputable is that growing literacy at this time contributed to the growth and the proliferation of the printing industry, and that mass printing of books significantly increased the desire to read and write among those Europeans who were equipped to do so. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Europe printed nearly 13 million copies of books; in the sixteenth century, over 200 million; in the seventeenth century over half a billion copies; and in the eighteenth century that number soared to approximately one billion copies of books — a growth rate far exceeding that of the population on the continent. What is also apparent is that the rapid growth of the European book industry spurred further technological and cultural change, which in turn contributed to the enhancement of human capital formation. The late fifteenth century saw the mass printing of "commercial mathematics" textbooks, written to teach trainee merchants how to price their stocks, convert currencies, and calculate profit margins and interest payments. Others disseminated the essential discipline of double-entry bookkeeping, an innovation that allowed merchants to manage their accounts rationally and professional textbooks proliferated across the European continent and became an indispensable source of knowledge for doctors, lawyers and teachers. Not surprisingly, therefore, cities that embraced the printing press in the late fifteenth century experienced greater population growth, predominantly due to inward migration, and became major hubs of intellectual thought and literature, further promoting literacy as a noble pursuit for respectable citizens and as a virtue in its own right. During this period, Europe became the most literate and technological place in history. By 1800, literacy rates were 68 per cent in the Netherlands, 50 per cent in Britain and Belgium, and around 20 per cent in other Western European nations. In non-European societies, however, literacy rates started to rise only in the twentieth century. For humanity as a whole, the adult literacy rate stood at a mere 12 per cent in 1820, only crossed the 50 per cent mark around the mid-twentieth century, and currently stands at about 86 per cent (Fig. 7). Yet education in pre-industrial Europe was still not geared towards the provision of skills to a mass workforce. One of the pioneers of modern education, the seventeenth-century Czech philosopher John Amos Comenius, promoted innovative pedagogical methods such as learning in vernacular languages (instead of Latin), introducing pupils to a range of subjects with gradually increasing degrees of complexity, and enhancing logical thinking over dull memorisation. However, even Comenius's most revolutionary inclusive teaching enterprise, integrating women and the poorer segments of society into the education system, was designed to instil moral and cultural values, not to impart expertise vital for work. Few children, including those fortunate enough to gain a rudimentary education, acquired skills and knowledge at school that were relevant to their adult working lives; those skills were learned predominantly on the job — tilling the fields, performing housework, or serving as apprentices. Starting in the mid-seventeenth century, Western Europe became home to philosophers who championed a notion of progress based on cumulative scientific knowledge, a rationalist rejection of mysticism and religious dogma, and sometimes progressive values such as equality of opportunity, freedom of expression and individual liberties, as well as curiosity and scepticism. During this Age of Enlightenment, education — and its corollary, enhanced human capital — became increasingly important, both culturally and economically. Even so, the metamorphosis in the nature of education — geared towards industrial and commercial purposes — had yet to come. ## Industrialisation and Human Capital In the earliest phase of the Industrial Revolution, literacy and numeracy played a limited role in the production process, and thus the enhancement of these aspects of human capital would have had a limited effect on workers' productivity. Although some workers, supervisory and office personnel in particular, were required to be able to read and perform elementary arithmetical operations, a large portion of the tasks in industry was successfully performed by people who were illiterate. During the subsequent phases of the Industrial Revolution, the demand for skilled labour in the growing industrial sector markedly increased. From here on, and for the first time in history, human capital formation — factors that influence worker productivity, such as education, training, skills and health — was designed and undertaken with the primary purpose of satisfying the increasing requirements of industrialisation for literacy and numeracy as well as mechanical skills among the workforce. This was the case across a wide range of industrial nations but was particularly apparent among the first countries that experienced industrialisation — England, France, Germany and the United States. In England, the first phase of the Industrial Revolution was associated with the intensification of the mechanisation of the production process, but without a corresponding increase in the employment of skilled workers. In 1841, for instance, only 5 per cent of male workers and only 2 per cent of female workers were employed in occupations in which literacy was required. Workers developed skills primarily through on-the-job training, and child labour was highly valuable. During the latter stages of the Industrial Revolution, however, the scale of education in England dramatically changed. The proportion of children aged five to fourteen in primary schools rose from 11 per cent in 1855 to 25 per cent in 1870, and in the period 1870-1902, as the government assumed responsibility for providing a free education system for the public, that proportion rose to nearly 74 per cent. Thus, literacy rates among English men, which were at around 67 per cent in the 1840s, increased significantly, reaching 97 per cent by the end of the century. In France, the development of the education system occurred well before the Industrial Revolution, but the process was deepened and transformed to satisfy industrial needs during the early phases of industrialisation. The provision of elementary and secondary education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was dominated by the Church and religious orders, although some state interventions in technical and vocational training were designed to reinforce development in commerce, manufacturing and military efficiency. After the French Revolution, the state established primary schools and selective secondary and higher education, with the objective of producing effective elites to operate the military and governmental apparatus. In view of the growing industrial demand for human capital, the provisions of primary and higher education was then extended, and the number of communities without schools fell by 50 per cent between 1837 and 1850. By 1881-82, a universal, free, compulsory and secular primary school system had been established, emphasising technical and scientific education, and the proportion of children aged five to fourteen in primary schools increased from 52 per cent in 1850 to 86 per cent in 1901. In Prussia, as in France, the initial steps towards compulsory education took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century, well before the Industrial Revolution, and education was viewed primarily as a way to unify the state. In the second part of the eighteenth century, education was made compulsory for all children aged five to thirteen, though these regulations were not strictly enforced partly due to the lack of funding. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, motivated by the need for national cohesion, military efficiency and trained bureaucrats, the education system was further reformed. Schooling became compulsory and secular for a three-year period, and the gymnasium was reconstituted as a state institution that provided nine years of education for the elite. As in England and France, industrialisation in Prussia coincided with the implementation of universal primary schooling. Secondary schools started to serve industrial needs as well; the Realschulen, which emphasised the teaching of mathematics and science, were gradually adopted, and vocational and trade schools were founded. Overall, total enrolment in secondary school increased six-fold from 1870 to 1911. Industrialisation in the United States also increased the importance of human capital in the production process and in the economy as a whole. The rise of the industrial, business and commerce sectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries increased the demand for managers, clerical workers and educated sales personnel who were trained in accounting, typing, shorthand, algebra and commerce. By the late 1910s, technologically advanced industries demanded blue-collar craft workers who were trained in geometry, algebra, chemistry, mechanical drawing and related skills. The structure of education was transformed to meet these needs, and total enrolment in public secondary schools increased seventy-fold from 1870 to 1950. This historical evidence clearly suggests that technological advancements in the course of industrialisation have been associated with human capital formation. But is there substantial evidence that this association is indicative of industrialisation being the cause and skill formation the effect? After all, it could be that this association reflects the impact of human capital formation on the evolution of the industrial sector, or else that some other cultural or institutional factors gave rise to both industrialisation and education. In order to establish a line of causality between technological acceleration and industrialisation on the one hand and human capital formation on the other, we can refer to a quasi-natural historical experiment. In France, the steam engine — one of the most important inventions in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution — was first introduced in a mine in Fresnes-sur-Escaut, a sleepy village near the French-Belgian border. Evidence suggests that, due to the regional diffusion of this novel technology, over the course of the mid-nineteenth century the closer a local region or département (an administrative unit created in 1790) was to this village, the more rapidly it adopted the steam engine for itself. Geographical distance from Fresnes-sur-Escaut could therefore predict the relative presence of steam engines in each region. In other words, while the actual number of steam engines in any place may have been affected by the pre-existing level of education in that département and other potential confounders, distance from Fresnes-sur-Escaut can be used to assess the potential causal impact of technology on education because it (a) directly predicts the presence of steam engines, (b) cannot be affected by pre-existing levels of education or indeed by other confounders and (c) has no direct effect on the level of education, only an indirect one through its impact on the number of steam engines. (After all, Fresnes-sur-Escaut was not, we may be sure, the first place to adopt education in France, and was therefore not the origin for its spread throughout the country.) Using this method, we can establish that technological acceleration in the form of industrialisation, as reflected by the number of steam engines in each French département, and as inferred by distance from Fresnes-sur-Escaut, had a positive impact on several measures of human capital formation in the 1840s, including the share of primary school students in the population and literacy rates among army conscripts. The more steam engines in each département, the greater the investment in human capital. Similarly, separate evidence shows that the use of steam engines in early-nineteenth-century Britain increased the skill intensity of the nearby workforce, especially in mechanical occupations. The impact of technological advancement on human capital formation is also observed in the United States. Evidence based on the expansion of railroads into new American towns during the period 1850-1910 suggests that counties that were fortunate enough to be plugged into the national train network were characterised by higher literacy rates and more skilled workers, such as engineers, technicians, doctors and lawyers, and had a lower share of the population employed in the agricultural sector. This wide range of findings suggest that technological and commercial development during the Industrial Revolution stimulated various forms of investment in human capital. In some societies, human capital took the form of literacy and formal education, while in others it was associated with the development of professional crafts. Given the argument of the previous chapter — that technological development and human capital created a mutually reinforcing cycle — it will come as no surprise that there is also evidence that this enhanced human capital facilitated further technological advancement. Indeed, one of the reasons why some argue that the Industrial Revolution broke out in Britain rather than elsewhere in Europe was Britain's comparative advantage in human capital, which proved to be particularly beneficial in the early stages of industrialisation. After all, Britain was undoubtedly rich in coal, which was an essential fuel for the first steam engines, but so were many other countries. However, Britain also had a more unusual raw material — human capital. Historians describe the presence at that time of a broad class of professional carpenters, metalworkers, glassblowers and others who were able to support the work of the finest inventors and build or even improve their innovating designs. These craftsmen passed on their skills to their apprentices, whose numbers soared in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution and were instrumental in the adoption, advancement and proliferation of industrial technologies. Indeed, engineers who emigrated from Britain became the industrial pioneers of many other countries, including Belgium, France, Switzerland and the United States. The first textile factory in North America, for instance, was built in the town of Pawtucket in Rhode Island in 1793 — just a few miles from Brown University, where this book was written. Funded by the American industrialist Moses Brown, the factory was the initiative of the British-American industrialist Samuel Slater, who arrived in the United States at the age of twenty-one. Slater had worked in a textile factory in Britain since the age of ten, where he developed a first-hand understanding of the technicalities of Richard Arkwright's spinning frames. Hoping to protect its technological advantage, the British government banned the export of the machine, and even the blueprints required for its construction. Nevertheless, Slater found a simple, yet fiendishly difficult, way to get around the prohibition — by memorising the designs. The influence of Slater, who is known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution," was so significant that some Britons in his city of birth smeared him as "Slater the Traitor." The contribution of an educated workforce to technological development is further corroborated by historical evidence from some of the other countries that first experienced industrialisation. In nineteenth-century Prussia, for instance, literacy had a positive impact on innovation, as reflected by patent registration. Moreover, remarkably, a study suggests that subscriptions to the Encyclopedie in eighteenth-century French towns (reflecting the size of their educated elite) were positively correlated with technological innovations by French firms in the same towns a full century later. Similarly, cross-country analysis establishes that the number of engineers in various countries had a persistent effect on per capita income, and in today's world, human capital formation encourages entrepreneurship, the adoption of new technologies and working methods, and, more broadly, economic growth. So how in practice did this rise in public mass education come about? ## The Advent of Universal Public Education In 1848, one of the most influential books in human history was released in London: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels believed, quite rightly, that the social and political upheavals the world was then experiencing were directly related to the rapid technological change in production methods at the time. They argued that the rise of the capitalist class had played a major role in uprooting the feudal order and generating economic progress, but further maintained that ever-intensifying competition among capitalists could only result in a reduction in their profits, inducing them to deepen the exploitation of workers. Class struggle would therefore be inevitable since society would necessarily reach the point where the "proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains." The central pillar of the Marxist thesis was the unavoidable power struggle between capitalists and workers that would lead ultimately to a revolution and the shattering of the class-based society. It is indeed the case that industrialised nations experienced fierce and often violent conflicts between capitalists and organised labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the communist revolution Marx and Engels foresaw happened in 1917 in Russia of all places, where at the time the share of employment in the agricultural sector exceeded 80 per cent. In fact, the most heavily industrialised capitalist nations have never experienced a successful class revolution, neither during Marx and Engels's lifetimes nor ever since. How was the "inevitable class struggle" and the communist revolution their Manifesto prophesised averted in most societies? One explanation is that the threat of revolution prompted industrialised nations to adopt policies designed to alleviate interclass tensions and mitigate inequality — primarily, the expansion of voting rights and thus the power to redistribute wealth, as well as the rise of the welfare state. But an alternative hypothesis is centred around the critical role that human capital began to play in the production process during the era of industrialisation. According to this view, investing in the education and the skills of the workforce became increasingly more important to the capitalist class, not less so, as they came to realise that of all the capital at their disposal, it was human capital that held the key to preventing a decline in their profit margins. In particular, the importance of specific craft skills that were instrumental in the country's first steps towards industrialisation soon diminished and were replaced not by an absence of skill, as some might suppose, but by a need for a general-purpose, adaptable sets of skills that would allow the workforce to navigate the challenges associated with rapidly changing technological and institutional environments. In such conditions, workers benefited from having a broad and flexible education, rather than exclusive, vocational skills that complemented a particular task or occupation. By this account, contrary to Marx's conjecture that the Industrial Revolution would erode the importance of human capital, allowing the owners of the means of production to exploit their workers more viciously, ongoing technological transformation of the production process in fact made human capital an increasingly critical element in the boosting of industrial productivity. Instead of a communist revolution, therefore, industrialisation triggered a revolution in mass education. Capitalists' profit margins stopped shrinking and workers' wages started rising, and ultimately the threat of class conflict — the beating heart of Marxism — began to fade. Put simply, industrial societies around the world, even those who resisted other aspects of Western modernity, supported the provision of public education predominantly because they realised the importance of general mass education in a dynamic technological environment, both for business owners and for the workers themselves. Nevertheless, industrialists were reluctant to fund the education of their potential workforce, as there was no guarantee that these workers would not take their newly acquired skills and find employment elsewhere. Indeed, in 1867, the British iron magnate James Kitson testified to an official commission that individual manufacturers were holding back on funding schools because they feared that their competitors would reap the rewards. In the Netherlands and Britain, a handful of industrialists did fund their own private schools, but they had limited success. The few capitalists who did open and maintain schools in this period, such as the Welsh textile manufacturer Robert Owen, were predominantly motivated by philanthropic, rather than commercial, reasons. As it became increasingly apparent that skills were necessary for the creation of an industrial society, previous concerns that the acquisition of literacy would make the working classes receptive to radical and subversive ideas were jettisoned and capitalists began lobbying governments for the public provision of the education. Industrialists in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States became actively engaged in influencing the structure of their countries' public education systems and encouraged their leaders to amplify investment in mass education. Ultimately, national governments caved to pressure from the industrialists, and increased their expenditure on elementary-level education. In 1867-68, the British government established the parliamentary Select Committee on Scientific Instruction. So began nearly twenty years of various parliamentary investigations into the relationship between the sciences, industry and education, designed to address the capitalists' demands. A sequence of reports based on these investigations underlined the inadequacy of the training that supervisors, managers, proprietors and workers generally had been receiving. They argued that most managers and proprietors did not understand the manufacturing process and thus failed to promote efficiency, investigate innovative techniques, or value the skills of their workers. The reports made several recommendations, including the need to redefine primary schools, revise the curriculum throughout the entire school system (particularly with respect to industry and manufacturing), and improve teachers' training. Moreover, they recommended the introduction of technical and scientific education in secondary schools. The government gradually yielded to the capitalists and increased contributions to primary as well as higher education. In 1870, it assumed responsibility for ensuring universal primary education, and in 1880, prior to the significant extension of the electoral franchise in 1884, education was made compulsory throughout Britain. There was resistance from some quarters to the provision of public education in Britain. What is telling is that it came from the landed rather than industrial elite. In 1902, when Parliament legislated the Education Act that established the provision of a free education system for the public, there was growing demand in the manufacturing and services industries for technicians, engineers, clerks, lawyers and workers able to read blueprints, instruction manuals and warehouse inventories. Industrialists stood to gain from an investment in human capital that would enhance their workers' productivity. But from the point of view of a wealthy landowning family, the output of an educated farmer was scarcely higher than that of their uneducated peers, so there was no incentive to support public education. On the contrary, were you lucky enough to be one, you might very well have vigorously lobbied to stop your tenant farmers from investing in their children's education so as to reduce their incentive to leave your land in pursuit of the new opportunities being created for educated workers. Indeed, Members of Parliament from constituencies with relatively high proportions of workers in industrial professions voted predominantly in favour of the Education Act, while the constituencies that most opposed the establishment of comprehensive education were the agricultural-intensive ones, where the landed gentry held most sway. Another major factor in the opposition to public education was concentration of land ownership. In agricultural areas where land was relatively equally distributed, landowners had little incentive to impede education reforms, since their earnings from agriculture were relatively limited in comparison to the impact education would have on their own children's wellbeing. In places where land was concentrated in the hands of a few, however, landowners who relied heavily on agriculture for their wealth and who wished to staunch the exodus of their workers to nearby towns were particularly hostile to the establishment of comprehensive public education. In such a manner, historical inequality in land ownership may have had a powerful effect on the pace of the transition from agriculture to industry, and the emergence of the modern growth regime. This is borne out by the varying pace of educational reforms across the United States in the early twentieth century, where unequal land distribution had an adverse effect on education spending. In fact, the relatively egalitarian distribution of land in Canada and the US as compared to Latin America might provide a partial explanation for the educational gap between the two regions. Furthermore, within South America, educational standards are higher in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, where distribution of land ownership was (relatively) more even. And in other areas of the world such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Russia, the enactment of agrarian reforms that partially equalised land ownership predicated further reforms that improved the education of the general populace. Ultimately, in the second phase of industrialisation, the allied interests of children, parents and industrialists trumped the interests of landowners, and education spread to all layers of society among the first industrialised nations. Though at the turn of the nineteenth century relatively few adults in Western countries had received basic schooling, by the turn of the twentieth century, education had been completely overhauled, and nearly 100 per cent of adults in Britain, the United States and other industrial nations had completed an elementary education — a truly seismic shift that occurred in the developing world in the mid-twentieth century, once the pace of technological advancement induced this transformation. This, surely, was progress and it led in turn to other indisputable improvements in workers' lives. Fifty years after Marx prophesised the spectre of class struggle, workers' wages were rising, class boundaries began blurring, and mass education enabled the democratisation of further opportunities as well as the phasing out of a particularly insidious but widespread practice: child labour. ## Child Labour No More In 1910, the American photographer Lewis Hine snapped a portrait of a barefoot twelve-year-old girl dressed in rags, leaning against a large machine in a textile factory. Her name was Addie Card and her serious expression was haunting. Hine and other photographers immortalised many similar images of child labour in the United States and Britain, and their pictures soon became some of the most iconic symbols of the Industrial Revolution. These photographs aroused fierce public protest and led to legislation banning the employment of children. But contrary to popular belief, child labour was neither an innovation of the Industrial Revolution nor a significant factor in the industrialisation process. Nor, in fact, was child labour eradicated as a result of the legislation against it. Child labour has been an intrinsic element of human societies throughout history as the challenges of a subsistence existence demanded that young children perform a plethora of back-breaking tasks, both domestic and agricultural. But when the Industrial Revolution broke out, the prevalence of the phenomenon had reached an unprecedented magnitude. Families' earnings in urban areas were barely above subsistence, and children as young as four were sent for employment in the industrial and the mining sectors. Child labour was particularly prevalent in textile factories where delicate hands were advantageous for unclogging the machines. The dismal, abusive and hazardous working conditions that children experienced over this period, along with educational deprivation, reinforced the cycle of poverty. But rapid technological change in the course of industrialisation and its impact on the demand for educated labour gradually reduced the profitability of child labour for parents as well as industrialists in two ways. First, the new machines reduced the relative productivity of children by automating the simpler tasks that children were capable of, thus magnifying the difference between the earning capacity of parents and children and reducing parental benefit from child labour. Second, the rise in the importance of human capital in the production process induced parents to invest their children's time and energy in education rather than work, and led industrial