The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (15 page)

With its specialized institutions employing tens of thousands of clerks, administering the world’s trade in equities as well as commodities such as coal and wool, London clearly occupied the commanding heights of the British economy.
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But the most radical transformation—and the greatest source of Britain’s wealth—took place in cities far from the great metropolis.

The epicenter for this new urban revolution lay in Lancashire. Long among Britain’s poorest regions,
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in the early nineteenth century Lancashire emerged as the world’s most dynamic economic area. The population of its principal city, Manchester, soared from 94,000 to more than 270,000 during the first thirty years of the century and would more than double again by its end.

Some smaller cities experienced even more rapid growth. In 1810, the worsted manufacturing center of Bradford was an obscure small town with 16,000 people. As the capacity of the city’s factories rose by more than 600 percent in the first half of the nineteenth century, the population exploded to more than 103,000, the fastest growth experienced by any city in contemporary Europe.
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Unlike London, which remained both a traditional commercial center and an imperial capital, these cities represented something entirely new: urban centers whose prominence rested primarily on the mass production of manufactured goods. This evolution would mark the beginning of an urban revolution that would transform cities all around the world.

The rapid growth of these industrial cities greatly accelerated Britain’s unprecedented rate of urbanization. Between 1750 and 1800, England, although it accounted for barely 8 percent of Europe’s population, was responsible for roughly 70 percent of all urban growth. By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain became the first country with a majority of its people living in large cities; by 1881, urbanites accounted for two-thirds of its population.
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The Industrial Revolution profoundly transformed the urban environment in often hideous ways. Visitors remarked about the persistent smell of the tanneries, breweries, dyeworks, and gasworks. Living conditions, particularly for the poor, were often abominable.
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Friedrich Engels wrote this account of a working-class ward in Manchester:

Everywhere one sees heaps of refuse, garbage and filth. . . . One walks along a very rough path on the river bank, in between clothes-posts and washing lines to reach a chaotic group of little, one storied, one room cabins. Most of them have earth floors and working, living and sleeping all take place in one room.
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This squalor created lethal health problems. Death rates in early-nineteenth-century Manchester were one in twenty-five, almost three times that of surrounding rural hamlets. Death from disease, malnutrition, and overwork became so pervasive that factories could be kept running only by tapping a continuous supply of workers from the distant countryside and from impoverished Ireland.
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Extreme poverty in what was now easily the world’s greatest economic power, noted Alexis de Tocqueville, appeared more pervasive than in such backwaters as Spain or Portugal.
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The treatment of young children was particularly shocking. Traditionally, children had labored alongside their parents at home, in a small workshop, or in the fields; now they often worked by themselves, servicing machines in vast impersonal industrial plants. One West Indian slave-holder, on a visit to Bradford, thought it impossible for “any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine to work twelve and a half hours a day.”

In part, this “cruel” treatment may have resulted from lack of intimate contact between owners and workers. The capitalist controlling a small factory might have had some casual familiarity with his workers and their children. The great capitalists owning the largest factories, in contrast, often lived far away, in London or at their country estates.
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In contrast to the creators of the classical or Renaissance cities, such beneficiaries of the new order initially scorned the cities of their creation. These were places to make money, not to spend one’s leisure time. “There are no pleasant rides, no pleasant walks,” a socially prominent Bradford doctor complained, “all being bustle, hurry and confusion.”
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This new industrial society may have been creating unprecedented wealth, but at the cost of every basic human value. There seemed little place for either compassion or God in the factory; the industrial city seemed largely devoid of sacred space or any compelling social morality other than what Marx called “the cash nexus.” By the 1850s, religious attendance, once almost universal, had dropped to less than 50 percent and to less than a third in such cities as Manchester.
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William Blake expressed his alarm at the impact of this mechanistic age:

Washed by the Water wheels of Newton, black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, Wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden.
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By the 1850s, signs of the new order were evident everywhere in British cities: looming railway bridges, vast tunnel systems, sprawling factories. Gradually, some began to sense something monumental was afoot. There was in Britain, noted the usually even-tempered Tocqueville, at “every step . . . something to make the tourist’s heart leap.”
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Where Blake saw only the soulless “cogs tyrannic,” some now envisioned the factory as the harbinger of a glorious and prosperous future. Sir George Head, traveling in Leeds in 1835, described a mechanized cloth factory as “a temple dedicated by man, grateful for the stupendous power that moved within, to Him who built the universe.” The “hero of the age,” he noted, was not the knight or aristocrat, but the “hard-working mechanic, blackened by smoke, yet radiant in the light of intelligence.”
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By midcentury, this sense of optimism had spread as even ordinary Britons now began to enjoy the benefits of mechanization. Wages, spurred by the growth of trade unions, now rose. Working-class consumers, who before could hardly have hoped to afford them, could now purchase such items as stockings or dining utensils. Some, particularly in the skilled trades, ascended into the middle class; children from the industrialist class now entered the elite universities. Having become great lords without proper titles, some now, by marriage or through influence, acquired noble status.
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Social reform movements—led usually by the clergy and a rising professional class—now organized to address the most obvious defects of the industrial system. Reform legislation, such as the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835 and the first Public Health Act by Parliament in 1848, brought more efficient administration to the sprawling, chaotic cities. Reformers established parks, baths, and washhouses for the poor. New sanitary measures and improvements in medicine lowered urban rates of mortality significantly. Crime, once rampant, dropped dramatically.
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By the turn of the century, wrote Liverpool’s Thomas Baines, cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Bradford—for all their undoubted ugliness, polluted skies, and terrible slums—could not be dismissed merely as crude places spewing out goods. They now constituted, like Tyre or Florence in the past, “nurseries of intelligence” whose inventions were improving the lot of mankind.
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Wealth allowed these once dreary cities to erect magnificent new public buildings—town halls, libraries, and hospitals—that in the words of one Bradford writer rivaled “the far famed palaces of Venice....”
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In the first half of the nineteenth century, no European country came close to matching Britain’s industrial might. Paris, the largest city on the continent, remained mainly a city of small enterprises. After 1850, the conscious policy of Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, fearful of proletarian unrest, actually discouraged large-scale industrial growth in the capital.
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The new focus of industrial growth lay instead in the still largely underdeveloped expanses of North America—a place some Europeans romanticized as the “garden of the world.” Here the factory town not only took root, but did so on a scale exceeding that of Britain itself.
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Industrialism would bring many changes to the United States, ultimately transforming a primarily rural landscape into one of large cities. As late as 1850, the United States had only six “large” cities with a population of over one hundred thousand, constituting barely 5 percent of the population. This reality would change dramatically in the next fifty years. By 1900, there were thirty-eight such cities, and they now housed roughly one in every five Americans.
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The spectacular growth of American cities was driven by several factors—immigration, investment from Europe, the overall growth of the North American consumer base, and most of all, the rapid development of manufacturing industries, particularly in mass production. The country had proved uniquely suited to the rapid evolution of capitalist enterprise. Adam Smith’s “voice had been ringing in the world’s ears for sixty years,” wrote one observer in 1838, “but it is only in the United States that he is listened to, reverenced, and followed.”
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Large numbers of British and other European immigrants sought new lives in this booming capitalist economy, especially in the great port city of New York.
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By 1860, Gotham’s population had topped 1 million, 42 percent foreign born.
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Some of these immigrants lived in squalid conditions comparable to those found in Britain. Disease was rampant throughout the crowded working-class sections of Manhattan: Between 1810 and 1870, the rate of infant mortality in New York doubled.
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Class distinctions, defined more by wealth than pedigree, persisted as well in the new land. “A few moments from salons superbly furnished in the style of Louis XIV,” noted the writer Lydia Child, lay the abodes of “dreary desolate apartments” inhabited by “shivering urchins.”
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Yet what most impressed many observers about New York was its extraordinary social mobility. A manual worker in an American factory still enjoyed a far better chance, and his offspring an even better one, of rising into the middle or even upper class than his European counterpart.
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Lowly artisans and mechanics, many of them immigrants, were prominent among the owners of the more than four thousand manufacturing establishments on Manhattan island, which at the time may well have been the most rapidly industrializing place in the world.
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Equally dramatic changes took place out on the western frontier, where Americans were moving to in massive numbers. New cities appeared seemingly overnight on places hitherto only lightly settled by native peoples. Among the first was Cincinnati, located on a bend in the Ohio River, which grew from a tiny frontier settlement of barely 750 residents in 1800 to a booming city of more than 100,000 forty years later.

Cincinnati and other midwestern cities proved ideally suited for manufacturing growth. The region’s huge agriculture surplus created an opportunity for mass production of animal products on a hitherto unimagined scale. Soon dubbed “Porkopolis,” Cincinnati boasted vast slaughterhouses that dropped “rivers of blood” into Deer Creek and from there into the Ohio.

Other cities enjoyed similarly rapid growth.
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St. Louis, home to a few hundred hardy souls at the opening of the nineteenth century, was by century’s end a mature metropolis of half a million. Detroit, a rugged outpost of barely 20,000 in 1850, shot up to more than 200,000 fifty years later. Chicago’s explosive growth outpaced them all. A settlement of barely 350 in 1835, it expanded to 100,000 at the time of Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and housed over 1 million forty years later.

These midwestern cities differed in many ways from the older coastal hubs. Unlike New York or Boston, with their thousands of small industrial shops and thriving mercantile districts, the heartland metropolis was more often dominated by giant factories, sometimes with thousands of workers, producing such hard goods as steel, agricultural implements, and cars.
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The United States was becoming the world’s leader in heavy manufacturing—and its beating heart lay in the cities of the Midwest.
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These cities competed ferociously, and often recklessly, with one another for preeminence. Chicago, following the panic of 1837, one speculator wrote, “resounded with the groans of ruined men and the sobs of defrauded women who entrusted all to greedy speculators.” Undaunted, the city’s elites proved relentless in their ambition, lobbying Washington and Wall Street for dominant position in the burgeoning east-west trade. St. Louis businesspeople, noted the
Chicago Tribune
in 1868, “wore their pantaloons out sitting and waiting for trade to come to them,” while Chicago’s “wore their shoes out running after it.”
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