The Transformation of the World (141 page)

It is no longer sufficient to present lists of Europe's advantages and achievements (from Roman law and Christianity to the printing press, exact sciences, rational attitudes to economics, a competitive system of states, and an “individualist picture of human beings”) before moving on to the bald assertion that all this was lacking elsewhere.
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The closer that Europe and Asia appear to each other in the premodern age, and the narrower the qualitative and quantitative differences between them, the more mysterious becomes the “great divergence” of the world into economic winners and losers after the middle of the nineteenth century.
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Whereas Europe's success long seemed to have been programmed in the depths of its geographical-ecological setup (as in Eric L. Jones
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) or in particular cultural dispositions (as self-proclaimed Weberian sociologists, David S. Landes, Niall Ferguson, and many other authors claim), detective work has now begun afresh on the question of what was Europe's real
differentia specifica
.

The point at which this difference became really telling keeps being pushed further into the nineteenth century as Asia's relative decline is set at a later and later date. The beginning of Europe's special path sometimes used to be placed as early as the Middle Ages (Eric L. Jones, and more recently Michael Mitterauer)—a time when other historians considered with good reason that China (especially in the eleventh century) and parts of the Muslim world were still ahead socioeconomically and culturally. More recently the point of bifurcation was shifted into the period commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution. The great divergence, then, first appeared in the nineteenth century. The issue has acquired a topicality and urgency that it did not have twenty years ago, because today's social and economic gap between Europe and Asia is beginning to close. The rise of China and India (Japan's has for some time been viewed with some equanimity) is currently perceived in Europe as little more than part of contemporary “globalization.” But in reality it involves genuine industrial revolutions that, without precisely repeating the European experience, reenact much of what happened in the nineteenth-century West.

2 Energy Regimes: The Century of Coal

Energy as a Cultural Leitmotif

In 1909 Max Weber pulled out all the stops in polemicizing against “energy theories” of human culture, such as that which the chemist, philosopher, and Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald had raised for discussion earlier in the year. According to Ostwald, as cited by Weber, “every turnaround in culture is determined by new energy circumstances,” and “cultural work” is guided “by the endeavor to preserve free energy.”
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At the very time when the human sciences were struggling to emancipate themselves from the methodology of the natural sciences, their most distinctive area of study, human culture, was thus being incorporated into a monistic theoretical framework. We do not have to blunder into the trap identified by Weber, however, even if we regard energy as an important element in material history. In those days the discipline of environmental history did not yet exist, but since then—especially in light of today's energy problems—it has taught us the importance of this factor.

Energy theories of culture fit well into the nineteenth century. Hardly any other concept occupied scientists so intensively or cast such a spell over the public. Alessandro Volta's experiments with animal electricity in 1800, which had made possible the construction of the first source of electrical current, had led by midcentury to a whole new science of energy, and various cosmological systems—above all, that of Hermann Helmholtz in his epoch-making
Über die Erhaltung der Kraft
(1847)—had arisen on its foundations. The new cosmology left behind the speculations of the Romantic philosophy of nature; it had solid roots in experimental physics and formulated its laws in such a way that they
stood up to empirical testing. The Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell discovered the basic principles and equations of electrodynamics and described the wealth of electromagnetic phenomena, after Michael Faraday had demonstrated electromagnetic induction in 1831 and built the first dynamo.
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The new physics of energy, developed in tandem with optics, led to a great flow of technological transformation. A key figure of the times such as William Thompson (from 1892: Lord Kelvin, the first scientist to be raised to the peerage) shone both as science manager and imperial politician, groundbreaking researcher in physics and practical technologist.
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Alongside the low-voltage technology needed for international news communication, with which the Siemens brothers made their first money, high-voltage technology appeared in 1866 when Werner Siemens discovered the principle behind the electrical dynamo.
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From Siemens to the American Thomas Alva Edison to amateur enthusiasts, thousands of people with expertise in the field worked on the electrification of more and more parts of the world. From the eighties on, power stations came into operation and various municipalities introduced a regular electricity supply, and by the nineties it was possible to produce small three-phase current motors in large series.
⁵⁸
But already in the first half of the century, the most important inventions for people's real lives had been those that generated and converted energy. The steam engine itself was nothing other than a device for the transformation of dead matter into technically useful power.
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Energy was a leitmotif of the whole century. What had previously been known only as an elemental force, especially in the shape of fire, now became an invisible but efficient power with unsuspected possibilities. The guiding scientific image of the century was no longer the mechanism, as in the early modern age, but the dynamic interrelationship of forces. Other sciences followed along the same path. In fact, political economy had already done this with much greater success than the energy theory of culture targeted by Max Weber. After 1870 neoclassical economics suffered from something like physics envy and began to make abundant use of energy images.
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Ironically, it was just when the energy of animal bodies was losing its significance for economics that the significance of human corporeality became clear. Bodies were seen as necessarily participating in a universe where energy had no boundaries and—as Helmholtz had shown—did not vanish into thin air. Under the influence of thermodynamics, the still abstract philosophical “labor power” of classical political economy was replaced with the “human motor,” which, as a combined muscular-nervous system, could fit into planned work processes, and whose ratio of energy output to input could be measured experimentally with precision. By midcentury Karl Marx's concept of labor power was reflecting the impact of Helmholtz's theories, and Max Weber too, at the beginning of his career, occupied himself in detail with the psychophysics of industrial work.
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It was no accident that nineteenth-century Europeans and North Americans found energy so fascinating. In one of its most important aspects, industrialization
constituted a change of energy regime. All economic activity requires energy inputs, and poor access to cheap energy creates one of the most dangerous bottlenecks a country can face. Even when resources were otherwise quite plentiful, preindustrial societies everywhere were able to draw only on a handful of energy sources other than human labor: water, wind, firewood, peat, and work animals capable of converting fodder into muscle power. Given this limitation, energy supply could be assured only through more extensive farming and woodcutting, and more nutritious crops, but there was always a danger that the available energy would not keep pace with population growth. Societies differed in their proportional use of various kinds of energy. It has been estimated, for example, that in 1750 wood was the source of roughly a half of energy consumption in Europe, but of no more than 8 percent in China. Conversely, the use of human labor power was several times greater in China than in Europe.
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Every society possesses its specific energy profile.

Fossil Fuels

With industrialization, one fossil fuel—coal—gradually came to dominate the energy scene, having been used increasingly since the sixteenth century, above all in England.
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The speed of the change should not be overstated. In Europe as a whole, coal provided only a tiny fraction of energy use around the middle of the nineteenth century. Only subsequently did the share of traditional sources decline, while coal and later oil—as well as hydraulic power, now better harnessed by dams and new kinds of turbines—rose dramatically in importance.
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The range of energy forms familiar to us today followed millennia dominated by wood, which in nineteenth-century Europe was still being used in quantities that now seem hard to believe.
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Alongside the rise of coal and the decline of wood, wind continued to be used for transportation and mill power until the second half of the century. Combustible gas, initially obtained from coal, lighted the early public lamps in big-city streets; natural gas, which now covers onequarter of world energy needs, was not yet available. World use of coal as a fuel reached its peak in the second decade of the twentieth century.

Whereas coal had long been known to humans, the history of petroleum can be precisely dated. The first successful drilling for commercial purposes took place on August 28, 1859, in Pennsylvania, immediately triggering an oil rush comparable to the Californian gold rush a decade before. From 1865 a young entrepreneur by the name of John D. Rockefeller made oil the foundation of big business. By 1880 his Standard Oil Company, founded ten years earlier, had near-monopoly control of the growing world market—a position that no individual supplier ever conquered in relation to coal. At first petroleum was mainly processed into lubricants and kerosene, a fuel for lamps and stoves. Only the spread of the automobile in the 1920s gave it major weight in the global energy balance.
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A demand still remained for animal energy: camels and donkeys (both unusually cost-effective) in transportation, oxen and water buffalos in agriculture, and (Indian) elephants in the rainforest. Part of the “agricultural revolution” was
the growing substitution of horsepower for manpower: the number of horses doubled between 1700 and 1850 in England, and between 1800 and 1850 (at the height of the Industrial Revolution) the horse energy available per agricultural worker rose by 21 percent. In Britain as in France, the ratio of one horse to eight inhabitants remained fairly stable during the second half of the century.
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The number of horses per hectare fell in Britain only after 1925—a process that had begun several decades earlier in the United States, the pioneer of this trend. Eventually the introduction of tractors expanded areas under cultivation without clearing new land, since it meant that less land was needed for the production of grass and oats to maintain workhorses.
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Even in the United States, one-quarter of farmland in 1900 had been used to feed horses. The rice economies of Asia, where animal traction played scarcely any role and mechanization was more difficult to implement, lacked this important buffer for an efficiencyraising modernization of agriculture.

The industrial civilization of the nineteenth century rested upon fossil fuels and ever more efficient technical-mechanical conversion of the energy obtained from them.
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The coal-guzzling steam engine set up a spiral of its own, since only steam-driven elevators and ventilators enabled the extraction of coal deposits deep below the earth's surface. In fact, the quest for better means of pumping water from mine shafts had been at the origin of the steam age; the earliest steam pumps, still primitive in their functioning, were built in 1697, and in 1712 the first of Thomas Newcomen's steam-driven vacuum pumps, indeed the first piston steam engine of any kind, was installed in a coal mine.
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When the engineer James Watt and his business partner and capital provider Matthew Boulton launched their smaller and better steam engines from 1776 onward, the place they chose for the experiment was not a textile factory but a tin mine in Cornwall, a remote corner of England never of much importance industrially. The decisive technological breakthrough was then made by the tireless innovator James Watt, who in 1784 designed a much more efficient machine that could generate not only vertical but rotating movement.
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The steam engine had come of age. Its coal consumption efficiency (that is, the proportion of freed energy usable for mechanical purposes) continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century just as, generally speaking, power-generating technology kept up with demand that was rising in quantity and changing in kind.
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Watt's machine made its debut in an English cotton-spinning mill in 1785, but it would be decades before the steam engine became the main energy source in light industry. In 1830 most textile factories in Saxony, one of the industrial heartlands of continental Europe, were still mainly using water power, and in many places it became profitable to switch to steam only after the railroad had facilitated access to cheaper coal.
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To extract deposits with technologically advanced methods (themselves using steam power) and then to transport the coal at low cost by steam-powered trains and ships to the point of consumption became key conditions for successful industrialization.

Japan, with few coal reserves of its own, faced the greatest difficulties, and so it is not surprising that the age of the steam engine did not last long there. The first fixed machines (that is, not on board a ship) were imported from the Netherlands and installed at a state ironworks in Nagasaki in 1861. Until then most commercially used energy had come from water mills, which, as in England, had also driven the first cotton spinning mills. For some time the various kinds of energy existed alongside one another. But when Japan's industrialization got under way in the mid-1880s, it took only a few years for its factories to be equipped with steam engines, and their industrial use peaked by the mid-nineties. The Japanese economy was one of the first to employ electricity on a grand scale, obtaining it partly from water power, partly from the burning of coal, and this gave its industry major advantages. When the first steam engines began operating in Japan in the 1860s, the country was some eighty years behind Britain in energy technology. By 1900, advancing at breakneck speed, it had completely closed the gap.
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