The Transformation of the World (149 page)

The variations were endless because of the very different surroundings in which the early factories sank root, but nearly everywhere the appearance of factories triggered a major shakeup of the labor market, redistributed people's life chances, and established new kinds of hierarchies.
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The break with the past did not necessarily come with the very first factories, but rather with the first ones that managed to stabilize themselves and reach a sufficient size to make a wider impact on work organization. The decisive threshold to a new type of society was reached with the consolidation of a full-time labor force. A large number of people became industrial workers and were nothing other than that.
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For a long time the image of work in the nineteenth century was based on the “leading sector” iron and steel: that is, on heavy industry. Adolph von Menzel's painting
Iron Rolling Mill
(completed in 1875) strikes everyone who has seen it as a distillation of the age.
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But in 1913, steel production was still fairly uncommon around the world, concentrated in a few countries and a few locations within them. The United States was by far the largest producer (31.8 million tons), followed by Germany (17.6 million) and then, well behind, Britain (7.7 million), Russia (4.8 million), France (4.7 million), and Austria-Hungary (2.6 million). Japan was still below 300,000 tons. In many countries there was one isolated steelworks (the Tata operation in India or the Hanyeping plant in China) but not an entire steel industry employing significant numbers of workers. No steel was produced anywhere in Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Near and Middle East (outside the Ottoman Empire), or in the Netherlands, Denmark, or Switzerland.
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Only a tiny part of the working population worldwide was familiar with the most spectacular branch of production in the early industrial age.

Canal Construction

Less new, though hardly less emblematic of the age, and geographically more widespread than heavy industry, was a second kind of workplace: the large construction site. It had, of course, long existed, since the building of the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and the medieval cathedrals, but in the nineteenth century major construction sites became more common and even larger in size. The main purpose of monumental building was no longer to glorify worldly and spiritual power, but rather to create basic infrastructure for the life of society.

Before the railroad came canals. Those of eighteenth-century England were built not by a fixed proletariat but by migrant workers, often of foreign origin and on a subcontractor's payroll. In the United States, the eight decades between 1780 and 1860, especially the 1820s and 1830s, were the great age of canal construction. A total of forty-four were built during this period in North America, and by 1860 there were approximately 6,800 kilometers of navigable canals in the United States.
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At midcentury canal construction was among the most advanced industries, requiring the investment of large capital sums and cutting-edge technology, as well as the organization and disciplining of huge numbers of workers. It was
the
large-scale enterprise of the epoch—it opened new markets and called for business strategies of a new order. At the same time, it was an activity of great symbolic significance: no longer was the earth the sole preserve of farmers and miners; the arteries of capitalism were now being dug deep inside it. This was a new, often especially harsh experience in the world of work; the path from workshop to factory was not the only one taken in the nineteenth century. An army of mainly unskilled workers, drawn from the most diverse sources, came together for the construction of the American canals: job seekers from rural areas, new immigrants, slaves, free blacks, women, and children. They all lacked power and status, and control over their work conditions. The chances for solidarity were small, and organized workers' movements did not arise out of such kinds of work. Besides, canal workers were geographically marginal; their lifeworld was the construction site and the barracks camp.

In comparison with river regulation in the eighteenth century, the canal projects were truly gigantic. Whole areas had to be cleared, swamps drained, trenches dug, inclines secured, cliffs blown up, bricks produced and laid, and sluices, bridges, and aqueducts constructed. On an average day, lasting twelve to fourteen hours in summer and eight to ten in winter, ordinary digging cleared seventy wheelbarrows of material per worker.
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It was pure drudgery, distinctly worse than the round of farm labor. And since the contractors were paid by results, they kept up a quasi-industrial pressure on the workers. At first horses were the only other source of energy; machines began to play a greater role only in the Suez Canal operations. Most demanding of all was the Erie Canal, a project of huge economic importance between 1817 and 1825 that involved digging a total of 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo.
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Accidents were a frequent occurrence, as were outbreaks of
mosquito-borne malaria, dysentery, typhoid fever, and cholera. Medical care was rudimentary, support for the bereaved or the incapacitated nonexistent. Canal construction was the grim material foundation of the rise of the United States.

Most spectacular of all was the Suez Canal, proposed as early as 1846.
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In November 1854 the Egyptian authorities granted Ferdinand de Lesseps a first concession that enabled him to set up a fundraising company, and on April 25, 1859, after nearly two years of survey work, construction officially got under way at the Port Said lido. On August 12, 1865, the first convoy of coal ships completed the passage to the Red Sea. The Suez Canal Zone was marked out in February of the following year, and in July 1868, a regular train service began between Ismailia and Cairo. When the waters of the Red Sea were allowed into the Bitter Lakes on August 16, 1869, the ten-year-long construction program over a stretch of 101 miles was all but complete. The Suez Canal opened to shipping on November 20, 1869.

The canal was a French private venture, although the Egyptian government put up half the capital, incurring a huge debt that would be among the factors behind the British occupation in 1882. The construction site was one of the century's largest, intricately organized with a resident director-general at the top and a hierarchy of bureaucrats and engineers modeled on the French Ponts et Chaussées. The environment posed problems different from those encountered in America. Extreme temperatures meant that it was a challenge to ensure the workers' water supply: in April 1859 a Dutch firm installed a number of steam-powered desalination plants, but their high coal consumption made them unviable and water had to be brought in by barge and camel from Damietta. The pasha's very first
firman
stipulated that four-fifths of the labor had to be Egyptian. Unpaid corvée duty had normally been required of the fellah population since antiquity, but only on irrigation works in their local region. (This was not just a token of “Oriental” backwardness—witness the fact that until 1836 every peasant in France had been obliged to spend three days a year maintaining the roads in his local area, or that until the 1920s indigenous people in Guatemala were assigned to perform compulsory [paid] labor.)
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In the case of the Suez Canal, fellahs had to be assembled from far and wide, and the Suez Canal Company, mindful of public opinion in France, initially advertised for free laborers in every Egyptian mosque, railroad station, and police station and handed out leaflets in villages as far away as Upper Egypt, Syria, and Jerusalem. This had little success, however, and most of those who took the offer soon melted away because of the terrible working conditions (digging in the mud of shallow lakes, etc.). European workers from places such as Malta were even harder to obtain. There were plans to hire as many as 20,000 Chinese—a remarkable idea at a time when “coolie exports” were just beginning.

Only when all else failed did de Lesseps and the khedive resort to the corvée, which was introduced in grand style in January 1862. But while the pasha supplied the promised labor, the company's French subcontractors did not keep their side of the bargain; the wages, if paid at all, were inadequate and often in the shape of useless French francs and centimes. A normal working day lasted
seventeen hours, and no care was provided for workers who fell sick or suffered an accident. Discontent kept mounting, and more and more fellahs took to their heels. The forced labor in Egypt aroused revulsion among the British public, becoming an important weapon in Whitehall's attempts to sabotage the canal project. After all, the serfs had been emancipated in Russia and slaves freed in the United States. Under British pressure, the sultan—as the pasha's nominal overlord—banned the use of the corvée. In July 1864 Napoleon III declared an arbitration award that was accepted by both sides: French firms would cease to employ Egyptian forced laborers at the end of the year, but the Egyptian authorities agreed to sponsor their use for ancillary tasks. Figures are lacking for the total workforce, but it is estimated that 20,000 fellahs were taken on each month, and that altogether 400,000 Egyptians worked on the canal project.
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The most important tasks, however, were performed by freely recruited workers. Fellahs working under the corvée system could be deployed only for short periods and in the vicinity of their home village. Any who came from Upper Egypt wasted half their requisition time on the journey.
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The construction of the canal drew on resources from many countries: coal from England for the steam dredgers and pumps (12,250 tons of coal a month were used for the final, technically most difficult, phase beginning in late 1867), wood from Croatia and Hungary for the construction of camp barracks, technical equipment and standard items of iron hardware from France. The accommodations improved over time, although the European camp for engineers remained strictly separate from the “Arab” tent city for the workers. Health considerations were an issue right from the start. Several hospitals in the new city of Ismailia and near the construction sites, as well as a fleet of ambulances, looked after Egyptians too. Preventive medicine and the quality of food also grew better—partly to take the wind out of the sails of British and other critics. All in all, a massive technological-administrative system took shape. The ceremonial opening of the canal took place on November 16–20, 1869, in the presence of Empress Eugénie and her itinerant court, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, and quite a number of European crown princes. Ismailia, usually a city of 5,000 souls at the most, received some 100,000 visitors. The khedive invited thousands of guests at his own expense; travel agencies organized tourist trips to the event of the century; public speakers and newspaper leaders compared Ferdinand de Lesseps, now sporting countless medals, to the greatest heroes in history.
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Giuseppe Verdi, under contract to compose
Aida
for the canal's opening, had not exactly been idle, but he was able to deliver it only after the opening; the premiere took place on Christmas Eve 1871, before an international audience in Cairo.

Railroad Construction

While fellahs dug up the desert en masse, railroad tracks and stations were being built in many parts of the world. In principle, the work involved the same technical tasks in every continent: an accurate survey of the terrain, the
installation of high-specification bridges and tunnels, and the development of civil engineering specialists in the field. The earth-moving requirements were greater than in road construction projects up to then; it was not uncommon for as many as 15,000 workers to be employed at the same time in coordination with one another. Construction work on the railroads, as on canals, involved basic manual labor with ax or shovel, but also highly advanced equipment such as steam cranes.
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The Transcontinental Railroad from Chicago via Omaha (Nebraska) to Sacramento (California)—which was completed in 1869, the same year as the Suez Canal—deployed groups of workers as large as one of the smaller Civil War armies; indeed, it became a catchment basin for demobilized soldiers in the years immediately after the end of the conflict.

The Transcontinental also hired approximately 100,000 Chinese workers—although when this was first proposed, many had thought they would be physically too weak. “But they built the Great Wall,” was the answer of the chief engineer, Charles Crocker.
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Recruited via contractors, the Chinese were organized into gangs of twelve to twenty, each with its own cook and a responsible “headman.” They proved to be capable workers, not only in implementing Western plans but also in finding solutions to difficult problems that cropped up along the way. They took charge of providing adequate food for themselves, and their custom of drinking tea and hot water reduced the number of accidents and protected them from many of the diseases that plagued Europeans. Unlike the Irish, who were also employed in large numbers, they did not have a problem with alcohol. They smoked opium only on Sundays, and violent quarrels and strikes were virtually unknown among them. However, though considered hardworking and conscientious, the Chinese were also treated with racist contempt.

Skillful teams of tracklayers could cover as much as three miles a day. Then came the hammer and screw men, performing a mechanical chorus like that of the hammering Nibelungs in Richard Wagner's
Rheingold
(composed in 1853–57, at a first climax of railroad construction in central Europe). Each mile required four thousand nails to be driven home with three hammer blows each. Once it was fully operational, in May 1869, the Transcontinental made it possible to travel from New York to San Francisco in seven days. It was the last major engineering project in the United States to be executed overwhelmingly by manual labor.

The great railroads of the world took shape along construction sites that were transnational in character.
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British and French capital were dominant before 1860, but afterward national sources of finance made increasingly important contributions. The materials, craft labor, and technical know-how were seldom only local; European and North American planners and engineers everywhere monopolized the higher rungs of the jobs ladder. Skilled workers with experience were also in great demand. Only a few of the countries engaged in railroad construction had the heavy industry and machinery sector necessary to organize it by themselves. Even Witte, the Russian finance minister who wanted to construct
the Trans-Siberian with national resources—and who was largely successful in his aim—could not dispense entirely with American steel. Local peasants helped with the construction in western Siberia, but as the work moved farther eastward the terrain became more difficult and the human resources harder to obtain. Laborers were recruited from European Russia, along with numerous Kazan Tatars and foreign workers from Italy and elsewhere. Soldiers were drafted in to work on the Ussuri section, alongside some eight thousand Chinese, Korean, and Japanese migrant workers. Prisoners were transported from Ukraine and other parts of the empire, and after a certain period they were even paid the full wage. It was a use of convict labor that prefigured Stalinist practices.
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