AP European History
AP European History
The factory system that became so entrenched in Britain grew more slowly on the Continent. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, most of the Continent was physically and economically devastated. Countries struggled just to rebuild their governments, financial systems, and manpower.
There were other obstacles on the Continent. Initially, there was little capital available to build the machines necessary to compete with Britain in a global market. In addition, guilds were stronger there than in Britain, and they worked against the development of industry; with industrialization, the guilds would lose their ability to monitor the quality of goods, a role that they had had for centuries. The Continental nations also did not have the network of good roads and ease of river transportation that supported the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Finally, the British, eager to protect their edge, did not allow machines, skilled workers, or even plans for machines to leave the country. As industry developed in Britain, little of it moved to the Continent.
But as the nineteenth century progressed, France and Belgium began to grow as centers of industry. British factory workers who escaped their country’s regulation of industry took plans for factories and machines with them, to the benefit of nations nearby. The French and Belgian governments put in place protectionist policies to help their fledgling industries grow. They set very high tariffs, taxes on imports, to keep out foreign manufactured goods, and provided the infrastructure – especially railroads – needed to carry both raw materials to factories and finished products to markets. The development of joint-stock banks also encouraged industrial growth in Continental Europe by providing the required capital. With the discovery of major concentrations of coal in Belgium and the German states, they eventually took the lead in manufacturing on the Continent.
Like Continental Europe, the United States was slow to begin industrializing, but by the mid-nineteenth century, it had embarked on a period of great industrial growth. With help from emigrating Britons, who brought their plans and their know-how, the United States built the workforce and infrastructure for an American Industrial Revolution that rivaled Europe’s and England’s by the end of the century.
The failure to industrialize in Eastern and Southern Europe was due to various factors, such as geography and lack of resources in some cases, and in other cases the continuation of serfdom and powerful landed political elites. As in the United States, where the North industrialized and the South stayed more agriculturally based with a system of slave labor doing the work on large plantations, Russian nobles kept serfdom and an agriculturally based economy alive until the 1860s.