#301 Unit 6 - Industrialization on the Continent

Buenos quesadillas! Back in the 1970s and 80s in the United States, Americans started purchasing Japanese vehicles like Toyota's and Honda's because they were so well made, could get, you know, 200-300,000 miles, simply by doing the basic maintenance and they sipped gasoline rather than guzzled it. And then, Japanese products of all sorts were starting to flood the American market, TVs, phones, bicycles, name it, Japan was making it, and it was high quality. Well, a saying developed in that time period that was something along the lines of, yeah, Americans invent everything and the Japanese, they just make it better. Well, this wasn t the first time that that happened. We re going to be looking at that idea today on the podcast. You are listening to Episode 301, Linduro Zone. Welcome to the Linduro Zone Euro-Simplified Podcast, where we take the big ideas of the AP European History curriculum and make them easier to understand so that you can excel. My name is Robert Lind, and I ve been teaching European history for over two decades now, and it is my mission to make my passion, European history, and the AP Euro Curriculum as easy to understand as possible. Remember, you can support the Linduro Zone podcast by telling your friends about it and by also checking out the LinduroZone.com website. That s L, Y, N, D, E, U, R, O, Z, O, N, E. Let s get moving. So we re looking at the topic of industrialization outside of England today. We re looking at how it spreads to the continent, and we re in particular going to spend a little time looking at how it spreads to Germany. You would think with the way that England dominated industrialization in the first half of the 19th century that they would have continued to dominate. And there s a lesson there. Not to rest on your laurels. If you are good at something, you have to constantly continue to improve. You ve got to constantly keep that saw sharpened. You know, for the longest time, we see that the British were very good at that. And one way that we can look at this is to look at their Crystal Palace exhibit of 1851. What was the Crystal Palace exhibit? Well, let me tell you what it wasn t. It wasn t a greenhouse, but it looked like one. So the Crystal Palace exhibit was this early sort of incarnation of the world s fare. It was most definitely not the first world s fare. That will take place in Paris in 1889. But the Crystal Palace exhibit was this massive exhibit of British engineering and ingenuity. England wanted to sell its products to other nations. And they basically built this beautiful building called the Crystal Palace. It was mainly made of steel and it is one of the world s first steel buildings with glass siding. And it was a building that had never been seen before. You see, Europe had just been building from stone. And all of Europe s buildings were stone. And this building in and of itself was an amazing feat of British engineering and architecture. But then when you went inside, you saw all of these different machines and different elements of British industrialization in the 1850s. And they invited the world to come. Western Europe came. Many countries from around the world came. The United States was definitely there. And the British were trying to highlight their engineering so that hopefully these other countries that had capitalist economies developing like the United States would buy these machines. It was a way to bring about increased profits in England. And we see that industrialization is most definitely going to spread to other parts of Europe. So where did industrialization spread to in Europe? Well, to keep it general, it mainly spread to just Western Europe. We are not going to see much industrialization for a while in Eastern Europe. And that's a trend that is going to have a long lasting impact. But we're going to talk about that in a little bit. What we are going to see though is these zones of development in Western Europe where industrialization will take hold. And these areas in general are going to be northeastern France. A lot of industrial development in the Netherlands and some in Belgium. We are going to see a lot in northern Italy in the region of Milan. Until this day, Milan is still very much an industrialized portion of Italy. And finally, we are going to see the German Confederation become highly industrialized. And of all of these regions, I always tell my students they've got to have one really solid hardcore concrete detail to highlight a topic. And so when it comes to industrialization on the continent, I tell my students the way to always go and the way to always know is the German Confederation. So let's go talk about the German Confederation a little bit and understand how it is the Germans came to dominate industrialization. So before we get into the German Confederation, we have to remember that post-Napolian Europe was in a rebuilding process. And the Congress of Vienna was redrawing the map and one of the regions that was put together at the Congress of Vienna was this entity known as the German Confederation. And the German Confederation was made up of about 30 plus independent German states into one entity that is loosely attached to each other so that they could be a strong power against France, should France come up and revolt again and another Napoleon comes about. And the whole idea was to maintain a favorable balance of power and the German Confederation was part of that idea. Well, there's 30 plus German states in this Confederation with Austria being the dominant German state. And they each have their own separate governments and like I told you, it's a Confederation. It's a very loose joining together. It is definitely not one solid Germany yet. We're not going to see that for a few more decades. And we are going to see that this German Confederation is going to industrialize because it has so many of the advantages and a history about it that is very similar to that of England. Number one, there is a lot of iron ore in Germany and therefore they have the ability to make steel. Number two, there is a lot of coal in Germany, which is very important in powering those steam engines and again, making steel. And finally, last but not least, you might remember that Frederick the Great, way back in the 1700s, started the Bank of Berlin and was encouraging people to come and get loans to bring about new businesses. And that is something that we also saw in England and that is a pattern that continued in this time period, the modern idea of banking. And so this German Confederation had everything it needed, but it was not one country under one government like we saw in England. And that can be an impediment to a region developing its economy. Well, Prussia brought about some plans. Remember, Prussia is one of these German states and it most definitely is a powerful one. And to just go ahead and tell you what's going to happen, Prussia is going to be the German state that is going to unite Germany when we get into the 1870s. But there was an economist in Germany named Frederick List, and I tell my students you've got to know Frederick List because he sets in motion so many of the things that we see develop later on in the 19th and in the 20th century when it comes to a united Germany. So this economist, Frederick List, we should also note that he is a nationalist, meaning he is a proponent of German nationalism. And he basically saw some ideas that if Germany was going to become strong, they needed to become strong economically. And this was the best thing for the German people. And he's going to propose some ideas and Prussia is going to make them happen. And these ideas are known as the Zolverein. So what is the Zolverein? The Zolverein was an agreement amongst these 30 different German states within the Confederation. And List wanted all of them to work together economically to support each other in developing their economies and their industries and their infrastructure. And basically what Frederick List was arguing for was creating tariffs on imported goods and allowing for free trade within the German Confederation of German goods. So what is a tariff again? A tariff is a tax that is placed on something that comes from another country. And guess what country Frederick List wanted goods taxed higher? England and actually anything that came out of the outside portions of the German Confederation. But this idea is also going to be an embrace of free trade within these 30 different German states. Now free trade is this idea that goods, services, people, they move amongst these 30 different German states easily without any taxes or tariffs. So ultimately what does this Zolverein do? It encourages the trade and the development of German products for the German people and a German economy that will lift up the German people and make them stronger and it minimizes trade through tariffs from any outside entities. This encouraged Germans and German industry to support other German states and their development and not allow the already thriving English industrial system to dominate over Germany and the German economy. List argued that these tariffs on foreign made products were a sort of investment in the future of the German people and the German people would benefit later on. And all truth be told they absolutely did. They absolutely did benefit from this. Now Breadrick List was also a major proponent of the German railway system in the German states and his ideas as to why the German states needed to cooperate with each other on their rail systems were all based on the idea that the German states could compete and support the German people in an ever changing economy. Now let's go back and let's think for a minute what do the railway systems do for a nation? Well they move products. They move products that maybe people might not be able to get in their region. This could reduce economic downturns like let's say a famine is bad in a certain area or there's some kind of natural catastrophe they can move products quickly into take care of those people there. What is this in the big picture though? This is a really interesting thing and we're going to come back and we're going to talk about it later. This is a really really big step right here in what will become the unification of Germany. Now Breadrick List was not trying to unify Germany but what we start seeing is these 30 German states cooperating with each other. They're building railway systems throughout their 30 states that work together in unison. This is all infrastructure and Germany is going to be born out of these ideas because when these states are working with each other, well when one of them has problems they're going to go look to another one to get some help and they're there for each other. That is what a nation does and that is what Germany is doing at this time. So what was the Zolverein in general? It was an early form of a customs union that kept the German states looking out for each other and not trading with these other European states that were creating competing products and it is seen as most definitely an early and very important step in a united Germany. Now, in our last podcast we talked about a number of the inventions and a number of the things that developed in England and at this point there's not a whole lot of inventing going on in Germany but there is a whole lot of making those products in Germany but making them a whole lot better. Today we have this whole concept of German engineering and if we think about some of the great cars that we see around, we've got BMW, well that's a German car company, Bavarian Motorworks, we've got Mercedes-Benz, we've got Porsche, we've got Audi and well we won't talk about Volkswagen but well the German Confederation will industrialize really really quickly because of this Zolverein and they will eventually overtake England and there was some major major developments that we will see go on in Germany but this is later and the big deal with England was is they just didn't continue, they kind of had this idea that they could continue doing what they were doing and they would always be on top and the Germans came in and they did it better. So in 1876 we see Germany develop the internal combustion engine. Now the internal combustion engine, that's the engine that you have in your car and it is a whole lot more efficient and more powerful than a steam engine. We also were going to see Germany develop the electric train by 1879 and that is a train that is not going to be moved on coal and steam power, it's an electric train and we are going to see a company that is still around today that company is Daimler Benz, it's not around in the same incarnation today but it's called Daimler Benz and they patented the first automobile in Europe and what is that, well that's Mercedes Benz. And to put all of it into a little bit of perspective by 1900 Germany which at that point is united will have over 47,000 miles of railway track laid. That is infrastructure, that is people moving, those are products moving, that is the backbone of capitalism and a thriving economy. And if we look at Germany today, Germany today is an economic powerhouse, it is the economic powerhouse of Europe today and one of the world's largest economies and this is where all of this is coming about. So Germany is definitely going to pick up the industrial ball that England dropped and take it even further. Alright, now let's talk about Eastern Europe because that too is a very interesting situation. Eastern Europe and I'm talking about Austria, Hungary, everything east of Germany, Poland, Russia, Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, Eastern Europe is going to be very, very, very slow to industrialize and that too is going to have huge impact later on in the 20th century when it comes to the two world wars but we're going to talk about that later. What I want to talk about now is why they were slow to industrialize in the 19th century and the main reason is that mercantilist ideologies died so incredibly slowly in Eastern Europe and why did they die slowly? They died slowly because the landed nobility, the nobles that own land were very, very resistant to change. They were resistant to letting the peasants be free and we're going to see that idea of Serfdom continue on in Eastern Europe when it is completely wiped out in Western Europe and they're no longer using the whole institution of Serfdom any longer. Remember, the institution of Serfdom is this idea that peasants were tied to the land and needed to work the nobles land. Well, why does that end in Western Europe? Well, that ends in Western Europe because of the changes to the economy and mainly it also ends because of the agricultural revolution and the new inventions that come about that really minimize the number of workers that are needed on a farm. And so where these workers are going to go, they're going to go to the cities and there's your labor pool for the factories that are going to develop there. Well, in Eastern Europe, we don't see that happening because the nobles didn't want that sort of change happening and they didn't allow that change to happen. The Congress of Vienna restored the old systems of government in Eastern Europe and removed the rights that were established by the Napoleonic Code. Yet in Western Europe, we see those rights that were established by the Napoleonic Code held onto, even the bourbon kings in France, Louis XVIII, when he came back and was restored to power in France, post-Napoleon, he left the Napoleonic Code in place and that did provide for a lot of freedom and for people to try and make a living in any way they could. Well, that did not happen in Eastern Europe, so old, conservative, Eastern Europe really did not change with the times and capitalism was really slow to develop in Eastern Europe. And because of this, I've always thought this was really interesting. We're going to see these regions develop their economies much more slowly and we're not really going to see the development of a larger middle class like we saw going on in Western Europe. And it's pretty interesting because this concept of communism is going to come about in the 20th century with the Russian revolution that we will be talking about later on and what parts of Europe followed communism? Well, Eastern Europe will all fall to communism and it's kind of an idea that's worth looking at a little bit and one will be examining further and what did we not really have too much of in Eastern Europe, a middle class. You see, when there's a strong middle class, there tends to be a resistance to things like communism. But everyone, I digress. That is a topic that we are going to look at much later, but we will be discussing socialism and communism and Karl Marx in the next podcast or possibly the one after that. So what do you say? We had a quick podcast today. Let's go ahead and summarize this one and round it up. But before we do, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so that you have easy access to every show we produce and don't forget that you can support this podcast and help us with the expenses of maintaining it by checking out our lindurozone.com website. There are links there to make a one time donation to the podcast or you can find a link there to our Patreon and you can support us on Patreon for as cheaply as a dollar a month. I know a lot of my listeners, if not most of my listeners are high school students, so make certain you talk to your parents about that before you go ahead and do that. If anything at all, please just tell your friends who are taking Euro about this podcast and at a minimum, just go on to iTunes and rate this podcast and leave a positive comment. It really does help to get exposure to the podcast and bring about more word of mouth. Alright, let's hit that summary. So we started off looking at the Crystal Palace exhibit in England in 1851 that encouraged all the European nations to come to England and see its engineering wonders in an architectural wonder itself, the Crystal Palace. And it really does encourage these other European countries to begin the process of industrialization and buy British products. From there, we went on and we looked at the German states and how they encouraged industrialization through the Zollvrain, which was a customs union that really encouraged the different 30 German states to work together economically by having a free trade agreement for all things that were German within the German states, but having very high tariffs on things that came from outside of the German states. This will really allow the German economy to develop and we look at this Zollvrain as a first sort of economically unifying step towards the development of a unified Germany. We'll definitely be talking about a unified Germany in the months to come. Now, from there, we went and looked at why Eastern Europe did not move into industrialization and it was mainly because the landed nobility did not want change and mercantilist ideals died slowly. So yeah, Japan making better cars and products than what Americans were making. This was not the first time that this happened. It most definitely happened between England and Germany, the Germans made better products than the English did. There's a lesson to be learned there and it's one that we should look at in all avenues of our lives. We've always got to keep the saw sharp and we've got to constantly be trying to improve. So it's currently Sunday afternoon as I record this and there is a pumping swell at the time and I think I'm going to go get my surfboard and strap it on top of my Honda Civic and go see if I can catch a few. I have no doubt that it will get me there. Thanks for joining us today. 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