Winners and Losers:Global Impact of Industrialization

• Core – industrialized nations like Great Britain, America, Germany, and Japan

• Periphery (Peripheral) – countries that provided raw materials to the industrialized nations; very slow to begin industrializing themselves

Periphery(India, Egypt)

Core(Great Britain)

Before the U.S. Civil War in 1861, the American south produced cotton that was used by Great Britain in its textile

mills.

Once the Civil War started, the South couldn’t export cotton to Great Britain.

The factory owners in Great Britain were desperate to obtain cotton. They couldn’t make textiles without it. British factory workers rioted because there was no work. The government decided it needed to do something. What do you think they decided to do?

What does this graph show? Why is this information significant?

Table 1: Cotton Exports from India, Egypt, and Brazil, 1860–1866, in Million Pounds. Sources: Government of India, Annual Statement of the Trade and Navigation of British India and Forign Countries vol. 5 (Calcutta, 1872); vol. 9 (Calcutta, 1876); Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914 (Oxford, 1969), 90; Estatisticas historica do Brasil (Rio de Jeneiro, 1990), 346.

So, we now know that Great Britain began to obtain cotton from other countries during the U.S. Civil War.

The countries of India, Egypt, and Brazil were not very developed and were under British control. What do you think they had to do to make sure that cotton was grown in these countries?

• Tried to convince with wages

• Bought up/consolidated land

• Made laws on what crops locals could plant

• Sharecropping

• Vagrancy laws

• Contract labor

What were the consequences of planting cotton in these countries for the people living there?

• Not planting subsistence crops

• Village life undermined – taxes placed on individuals

• FAMINE

We’ve looked at major changes occurring in industrializing nations in the early-mid 19th century. How did industrialization impact people in places like Great Britain differently than in places like India?

What could governments have done to stop businesses from exploiting India?

“A key thesis of this book is that what we today call the “third world” is the outgrowth of income and wealth inequalities – the famous “development gap” – that were shaped most decisively in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasants were initially integrated into the world economy…By the end of Victoria’s reign…the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irrevocably divided. And the famed “prisoners of starvation,”…were as much modern inventions of the late Victorian world as electric lights, Maxim guns and “scientific” racism.”

-Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts

Key Points

• Civil war in US interrupted trade and so Great Britain looked to other places to grow cotton for them.

• Countries chosen to grow cotton, such as India, did so at a cost to their own economy: Their people starved from lack of food crops Their economies became weaker since their

resources were all sold cheaply to Britain and other core countries.

• The reason why certain countries today are wealthy and others are poor all dates back to the exploitation of peripheral countries by core countries as part of their industrialization.