Eric Hobsbawm: Summarized Classics: SUMMARIZED CLASSICS

By MAURICIO ENRIQUE FAU

The greatest thinkers of humanity at your fingertips, in minutes! 
If you thought you would never be able to understand the essential classic authors, you were wrong! 
With our "Summarized Classics" collection, you will understand the main ideas of the most important thinkers in a very short time and with little effort.

 

The present volume covers the central axes of this discipline.
Among them, the reader will find an analysis of the following: Who Is Hobsbawm, Great Britain In 1750, The Origin Of Industrial Revolution, Age Of Capital, among others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOOKS AND SUMMARIES BY MAURICIO FAU
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201003692

MAURICIO ENRIQUE FAU

Mauricio Enrique Fau nació en Buenos Aires en 1965. Se recibió de Licenciado en Ciencia Política en la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Cursó también Derecho en la UBA y Periodismo en la Universidad de Morón. Realizó estudios en FLACSO Argentina. Docente de la UBA y AUTOR DE MÁS DE 3.000 RESÚMENES de Psicología, Sociología, Ciencia Política, Antropología, Derecho, Historia, Epistemología, Lógica, Filosofía, Economía, Semiología, Educación y demás disciplinas de las Ciencias Sociales. Desde 2005 dirige La Bisagra Editorial, especializada en técnicas de estudio y materiales que facilitan la transición desde la escuela secundaria a la universidad. Por intermedio de La Bisagra publicó 38 libros. Participa en diversas ferias del libro, entre ellas la Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires y la FIL Guadalajara.

Book preview

INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE

CHAPTER 1 GREAT BRITAIN IN 1750

During the eighteenth century, no English city was comparable to London, with its 50,000 inhabitants, and the overseas trade was the great British wisdom.

Manufacturing and agriculture were thriving, although in the eyes of the city's visitors, they did not match the importance of commerce. The merchant, rather than the industrialist, was the most important citizen. 75% of the raw materials came from trade with the colonies.

Trade was intimately associated with the political system of Great Britain, in which kings were subject to Parliament, controlled by landed aristocrats.

Despite the aristocratic composition of Parliament, the British political system was responsive to the concerns of the commercial bourgeoisie (the so-called honest middle class), unlike the more traditional continental countries.

In short, England impressed the outsider as a rich country and above all for its commerce and its enterprises; as a state whose power rested on trade and fleet.

IN 1750, ENGLAND WAS A RETAIL AND NATIONAL MARKET ECONOMY.

In cities this was natural, because in an enclosed, self-sufficient economy, it is not possible for them to exceed a certain size, and England was fortunate enough to have the largest western city (and consequently the most central market for consumer goods) in London. This city represented an insatiable demand for food and fuel, transforming all agriculture in the east and south.

The growing importation of tea, sugar and tobacco, not only shows the expansion of overseas trade, but also of the commercialization of rural life. While in other countries the figure of the small owner-cultivator who lived off the land worked by his family was common, in England and Israel trade became more important.

By 1770, the STRUCTURE OF LANDOWNERSHIP showed THOUSANDS OF SMALL FARMING LANDOWNERS WORKING ON THEIR LAND FORTH FORSEVERYTEEN THOUSANDS OF FARMERS, who, at the time, had the work of hundreds of thousands of laborers, servants and smallholders who were hired for most of their time.

Moreover, much of British industry and manufacturing was rural, and the worker was a rural artisan who was gradually specializing in the production of a particular product, gradually turning from a small peasant or artisan into a wage laborer.

The small market centers, from which merchants came to collect the products from the villages, or to distribute the raw materials and the barter, became towns, and were filled with workshops. The nature of this type of DOMESTIC INDUSTRY spread throughout the British countryside, and favored the development of an extensive network of money transactions that spread throughout it. Any village that specialized in manufacturing and became industrial meant that some other village specialized in selling it the foodstuffs that it had first produced:

On the one hand, the TREASURY CLASS awakened an interest in the mines to be found in their lands and in the manufacturing centers of their villages; it also developed an interest of the nobility in investments in canals and roads, not only in the hope of opening wider markets for their agricultural products, but also in the anticipated advantages of better and cheaper transportation for their mines and manufactures.

On the other hand, MANUFACTURING INTERESTS could already determine government policy. Thus, when a choice had to be made between the interests of trade (which rested on the freedom to import, export and re-export) and those of industry (which at that time relied on the protection of the British internal market), the interest of the domestic commodity prevailed, because the merchant could only count on the support of London and some ports; The manufacturing sector, on the other hand, counted on the political interests of sectors of the country and the government. The conflict was resolved around the turn of the seventeenth century, when the textile manufacturers obtained a ban on the importation of the Indians.

BRITISH INDUSTRY WAS ABLE TO DEVELOP IN AN INTERNAL MARKET UNTIL IT BECAME STRONG ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO FREELY ENTER OTHER PEOPLES' MARKETS (FREE TRADE).

However, the country's industry could not have developed if not for the particular political situation in England. This country was a landed gentry oligarchy, headed by a self-perpetuating self-perpetuating gentry, a powerful system of family marriages under the rule of the ruling estates of the great families with a great influence on the political system. These sectors knew that the power of the country, and their own, rested on the ease of obtaining money from war and trade. Even though in 1750 they were unable to make large profits in industry, when they became possible they did not hesitate to adapt to the new situation.

CHAPTER2THEORIGINOFTHEINDUSTRIALREVOLUTION

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IS DETERMINED BY ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Although the novel appearance of means-machines, the factory system, etc.-generally revolutionized the productive system, what really ends up explaining the root of the process within the prevailing (capitalist) economic order is the pursuit of private profit. This is the economic corollary of the system that led to the technological transformation.

Second, however, the Industrial Revolution - the first in history - did not first appear, nor was it similar to the revolutions that followed it, and Great Britain became the paradigmatic example of this transformation because of the pattern of economic development that preceded it. The British economy, however, was part of a wider, imperial one, which incorporated the dependent economies of the East and the Americas as trading and dominion points in some cases and, in others, as formal colonies.

But the fact is that it was England-and not just another European nation-that brought together the conditions that led to its becoming the world's first "workshop.

The preconditions for industrialization were already present in eighteenth-century England. The economic, social and ideological ties that mobilized most pre-industrial people were already weak and could easily be broken. By 1750, for example, it was difficult to find a peasant farmer who owned large extensions and was employed as a farm laborer in subsistence farming, so there were no major obstacles to the transfer of non-industrial to industrial skills. Transportation and communications throughout the country were easy and inexpensive. The First Industrial Revolution did not face complicated technological problems and had the human resources that were adequate for the transformation without major inconveniences.

So far an attempt has been made to explain how the material that led to the economic explosion was accumulated, but it is not the end of the story to explain the origin and the execution of a phenomenon that did not occur outside England, or took much longer to occur in other countries of equal development. The relationship between profit-making and technological innovations in a private enterprise economy is only one side of the question: it must be complemented by the coexistence of a market oriented towards the mass consumption of the goods that are produced and which also offers security and confidence to the capitalists who own the means of production.

When Henry Ford launched the T series automobile, it was cheap and simple and was aimed at a large majority of the population, and a century of industrialization and a culture suited to mass consumption made it successful.

But this was not precisely the situation at the origins of the English Industrial Revolution, to which the following factors contributed fundamentally: the domestic market, which offered the greatest possibility of quality products from all over the country; the external market, which was in perspective much more dynamic, as exports were developed; and together with these, essential, a third, hitherto neglected factor: the government. A fourth important factor to consider was population, not only in the variability of growth rates, but also in the changes in culture that had an impact on the economy.

Three events made this transformation possible: transportation, foodstuffs and, especially, a basic product, coal.

TRANSPORTATION was improved at the beginning of the 18th century, making it easier and cheaper throughout the country, reducing the cost of manufactured goods, especially those produced by inland industry. This allowed greater consumption-especially in FOOD-from the masses