224 Chapter Seven
market system. Relatively minor resort to military force sufficed to
open China, Japan, inner Asia, and Africa to European (especially
British) trade. Europeans’ vulnerability to tropical diseases remained
an obstacle, especially in Africa; but even this barrier to the expansion
of world market relationships began to fall after about 1850 when
European doctors developed effective prophylaxis against malaria.
Until the mid-1870s the triumph of a world market, with its most
active center firmly planted in London, seemed unmistakable. Yet the
depression that began in 1873 marked a turning point. Britain’s in
dustrial primacy began to be challenged by countries that sheltered
behind protective tariffs. Such demonstrations of the effectiveness of
administrative action in economic matters was followed by a veritable
avalanche of managerial intervention aimed at altering patterns of
supply and demand by deliberate policy. The pioneers sometimes
sought private profit,^1 sometimes the welfare of the poor, and some
times more efficient warfare. But all three pursuits ran parallel and
with increasing power to affect human behavior.
This constituted a remarkable change in the organization of society.
In retrospect one can see that the industrialization of war, so casually
launched in the 1840s, played a leading role in forwarding the transi
tion to managed economies. But this denouement was hidden from the
actors of the age itself by the fact that before the 1880s initiative for
technical change nearly always rested with private inventors who
hoped to make money by persuading the authorities to change some as
pect of existing weaponry or production methods. Plenty of cranks
and crackpots competed with those who did have a technically sound
innovation to peddle; and until the 1880s the prevailing attitude
among officers charged with deciding whether to approve technical
change was one of extreme skepticism toward the claims that eager
salesmen made for their new gadgets.
Commercial and National Armaments Rivalries
The ritual routine of army and navy life as developed across centuries
discouraged innovation of any kind. Only when civilian techniques
had advanced clearly and unmistakably beyond levels already incor
porated into military and naval practice, did it become possible to
overcome official inertia and conservatism. About midcentury this
situation presented itself more dramatically in maritime than in mili-
- Cf. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
