260 Chapter Sevenarising from their steady development of new industrial and commer
cial activities. Great Britain, on the contrary, maintained a high birth
rate until the end of the century but from the 1850s found it possible
to export those who could not find suitable employment at home as
settlers in distant lands overseas.^50 The Germanies, too, found the
British recipe for coping with population growth—i.e., rapid industri
alization supplemented by emigration—generally effective; and by the
1880s, lands farther east in Europe began to react in similar fashion to
overcrowding in peasant villages.^51
As far as western Europe was concerned, therefore, by about 1850
the factor that had been so unsettling to Old Regime institutions and
governments a century earlier seemed to have come under satis
factory control at last. The stormy passage of the French revolutionary
wars and the first onset of the industrial revolution had begun to
recede into the past. For the next ten decades, liberal ideas of peace,
prosperity, free trade, and private property attained greater plausibil
ity than before or since.
After a lapse of more than a century, it is easy to find fault with the
narrow sympathies and ethnocentric outlook of nineteenth-century
liberals, whether in Britain, France, Germany, or America. Yet even if
the tide of social change since the 1870s has turned towards collective
forms of human action and seems to have reinstated the primacy of the
command principle in human affairs, it still seems appropriate to em
phasize the truly extraordinary character of the world dominance Brit
ain and France briefly exercised in the period between 1840 and 1880.
Cheap machine-made goods and cheap machine-based superiority of
armed force were both available for export, and exported they were.
As a result, the world was united into a single interacting whole as
- Overseas settlement as a safety valve for British and other European populations
was enormously facilitated by the fact that vast and fertile regions of the earth were
drastically depopulated when diseases of civilization attacked the native populations of
such places as Australia, South Africa, North and South America. It consequently
became possible to settle and develop these half-emptied lands without using any but
the most trifling military force. Russian expansion into central Asia required rather
more resort to force because it impinged on populations already inured to civilised
diseases; the same was true in other Moslem lands, whether of Africa or the Middle
East. On disease and European expansion, cf. W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New
York, 1976), chap. 5.
5 1. An adequate account of nineteenth-century European migration—both of indus
trial techniques and of population—remains to be written, but cf. D. F. Macdonald,
“The Great Migration,” in C. J. Bartlett, ed., Britain Pre-eminent: Studies of British
World Influence in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1969), pp. 54–75 for a brief
conspectus of one half of the phenomenon. He estimates that 23 million persons left
Europe for overseas destinations between 1750 and 1900, of whom 10 million came
from the British Isles.