272 DESTINY DISRUPTED
textile looms. Anyone who possessed a power loom could now outproduce
rival cloth makers and drive them out of business-unless the rivals ac-
quired power looms too; so they all did.
But anyone who had the capital to acquire two power looms, ten
looms, a hundred, could drive out many many many many competitors
and grow rich, rich, rich! All the money to be made got clever tinkerers
wondering what else could be manufactured by fuel-driven geared ma-
chinery. Shoes? Yes. Furniture? Yes. Spoons? Absolutely. In fact, once peo-
ple got started, they came to find that almost every item in common use
could be made by some fuel-driven machine faster, cheaper, and in much
greater quantities than by hand. And who wouldn't want to be a shoe ty-
coon? Or a spoon tycoon or any kind of tycoon?
Of course, this process left countless artisans and craftspeople out of
work, but this is where nineteenth-century Europe differed from tenth-
century China. In Europe, those who had the means to install industrial
machinery had no particular responsibility for those whose livelihood
would be destroyed by a sudden abundance of cheap, machine-made
goods. Nor were the folks they affected downstream their kinfolk or fellow
tribesmen, just strangers whom they had never met and would never know
by name. What's more, it was somebody else's job to deal with the social
disruptions caused by widespread unemployment, not theirs. Going ahead
with industrialization didn't signify some moral flaw in them; it merely re-
flected the way this particular society was compartmentalized.
The Industrial Revolution could take place only where certain social pre-
conditions existed, and in Europe at that time they happened to exist. The
Industrial Revolution also had inevitable social consequences and in Europe,
at that point, turning production over to machinery did change societies,
daily life, and Europeans themselves. Let us count (some of) the ways:
- Rural areas emptied into exploding new cities.
- Animals vanished from daily life for most people.
- Clock and calendar time became more important than natural
time markers such as the sun and the moon. - Large family networks dissolved, and the nuclear family-one
man, one woman, and their children-became the universally ac-
cepted default unit of the industrial age.