INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 273
- The connection between people and place weakened as new eco-
nomic realities demanded mobility: people had to go where the
work was, and suddenly the work could be anywhere. - The connection between generations weakened, as most individ-
uals no longer had any useful work skills to learn from their par-
ents and little of value to pass on to their kids. The best parents
could do for their children was to make sure they had the basic
skills needed to flex, learn, and adapt. Thus, more broadly than
ever before, reading, writing, and arithmetic became the indis-
pensable skills of functional individuals. - And finally, psychological adaptability-an ability to constantly
relinquish old values and ideas and embrace new ones-became a
competitive asset.
All these changes generated anxiety, but it was not catastrophic anxi-
ety, because Europeans (and Americans even more) had already evolved a
complex of attitudes enabling them to cope, and the core of this complex
was individualism, an orientation that had taken centuries to develop in
the West.
When Europeans came to the Islamic world, they brought along goods
that were the end products of the Industrial Revolution, but not the evo-
lutionary processes that made those goods possible. Muslims wanted the
products, of course, as who wouldn't: the cheap doth, the machine-made
shoes, the packaged dried goods and whatnot, and saw no reason why they
should not have them. They could buy and operate any machine the West
could make. They could take the machines apart, study how they were
built, and make similar machines themselves. Nothing in the manufactur-
ing process lay beyond their comprehension.
But the social underpinnings were a different matter. The precondi-
tions of industrialization could not be instantly imported. The social con-
sequences could not be so easily absorbed in societies structured so
differently from those of western Europe.
In the Ottoman world, for example, manufacturing had long been in the
hands of guilds, which were interwoven with Sufi orders, which were inter-
woven with the machinery of the Ottoman state and society, which was in-
terlinked with the fact that every person had numerous tribal affiliations,