Growth in industrializing regions was accompanied by sometimes
catastrophic decline elsewhere. As productivity rose in the new hub regions,
regional differentials in wealth and power widened. The once awesome
power of ancient tribute-taking empires evaporated. China’s share of global
production fell from 33% in 1800 to 6% in 1900, and in the 1840s, British
gunboats forced China to trade in opium with the remarkably hypocritical
argument that they were defending free trade. China was then forced to
accept humiliating controls on its foreign trade. By 1900, states from the
new hub regions dominated much of the world, directly or indirectly.
This sudden transformation depended in part on new industrial weaponry.
The ¿ rst successful machine gun, the Gatling gun, was used in the later
stages of the American Civil War. It could ¿ re 1,000 rounds a minute. The
Maxim gun, the ¿ rst machine gun to use a belt feed, was invented in 1884
and used by British troops in the Matabele war in 1893–1894. Hilaire Belloc
wrote, with vicious irony:
Whatever happens
We have got
The Maxim gun
And they have not.—(Belloc, The Modern Traveler)The vast regional differences in wealth and power that are familiar today ¿ rst
appeared in the late 19th century. Mike Davis has shown that it was in the late
19 th century, for the ¿ rst time, that differences in living standards between
different parts of the world began to widen sharply. This was when the “third
world” was born (Christian, Maps of Time, pp. 435–36).
This lecture has traced how the Modern Revolution spread around the world,
transforming governments and cultures as well as economies. It also showed
how industrialization created new regional disparities in wealth and power.
Would these changes continue? Yes, and they would even accelerate in the
20 th century. Ŷ