INDUSTRIALISM AND WORLD HISTORY

I. STAGES OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS:

A. Western Europe and the United States, from 1760 to 1900

B. Russia and Japan, from 1880s onward

C. Pacific Rim, Turkey, India, Brazil and other parts of Latin America, from 1960s onward.

II. FOUR GLOBAL EXAMPLES OF INDUSTRIALISM:

A.      Transforming Sugar Plantations in Cuba

B.       Liebigs Beef in Uruguay

“Gelatine, when taken in the dissolved state, is again converted, in the body, into cellular tissue, membrane and cartilage; that it may serve for the reproduction of such parts of these tissues as have been wasted, and for their growth.” (Liebig)

C.  Silk Industry in Japan

D. French “mission civilisatrice” in Indochina:

III. The Positive Side of Industrialization:

A.     Inventions:

Kindergarten…Friedrich Froebel, 1837

Medical Advances…xrays, vaccines,

Printing…Friedrich Gottlob Koenig and

Andreas Friedrich Bauer, 1812, created a steam powered printer made it possible to print thousands of copies of a page in a day.

B.    Art:

Town Anthem of Yawata, Japan:

Billows of smoke filling the sky

Our steel plant, grandeur unmatched

Yawata, O Yawata, our city!

Wordsworth:

“Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” (1833)

               MOTIONS and Means, on land and sea at war

          With old poetic feeling, not for this,

          Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!

          Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar

          The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar

          To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense

          Of future change, that point of vision, whence

          May be discovered what in soul ye are.

          In spite of all that beauty may disown

          In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace                

          Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time,

          Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,

          Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown

          Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

The Erie Canal:

Charles Dickens: “exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came glancing off from everything; the gliding on at night so noiselessly, past frowning hills sullen with dark trees and sometimes angry in one red, burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by any noise of wheels or steam or any other sound than the limpid rippling of the water as the boat went on; all these were pure delights.”

IV. THE SAD TRUTH OF GLOBALIZED INDUSTRIALIZATION:

A. Art

“Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested….The spectator’s process of association in the view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind.” (Benjamin, 238).

Marx noted the fetish of the machinery of industrialism:

“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The newfangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to have become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy.”

B. New Forms of Discipline:

            How is your life ordered?

In Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, Foucault wrote,

“In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time, nothing must remain idle or useless: everything must be called upon to form the support of the act required.”

You are an industrial creation….