As is remarked in the Introduction to the third volume of the Cambridge History of Africa, there are obvious pitfalls in marking out periods of African history which are equally valid for all parts of the continent. Africa is a vast land mass, and also the only one to be centred in the tropics. It has presented quite as many and as varied difficulties for its human inhabitants to master as it has resources to be exploited. Thus until the general world-wide acceleration of processes of change brought about by the rise and spread of modern scientific technology, there could be extremely wide variations in the degrees of social and material development to be found among African peoples. During the very long period of history covered by this volume these differences seem to have been accentuated by the fact that the more temperate lands north of the Sahara (and to some extent the eastern littoral also) were in much closer touch with developments in other parts of the world than were the great tropical heartlands of the continent or its southerly temperate zone.

A by-product of this fact that historians cannot escape is an imbalance of historical source materials for the period. Some of the implications of this are more fully discussed later in this Introduction. Here no more need be said than that this imbalance makes it possible to consider the course and the significance of events in northern Africa in greater detail and with less recourse to hypothesis or speculation than is the case for the other three-quarters of the continent.

Introduction

By ‘industrialization’, for the purpose of this study, is understood a process of change in time at the centre of which is a switch from manufacture of commodities by hand to that using machinery and mechanical motive power. It marks the rise of ‘modern industry’, absorbing increasing proportions of fixed capital relative to circulating capital. Its corollary is the factory system, entailing the problems of recruiting, training, and managing a spatially concentrated labour force and of apportioning resources between various factors of production in accordance with the nature of the individual enterprise and its ultimate aim of maximizing profit.

In the long run, and at a pace and in patterns differing with individual economies, industrialization releases processes of change in the nature of society, in the composition of the labour force, in the structure of the GNP, and in incomes per head.

In Russia ‘modern industry’ of any significance dates from the 1830s, when it was confined by and large to the cotton-spinning and beet-sugar industries. By 1861, a date conventionally regarded as the watershed separating modern from traditional Russia, about 85 per cent of sugar and about 90 per cent of cotton yarn was produced in factories by mechanical means. In these two industries there was undoubtedly continuity across the watershed of the Emancipation of serfs in 1861. Other industries, however, were only marginally affected by the new methods of manufacture: cotton-weaving remained at the handicraft stage, and mining, metallurgy, and metal-processing in particular remained backward and traditional.

Introduction: Modern Business Enterprise

Large business enterprises have come to dominate American production, distribution, transportation, finance, and services. Such enterprises have been products of, and prime movers in, the rapid industrialization of the United States. Indeed, this new institutional form now plays a major role in all the urban and industrial economies of the non-Communist world. Giant business organizations have become hallmarks of the twentieth century.

Modern business enterprise makes use of more workers, managers, owners, machines, materials, and money than any other economic institution in history. Because of its size, it is impersonal in tone and bureaucratic in organization. Its managers, workers, and owners cannot possibly come to know one another. Its control requires the creation of a carefully defined hierarchy of offices, each with its own functions and responsibilities. The lines of authority, responsibility, and communication among offices are also carefully defined. Detailed accounts and other statistical and financial data flow through these channels. Control through statistics has become a basic managerial art. The managers of these enterprises make their careers in a single industry and often in a single firm. They are rarely, if ever, owners of their enterprises, for nearly all the enterprises are ‘publicly owned’ corporations in a legal sense, and their stock is held by thousands or even tens of thousands of shareholders. In only 15.5 per cent of the 200 largest corporations in 1963 did an individual, family, or group hold as much as 10 per cent of the stock.

Size and Structure of the Labour Force

The industrial revolution in Germany is generally dated from the 1840s. It exerted too localized an initial impact, however, to significantly relieve the pressure on subsistence caused by the rise in population from 15 million in 1750 to 35 million in 1850. The heavy emigration that began in the 1840s reduced the annual rate of population growth from over 1 per cent between 1815 and 1843 to 0.7 per cent between 1843 and 1871. The spread of industrialization then permitted the rate of growth to recover to 1 per cent per annum between 1871 and 1890 and to rise to no less than 1.4 per cent per annum between 1890 and 1914, when the population reached 67 million.

Food prices largely determined the timing of the migration of the one million emigrants who had left – mainly from the West and South – before 1860. Unprecedented peaks were recorded when rye prices soared in 1846–8 and again in 1853–5. Emigration from East Germany rose rapidly once land reclamation ground to a halt in the 1860s. The great boom of 1871–3 stimulated high internal migration in West Germany, but failed to divert most East Elbian migrants from American destinations. Both internal migration and emigration declined abruptly in the general slump from 1874 to 1878. The American recovery after 1879, coinciding with agricultural depression in East Germany, released a pent-up emigrant backlog. The emigration rate reached 4 per thousand between 1880 and 1885, when about a million emigrants left Germany.

Introduction

Even though neglected by historians since E. Levasseur and a few other precursors, the demographic analysis of the labour force has been the subject of much contemporary attention, and it is not surprising that the failings of historians have been redeemed by demographers and economists. One fundamental demographic fact is apparent, however: the weakness of French population growth from the 1800s until the 1940s. With its 28.3 million inhabitants at the end of the eighteenth century, France was the ‘China of Europe’, accounting for 15 to 16 per cent of its population, while Napoleon's military success was based largely on her big battalions. But this population growth was checked very early and slowed down after 1850, when it reached 35.7 million. In 1911, France's 39.6 million inhabitants made up only 9 per cent of the European total, and the density of her population was the lowest on the continent, at a level in 1846 that Great Britain had reached in 1775. The population increased by only 14 per cent in 60 years or so, as against 78 per cent in Great Britain, 64 per cent in the Netherlands, 56 per cent in Belgium, and 57 per cent in Germany. The nineteenth century, long considered the period of decisive transformation, was in fact one of stagnation, and a catastrophe intervened after the First World War before a spectacular reversal of the situation, in a twentieth century which, beneath superficially confused trends, was to prove an epoch of real change.