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N. N. CONSTANTINESCU (Bucharest, Romania) The Problem of the Industrial Revolution in Romania Study of the Romanian industrial revolution began nearly two decades ago. Romanian historians before World War II ignored the highly important problem of the stages of capitalist development from the viewpoint of labor productivity- simple cooperation, manufacturing, and mechanization. Earlier historians consider- ed factories to be not only manufacturing plants (large workshops organized on the basis of internal division of labor or of the techniques of manual work), but also shops based on simple cooperation in which some wage earners were simultaneously engaged in similar manual work and artisan artels. The confusion between small- scale and capitalist production of goods, as well as between simple cooperation, and factories-that machines-is charac- manufacturing plants, is, enterprises using ' teristic even in the works of such great historians as Alexandru D. Xenopol and Nicolae Iorga. This explains N. P. Arcadian's statement, in the introductory part of his work on the industrialization of Romania published in 1936, that "the oldest factory in this country may be one for glassware, established by Matei Basarab in 1650, or more probably by one of his predecessors, inasmuch as there were glass- blowers in Trrgovi5te in 1621."l One of the hindrances to research on the history of Romanian industry before World War II was the pseudo-theory of "Romania-an eminently agricultural country," propagated by retrograde ideologists. Moreover, because of this theory, no industrial statistics of consequence were collected in Romania between the 1859-60 census of "industrial establishments," published by D. P. Marxian in 1863, and the industrial inquiry of 1901-02. In discussing Romania's industrial development, the economist Virgil Madgearu considered that his country had "entered the path of industrialization in the most recent period, 1890-1914";2 significantly, however, he pretended that "there was no industrial proletariat" in Romania before World War 1.3 The problem, of the industrial revolution, as any other historical problem, cannot be solved except by the scientific analysis of historical materials-of the facts. The facts, as we shall see in the following pages, show that there was also a process of industrial revolution in Romania. 1. N. P. Arcadian, Industrializarea României, 2nd ed. (Bucure3ti: Imprimeria nationala, 1936), p. 69. 2. Virgil N. Madgearu, Evolulia economiei românejti dupä razboiul mondial (Bucure?ti: Independenia economica, 1940), p. 135. 3. Ibid, p. 21. 210 The industrial revolution, an historical process involving the replacement of manual by mechanized labor, occurred during the transition from handicrafts to the factory system of capitalist production. Because this process created the technical- material basis of capitalism, it also determined capitalism's stability and its victory. The industrial revolution had, therefore, two levels: technical-the transition from manual to mechanized production, and socioeconomic. The scope, rate, and the profoundness of the industrial revolution differed from country to country accord- ing to historical circumstances, conditions, and time it took for production to pass from manual labor to the factory system. That is why, in comparison with the classical model of the industrial revolution in England, the industrial revolution process in other countries displayed numerous differences. First of all, in contrast to the industrial revolution in England, which is of world importance for opening the machine age, the industrial revolution in Romania, as well as in other countries, is only of local importance. The primary historical factor affecting the Romanian industrial revolution was that unlike the English economy, which benefited from the conditions of a centralized state, the Romanian economy during the period of the industrial revolution was not within a unified state. Until 1859, the three Romanian principalities of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia were separate entities, and in 1859 only Moldavia and Wallachia were unified; unification with Transylvania occurred in 1918. Despite close, organic economic connections between the Romanian lands, lack of unity had important negative consequences on the unfolding of the industrial revolution. The country's economic and especially industrial development was hampered by the Turkish yoke on the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia until 1877, and the Habsburg yoke on Transylvania until 1918. In England, capitalism developed early and rapidly due to the abolition of serf- dom, the liquidation of feudal divisions, the success of the revolution of 1640-60, and the unrestrained development of primitive accumulations. Manufacturing de- veloped greatly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century; the industrial revolu- tion began in the last third of the eighteenth and lasted until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. On Romania's territory the situation differed; not only did manufacturing begin to develop later-especially in the second half of the eighteenth century-but the manufacturing stage of capitalism had not yet begun to mature when the progress of European industry brought the huge problem of introducing machines. Of course, the industrial backwardness of the Romanian lands is explained both in the division of the state as well as in the Turkish and Habsburg yokes; but it also results largely from the prevalence of serfdom until a late date (1848 in Transylvania and 1864 in the United Principalities) as well as from the difficulties in the process of primitive accumulation of capital in Romania, and especially from the insufficient domestic, primitive accumulations of capital. Although the first machines were used in Romania before the maturity of the manufacturing stage and the abolition of serfdom, they were not important in production until the abolition of serfdom. This created more favorable conditions for the development of industry, and consequently for the industrial revolution; .

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