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4. The Great Divergence – World since 1800

I know that the English millocracy intend to endow with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminishing expenses the and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses and , you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication….The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry (Marx (1853)).

Introduction

As we saw, it is not clear when the great turning point in , the Industrial

Revolution, actually arrived. Arguments can be made for dating this to the , arguments can be made for dating it only to the late nineteenth century. But certainly by 1860 there was a steady expansion of the production possibilities year by year through the development of new production knowledge in the most advanced economies.

We also saw that modern economic growth stemmed ultimately from an increase in knowledge, rather than from physical , or from the exploitation of natural . This, it would seem, should have ensured the rapid spread of the Industrial

Revolution across the world. For while developing new knowledge was an arduous task, copying innovations was much easier. In particular the new of the classic Industrial

Revolution were not particularly sophisticated. Thus they were quickly transmitted to other

European countries despite British bans on exports of machinery and of artisans. Table 1 shows how long it took for a range of discoveries originating in Britain before 1850 to reach other parts of and other parts of the world. The increasing prosperity and economic power of Britain impressed both governments and individuals in foreign countries. There was thus a rapid response in terms of attempts to import the new British technologies. A series of Acts were passed in Britain in the eighteenth century restricting the export of both artisans and machinery, 1

plans, or models in the and other industries. Only after 1825 were artisans free to take employment abroad, and only after 1842 was the export of machinery liberalized.1 How much these legal prohibitions slowed the export of British is not known, but machines and workers did flow to other countries.2

In table 1 the time taken to start steam railways is a good indicator of the time it took to notice an innovation in Britain in the period and organize the capital and expertise to export it. As can be seen even though the railway in its modern form was not fully developed until the Liverpool-Manchester line of 1830, adoption of railways was rapid in many countries. By 1840 ten countries had established rail lines of their own. India had completed a railway by 1853 even though it was one of the world’s poorest countries. Thus the lag in diffusion of technology is modest even in the early nineteenth century. Similarly if we look at the earlier Watt we again see modest lags.

The of the World Economy

In the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century there were a series of technological, organizational and political developments that seemed to imply the integration of all countries into a new industrialized world.

The technological changes were the development of railways, steamships, the telegraph, the mechanized factory. The organizational change was the development of specialized machine building firms in Britain, and later the USA, whose business was the export of technology. The political changes were the extension of European colonial empires to large parts of and

Asia, and political developments within European countries.

1 Henderson (1965), pp. 4, 139-41.

2

Technology

The world before 1800 was one in which information and people traveled at astonishingly slow speeds. We have a nice example of the speed of information flow for the later for example, from the work of Duncan-Jones. Legal documents in Roman

Egypt under the Empire listed both the calendar date and the name of the reigning emperor.

When the emperor changed in Rome there was thus a period when legal documents had, incorrectly, the name of the previous emperor. The length of this period indicates how long it took information to get to Egypt.

If a document survived for every day of the year then the first document after the transition with the name of the new emperor, or the last document with the name of the old emperor, would tell exactly the length of time information transmittal took. But since few documents survive for each transition between emperors, the first document with the correct name of emperor provides just an upper bound on the time of transmittal. Equally the last document with the wrong Emperor name is a lower bound on the time needed for information to arrive. But if we take the mean of these two dates for each transition between emperor then we will have an unbiased estimator of the correct time for information transmittal. The estimated average number of days for transmission of this information are shown in table 2. In the Roman

Empire, along a major route, information flowed at an average speed of 0.7 miles per hour.

We also have estimates of travel speeds in the Mediterranean circa 1500 from the diaries of

Venetians. These show the lapse in time between events occurring elsewhere, and a report of them in the Venetian diaries. These time intervals are also shown in table 2.

2 It was estimated that by 1824 there were up to 1,400 British artisans in alone. Ibid., p. 141f. 3

Even by 1800 information flows were not much faster. The Times did not print

news of Nelson’s triumph at the Battle of the on August 1, 1798 until October 2, 62 days later. That is an average speed of travel of the news of 1.5 miles per hour. Nelson’s victory over the French and glorious death at Trafalgar off the Portuguese cost on October 21, 1805 was first reported on in the Times on Nov 7, 17 days later. This is faster, but still a speed of travel of news of only 2.7 miles per hour. Table 3 gives a general tabulation of how long it took news of events elsewhere in the world to reach the Times of London. Information was flowing about 2-3 times as rapidly in the early nineteenth century than it did in the Mediterranean before 1600. But these are still really slow speeds.

In the course of the nineteenth century both the speed and the costs of land transportation, even in the poorest countries, were revolutionized by the spread of railways. Table 4 shows the miles of railroad completed in selected countries by 1850, 1890, and 1910. The great expansion of the rail network in the late nineteenth century, even in countries otherwise little affected by the Industrial Revolution such as Russia and India, improved communication immensely.

Ocean transport was similarly revolutionized in this period by the development of faster more cost-effective ocean steamships. Already by the 1830s and 1840s steam ships were faster and more punctual than sailing ships, but they were used only for the most valuable and urgent freight such as mail because of their very high consumption which limited the amount of cargo they could carry. To sail from Bombay to Aden in 1830 the Hugh Lindsay "had to fill its hold and cabins and pile its decks with coal, barely leaving enough room for the crew and the mail." (Headrick (1988), p. 24). The liner Britannia in the 1840s required 640 tons of coal to cross the Atlantic with 225 tons of cargo. Thus even in the 1850s steam power was used only for perishable cargoes, and only then even on some routes.

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But in the 1850s and 1860s four innovations lowered the cost of steam ocean transport:

the screw propeller, iron hulls, compound engines, and surface condensers. Screw propellers

translated power into motion in the water more effectively. Iron hulled boats were 30-40%

lighter and gave 15% more cargo capacity for a given amount of steam power. Compound

engines converted coal into mechanical power more efficiently. Surface condensers conserved on water. Previously ocean steamships had to use seawater to make steam which produced corrosion and fouling of the engine.

These last two innovations greatly reduced the coal consumption of engines per horse- power per hour. In the 1830s it took 4 kg to produce one hp-hour, but by 1881 it was down to

0.8 kg. This directly reduced costs but since it also allowed ships to carry less coal and more cargo there was a further reduction in costs. Real ocean freight rates fell by nearly 35% from

1870 to 1910.

Steamship speeds were also increasing. On the Atlantic the Great Western in 1838 had a maximum speed of 9 knots per hour. By 1907 the Mauretania could make 25 knots per hour, nearly three times as fast.3 The speed of travel to the East was further enhanced by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The canal saved 41% of the distance on the journey from London to

Bombay and 32% of the distance on the journey from London to Shanghai. In 1914 the Panama

Canal had similarly dramatic effects on transportation distances between Europe and the West

Coast of the .

The last of the important technical innovations in the late nineteenth century was the

development of submarine cables for the telegraph. In the 1840s before the telegraph it took 5 to

8 months for a letter to go from Britain to India. Thus if an Indian firm bought British textile

machinery and ran into problems with it, it would take then at best ten months to receive any

3 Kirkaldy (1914), Appendix XVIII. 5

return communication from the machine builders. In 1851 the first submarine telegraph cable

was laid between France and , and by 1866 a successful transatlantic telegraph

had been established. By 1865 India was linked to Britain by a telegraph system partly over land

which could transmit messages in 24 hours.

These changes together made the world a much smaller place in the late nineteenth

century than it had been earlier. With the telegraph, rail, and steamship it was possible to send

information across the world in much faster time. Table 3 shows the enormous increases in the

speed of flow of information after the 1850s. The steamship and railroad also made travel faster

and much more reliable for people and . And the development of the steamship made the

cost of reaching far-flung places quite low as long as they had good access to ocean navigation.

The technological basis for the export of the Industrial Revolution technologies to almost any country in the world thus seemed to have been completed by the 1860s if not earlier.

In 1907, for example, it cost ₤0.4 to carry a ton of cotton goods by rail the 30 miles from

Manchester to Liverpool, but only ₤1.5 to ship those goods the 7,250 miles from Liverpool to

Bombay. Since a volume ton of cotton at that time would have a of about ₤--, these costs represented a mere --% of the value of the product. In comparison the rate for cotton goods carried from Bombay to London by the in 1794 was nearly ₤30 per ton. In terms of day shipping costs to the East were only 2% the level of 1794 by 1906.

Much of this decline in costs was achieved by the 1840s, still with sailing vessels and before the

Suez Canal opened. In the 1840s it cost ₤-- per ton to ship goods from Calcutta to England.4

By the late nineteenth century industrial locations with good water access which were on

well established shipping routes – Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Shanghai, Hong Kong – could get

access to all the industrial inputs of Britain at costs not too much higher than many firms in

4 McGregor (1850), p…. 6

Britain. Table 5 shows, for example shipping costs per ton for cotton goods from ports in

England to various destinations in 1907. By 1907 production of goods like cotton textiles was feasible anywhere in the world close to an ocean port.

Table 6 shows the costs of another important industrial input, energy, measured as coal costs at various ports around the world, standardized to the in tons of Welsh steaming coal.

The low shipping costs meant that English coal was available in a surprising range of ports across the world. In 1907 steamers at such distant locations as Singapore, Colombo, Alexandria,

Buenos Ares, and Istanbul could fuel using English coal. Coal costs were higher in many countries than in northern Europe and the USA, but the range of costs for such a heavy material as coal, found in such uneven across the world, was remarkably small, little more than 2:1.

The last of the technological changes was the introduction of the mechanized factory. As noted in chapter 8, the Industrial Revolution in Britain had as its centerpiece a revolution in the cotton textile industry, with the adoption of the of production and its associated new machinery. The textile industry was revolutionary in that output per unit of inputs rose rapidly from 1770 onwards. But it was also revolutionary in its ability to employ, with minimal supervision, large numbers of unskilled and uneducated workers. The replacement of skilled lifetime workers by cheaper types of labor did not occur at once, and was not completely possible until the development of the ring spindle in the late nineteenth century. But all through the nineteenth century adult males, traditionally the most expensive and intractable form of labor, were less than 30% of cotton textile operatives even in Britain where skill-intensive mule predominated (Deane and Cole (1962), 190). By the late 1930s for example, when the

Japanese cotton spinning industry had labor levels not much below that of Britain,

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the labor force in was 88.5% female, the average age of female cotton operatives was 17.0 years, and the average length of service was 2.33 years.5

The ability of the textile industry to keep both operative skills and education and the need

for supervision to a minimum is well illustrated by ring spinning. This was a new spinning

technique developed in the nineteenth century which was successful in part because it minimized

the skill demands on workers. Since then the tasks in ring spinning have consisted of all or some

of the following five tasks:

1. Piecing. This consists of twisting together the broken pieces of thread or roving when a break occurs in the spinning process.

2. Creeling. This is when the spinner replaces the bobbins supplying the roving to

the spindle when they have been depleted or are about to be depleted.

3. Cleaning. This consists of wiping away tufts of loose cotton fibers which

accumulate on the spinning frames.

4. Doffing. This is when operatives remove the full bobbins of spun yarn and

replaces them with empty bobbins. This is normally done at regular intervals by specialized

squads of doffers.

5. Patrolling. Walking around the machines inspecting for spindles in need of

operations 1 to 3.

There are also a variety of ancillary tasks such as oiling the machines and sweeping the

floor which are done by specialist ancillary workers at regular intervals.

The organization of the work is very simple. Each spinner ("piecer" in India) is assigned

a set of spindles. During work hours the spinner walks around the set of spindles on the same

path. Each spindle is inspected to see if it needs piecing, creeling or cleaning. If so the task is

5 Shindo (1961), 233-6. 8

performed. Thus spinners do not need to be literate. Nor do they need any special strength or dexterity. Nor do they need to plan ahead. They merely proceed from spindle to spindle doing whichever of the three tasks is necessary.

The tasks in carding, opening, drawing, and roving – the precursors to the actual spinning

– had exactly the same character. In the earlier tasks there was more creeling and doffing and less repairing of end breaks. It was just for these reasons that the textile industry was hailed by

some, and reviled by others, as the precursor of a new industrial order where work would be

machine regulated and machine paced.

Thus while the sophistication of technology was increasing after the industrial revolution,

for many production processes the tasks, by design, were simplified and routinized. Technology

might be designed by the countries with high levels of education after the Industrial Revolution,

but much of it was seemingly well fitted for employment in the poor economies such as India

and .

Organizational Changes

In the early nineteenth century a specialized machine building sector developed within

the Lancashire cotton industry. These machinery firms, some of which such as Platts were

exporting at least 50% of their production as early as 1845-1870, had an important role in

exporting textile technology. Such capital goods firms were able to provide a complete

"package" of services to prospective foreign entrants to the textile industry, which included

technical information, machinery, construction expertise, and managers and skilled operatives.

By 1913 the six largest machine producers employed over 30,000 workers (Bruland (1989), pp.

5, 6, 34). These firms reduced the risks to foreign entrepreneurs by such practices as giving them

machines on a trail basis, and undertaking to supply skilled workers to train the local labor force.

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Table 7 shows the number of orders for ring spinning frames Platt took (each order typically involved numbers of machines) for a sample of nine years in each of the periods 1890-

1914, and 1915-1934. Indeed for ring frames England was a small share of Platt’s throughout these years.

Similar capital goods exporters developed in the rail sectors, and later in the U.S. in the boot and shoe industry. In the railways British construction crews completed railways in many foreign countries under the captainship of such flamboyant entrepreneurs as Lord Brassey. The reason again for the oversees exodus was in part the saturation of the rail market within Britain by the 1870s after the boom years of railway construction. By 1875 in a boom lasting just forty- five years 71% of all the railway line ever constructed in Britain was completed. As Table 4 shows thereafter the major markets for British contractors and engine constructors were overseas. India, for example, got most of its railway equipment from Britain, and the Indian railway mileage by 1910 was significantly greater than that of Britain.

Political Changes

A number of political developments should have sped the export of technology in the nineteenth century. The most important of these was the expansion of the European colonial territories. By 1900 the European powers controlled as 35% of the land surface of the world, even excluding from this reckoning Asiatic Russia. Thus of a world area of 57.7 million square miles Europe itself constitutes only 3.8 m square miles, but by 1900 its dependencies covered 19.8 m square miles. The was the largest covering 9.0 m square miles, the French had 4.6 m square miles, The 2.0 m square miles, and 1.2 m square miles.

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Even many countries formally outside of the control of European powers were forced to cede trading privileges and special rights to Europeans. Thus China was forced in the course of the nineteenth century to cede various treaty ports such as Shanghai to the imperialists. The political control by countries such as Britain of so much of the world allowed entrepreneurs to export machinery and techniques to low areas with little risk of expropriation. Thus the great increase in the scope and effectiveness of British political power in the course of the nineteenth century made it easier to export capital from Britain to support new textile industries.

Most of the Indian subcontinent and of Burma was brought under British administrative control in 1858, and Egypt fell under effective British control in 1882. In 1842 the British secured Hong Kong from China, and in 1858 through the Treaty of Tien-Sin a concession in

Shanghai. These were all localities with very low wage rates and easy access to major sea routes. The joint effect of these technological and political developments was to create by 1900 an expanded British economy spanning the globe. British policy within its empire was to eliminate barriers to trade, and to allow economic activity to proceed wherever the market deemed most profitable. In India, for example, despite protests from local the British insisted on a policy between Britain and India. Any manufacturer who set up a in Bombay was assured that he or she would have access to the British market on the same terms as British mills.

The nature of British imperialism also ensured that no country was restrained from the development of industry up until 1917 by the absence of a local market of sufficient size.

Because of the British policy of free trade pursued in the nineteenth century Britain itself and most British dependencies were open to imports with no or else a low tariff for revenue purposes only. The large Indian market which took a large share of English textile production, for example, was open on the same terms to all foreign producers. There was a 3.5% revenue

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tariff on imports, but a countervailing tax was applied to local Indian mills at the insistence of

Manchester manufacturers. The Chinese textile market, at the insistence of the Imperial powers

was protected by a 5% ad valorem revenue tariff also.

The pre I was also a major element in reducing transport costs

on the oceans. Prior to the nineteenth century shipping rates were often driven up by outbreaks

of conflicts.

The world thus seemed poised for rapid economic growth, and a of

international income differences by the 1850s.

World Growth since 1800

What actually happened? The answer surprisingly is that the result of the Industrial

Revolution was a big increase in the disparity in incomes per capita between countries. Further

the divergence of national incomes and living standards continues to the present day. In a world

of ever more rapid communication of information, and ever falling transport costs, the gaps

between countries based on material living standards widen steadily. As table – of chapter 7

showed, the gap between material living standards in the richest and poorest economies of the

world is now 30 or 40 to 1, while in 1800 it was at most 2 or 3 to 1. Since material living

standards have increased only 10-12 fold successful economies such as England and the USA,

this implies that most likely some of the poorest economies now, places like Nigeria, are poorer

than the average society before the Industrial Revolution.

Thus figure 1 shows income per capita for a number of major countries or from

1700 to 1992, all measured relative to India. There is clear divergence in incomes per capita, at least up to 1978. There are signs in the figure of some convergence in the last period from 1978 to 1992. But this is in part because while in 1910 China and India were among the world’s

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poorest economies, by the 1990s a number of countries in Africa had become much poorer than

India. In 1910 India and China seem to have been the poorest countries in the world, and income

per capita varied by a factor of about 9 to 1 around the world. By 1990 the income in some Sub-

Saharan Africa countries was no higher than in India in 1910, and incomes per capita by then varied by a factor of about 30 to 1 around the world.

The most notable case of success was the USA that seems to have surpassed Britain in terms of income per capita before 1880. Thus by 1914 the USA was the richest economy in the world, and also the biggest economy with 17% of the entire material output of the world economy, a position it has remained in until this day. Within Europe a small group of countries

– Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland – drew close to British levels of industrial output per capita by the beginning of the War. These countries were all close to each other in north west Europe. Indeed if we were to look at industrial development in regional rather than

national terms in 1913 we would see that it was largely confined to two major areas. The first

was the North and Central USA in a belt running from New England to Wisconsin. The second

was a band a couple of hundred miles wide which ran Southeast from Britain through Belgium,

Northern France, Western Germany, Switzerland, and the North of . Outside of this core

area of industrialization, large areas of the world, including Europe, remained largely devoted to

peasant by 1914 as they had been in the 18th century. In 1914 the share of the

population employed in agriculture in Britain was a mere 8%, in Romania it was 80%, and in

Bulgaria 82%.

Outside Europe the effects of the Industrial Revolution in Britain more than 100 years

after its onset were even more slight in terms of the development of some huge areas such as

India and China. Estimated per capita industrial output actually declined in both India and China

up to 1914, as these countries moved into position of exporting raw materials (wheat, jute,

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indigo, and opium in the case of India) to pay for manufactured imports from Britain. Table 8 shows, for example, for British India the composition of its imports and exports in 1912. As a result of the Industrial Revolution and the British policy of free trade, low wage India found its comparative advantage in trade to be in exporting food and raw materials, and importing manufactured products. Indeed, most dramatically India raw cotton was being exported through

Bombay 6,851 miles to Lancashire mills, where workers paid 4-5 times the daily wages of mill operative in Bombay manufactured it into cloth, which was then shipped back 6,851 miles through Bombay to be sold back to the cultivators of the raw cotton. The net raw material export of India in 1912 was about $460 million. With Indian GDP measured in US at about

$11.5 b. in 1910 this implies that net exports of raw materials were about 4% of Indian GDP.

Since the agricultural sector experienced little measurable productivity growth in the years from

1870 to 1949, India benefited from the Industrial Revolution largely through improving terms of trade for its manufactured imports.

In the case of India because we have relatively good GDP figures back to 1873 we can measure its economic decline relative to Britain and the USA from 1873 until 2000. Figure 2 shows calculated GDP per capita in India from 1873 to 1998 measured relative to the USA and

Britain. India did show a substantial increase in absolute GDP per capita over these years. Real incomes per capita in 1998 were 3.6 times those estimated for 1873. But relative to both Britain and the USA Indian income per person fell from 1873 to the mid-1980s, before rising from 1987 to the present. As late as 1931, 150 years after the factory was introduced in Britain, less than

1% of Indian workers were employed in modern factory industries.

Many other countries that have witnessed a declining relative income level have done so in circumstances where political and social have suffered breakdowns. Thus many of the countries of Africa which are now among the world’s poorest have suffered from ethnic

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strife, and the collapse of political institutions, since their independence. But the Indian

economy experienced its decline in a long period of relative political and social stability, first

under British colonial rule until 1947, and even after independence.

The result of the Industrial Revolution was thus an increased concentration of world

economic output in a very small portion of the world. Two areas, and the USA,

with about 20% of the world’s population produced more than half the economic output of the

world by 1910. Table 9 shows the effects of the Great Divergence since 1800. It gives very rough estimates of the share of total output of Western Europe, North America and Oceania, and east and South relative to their shares of population.

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References

Clark, Gregory, "Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills,"

Journal of , 47, March 1987, 141-173.

Davis, Ralph. 1962. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Centuries. London: Macmillan.

Edelstein, Michael, 1982. Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism. The United

Kingdom, 1850-1914. New York: Press.

Headrick, Daniel. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism,

1850-1940. Oxford: , 1988.

Homer, Sidney and Richard Sylla, 1996. A History of Rates. Rutgers: Rutgers

University Press.

Kirkaldy, Adam W. 1914. British Shipping: Its History, Organization and Importance. London:

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.

Maddison, Angus. 1989. The world economy in the 20th century. Paris: OECD Publications and Information Center.

Marx, Karl. 1853. “The Future Results of British Rule in India.” New York Daily Tribune.

August 8.

Pamuk, Sevket. The and European , 1820-1913: trade, investment, and production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the

Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Prados de la Escosura , Leandro. 2000. “International Comparisons of Real Product, 1820-

1990: An Alternative Data Set” Explorations in Economic History, 37(1): 1-41.

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Wolcott, Susan and Gregory Clark. “Why Nations Fail: Managerial Decisions and Performance in Indian Cotton Textiles, 1890-1938.” Journal of Economic History, 59(2), June, 1999, 397-

423.

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Table 1: Time Lags in the Diffusion of Innovations

Newcomen Spinning Water Power Watt Steam Country Engine Jenny Frame Mule Loom Engine Railway

Great Britain 1712 1768 1769 1779 1800 1775 1825

France 1726 1772 1779 1800 - 1778 1832 Belgium 1721 - 1801 1821 - 1791 1835 Netherlands - - 1785 1839 - - - Germany 1722 1782 1783 1799 1842 1791 1835 Switzerland - - - - - 1824 1847 - - - - - 1789 1848 Portugal - - - - - 1803 - Italy - - - - - 1787 1839 Austria 1724 - - - - 1817 1838 Hungary 1733 - - - - 1803 - Sweden 1728 ------Russia - - - - - 1790 1838

U.S.A. 1755 1775 1789 1789 1811 1803 1830 Canada - - - - - 1811 1836 Brazil - - - - - 1810 1854 Argentina ------1857 Mexico - - - - - 1818 -

India - - - 1817 - 1800 1853

Notes: The Table gives the date of the first use I found recorded of the machine. Its use earlier than this date is possible.

Sources: Henderson (1965), Jeremy (1981), Pollard (1981), Rolt and Allen (1977), Tann and Breckin (1978), Woodruff (1976).

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Table 2: The Speed of Travel of Information in the Mediterranean

Period Journey Distance Days Observations Miles/hour (Great Circle)

AD 54-222 Italy to Egypt 1323 56 23 1.0

c. 1500 Damascus to 1514 80 56 0.8 c. 1500 Alexandria to Venice 1366 65 266 0.9 c. 1500 Lisbon to Venice 1189 46 35 1.1 c. 1500 Palermo to Venice 507 22 118 1.0

Source: Duncan-Jones (1990), pp. 7-29.

Source: http://www.indo.com/distance/

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Table 3: The Speed of Travel of Information to London, 1798 to 1914

Event Date Place First Times Days Distance Miles per Report (Great Circle) Hour

Battle of the Nile 08/01/1798 Egypt 10/02/1798 62 2,073 1.4

Trafalgar 10/21/1805 Portugal 11/07/180517 1,100 2.7 Earthquake, Kutch, 06/16/1819 India 11/16/1819 153 4,118 1.1 India Treaty of Nanking 08/29/1842 China 11/21/1842 84 5,597 2.8

Charge of the Light 10/25/1854 Crimea 11/11/1854 17 1,646 4.0 Brigade Indian Mutiny, 05/12/1857 India 06/27/1857 46 4,176 3.8 Delhi Massacre

Treaty of Tien-Sin 06/26/1858 Tianjin, China 09/16/1858 82 5,140 2.6

President Abraham 04/14/1865 Washington DC, 04/27/1865 13 3,674 11.8 Lincoln USA Assassinated

Assassination of 06/19/1867 Queretaro, 07/01/1867 12 5,545 19.3 Archduke Mexico Maximilian Assassination of 03/13/1881 St. Petersburg, 03/14/1881 0.458 1,309 119.0 Tzar Alexander II Russia

Nobi Earthquake 10/28/1891 Nobi, Japan 10/29/1891 1 5,916 246.5

Messina Strait 12/28/1908 Italy 12/29/1908 0.125 1,191 397.0 Earthquake

Assassination of 6/28/1914 Sarajevo 6/28/1914 0.354 1,007 118.5 Franz Ferdinand

Source: http://www.indo.com/cgi-bin/dist/

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Table 4: Railway Mileage Completed

1850 1890 1910

Britain 6,088 17,291 19,999 USA 9,021 208,152 351,767 Germany 3,639 26,638 38,034 France 1,811 20,679 25,156 Russia 311 19,012 41,373 India 0 16,918 32,789

Source:

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Table 5: Transport Costs from England in 1907, Cotton Goods

From To Ocean distance Cost per 40 ft3 (miles) (₤)

Manchester Bombay 6,851 0.93 Manchester Calcutta 8,751 1.50 Birkenhead Shanghai 11,676 1.66 Birkenhead Japan 12,461 1.66 Birkenhead Manila 10,667 2.08 Liverpool Java 9,441 1.88 Manchester Buenos Ares 6,844 1.75 Manchester Rio de Janeiro 5,577 3.25 Manchester Limon (Costa Rica) 5,337 2.38 Liverpool Sydney 12,366 1.78 Liverpool Cape Town 6,663 2.12 England Valparaiso 8,060 2.50 England Lagos 4,199 2.25

Source: Transport costs, Parliamentary Papers (1909). Distances http://www.geocities.com/eu84/frtop_files/distance.htm, http://www.indo.com/cgi-bin/dist/ Hydrographic Office (1944) Track chart of the world showing selected tracks with distances from place to place in nautical miles (Chart no 1262). Washington D.C.

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Table 6: Coal Costs at Ports around the World in 1907

Place Country Distance from Coal cost British Coal (modern) Cardiff (shillings per sold in this ton Welsh coal market? or equivalent)

Dartmouth England 19.3 Yes Rotterdam Netherlands 15.6 Yes Boston USA 16.9 No Bremen Germany 18.7 Yes Natal South Africa 6,663 18.7 No Stettin 19.3 Yes Copenhagen Denmark 19.6 Yes Algiers Algeria 21.8 Yes Le Havre France 22.0 Yes Charleston, S.C. USA 22.1 No Pireaus Greece 23.2 Yes Genoa Italy 23.3 Yes Naples Italy 24.0 Yes Bilbao Spain 24.5 Yes Shanghai China 11,676 24.6 No Constantinople Turkey 24.6 Yes Alexandria Egypt 25.9 Yes Melbourne Australia 12,366 27.7 No Bombay India 6,851 28.5 No Karachi Pakistan 28.7 No Yokohama Japan 12,461 28.9 No Capetown South Africa 30.5 No St Vincent St Vincent 31.0 Yes Hong Kong China 31.6 No Colombo Sri Lanka 34.3 Yes Singapore Singapore 9,441 34.6 Yes Rio de Janeiro Brazil 5,577 36.0 Yes Buenos Ares Argentina 6,844 39.0 Yes Mauritius Mauritius 40.1 Yes

Source: Parliamentary Papers (1909).

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Table 7: Platt Ring Frame Orders by Country, 1890-1936

Country Sales, 1890-1914 Sales, 1914-1936 (9 years) (9 years)

Austria 4 0 Belgium 17 15 Brazil 95 43 Canada 15 17 China 5 64 Czechoslovakia 14 10 Egypt 0 5 England 110 74 Finland 1 0 France 41 31 Germany 47 6 Guatemala 1 1 Hungary 0 4 India 66 132 Italy 69 29 Japan 66 117 Mexico 75 7 Netherlands 7 2 Nicaragua 2 0 Peru 7 0 Poland 41 8 Portugal 8 0 Russia 131 23 Spain 95 35 Sweden 3 0 Switzerland 3 0 Turkey 0 6 USA 2 0 West Africa 0 2

Source: Platt Ring Frame Order Books, Lancashire Record Office.

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Table 8: The Commodity Trade of British India, 1912-13

Commodity Imports Exports Net Exports $ m. $ m. $ m.

Grain, pulse and flour 0.42 195.64 195.21 Jute, raw 0.00 87.76 87.76 Cotton-raw 7.21 91.20 83.99 Seeds 0.00 73.68 73.68 Hides and Skins 0.71 53.11 52.40 0.23 43.13 42.90 Opium 0.00 36.41 36.41 Oils 16.94 2.78 -14.15 Sugar 46.33 0.00 -46.33 Other raw materials 34.20 64.79 30.58

All Raw Materials 106.04 648.50 542.46

Cotton-piece goods 195.73 39.58 -156.15 Jute-piece goods 0.00 74.20 74.20 50.30 3.48 -46.81 Railway plant 20.77 0.00 -20.77 Hardware 17.57 0.00 -17.57 Other Manufactures 108.88 5.99 -102.90

All Manufactures 393.25 123.26 -270.00

Source: United States, Department of (1915), Bureau of Foreign and Domestic

Commerce, Special Consular Reports, No. 72, British India (Washington: Government

Office, 1915).

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Table 9: World Population and Income Shares, 1800-2000

Year Western Western North North East and East and Europe, N Europe, America, America, South Asia, South Asia, GDP Oceania, N Oceania, GDP N GDP

1800 1860 1910 15.9 31.5 5.9 19.8 56.1 24.0 1950 2000

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Figure 1: Incomes per Capita Relative to India

Sources: 1700, 1820, Maddison (1989), 1910, Prados de la Escosura (2000) and Maddison

(1989), 1952, 1978 and 1992, Penn World Tables.

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Figure 2: Indian GDP per Capita relative to Britain and the USA, 1873 to 1998

Sources: India. Pre-1947, Heston (1983). 1950-1980, Penn World Tables (PWT 5.6). 1981-

1998, Statesforum. USA. 1873-1929, Balke and Gordon (1992). Economic Report of the

President (2001). /Britain. 1873-1965, Feinstein (1972), 1965-1998, United

Kingdom, National Statistical Office.

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