Lessons from the early Industrial Revolution

The King-Church combine

Anthropogenic climate change as of about 1800 started with the need for social change. Europe was filthy and disorganized. Few people lived long; many succumbed to disease and starvation. Women were almost never educated- but frequently burnt for being witches. While Papin and Leibnitz were inventing the steam engine, and Newton was writing his Principia Mathematica, London was hit by the plague and largely burnt down.

At that time, the social order was essentially ruled by kings and the Church. In France, Louis XIV alone controlled the minting of money and manufacture of arms and ammunition. Nothing could be printed there without his Imprimatur. His divine rights and powers were sanctified by the Church. There was no salvation outside it, and Constantine the Great had donated the entire Western Roman Empire to it. The Catholic Church thus theoretically owned Europe and delegated powers to puppet governments - symbolically by anointing monarchs. That is why the future Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Henry IV, had to cross the alps barefoot in the midwinter of 1077 to kiss the big toe of Pope Gregory VII at Canossa. Louis and his cardinals thus jointly enjoyed God-given monopolies to murder Frenchmen, tell them what to think, and pay legislators to lay down, and enforce, the law as they pleased. Princes and prelates lived in luxury, other people were mostly taxed and exploited into misery.

It was almost impossible to crack the King-Church combine in continental Europe. But England was far from Rome, and largely Protestant. People there had greater freedoms to think and believe as they pleased. During the 18^th century it seethed with new- and for that time- revolutionary ideas. See, for instance, the writings of J Locke, Erasmus Darwin- Charles' granddad, D Hume, and Adam Smith. These men had enormous faith in reason, science, democracy, free competition and enterprise. The English North Country was further from Rome and so poor, bleak and barren, that many people there did not merely protest against monarchical and ecclesiastical powers, they dissented- vigorously.

That self-confidence and idealism expressed itself practically in projects to use A Darby's coke fired iron smelters, J Watt's improved steam engine, J Priestly's chemistry... for the betterment of mankind. They realized that there was a great need for cheap goods mass-produced with the then most modern technologies. They also realized that researching and building blast furnaces, steel and textile mills, ceramic and glass works, cost much money that they did not have.

Adam Smith's Invisible Hand argument solved the problem. It enabled numerous small farmers, craftsmen and shopkeepers to deposit their savings with bankers. These savings hardly earned more interest than inflation. The banks freely combined and invested them into highly profitable high-tech mass-production industries. Textile mills using R Arkwright's spinning and weaving machines were soon bankrupting hand looms. Mass-produced mugs and plates rolled out of J Wedgwood's ceramics factories, and assembly-line hardware - horse shoes, axles, screws, nails.. put village smithies out of business. Mechanized seed sowing drills (J Tull), and horse drawn reapers enabled rich industrialists to undersell, buy out, and consolidate small farms into agribusinesses.

As rural communities were ruined in the 18^th century, villagers streamed to towns to become minimum wage slaves in dark satanic mills. Corn laws were also passed to facilitate cheap imports while village commons were enclosed and incorporated into huge private estates.