CHAPTER VII
ECONOMIC CHANGE
One of the most interesting phenomena of modern world-history is the twofold conquest of the East by the West. The word "conquest" is usually employed in a political sense, and calls up visions of embattled armies subduing foreign lands and lording it over distant peoples. Such political conquests in the Orient did of course occur, and we have already seen how, during the past century, the decrepit states of the Near and Middle East fell an easy prey to the armed might of the European Powers.
But what is not so generally realized is the fact that this political conquest was paralleled by an economic conquest perhaps even more complete and probably destined to produce changes of an even more profound and enduring character.
The root-cause of this economic conquest was the Industrial Revolution. Just as the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama gave Europe the strategic mastery of the ocean and thereby the political mastery of the world, so the technical inventions of the later eighteenth century which inaugurated the Industrial Revolution gave Europe the economic mastery of the world. These inventions in fact heralded a new Age of Discovery, this time into the realms of science. The results were, if possible, more momentous even than those of the age of geographical discovery three centuries before. They gave our race such increased mastery over the resources of nature that the ensuing transformation of economic life swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things.
This transformation was, indeed, unprecedented in the world's history. Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature's hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of previous generations.
When I say "Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the white man of Europe and its racial settlements overseas. It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this, and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine-industry with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favoured a prodigious increase in economic power and wealth in Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and exchange.
Such was the industrially revolutionized West which confronted an East as backward and stagnant in economics as it was in politics and the art of war. In fact, the East was virtually devoid of either industry or business, as we understand these terms to-day. Economically, the East was on an agricultural basis, the economic unit being the self-supporting, semi-isolated village. Oriental "industries" were handicrafts, carried on by relatively small numbers of artisans, usually working by and for themselves. Their products, while often exquisite in quality, were largely luxuries, and were always produced by such slow, antiquated methods that their quantity was limited and their market price relatively high. Despite very low wages, therefore, Asiatic products not only could not compete in the world-market with European and American machine-made, mass-produced articles, but were hard hit in their home-markets as well.