These figures of the production and consumption of iron, coal and copper tell the story of an economic interdependence that makes isolated industrial life virtually impossible. Manufacturing and transport depend for their maintenance upon minerals and fuels, and those countries that propose to manufacture and to transport must either produce minerals themselves or depend upon some other country that does produce them. In practice, a few countries are enabled to produce more of the minerals and fuels than they themselves use, and to sell the surplus to their needy neighbors.
With the spread of the industrial system, this dependence will increase rather than diminish because of the way in which the reserve supplies of minerals and fuels are distributed. The principal deposits of iron, coal, copper and petroleum are apparently in the Western Hemisphere, and particularly in North America. In so far as this is true, the remainder of the world will be compelled to look to the Americas for these basic commodities. Out of a total world product of iron ore (1913) of 177 millions of tons, the United States produced 63 millions (over a third) because that country is far better supplied with available iron ore deposits than is any other country. Since the war, France holds the second largest deposits, but the third largest are in Newfoundland, the fourth largest in Cuba, and the fifth largest in Brazil, whose "enormous deposits are almost untouched" ("Atlas," p. 26). As for coal, about three-fourths of the world's known reserves are in North America. The largest known reserves of copper are in North and South America—those of Canada and Mexico are comparatively important; those of Chili probably greater than any other country except the United States. Petroleum is also highly localized. Between 1857 and 1918 the world's production of petroleum was 1,005 millions of tons. Of this total, three-fifths came from the United States, while seventeen-twentieths came from the United States and Russia. Indeed, resources are limited and localized to such a point that the economic survival of many parts of the industrial world depends upon the continued importation of raw materials from other countries or from other continents.
This localization of resources has resulted in a corresponding localization of many of the basic industries. Germany thus became a manufacturing center and Argentina a producer of food. Necessarily these two countries exchange their products, the Germans eating Argentinian wheat reaped by German machinery. So complete has this specialization become, that industrial communities, and even industrial countries, like Britain and Germany, have ceased to produce sufficient food for their maintenance, and have relied, instead, on the American, African and Australian grain fields.[1]
In order to buy wheat, these countries must sell manufactured goods. In order to manufacture, they are compelled to import the raw materials and fuels—cotton, copper, rubber, petroleum, coal, iron. The countries with highly developed industries have therefore ceased to be self-sufficient. Their whole economic life has become a part and parcel of the life of the world.
This world interdependence is reflected in the growth of world commerce from a total value of 1,659 millions of dollars in 1820, 4,049 millions in 1850, and 20,105 millions in 1900, to 75,311 millions in 1919. Meanwhile, the nominal tonnage of steam and sailing vessels increased from 5.8 millions of tons in 1820 to 12.3 millions of tons in 1850, to 20.5 millions in 1900, and to 32.2 millions in 1919.
Resources are sought after, raw materials are transported and manufactured into usable products, manufactured products are exchanged for food and raw materials, and the cycle is thus completed. In its course, all of the principal countries and all of the continents are drawn upon for the means of maintaining economic life.
While the industrial revolution broke the spell of isolation that lay so heavily upon the remote parts of the world, the driving power of the economic forces that followed in its wake, has battered down the geographic barriers that separate men, almost to the vanishing point. Peoples work together, exchange the products of their labor, travel, accumulate and spread news, broadcast ideas and organize and co-ordinate business ventures and labor unions, without any great consideration for geography, and despite the political boundary lines that separate nations. A century of rapid economic development has brought the world into a physical unity the like of which it has never before experienced.
Through the ages, human brotherhood has been the theme of philosophers and poets. Recent economic changes have established a world fellowship, not, to be sure, of the kind about which utopists had dreamed, but one growing out of the exigencies of world interdependence.
Tens of millions are to-day co-operating in production and exchange, not because of any sweet reasonableness but because the pre-emptory demands of existence leave them no choice. Of necessity, therefore, since they are in constant touch with one another, they begin to learn one another's little ways; to inquire into the personalities of the "foreigners" that pass them on the street, work with them elbow to elbow in the shops, and eat with them at the same restaurant tables. This new brotherhood is an outgrowth of day-to-day relations in an industrial community.
Old time questions were of a kind that divided men. "Are you a Christian?" "Where were you born?" "Can you speak Spanish?" No matter how a man answered these questions he got himself into difficulty. If he was a Christian, he found two-thirds of the world confronting him with different religious beliefs. If he was born in France, he was compelled to assume all of the enmities, hatreds and antagonisms felt by Frenchmen for their rivals. If he spoke anything except Spanish, he was a "foreigner" in Spain. The old world was a separatist world, lined with walls, fences, boundary stakes and frontiers.