I think in some ways I should have been in the last session and Congress should have been in this
session because we already broached the environment and I'm not going to be talking about it much.
What I really want to stress is the idea that we've tended to think of deindustrialisation as an established fact in the 19th century,
which I think is basically incorrect.
I think there is a really interesting question which remains which is there was industrialisation everywhere in the world,
but could it have been greater? This is, to my mind, is a much more interesting question than the deindustrialisation.
One gene to when I said this to him in Lausanne got really annoyed with me.
And this is kind of old style and dependency theory idea of deindustrialisation.
I think there is a sense that the West may have prevented the creation of modern industry.
And the question is, does it do it through colonialism? Does it do it through soft power?
And Kyra, of course, has shown that writing the rules of the game doesn't always go the way you expect it.
And that in many ways, free trade in Asia benefits in Japan much more than it benefited those who wrote those rules.
But this is the soft power model. Now what do I mean by industry?
I got caught up with this by Maxine Berg, who I think she's here,
but I gave a version of this paper in Warwick, and so I'm not sure that I've got a good definition.
I think these three ideas we talked about energy already machinery factories.
The trouble is that these things you can find in different combinations at different times, in different places.
I've tried, I'm doing as a case study of the Philippines trying to look at industrialisation in the late Spanish period in the 19th century,
and I tried to use installed horsepower as a kind of rough index.
But the trouble is that even the Americans with their efficient census of 1982 to three, they asked the question to everybody.
And roughly half or more of the people didn't answer the question.
So we don't have what I hoped would be a kind of benchmark of the end of the Spanish period.
This is what we all expect factories to look like on modern industries look like.
And of course, half the time it doesn't. Then there's been a recent shift from the kind of job to type dependency theory to Jeffrey Williamson,
who's arguing it's not really imperialism, whether soft or hard.
It's really free trade, because the terms of trade favoured are Ontario's labour moved into that sector.
I think that's that's true. That's quite a good point.
But then he argues that that involves lower skills, lower productivity and higher price volatility.
So this is his book. I think we spoke a little bit about books which engender debate, but which are not terribly good.
I would say this is in that category. I quite strongly disagree with virtually everything, he says, but it is quite it's quite a provocative book.
And yes, Jeff himself, of course, has taken part in some of the deliberations of organised by Patrick.
So our problems with Jeff's thesis. One of them, which I'd like to encourage you to look at more, is the question of futures markets.
A lot of the price volatility is hedged by the emergence of futures markets.
And of course, it's true that direct producers don't often have access, particularly peasants.
Nevertheless, the people who they sell to the merchants do have access to futures markets,
and the question of volatility then is, I think, more complicated than Williamson says.
I also think that the labour productivity thing is a chicken and egg problem.
I think in many ways there is low productivity in the global south.
But is it a result of moving into primary production or is it a cause of I mean, is there are there other causes rather which lower productivity?
We all know about stinginess of colonialism, but one of the things which I've been struck by my own work is how colonialism was actually
quite often less stingy in the provision of public goods than independent states.
I've done a comparison between the Gold Coast of modern Ghana and Bahia in Brazil, and my God,
the Brazilian authorities were a lot stronger than the Gold Coast authorities in terms
of providing anything at all for the taxes that they screwed out of the coca producers.
Oops. Sorry, wrong one.
So this is a monument to the first known futures markets in rice futures markets in Japan, surprisingly early, many ways under the 17th century.
There is a slight countervailing current, and I'm a very great fan of Ken Pomerantz is not the great divergence,
but the Pacific in the age of early industrialisation, which is the edited collection by Ken,
which I think actually is a very good set of studies show.
How you get industrialisation occurring right around the world from the early 19th century,
this is the book itself with a very unexciting Rutledge cover, which Routledge seems to specialise in.
So one sort of strand of this is the question of artisans, and we all know the idea that artisans are ruined.
Karl Marx is famous statement cos Karl Marx have never been to India, so he didn't see the bones of the cotton weavers.
But this is the sort of person we're talking about.
And if you put in deindustrialisation, if you type it into the internet, this is the image that springs up.
So they've gone from producing cotton cloth, being the workshop of the world to producing raw cotton.
Now this cotton is almost certainly industrially baled. Right?
So it's actually a very bad illustration of the idea that you get a complete wipe out.
In fact, as to funk art, of course, is very famously shown. Artisans don't disappear.
They this is also true elsewhere. So this is your tanker's book, which I think is an extremely important milestone in this.
But we've got other ones. We've spoken very little about the Middle East at this conference, I think is a bit unfortunate.
The Middle East has been largely left out, but we get a similar process sent by Syria for anarchy by part of IS, maybe for Iran again,
very important and very under use book because you wrote in French and not as French is no longer really much of a second language and most recently,
this, this author's being quoted earlier for something else. But this is just come out on the history of chin crafts now.
Crafts that's fairly loaded word in its own right now.
It's undoubtedly the fact that some artisans were negatively affected.
But of course, the point is that weavers actually benefited from the rise of cheap, reliable factory made threads.
So we get a kind of dual situation where spinning goes backwards, but weaving develops.
Much less known, I think, is in fact, the dyes and embroideries benefited from the creation of cheap factory made cloth.
I've looked at this for batik, for instance, and for embroidery batik in Indonesia,
embroidery in the Middle East, and we get exactly the same pattern.
And most interesting of all,
I think in years tanker's book is the the idea that certain artisans turn into industrialists slowly by kind of process of osmosis.
And I think his case study of the brass in Moradabad, near Delhi, this is one of these workshops, which, you know, looks very traditional.
But the fascinating thing is that they invest in machinery in energy and become really particularly in the Second World War,
come off to become really important industrialists.
We also tend to underestimate the industrialisation of services because we always think that we do have to be talk-,
we're talking about tangible goods. But in fact, what we find is the service sector from the 19th century diverges quite strongly.
Bits of the service sector become very highly industrialised and the repair and maintenance workshops for
this newly industrialised services transport services very often turn into industrial enterprises over time.
I think it's how Dick has looked at this for Indonesia, where you get the shift from repair and maintenance into manufacturing.
This is, you know, fairly obvious pictures, although this one is interesting because this is a railway which had very little economic benefit.
This is really to justify the Ottoman sultan continuing as the Khalifa of the faithful.
This is, of course, a service sector which is very slow to industrialise, and nowadays it has industrialise.
But you could argue that it's very retarder kind of sector.
But the thing I'm most interested in is the is the export substitution industrialisation through the processing of so-called raw materials.
And I think this is one of the areas we've got to be really careful with our language. We use this term raw materials all the time.
And if you look at them, they're often not very raw at all. And they're increasingly less raw.
So that all this emphasis on finished consumer goods, I think, needs to be thrown out the window.
That's not really what's important at the beginning of the 19th century.
It's the adding of value through and through industrial investment in so-called raw materials, sometimes also industrially extracted.
This is an early photograph of gold mines in South Africa, where industrialisation is going to the actual extraction process.
But most of the times to South Africa again, the industrialisation is occurring at the processing stage, the extraction of gold from the oil.
So we get all sorts of reasons, perhaps for this industrialisation to occur, some of which are technical.
And that's all. That said, not to change the argument. You have to process stuff because it spoils.
Right? I've worked on a number of different commodities where if you don't process them quickly,
they're basically either dropped completely like meat and fish, or they become less effective in whatever they're meant to be doing.
Also, to save transport costs of certain materials are very expensive transport,
and if you process them at source, you actually reduce your transport costs very considerably.
This is quite an interesting pick, just as from vector-borne of Thomas's history,
when we get the real factory in the field, the sugar factory in the field and of course, with the locomotive in front.
And Cuba is one of the most precocious areas in the world in the adoption of new industrialised transport services,
which I think is often forgotten by which John Kerry Machado, for instance, says this is true came grinding.
You can see what how sugarcane really is a factor in the field. Sugar packing is in colonial Taiwan.
The Japanese had earlier developed sugar. This is a very interesting picture of a tea lost factor.
I think this is in Java and actually being able to. You can see the the steam machinery right at the front.
But a lot of this is actually not machine based industry.
It's actually just providing loads of rooms in which you can do various things to the tea leaf.
This is a modern examples from Mozambique cashew processing and meat and fish, I think often forgotten in this kind of non spoiling.
Now we've got a real problem with statistics. I think one of the reasons why some of this has gone unnoticed is that customs service is right
around the world tend to be quite conservative in the labelling of certain categories of goods.
And once these established, they tend to go on forever.
Although to be fair to customs authorities, they often introduced various footnotes and various subdivisions,
which historians have rather cavalierly, I think, ignored. So this is a Spanish import statistics in which you get really interesting.
I can't see a sorry bad photograph, but I think, ah, the cover is that's a highly processed, highly industrially processed good.
And then we have cocoa in Ghana, which is virtually unprocessed,
and the two are put in exactly the same category within the Spanish import statistics in 1898.
This is another one of my famous examples.
So creating factory in Japan, the product of this, which I think is so jam, is always, always called raw silk.
There's nothing raw about this at all.
I mean, this really is a crazy piece of of labelling, but really quite reputable historians have fallen into this trap of calling this raw silk.
It's not. It's not raw. We have a real problem, which I'd be really glad of getting some help with,
which is why the same commodities process to differing degrees in different places.
I think there's a number of possible reasons for this. I don't think distance to markets which have been put forward is actually very important.
But I think the available factors of production for setting up modern factory industry are probably much more important.
So some extent colonies of rich or poor countries are important to this has to do with the degree of protectionism.
So I give you the example here this is cassiterite sound, which is exported as such from the Jos Plateau in Nigeria.
Instead of making it into tin, this is tin smelting in Australia.
You can see what large scale industrial process this involves.
Another example this is from Belize, where you're doing all the fashioning of the timber by hand.
This is a Japanese electric sawmill in East Sumatra and exactly the same period where you've got a really high degree of mechanisation.
And interestingly,
the use of electricity in Indonesia is actually quite a pioneer in the use of electricity for manufacturing for reasons which are not entirely clear.
So one of the reasons for this then, particularly in poorer and more backward metropolises,
is that workers tried to stop colonial processing to save their jobs at home.
Senegalese groundnuts a good example of this you can't press them into oil in Dakar because the workers in Marseilles want to keep their jobs.
So here we have the ground not ready for export in which risk.
And this is an early 19th century Marseilles soap factory. Interestingly, of course,
moving from olive oil olive oil used to be the reason why there was certain manufacturing in this area to imported colonial groundnuts.
So this export substitution industrialisation that I think is hugely benefited by free trade.
The real economies of scale for the world market.
Australia succeeds essentially on World Japan, as we had earlier, essentially on tea and silk better process than their Chinese rivals.
I was interested to hear from currency was largely with firewood and charcoal, which I didn't know.
It's just early stages of Japanese manufacture.
This is a tea factory in Japan and tea labels, this is tea labels showing that some of the markets for Japanese tea were in North Africa,
which is something I'm working on at the moment.
Consumer goods, I think, are more effects for some consumer goods industrialisation from the early 19th century.
But it's unusual. Indian case, which is ignored by Williamson, is largely a story of Indian yarn.
Replacing British yarn in the Indian Ocean and Chinese sea markets have been then replaced by Japanese yarn and its term.
Early textile mill in India, a certain amount of pretty uncompetitive consumer goods and ISI pushed through by settlers.
Example from South Africa.
And then we got the second period, which Williamson sees as a more positive period for industrialisation was, I think, in many ways,
much more negative period when free trade collapses and nationalism becomes obsessed with import substitution industrialisation of consumer goods.
Kwame Nkrumah in the gold has been a very good example of this. What we get then, is a very poor quality industry.
It's poorly planned, poorly coordinated, badly integrated with artisans, very badly sighted.
This is hashtag has some of the best critiques of particularly Turkish siting of import substitution industrialisation,
which is just mind bogglingly crazy. And of course, we get better about my neighbour policies, which the most famous example is India.
Setting up a sugar industry against Java basically through protectionist methods is a large sugar factory in colonial Java,
and this is a sugar factory in India. Catalysts are, I think, terribly divided coming to capitalism at last.
Metropolitan manufacturers the musées argument inefficient, declining sectors essentially tried to stop colonial industrialisation.
Entrepreneurs and dynamic sectors think of developing it with the French thinking of Vietnam as a new Japan.
This is Ramos's book is 1984 long time ago and yet in many ways, perhaps it's written in French again.
Same problem has had less of an impact than myself expected. Jacques Marseille, a former Communist Communist militant,
also noted that workers in the West were a very important group in trying to damp down colonial industrialisation in a time,
of course, of growing structural unemployment.
And Lenin argued in a slightly different vein, actually, that workers at home in the tropics were bribed by distribution of surplus value.
But I think it that I say raise this really interesting question is to what extent organised
labour was responsible for slowing down the industrialisation of the Third World.
This is the take in long term sugar refinery. Why not refine?
Why did you go through all these processes except refining a source?
And this is the Iron Tin smelter of the built on supply, which caused great problems for the Malaysian Peninsula tin smelters,
which were at that time already exporting tin as ninety nine point six per cent pure tin metal.
So in conclusion, then I'm arguing against Jeffrey Williamson and saying that, eh, there was much more manufacturing than we thought.
B that actually his periodisation is completely the wrong way round.
The free trade period was a much better period than the final collapse of free trade, but I think we do need to do the spadework.
We need to look at actual rates as far as possible of industrial growth in the global south.
And we need to bear in mind that Massey's very productive, important contribution on the role of Western labour.
Thank you.