Debunking the Myth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Occasional Paper March 2022 Ian Moll Debunking the Myth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Occasional Paper March 2022 Ian Moll About REAL The Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL) is a research centre in the School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand. It conducts cutting edge research, offers teaching programmes and provides support to policy makers and regulatory institutions on areas of theoretical, practical, and policy concern focused on the complex relationships between education, knowledge, work, the economy, and society with an aim to promote social, economic and ecological sustainability and a more just society. Acknowledgments The author thanks the following colleagues for generative critical comments on earlier versions of this paper: S’tha Ndlovu, Yael Shalem, Lynne Slonimsky, Barry Dwolatsky, Reuben Dlamini, David Cooper, Wayne Hugo, Yvonne Reed, Bobbie Louton, Mandla Nhlapo and James Avis. About the author Ian Moll is a research fellow in the Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL) He was retired as an academic member of the Division of Educational Information and Engineering Technology at the end of 2021. His interests lie in the networked society, theoretical psychology, learning and pedagogy, and e-learning. This paper is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ISSN Centre for Researching Education and Labour, Wits School of Education (Faculty of Humanities) University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Private Bag X3 Wits 2050 South Africa Introduction 2 Background: Schwab and Rifkin 3 The First Industrial Revolution – 1760 to 1850 4 Methodology: An Industrial Revolution, properly conceived 10 The Second Industrial Revolution – 1865-1914 16 The absence of Industrial Revolution – 1915 to 1965 22 The Third Industrial Revolution – 1969 to the present 24 The technologies of the Third Industrial Revolution 30 Digitalization 32 Artificial Intelligence 32 Robotics 33 Machine learning 34 Internet of Things 35 Cyber-Physical Systems 36 Big Data 37 Blockchain 38 3D Printing 39 Revolutionary technology and technological revolutions 39 The convergence of technologies 43 There is no Fourth Industrial Revolution 51 Recycling 4IR ideology 54 Conclusion 60 Notes 62 References 66 Contents 2 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION There once was a prophet, technophile Schwab All dressed up in revolutionary garb Should his 4IR hold sway? That’ll be the friggin’ day It really does not help les miserables Introduction The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is all the rage these days.1 In ideological terms, it appears to be hegemonic in its construal of our contemporary socioeconomic context, from our day-to-day interpersonal exchanges to the machinations of the global economic order. We often hear appeals to the supposed “magic”2 of the technology that goes with it, to resolve the economic, political and educational crises and problems of the world (and latterly, its health crises – WEF, 2020). Appeals to a 4IR usually go with a listing of a whole lot of ‘new’, ‘unprecedented’ technologies that sound smart, make us feel outdated, and leave us in awe of the future. Technologies like cyber systems, artificial intelligence, delivery drones, the internet of things, and fully autonomous killer robots.3 But it is around this misleading sense of awe – which I shall later refer to as an ideology – that my argument turns in this paper. None of these technologies necessarily warrants the claim that we are in a technological revolution, let alone a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. I shall examine these and similar technologies, to establish my claim. The argument also runs deeper than that. An industrial revolution, properly conceived, encompasses a complex range of economic, social and cultural transformations, and there is very little evidence to suggest that we are living through a fourth one of these. A careful, deep analysis of the First, Second and Third Industrial Revolutions will make this quite clear. What we discover in these three revolutions, by way of fundamental social transformation, is not taking place in the current context of the digital, networked, information society. This paper commences with an account of the dispute between Schwab (2016) and Rifkin (2011, 2016) about whether there is such a thing as a 4IR, to provide a context for subsequent arguments. It then moves to start to develop its main argument, that there is no such thing as a Fourth Industrial Revolution. First, an account of the First Industrial Revolution (1IR) is provided, based on an examination of historical literature. This establishes analytically that this period of history was one of fundamental, transcontinental change, characterized by complex, interconnected, mutually-dependent social and socioeconomic relations and practices, as well as economic and technical innovations. The significance of the 1IR, of course, is that it is the archetypal industrial revolution in historical and theoretical terms. From this history, a framework for the analysis of any industrial revolution can be derived; this is done here to establish the criteria that any social transformation must meet if it is to count as such. Having established this analytic framework, the argument then goes on to examine the Second Industrial Revolution (2IR) and the Third Industrial Revolution (3IR). Again through an analysis of historical literature, it is established that both of these meet the criteria to be considered as industrial revolutions. They did indeed take place, to the full extent of the social, economic and cultural relations that one might expect. The 3IR is also carefully examined in relation to the aggregate of technical innovations that characterize it, because this is crucial in determining whether or not we can meaningfully claim a revolution from the 3IR to a 4IR. The resolution reached here is that there is no evidence that we are living in a contemporary, society-wide, technological revolution of any sort. The final substantive section of the paper moves on to the much more important question of whether there is a contemporary industrial revolution that is fundamentally transforming society beyond the dominant everyday, economic, social, cultural and geopolitical realities of the 3IR. It argues that it is quite clear, on the basis of all the evidence adduced, that there is no such phenomenon. The last part of the paper is more illustrative. By way of a selection of quotations from a range of sectors, it shows how the ideological frame of the 4IR as a massively converged set of global, technological marvels has spread around the world, despite the fact that it is nonsense. 3DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Background: Schwab and Rifkin The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) pilgrimage to Davos in the Swiss Alps is often styled as the gathering of the world’s economic elites. Corporate heavyweights, heads of state, selected intellectuals, and their entourages gather to discuss and, importantly, strategize “the next big thing” in the exercise of global power. At Davos 2016, Klaus Schwab famously introduced (he would say disrupted) the world to the notion of the 4IR: We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity, what I consider to be the fourth industrial revolution is unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We have yet to grasp fully the speed and breadth of this new revolution. Consider the unlimited possibilities of having billions of people connected by mobile devices, giving rise to unprecedented processing power, storage capabilities and knowledge access. Or think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing, to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological worlds … The first industrial revolution … [was] Triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine, … The second industrial revolution … made mass production possible, fostered by the advent of electricity and the assembly line. The third industrial revolution began in the 1960s. It is usually called the computer or digital revolution because it was catalyzed by the development of semiconductors, mainframe computing, personal computing and the internet … I am convinced that the 4IR will be as powerful, impactful and historically important as the previous three (2016: 7 & 11 & 13; my emphases). He placed a great deal of emphasis on what he proclaimed to be the unprecedented speed, size and scope of the proclaimed 4IR, in relation to previous industrial revolutions. The velocity of change, he suggested, is exponential rather than linear; the combining of multiple technologies broader and deeper than ever before; and the systems impact is now total, across the whole of society and the world economy (2016, pp.8-9). This is why, he said, “disruption and innovation feel so acute today… innovation in terms of both its development and diffusion is faster than ever” (2016, p.14). Not far away, an expert contributor4 to the understanding of industrial revolutions, Jeremy Rifkin, was arguing that the WEF was “misfiring” with its 4IR intervention. Rifkin’s background is in an extensive ‘future of work’ literature, which explores the digitalization and automation of work in both offices and factories, attendant job losses, and the consequent ‘hollowing out’ of the middle classes in society (e.g. Rifkin, 1995; Zuboff, 1998; Gorz, 1999; Beck, 2000; Standing, 2009). He dates the emergence of the 3IR to the post World War II period (1995, p.61), but argues that its most significant impact was being felt only in the nineties – in computers, robots and software taking over strategic thinking and managerial functions, in relation to the production and distribution of goods. However, Rifkin notes how the ‘new generation of sophisticated ICTs being hurried into a wide variety of work situations… [replaces] human beings in countless tasks, forcing millions of blue and white collar workers into unemployment lines, or worse still, breadlines” (1995, p.3). So well before 2016, Rifkin was operating on the terrain onto which Schwab descended – but with a notable disagreement. Rifkin does not think that these dramatic changes to business processes, the workplace or society constitute a 4IR. Rifkin challenged Schwab’s claim that the fusion of technologies between the physical, digital and biological worlds is somehow a qualitatively a new phenomenon: The very nature of digitalization … is its ability to reduce communications, visual, auditory, physical, and biological systems, to pure information that can then be reorganized into vast interactive networks that operate much like complex ecosystems. In other words, it is the interconnected nature of digitalization technology that allows us to penetrate borders and “blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”. Digitalization’s modus operandi is “interconnectivity and network building.” That’s what digitalization has been doing, with increasing sophistication, for several decades. This is what defines the very architecture of the Third Industrial Revolution. (Rifkin, 2016) 4 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Rifkin went further, rejecting Schwab’s argument that an overall rapid increase in the velocity, scope and systems impact of new technologies implies a 4IR. He showed that it is the intrinsic interconnectedness of networked information technologies themselves, and the continuous, exponential decrease in digital technology costs, that produces changes in “velocity, scope, and systems impact”, and that this had been going on now for some thirty years. It was a misconception that Schwab saw this as a “new revolution”. So we sit here, in the first instance, inside a debate about contemporary technological innovation. Some have suggested that it does not matter whether or not we call it an extended 3IR or an emerging 4IR – we live in an era of widespread, rapid technological innovation, and this is what matters. This is not contentious (examples of this will be described below). The dispute is supposedly one of “semantics”. Unfortunately, though, this misses the point: the question is about whether there is rapid and fundamental social and political change – a revolution – taking place now, from the 3IR to a 4IR, and if so, what the implications of such a claim might be. The core contention underlying this paper is that the notion of a 4IR is ideology, and while it justifies certain practices, it does not exist as a substantive socio-economic phenomenon. As ideology, it functions to naturalize and obscure the deepening exploitation and marginalization of the world’s poorer nations and people (for a development of this argument, see Moll, 2022a). In the face of the serious possibility that the 4IR is nothing more than a myth, Schwab and his WEF pulled off a major coup at Davos in 2016. From then onwards, the notion that an unprecedented industrial revolution is upon us, has become ubiquitous in social, political and economic narratives around the world. In every sphere of life, the question on virtually everyone’s lips is, how can we make sure that we are ready for the 4IR? Alison Gillwald (2019) describes it as “one of the most successful lobbying and policy influence instruments of our time. … the WEF policy blueprints on the 4IR fill a vacuum for many countries that haven’t publicly invested in what they want their own futures to look like”. Perhaps the important lesson to be learned from all of this is that the most effective communication strategy by far, is to draw world leaders together in lavish and convivial surroundings, give them a free book, and send them back home with a formula that will convince their subjects, constituents, customers or clients that we are on the brink of a brand new world. The First Industrial Revolution – 1760 to 18505 There are two narratives of the 1IR that one encounters in the popular imagination. The first invokes the fantastical image of the Stephenson brothers driving their steam engine, ‘Rocket’, down a railway line through crowds of cheering, top-hatted men. In this account, the industrial revolution was “one of the most celebrated watersheds in human history”; it was “a response to the opportunity … of economic growth” (Allen, 2006, p.2). James Watt and his contemporaries invented the steam engine, the mechanical loom, the spinning jenny, and other innovative factory machines. Workers were no longer forced to work by hand, they could now use these machines, driven by water or steam power, to increase production. Labour was saved and productivity dramatically increased, e.g. in 1800, a cotton spinner could spin 200 times as much in a day as she could in 1700 (BBC, n.d.). Products could now be manufactured in factories, instead of just made at home. In this story, the 1IR was “fundamentally a technological revolution [focused on] the sources of invention” (Allen, 2006, p.2). The second narrative is also all too familiar: At the centre of most people’s picture of Britain’s industrial revolution in the nineteenth century stands the dark, satanic mill, where an exploited and dispirited army of men, women and children is engaged for starvation wages in a seemingly endless round of drudgery: the pace of their labour is determined by the persistent pulse of the steam engine and accompanied by the ceaseless clanking of machines; and the sole beneficiary of their efforts is the grasping, tyrannical, licentious factory master. (Bythell, 1983, p.17) The question is about whether there is rapid and fundamental social and political change – a revolution – taking place now, from the 3IR to a 4IR, and if so, what the implications of such a claim might be. 5DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Now both of these narratives might appear larger than life, but as Bythell (1983) points out, together they highlight the core of the social and economic transformation that characterized the 1IR, namely the emergence of the factory. It is the tension between economic production on the one hand, and the human degradation of broader social relationships on the other, that constitutes the ensemble of economic and social changes that we know as the 1IR. The revolution was not simply, nor fundamentally, technological. The imperatives that drove technical innovations of all kinds, including Watt’s famous steam engine, emerged from socioeconomic forces that were pushing the centres of economic production, and therefore people, out of the rural areas of Britain into the cities. A number of historians note that the 1IR in Britain represented a transition out of a feudal economy (Bythell, 1983; Deane, 1965; Heaton 1965; Hobsbawm, 1962; Knox, 1974; Marx and Engels, 1848; Reeve, 1971; Thompson, 1963). While the prevailing political system was a land-based, aristocratic one in which power was in the hands of a small governing class, there had for decades been a developing system of proto industries – styled as a ‘domestic cottage system’ – which supplied goods to rapidly expanding colonial markets. And it was not the traditional landed aristocracy that benefited most from these conditions. Behind Engels’ (1845) observation that, “before the introduction of machinery, the spinning and weaving of raw materials was carried on in the working- man’s home” (1845, p.51), lies the dramatic story of rise of the merchant bourgeoisie that is the social and political revolution known as the 1IR. “The domestic system, not less than the factory system which replaced it, was a method of mass production which enabled wealthy merchant-manufacturers to supply not only textile fabrics, but also items as diverse as ready-made clothes, hosiery boots and shoes, and hardware, to distant markets both at home and abroad” (Bythell, 1983, p.18). For some time in the eighteenth century, this network of cottage industries kept up the supply of commodities required by these ‘distant markets’. However, greater mass production was increasingly required to supply the Indian, North American and Caribbean colonies, let alone British consumers. Colonial mechanisms, at the centre of which was the rising class of increasingly wealthy, increasingly powerful merchant-manufacturers, were at work. For example, after the conquest of Bengal by the British East India Company in 1757, the massive imports of cheap textiles from England both undermined the home-spinning industry of Bengali village women, and increased the demand for cheaper imported cloth amongst Indians (Maddison, 1971; Heaton, 1965). Colonial markets, in general, were expanding in similar ways: English craftsmen and craftswomen, “were often, all unknowing, supplying the wants of West Indian slaves and North American frontiersman” (Bythell, 1983, p.19). The dependence being produced in the colonies saw British textile exports rising thirty-fold between the 1780s and the end of the Napoleonic wars circa 1815 (Deane, 1965, p. 89). This global demand for commodities was the death-knell for producers in cottage industries, who simply could not make enough quickly enough. Unprecedented mass production was required by world trade, and large-scale factories soon appeared in the cities, particularly in the north of England. Bythell (1983) points out that the same merchant-manufacturers who had profited from the organized cottage industry system, now turned their backs on it and became the new factory owners of the rising capitalist order. Factories represented major industrial growth, but the social consequences were devastating for the rural people whose livelihoods were now torn out from under them by the industrial revolution. As the famous English historian, Eric Hobsbawm, puts it, “in terms of economic productivity this social transformation was an immense success, in terms of human suffering, a tragedy … which reduced the rural poor to demoralized destitution” (1962, p.48). Cotton and textiles dominated the international cycles of production, distribution and consumption that constituted the 1IR. The Harvard historian, Sven Beckert (2014), makes the case that cotton was the 1IR’s “launching pad.” In replacing wool and flax in the manufacture of textiles and clothing, it made the mass production of clothing and textiles possible. Its strong fibres were uniquely suited to hard mechanical treatment by spinning and weaving The revolution was not simply, nor fundamentally, technological. The imperatives that drove technical innovations of all kinds, including Watt’s famous steam engine, emerged from socioeconomic forces that were pushing the centres of economic production, and therefore people, out of the rural areas of Britain into the cities. 6 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION machinery. Previously, from the sixteenth century, Britain (along with other European traders) had purchased cotton textiles in India for its own markets. Now, as colonization came into line with British manufacturing, the standard colonialist pattern of economic exploitation ensued: raw cotton was extracted from India, manufactured into textiles and clothing in Britain, and sold back into India at a significant profit. The Indian ‘homespun’ proto industries were quickly undermined. Soon, the cheaper cotton available from plantations in the Caribbean and American colonies undercut raw cotton exports from India. The consequences for India, increasing poverty and economic devastation, should be obvious. Beckert (2014) notes the irony that the British industrial revolution was built on a basic raw material, cotton, which was not produced locally at all. In the midst of all this industrial transformation, there were of course major technological innovations taking place all the time. It is worth emphasizing that, “for the economy as a whole to switch from manual techniques to mechanized production required hundreds of inventors, thousands of innovating entrepreneurs, and tens of thousands of mechanics, technicians, and dexterous rank and file workers” (Greenwood, 1999, p.8). The 1IR was indeed notable for its inventors and inventions. The steam engine was an iconic innovation of the period: James Watt’s invention in 1781 of a new type to power other machines in factories, and Stephenson’s Rocket hitting the railway lines in the 1820s. There were many others, especially in the textile industry: Crompton’s spinning mule, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Kay’s flying shuttle and Arkwright’s water frame. In America, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, a machine that separated cotton fibres from their seeds, added another 1IR technical innovation at the supply end of raw materials for British industry. These machines all contributed to a vast increase in the amount of cotton that could be spun or cloth that could be woven at any one time, thus propelling the expansion of the modern factory system. Kennedy (1993) suggests that, once the spinning mule was harnessed to steam power, the mechanization of manufacturing was inexorable. Technology developed rapidly in all kinds of factory situations. Cort’s puddling and rolling technique increased wrought iron production; Wilkinson’s gun-barreling machine made cylinders for steam engines; Maudley’s heavy-duty lathe went into factories for all kinds of purposes (Greenwood, 1999). It is reasonable to suggest that “no earlier technological breakthroughs produced anything like the rise in output that flowed from the Industrial Revolution” (Kennedy, 1993, p.8). However, this rapid development of the technologies of production brought with it the appalling, characteristic labour processes of the 1IR factory. Ironically, such conditions have been seen again only in today’s sweatshops in the global South, under the regime of the 3IR (or if you like, the putative 4IR) (see Mezzadri, 2017). Workers in British factories at the end of the eighteenth century laboured for long hours in intolerable conditions: “Suffering under awful conditions in factories and mines, they were organized alongside their machines in a strict, time-driven system of labour unlike anything known previously” (Kennedy, 1993, p.8). In contrast to work in the pre-industrial cottage system, factory workers lost autonomy in the work process, subject now to the factory hooter and the requirement that they keep the machinery turning. The exploitation of child labour was a particularly horrific feature of the 1IR. Children often worked in factories and mines in the most exploitative conditions possible; they could get into the nooks and crannies to oil up and maintain machines where no adults could. They were paid the least and forced to work in the most dangerous conditions. By 1841, over 45,000 boys and 60,000 girls in their teens worked in textile factories, and some 22,000 girls were clothing-makers (Tuttle, 2001; Humphries, 2013). 16% to 20% of the total work force in the textile factories were children under 14 (Cruikshank,1981, p.51). One-third of the work force of coal mines was under the age of 18. In 1842, there were some five thousand children between the ages of 5 and 10 working underground (Falkus, 1987, p.85). Engels (1845) aptly summed up the workers’ plight thus: “The industrial revolution has simply carried this [the exploitation of workers] out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity”. With this labour process went, inexorably, an emerging set of labour relations in the workplace. The factory became the crucible of the formation of new social classes. To use the everyday language of the factory floor, a clear hierarchy was set up of workers and bosses, in which the For the economy as a whole to switch from manual techniques to mechanized production required hundreds of inventors, thousands of innovating entrepreneurs, and tens of thousands of mechanics, technicians, and dexterous rank and file workers. 7DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION interests of these different classes differed from each other fundamentally: Where hundreds labour together under one roof and one direction as the normal type of work unit; it stresses the new importance of complex machine technology in the process of production; and it emphasizes that, because ownership of these machines, of the building which houses them and the engine which drives them, rests with the private capitalist, there exists an unbridgeable gulf between him and his property-less, wage-earning employees. (Bythell, 1983, pp.17-18) The English historian, E.P. Thompson (1963), suggests that “the outstanding fact” of the 1IR was the “formation of the working class” (1963, p.194). He shares a common understanding with most historians that the conditions of the factory floor thrust workers into “a competitive, scrambling, selfish system, a system by which the moral and social aspirations of the noblest of human beings are stultified” (1963, p.830). He reinforces the view that with the breakdown of rural proto industries, and the rise of the factory system, any mutuality of interest between employer and employee was lost. However, he is also at pains to emphasize the positive shared consciousness among English working people, who, “as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” (Thompson, 1963, p.11). It is no wonder that the issues surrounding labour in the factories of the 1IR provided fertile ground for the rallying call of the Communist Manifesto in 1848: “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has … simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – bourgeoisie and proletariat” (Marx and Engels, 1848, pp.14-15). If increased economic exploitation and workplace immiseration were straightforwardly the general conditions of the 1IR workplace, then the situation with regard to its socioeconomic and community-related consequences was more nuanced. If one were preparing a set of these ubiquitous notes on the Web to assist students to avoid reading and research, then one might be tempted to come up with something like Table 1, which describes differences without in any way understanding those differences. Table 1 A popular and misleading way to structure a school essay Social Impacts of the First Industrial Revolution POSITIVE NEGATIVE ¢ increase in wealth ¢ cheaper and more plentiful goods ¢ increased standard of living ¢ rise of professions and trades ¢ better housing ¢ technology development (machines, tools, vehicles) ¢ improved health care (vaccines, pasteurization, medical instruments) ¢ low wages ¢ urban poverty ¢ harsh and unsafe working conditions ¢ long working hours ¢ urban overcrowding (slums poor sewage contaminated water ¢ air and water pollution ¢ outbreak of disease (cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis) Hobsbawm (1962) points out that it was only after the 1830s that literature started appearing about ‘the rise of the capitalist society’ and the social effects of the industrial revolution. In this historical literature, there are frequent references to ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ interpretations of the 1IR. The former seems to emphasize the rising prosperity of Britain, the latter the degradation of the British working classes (Hobsbawm, 1963). One of the ‘optimists’, Allen (2019, p.111-112), argues that England was a highly prosperous country in the eighteenth century, “a long way down the social scale” – the average working class family consumed over three times as much subsistence goods annually as did workers in the rest of the world. Kennedy (1993) reinforces this view: “possessing greater manufacturing efficiency than any other society at that time and enjoying ever-higher standards of living, many Britons became proponents of laissez-faire economics and of an ‘open’ trading order” (1993, p.9). Many of the ‘optimistic’ authors write glowingly of the social, economic and technological advances of the period (Deane, 1965; Evans, 1983; Holland, 1968; Knox, 1974). It does indeed seem to be the case that, as a whole, Britain prospered at all of these levels during the 1IR, especially in relation to the rest of the world. Amongst other things, it was the dominant colonial power after the mid-eighteenth century, not least on the back of a liberal, free trade economic model that itself was generated by the context of the 1IR (Lange et al, 2006. p.1421). However, it does not take much further digging to discover that the prosperity of Britain as a whole was deeply 8 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION unequal in advancing the entire population of Britain. Kennedy (1993) immediately qualifies his optimism: “this is not to say the material benefits were immediate or, for that matter evenly distributed. Industrialization brought early gains to the entrepreneurs, inventors, mill owners, and their financial backers [as opposed to the ‘ordinary person’] who realized the new methods of manufacture would lead to enhanced profits” (1993, p.9). If one examines conventional economic population categories, then it is clear how this social cleavage permeated and consolidated itself in British society in the 1IR. Figure 1 shows starkly how, from 1759-1846, the average annual income per capita rose sharply for the bourgeoisie during the period, but hardly at all for the manufacturing workforce. The population as a whole grew considerably in this period, but it was the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, and not the labouring classes (about two-thirds of the population),6 who became wealthy, and benefitted from the improved standards of living, health care, housing and access to commodities that went with this population growth.7 It becomes clear that the ‘optimistic’ interpretations of the 1R mask the deepening of socioeconomic inequalities in Britain. As Haines and Walsh put it, “poverty stalked in the midst of plenty. While statistics revealed steadily mounting material welfare and the growth of national and per capita wealth, hundreds of thousands of wretchedly poor filled the slums of the great urban communities” (1941, p. 653). Evans epitomizes the triumphalist account of socioeconomic development: “The rise in the population of Britain during the eighteenth century… acted as a spur to industrial development… since it provided not only a potential workforce for workshop and factory but also rising demand for industrial goods” (1983, p.104). However, the inescapable truth of this population growth was appalling social conditions in the fast-growing cities and factory towns. Hobsbawm points out that the fact that the conditions of the labouring poor between 1815 and 1848 were intolerable, has not been denied by any reasonable observer (1962, p.205). Social housing provision was at the centre of these conditions. As factories boomed and markets grew, employers were forced to build houses for the prospective workers who migrated to the urban factories. These houses tended to be jerry-built, as cheaply as possible, in terraced rows or ‘back to back’, with shared, communal, ‘earth closet’ toilets (Thompson, 1963; Hobsbawm, 1962). The pressure of the population migration meant that, almost as soon as they were occupied, these housing quarters became overcrowded slums: [Everything combined to maximize] … the demoralization of the new urban and industrialized poor ... Towns and industrial areas grew rapidly, without plan or supervision, and the most elementary services of city life utterly failed to keep pace with it: street-cleaning, water supply, sanitation, not to mention working-class housing. The most obvious Figure 1 Increase in number of families and income per capita for three classes in British society from 1759 to 1846 (statistics from Allen 2019) 1759 1846 1759 1846 Number of families Average annual income per capita 2 600 000 650 000 364 000 £32 £13 £4 £15 £5 £3 1 100 000 188 000 84 000 Bourgeoisie Lower middle class Manufacturing workforce 9DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION consequence of this urban deterioration was the re-appearance of mass epidemics of contagious (mainly waterborne) disease, notably of the cholera. (Hobsbawm, 1962, p.203) Obviously, the mass of people who descended on the cities and industrial towns were not only the employed workers. Periodic bouts of unemployment were almost certainly extremely high, and contributed to overcrowding (Falkus, 1987, p.85); “a floating population of tens of thousands of unemployed slept on the ground overnight and poured into the streets the next day” (Kennedy, 1993, p.3). Health and sanitation deteriorated steadily. Problems with contaminated water, sewage, and garbage and solid waste disposal were widespread. “In the crowded cities ... garbage was thrown into the streets, rivers were polluted, and deaths from diseases such as cholera, smallpox, typhoid, and tuberculosis multiplied (Kennedy, 1993, p.96). Perhaps the most remarkable support for the ‘pessimistic’ interpretation of the 1IR comes from the fact that it was only “when the new epidemics sprung from the slums began to kill the rich also” (Hobsbawm, 1962, p.203), that something was done to intervene in the steady deterioration of working class housing and habitats. It took the 1842 Sanitary Conditions of the Working Classes inquiry, and the similar 1844 Health of Towns commission, as well as cholera epidemics in 1831 and 1848, to motivate the merchant-manufacturers to undertake systematic urban rebuilding and improvement of working class housing (Thompson, 1963, p.219). Last, but certainly not least, we must consider the expansion of colonialism and slavery as central features of the 1IR. The Trinidadian historian, Eric Williams, is known for the strong view that slavery funded the industrial revolution in Britain. He builds his thesis on the notion that the transatlantic slave trade provided a triple stimulus to British industry: The Negros were purchased with British manufactures; transported to the plantations, they produced sugar, cotton, indigo, molasses, and other tropical products, the processing of which created new industries in England; while the maintenance of the Negroes and their owners on the plantations provided another market for British industry … By 1750, there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial revolution. (Williams, 1944, p.52) Now subsequent historians have questioned the strong version of the ‘Williams thesis’, demonstrating in various ways that there were other forms of capital accumulation and sources of profit that also funded the revolution. One of the most recent historians of Atlantic trade summarizes the critical appraisal of Williams’ work thus: slavery neither produced nor funded capitalism, but “exchanges with the slave plantations helped British capitalism to make a breakthrough to industrialism and global hegemony ahead of its rivals” (Blackburn, 1997, p.573). Whether slavery played a key role in financing the industrial revolution or not, the political, economic, social and labour realities of this ‘triangular trade’ were an integral part of the 1IR. The 1IR was realized through slavery and cotton. We have already seen that cotton became the main raw material of the industrial revolution. Recent writers (Blackburn, 1997; Dattel, 2009; Beckert, 2014) have established how important slaves in the southern American cotton fields were to the British textile and clothing industry. These plantations supplied over eighty percent of its basic raw material. It follows that the dramatic increase in the capture and transport of slaves across the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century was a direct response to British demand for raw cotton. Forced labour on the cotton plantations was very harsh work, and there was a high mortality rate among slaves. There seems to be no doubt that the model of “triangular trade” provides a compelling understanding of just how slavery was implicated in the 1IR: African people were captured and sold onto ships, and transported across the Atlantic to become slaves on plantations in the Americas. The cotton that they produced was transported across the Atlantic to the burgeoning textile factories in the north of England. Much of the cloth produced in these factories was then transported down the Atlantic coastline, as the most desired currency used by British traders to buy slaves in Africa (Moll, 2020). Exchanges with the slave plantations helped British capitalism to make a breakthrough to industrialism and global hegemony ahead of its rivals. 10 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The transatlantic slave trade, with its systematic assault on the freedom of people on the west coast of Africa, and its brutal disregard for the lives of slaves on transportation ships and American cotton plantations, was a fundamental element of the 1IR. The detail and depth of this historical account of the 1IR has been necessary to establish its complexity. What made it a social revolution is to be found in the transformations of socioeconomic, cultural and geopolitical strata that were much broader than mere technology innovations. In many senses, the 1IR was primarily one of industrialised human degradation. This analysis allows us to avoid the tendency of so many writers who illustrate (and believe that they account for) the 1IR by picking out and naming one or two ‘iconic’ technologies of the time, such as coal-based energy, or the steam engine, or railway transport. The modelling and analysis of industrial revolutions requires that we transcend such technological reductionism. Methodology: An Industrial Revolution, properly conceived In the above account of the 1IR, we have encountered a number of claims about what lay at its heart. Its core was large-scale manufacturing driven by machines (Kennedy). It was a technological revolution focused on invention (Allen). It replaced the domestic system with the factory system (Bythell). It was both a successful and a tragic transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy (Hobsbawm). Its launching pad was cotton (Beckert). It sprouted as modern bourgeois society from the ruins of feudal society (Marx and Engels). Its outstanding fact was the formation of the working class (Thompson). Its commodity production was maintained by a continual supply of slave labour from Africa (Dattel). Its three- faced Janus was the commodification of Africans, the brutalization of slaves in the American colonies, and the immiseration of the working poor in Britain (Williams). So which of these claims about the essence of the 1IR should we take to be correct? The point is, they all are, and that is the paradox of the matter. All of them are strata of the fundamental socioeconomic transformation of the period 1760 to 1850 that was centred in British society, but which had consequences for the whole world. From the preceding historical analysis, we can distill the following key conjunctural features that constituted this era as a distinctive historical phenomenon that took place from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century: ¢ A technological revolution, consisting in the multiple innovations of the steam-powered textile factory, and the production and transportation of these commodities; ¢ Transformation of the labour process – the ‘nature of work’ – in which workers now operated large machines to enable mass production; ¢ Changing labour relations in the workplace, in which factory owners made large profits by exploiting workers, and which formed the working class in society at large; ¢ Changing community and social relations, in rapid, haphazard migration of newly impoverished people off the land into the cities and factory towns; ¢ Global transformations, related to the centrality of slavery in transatlantic trade and the exercise of colonial power. Historians regard (or construct) the 1IR as the archetypal industrial revolution (Cannadine, 1984; Coleman, 1992; Hobsbawm, 1997; Stearns, 2012). Falkus (1987) points out that while some economists and economic historians have considered concentrated moments of short-term economic acceleration a revolution, the dominant view amongst historians is that for a period of change to ‘count’ as a revolution it must be characterized by long-term socioeconomic change at a fundamental, or structural, level: 1. The first view seems to be associated with economists of many persuasions – neoclassical, neoliberal, Keynesian, evolutionary – who consider an ‘industrial revolution’ to be a rapid, short-term economic change where one or more technologies are replaced by another, novel technology. These thinkers tend to identify the notion of an ‘industrial revolution’ with a ‘technological revolution’. Such a revolution is a concentrated, short period of accelerated technological progress characterized by new innovations, a period when the whole economy moves faster and changes abruptly. There is something of this in the ‘optimistic’ views of the 1IR discussed above, e.g. in Allen’s notion that it was fundamentally a technological revolution focused on invention and opportunities for economic growth 11DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (2006, p.2). More sophisticatedly, these periodic economic accelerations are understood by various evolutionary economists as cyclical technological innovations, repeated from time to time, in a manner similar to the theory of punctuated equilibrium that defended Darwin’s classical theory of evolution in the face of apparently cyclical gaps in the fossil record.8 2. The second approach adopts a more fundamental social historical view, suggesting that if, after a longer period of time, the entire socioeconomic context has been transformed, then a revolution has taken place (Falkus, 1987, p.75). I have suggested that the pivotal transformation of the social and economic order that characterized the 1IR was the emergence of the factory. However, this idea does not reduce the 1IR to disruptions and transformations in either technology or the economy, although it encompasses both. ‘The factory’ is the central motif in the historical account of wide ranging transformations at every level, in every nook and cranny of the nascent industrial society. Consider Bythell’s two popular narratives of the rise of industry, or Thompson’s expansive account of the creation of the working class in and around the rise of the factory, or Hobsbawm’s extensive descriptions of ‘industrial revolution’ as the total ensemble of socioeconomic and macro-social changes that we know as the 1IR. As Knowles remarked 100 years ago, “the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ is used, not because the process of change was quick, but because when accomplished the change was fundamental” (1922, p.79). The latter view predominates in the historical literature on the 1IR. The historiographer Lemon cautions us against the lack of depth in the historical analysis of those who want to find revolution in short-term technological changes: Today we are prone to overestimate the pace of some change in earlier history … This is because certain changes, particularly technological ones, can have rapid practical effects. But changes in the way people think and behave regarding the larger questions in life take longer to become established, and even longer to work out their full effects” (Lemon, 2003, p.870, my emphasis). Historiography, the study of the research methodology of history, makes it clear that the writing of history must make practical sense of human action over long time frames. Ordinary language concepts like ‘actors’, ‘intentions’, ‘causes’, ‘consequences’, ‘past’, ‘present’, together with ‘time’ itself, must be refigured into a plausible, followable, extended narrative. An historian has a much wider set of statements to process than does an economist, straddling an entire social domain, and so historical explanations are more complex and elusive than those in economics. Paul Ricoeur (1965; 1984), in his account of the epistemology of historical research and writing, makes it clear that the aim of history is to explain more in order to understand better: “to explain what happens and to describe what happens coincide … a narrative that fails to explain is less than a narrative” (Ricoeur, 1984, p.125). In this regard, Hobsbawm (2002, p.294) comments that the twentieth century saw two great influences that changed the writing of history – the ideas of Fernand Braudel after 1945, and the influence of Clifford Geertz after 1968. For Braudel (1958), the writing of history is longue durée, and requires detailed narratives that achieve plausibility in their depth (see also Scriven, 1959). It prioritizes long-term historical processes over histoire événementielle (histories of events), and seeks to draw out historical trends and patterns in the telling of the story. Historians typically do not spell out a research ‘methodology’ in the sense that a research design based, at least originally, on the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation does – aim, purpose, research question, literature review, conceptual framework, methodology, findings, discussion, etc. – although the conceptual frameworks of social theorists in other disciplines clearly influence the historical accounts that they construct. Andrew Abbott usefully distinguishes the “axes of cohesion” of different disciplines: “anthropology is largely organized around a method, political science around a type of relationship, and economics around a theory of action” (2001, p.140, my emphasis) – economics is, if you like, a policy discipline. The axis of cohesion of history is clearly depth narrative. While some economists and economic historians have considered concentrated moments of short-term economic acceleration a revolution, the dominant view amongst historians is that for a period of change to ‘count’ as a revolution it must be characterized by long-term socioeconomic change at a fundamental, or structural, level. 12 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION A prominent historiographer describes the influence of Geertz’s concept of ‘thick description’ on history as the adoption of “the technique of bringing to bear upon a single episode or situation a mass of facts of every kind and subjecting them to intensive analysis so as to elicit every possible cultural implication” (Himmelfarb, 1987, p.128). The methodological principle of thick description – adopted by Geertz from Gilbert Ryle – is that it is not simply a matter of amassing detail about social reality (observed for ethnographers, recorded or remembered for historians), but an interpretation of the detail in relation to its contexts, circumstances, meanings and underlying causes. This interpretive characteristic of description, built detail upon detail, is what makes it ‘thick’. The methodology is simple in concept: describe and describe and describe again, until the evidence is saturated and the social phenomenon under scrutiny becomes explicable in terms of the meaning systems of the people whose practices constitute it – an echo of Ricoeur’s point that in depth narratives in history, “to explain what happens and to describe what happens coincide”. History is thus able to represent a “full living past reality…in its full complexity” (Berkhofer, 1995, p.31). Geertz (1973; see also 1990) is clear on the similarities and differences between thick description in history and anthropology. Both disciplines are interpretive, and importantly both are microscopic. Methodologically speaking, however, anthropology tends to be concerned with “exceedingly extended acquaintances with extremely small matters” (1973, p.21), whereas history tends more to be concerned with large scale interpretations of whole societies, world events, global neocolonialism, and so on. Despite the rise of ‘social history’, historians often work with the microscopic methods of thick description towards an overall account of historical epochs, such as industrial revolutions. One can imagine a critic (perhaps an economist), schooled in the deductive-nomological traditions of the social sciences, or even the building of ‘evolutionary’, predictive models based on cyclical patterns of the past, being nonplussed by the detailed historical narrative of the three industrial revolutions, and the absence of an explicit, multivariate theory of change, in this paper. They might insist that an analytical model of an industrial revolution, or even a techno-economic revolution, can be succinctly stated with a graphic representation to aid its visualization. Such a criticism misses the point entirely: it is precisely in the detailed, longue durée, thick historical description of each of the three industrial revolutions, and a similar treatment of the putative evidence for a 4IR, that it becomes evident that the latter has not come about. This point will be demonstrated as this argument proceeds. The ironic words of Paul Feyerabend come to mind: To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity’, ‘truth’, it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes (Feyerabend, 1992, p.19). Thick description, I would suggest, is the methodological realization of the anything goes principle.9 To turn now to the notion of a technological revolution, which I have suggested is only one of the socioeconomic transformations that is necessary for an industrial revolution to occur: The literature on this notion is replete with an impressive array of language signifying fundamental change. It is a terrain of cycles, crises and crashes; bubbles, booms and busts; slumps, stagnations and stagflations; golden ages and global shortages; upswings and downswings; prosperity, recession, depression, and recovery; innovations, disruptions and creative destructions. However, despite the poetic touches, close examination of these concepts shows them to be a series of synonyms that narrow down to a focus on technical innovations and attendant economic fluctuations. I have no doubt that much of this literature provides us with the basis of important explanations, in their disciplinary context, of the financial and technological changes that have taken place in the economy over time. However, my concern here is with the much broader, more pervasive matter of how we account for industrial revolutions. It is in the detailed, longue durée, thick historical description of each of the three industrial revolutions, and a similar treatment of the putative evidence for a 4IR, that it becomes evident that the latter has not come about. 13DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The following terms are often used interchangeably in these discussions: Technological revolution Techno-industrial revolution Techno-mechanical revolution Techno-scientific revolution Techno-economic paradigm Information technology (IT) revolution Digital (technology) revolution The problem of reductionism comes about when any one, or some, or all of these are equated with an industrial revolution. Each concept is seated within an axis of cohesion – a discipline (Abbott, 2001) – that is confined to the terrain of purely technological and value-related economic phenomena. To Abbott’s suggestion that economics is organized around a theory of action as its axis of cohesion, we need to add the increasingly common notion that information systems, and even Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its narrow sense, revolve around a “sociotechnical axis of cohesion” (Sarker et al, 2019; Lévesque et al, 2020). The upshot is that none of these concepts, when articulated within their own disciplinary contexts, can account for the transformed labour processes, labour relations, social relations, cultural expressions, and relations of global power and exploitation, that also have to be demonstrated if the phenomenon in question is to count as an industrial revolution. No doubt each term has validity in accounting for ‘techno-economic’ change, but it simply does not grasp the extent of an industrial revolution. Wikipedia, which we warn our students against, tells the basic lie: “The most well-known example of a technological revolution was the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century” (‘Technological revolution’, n.d.) – quite why the latter term is capitalized and the former is not, is unclear. It then goes on to blur the issue even further. The former concept seems to be just about technological and financial market fluctuations: What distinguishes a technological revolution from a random collection of technology systems and justifies conceptualizing it as a revolution are two basic features: (1) The strong interconnectedness and interdependence of the participating systems in their technologies and markets. (2) The capacity to transform profoundly the rest of the economy (and eventually society). (“Technological revolution”, n.d.) ‘Society’ creeps in at the end as a possible dependent variable to be impacted on by the independent variable of the technological revolution. Do societies somehow exist independently of technological revolutions or “the economy”? Can society be conceived of in any meaningful way as a ‘discrete’ statistical variable? The point in referring to this Wikipedia entry is not to endorse its claims, but to illustrate just how crude representations of a technological revolution can be, especially when they come to stand as proxies for putative industrial revolutions. We can dismiss such notions easily enough. However, there is a broad tradition in evolutionary economics that needs much more serious consideration. It draws on ‘Kondratieff wave’ theory and Joseph Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction to construe industrial revolutions as “techno-economic paradigms” (e.g. Freeman and Louçã 2001; Perez 2002; Malecki and Moriset, 2007). Nikolai Kondratieff10 (1935) posited technology-driven historical cycles of economic prosperity every 50 years or so, and his model of long, techno-economic waves of capitalism has been projected forwards mathematically to suggest a series of ongoing technological revolutions throughout modern history, and, as it were, future history. Some of these projections are particularly fanciful – for example, Knell (2010) imagines that we are currently entering a sixth techno- scientific revolution. There is an unfortunate teleology based on Kondratieff’s waves at work here. Knell bases his prediction on an extension of Perez’s (2002, p.57) retrospective11 mapping of five technological revolutions – 1771, 1829, 1875, 1908, 1971 – the last of which is the “age of information and telecommunications”. However, his sixth turns out to be a damp squib, no more than an echo of Schwab’s prophecy of ‘unprecedented convergences’ of the physical, digital and biological worlds in nanotechnology, biotech, quantum computing and AI. One can see here very clearly, though, how the idea of a ‘technological revolution’ can expand artificially to become an ‘industrial revolution’, almost without thinking. Do societies somehow exist independently of technological revolutions or “the economy”? Can society be conceived of in any meaningful way as a ‘discrete’ statistical variable? 14 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Schumpeter extended Kondratieff’s ideas in his notion of “industrial mutations” – in fact, it was he who coined the term “Kondratieff cycles”. Industrial mutations are processes in which the economy is “incessantly being revolutionized from within” to make way for innovation (1943, p.31). One commentator describes this as a unique explanation combining development, innovations and cycles: Economic development … has endogenous origins. … In a cyclical manner, innovations are implemented by a herd [“troupe”] of entrepreneurs (the leading inventors, followed by the rest of the herd), which generates a period of prosperity based on the widespread distribution of these innovations. Then, the disturbances in the economic system subside during the next phase (characterized by ‘credit deflation’ and ‘creative destruction’), and the economic system returns to a state of near equilibrium. (Potier, 2015, p.994, my translation) Schumpeter (1939, 1943) was interested in modelling business or economic cycles – the rate at which innovations are introduced into the economy. He developed a model incorporating three different conceptions of the waves of capitalism: the Kondratieff long cycles of about 50 years, the Juglar cycles of about eight years, and the Kitchin short waves of up to 40 months12 (Potier, 2015). These cyclical technological and economic events become the basis in some academic literature for classifying and predicting ‘industrial revolutions’. In popular literature, a number of authors use the ideas of Kondratieff and Schumpeter loosely to justify Schwab’s claim that there is a 4IR. Besides the technological reductionism, there is an unfortunate teleology here that projects ‘long waves’ into the future, on a recapitulationist evolutionary logic (although Kondratieff himself was sceptical of such teleology [Mustafin 2018, pp.10-11] and there is a suggestion that Schumpeter may have been too [Papageorgiou and Michaelides 2016]). Criticisms of both Kondratieff and Schumpeter abound. Wallerstein suggests that they both worked with data about western Europe and the USA, which may not hold for the world economy as a whole (Wallerstein 1984, p.563). Maddison (1991), in a mainstream economic critique of the idea of capitalist waves (he prefers the term ‘periods’), suggests that both Kondratieff’s and Schumpeter’s “treatment of statistical material is illustrative rather than analytic, and is at times rather cavalier”. He shows, for example, by means of his own impressive statistical analyses, that they underestimate the impact of World War I, and that Schumpeter also tends to “brush off” the serious economic consequences of the 1929-1933 recession and World War II. He further suggests that Kondratieff offers no plausible causal explanation as to why capitalist development should entail systemic, cyclic long waves, and that Schumpeter fails to explain why innovation should “come in regular waves rather than in a continuous but irregular stream” (1991, p.103). The Marxist, Gintis (1990), accuses Schumpeter of focusing only on the ability of an economic system to generate competent and innovative entrepreneurship, thus eliding issues such as the morality of private property and broader questions of democratic transformation. Moldaschl (2010) suggests that for Schumpeter the idea of innovation is one of “technological insularity” because it pertains only to “commercially exploitable novelty” (2010, p.2). He claims that Schumpeter does not have a theory of innovation, but only a theory “in which the entrepreneur – as a more or less creative subject engaged with ‘new combinations’ – [is] the most important endogenous driver” (2010, p.12). There are numerous examples of these kinds of criticisms of Schumpeter and Kondratieff in the literature on revolutionary technologies and economic changes, and an equally large number of defenses and extensions of their work and subsequent developments of it, for example in the ‘techno-economic paradigm’ (Freeman and Louçã 2001; Perez 2002). The point about the vast majority of all this literature, however, is that it is internal critique, by which I mean that it operates as theoretical and scientific debate within the boundaries of the concept (or if you like, the conceptual framework) of a technological revolution, conceived as a discipline (Abbott, 2001) or an academic territory (Becher and Trowler, 2001). It is inwardly focused rearticulation and debate concerned to sort out the problems and anomalies faced in the study of ‘technological revolutions’. The dissolving of the broader concept of an industrial revolution into the narrower concept passes almost without noticing. There appears to be very little external critique of the same literature. The conceptual problems associated with reducing ‘industrial revolution’ to ‘technological revolution’, ‘techno-scientific revolution’, ‘techno- economic’ paradigm, or whatever, need much more thorough academic scrutiny. So too do the practical problems and unintended consequences that arise in government, industry, education and the like if this conflation is not corrected. In South Africa, this debate is particularly urgent: a number of progressive thinkers and activists, in correctly eschewing Schwab and the WEF, have leaned towards Kondratieff and/or Schumpeter to 15DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION provide some understanding of contemporary advances in digital technology and their implications for our society (Gillwald, 2019; Deedat, 2020; Sutherland, 2020; Cooper, 2021; Maharajh, 2021). Sutherland’s (2020) article is, I suggest, particularly salient in understanding the problem associated with this tendency. He is fully aware of the ideology-laden character of 4IR rhetoric, describing it as “an attractive flag around which to spin an elitist and neoliberal vision of the future of manufacturing” (2020, p.246). He also considers the history and implications of the three industrial revolutions in Africa deliberately, which is something that neither 4IR advocates nor Schumpeterians often bother to do (see Moll, 2020).13 However, his account of the character of the 1IR and 2IR in and for Africa is a sweeping gloss over the entire eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “the role of Africa was limited to providing agricultural products and raw materials,14 such as cocoa and coffee beans, cotton, rubber, sugar cane, and tobacco, plus gold and diamonds from South Africa and copper from then Northern Rhodesia” (Sutherland, 2020, p.236). Sutherland’s account of this historical period is totally reduced to economic analysis, related to issues like the “extraction of resources”, “tiny markets for luxury goods”, “infrastructure for resource extraction (e.g. railways)”, and economic and industrial path dependencies. The definitive, pivotal character and consequences of the first two industrial revolutions in Africa were the issues of slavery, military conquest by European or European surrogate armies, the legal codification of colonialism, and the political, cultural and psychological colonization of its people, in addition to economic subjugation and the extraction of commodities (Amin, 1972; Amin, 1989; Fanon, 1986a; Fanon, 1986b; Memmi, 1965). Sutherland, however, dissolves the notion of an industrial revolution in technological, value- related economic and business-centred conceptions of pseudo-revolutions. The arguments of W.E.B. du Bois (1935) on economic reductionism in the writing of US history come to mind. Sutherland’s elision of slavery from the 1IR, and of imperialist colonialism from the 2IR, are reminiscent of the manner in which US economists treated slavery with “moral impartially”, as “a sort of working out of some cosmic social and economic law” (1935, p.585). For Du Bois, in this “sweeping mechanistic interpretation” of history: there is no room for the real plot of the story; for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy; for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this be omitted and half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientific? (Du Bois, 1935, p.585) This is precisely what the undermining of deep, systematic, historical accounts of the social totality of industrial revolutions (or the absence of such revolutions) by reductionist accounts of ‘technological revolutions’ does. It is telling, then, that Sutherland conceives of the supposed contemporary information technology revolution as follows: 4IR comes not from these historical analyses, but from of a recent tradition of auto-cannibalism of business models − firms re-imagining their businesses before rivals do it for them, in order to capture their revenues. … A central concept is the dynamic capability or the means by which an organisation adapts its resources, used as a framework to understand how corporations respond to disruptions, … Underlying this is the idea of Schumpeter who described a process of creative destruction… The principal thrust of 4IR is about changing business models, … through the adoption of a [Schwab’s] poorly defined set of technologies including 3D printing; artificial intelligence (AI); autonomous vehicles; biotechnology cyber-physical systems (CPS); fifth-generation wireless (5G); internet of things (IoT); industrial Internet of Things (IIoT); nanotechnology; quantum computing; and robotics. (Sutherland, 2020, p.237, my emphasis) The definitive, pivotal character and consequences of the first two industrial revolutions in Africa were the issues of slavery, military conquest by European or European surrogate armies, the legal codification of colonialism, and the political, cultural and psychological colonization of its people, in addition to economic subjugation and the extraction of commodities. 16 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Et voilà! Despite the progressive intentions of advocates of ‘waves’ or ‘disruptions’, the fusion of Schumpeter, Kondratieff and Schwab is upon us (might Schwab say this is an unprecedented technocratic convergence?). The 4IR is recast, and its associated ideological frame legitimated, by Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction. My argument in this paper is that this is a severe mistake, because it rips such technological change out of its deeper social and historical context. However, Hobsbawm makes the interesting observation that “good predictions have proved possible on the basis of Kondratiev Long Waves – this is not very common in economics – [and this] has convinced many historians … that there is something in them, even if we don’t know what” (1995, p.87ff). The questions that one might want to put to Hobsbawm, if it were possible, are: Are these historical predictions? Why would a historian want to make predictions? If so, are these teleological predictions of changes in a strict periodicity discovered in the past, or simply changes projected on the basis of an analysis of the contradictions of the present? Whatever the answers, this debate must clearly go on vigorously. The analytic approach in this article treats industrial revolutions as fundamental transformations across multiple social and economic dimensions which impact each other in complex ways and have a global impact – hence the use of the term ‘socioeconomic’ to grasp this complexity. The social transformation that resulted from the 1IR was a profound combination of material progress and social suffering that was so wide-ranging that it warrants the term ‘revolutionary’. It was far more than a period of intense technological innovation or the merging of technologies. While this transformation was centred in a particular society (Britain) over the course of nearly a century, it had ramifications and lasting consequences for the whole world. Karl Polanyi’s (1945) insights in this regard are crucial: prior to the industrial revolutions, the socioeconomic mentality of people was based on communal systems of reciprocity and redistribution; the consequence of industrialization was the institutional construction of a competitive market society regulated by the State. This “great transformation” was established in Britain in the 1IR, and consolidated globally in the 2IR. It was not simply an accumulation and confluence of inventions. By identifying the key elements which constituted the 1IR as an industrial revolution, we can construct an analytical framework that can be applied to other periods of significant change to evaluate whether they legitimately constitute industrial revolutions. These characteristics can be used as criteria for this analysis. An industrial revolution, in its socioeconomic entirety, must exhibit at least the following substantial, conjunctural features over a period of time: ¢ A technological revolution, characterized by widespread, connected technological innovations; ¢ Transformation of the labour process, to do with the productive activity of workers in the workplace, or the ‘nature of work’; ¢ Changing labour relations in the workplace and class- specific15 institutions in broader society; ¢ Changing community and social relations, in the sphere of everyday life and culture (notably in patterns of urbanization); ¢ Global transformations, related to international trade and agglomerations of power.16 The historical analysis of the 1IR above makes it clear that these different strata in society function together in an industrial revolution, and that any one of them cannot be reduced to any other. Hence the injunction that an industrial revolution is far more than just a technological revolution. It is a complex ensemble of technological, economic, social and political changes, not just a merging or emerging of technologies. We can now go on to assess the notions of the second, third and fourth industrial revolutions against these criteria. The Second Industrial Revolution – 1865-191417 More than any other industrial revolution, it seems appropriate upfront to highlight the technological marvels of the 2IR. Hobsbawm suggests that, in what he calls the “age of empire”, or the industrialized world – the world of factories – “modern technology was not only undeniable and triumphant, but highly visible” (1989, p.27). In the first place, by 1870, technology with roots in the 1IR had established an extensive infrastructure for trade and commerce: a network of harbours, particularly on the northern Atlantic, and railway and telegraph networks in Europe and North America, had shifted “the large 17DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION technological system from an exception to a commonplace” (Mokyr, 1998, p.2). Furthermore, unlike the 1IR, where the relatively few inventions and innovations were, as it were, out of the public eye, connected in productive ways inside factories, the new technologies of the 2IR were all over the place. They became very much the lifestyle of people in the industrialized countries of the world. There were many of them: motor cars, electric light bulbs, electrified streets, tall buildings, telephones, radios. Behind these sat the big industrial breakthroughs of the era: steel, electricity, petrol (‘gasoline’ in American), industrial chemicals, and the ‘machine tool revolution’ in the USA (for a more thorough discussion of this, see page 45 below). Steel was not invented in the 2IR,18 but cheap, quality steel was generally available after 1865 when open-hearth, and later electric and oxygen, furnaces enabled large-volume steel production. Neither was electricity discovered in the 2IR, but the large scale generation of power was one of its most significant achievements. Electric machines, and electric lighting in factories, streets and homes, were soon widespread. Petrol was a 2IR discovery: the first oil well had been dug in Pennsylvania in 1859, and paraffin (in American, kerosene) distilled for lighting. One of the by-products, petrol, was ‘discovered’ in the 1880s, with the invention of the motor car. And in industrial chemistry, European nations, especially Germany, took the lead (Mokyr, 1998, p.4), although plastics emerged in the USA. All of these breakthroughs were pivotal to the global industrial expansion of the 2IR. It is worth recalling the better-known innovations of the 2IR. In 1865, the German-French duo of Siemens and Martin introduced the open-hearth furnace to produce cheap steel. In 1867, Nobel invented dynamite in Sweden, which he was later to regret deeply. In 1876, the Englishman Bell invented the telephone. The American Edison perfected the light bulb in 1879. In 1882, the same Edison opened the world’s first steam-driven electricity generating stations in London and New York. The first skyscraper was built in Chicago in 1884, using a groundbreaking steel frame. In 1886, Starley built the first modern bicycle, the ‘Rover’, in Coventry, England. In 1886, two Germans, Daimler and Benz, respectively invented the first prototype of the internal combustion engine, and a pioneering three- wheeled motor car. Another German, Diesel, built the first diesel engine in 1893. The Italian Marconi broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901. The American Wright brothers flew the first aeroplane in 1903. In 1907, Baekeland invented bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, in Washington DC. The first diesel-powered motor ship was built in Denmark in 1912. In Detroit, USA, Ford introduced the automated assembly line in 1913. And then, to temper some of the technological triumphalism that might have crept into this paragraph, we might note that the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic was built in Belfast in 1911, and that the British soldier Swinton started to build the first military tank in 1914. Now my purpose in the previous paragraph was not to extol the achievements of great white men (although the significance of that should become clear shortly), but to illustrate two important points about the 2IR: (i) that technological innovation was no longer centred on the economy of one dominant country, as it had been in the 1IR. Now Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, the USA, some Scandinavian countries and Britain constituted a global industrial nexus. In the 1880s “no country outside of this ‘developed world’ (and Japan, which had joined it) could be described as industrial or even on the way to industrialization” (Hobsbawm, 1989, p.21); and (ii) that the range of technological innovations that characterized the period was indeed vast. This geographic spread and diversity of new technology is suggestive of a crucial economic aspect of this industrial revolution: the interaction between the giant industrial corporations in the USA and Europe, who employed only a small fraction of the overall labour force, and small, flexible, localized firms which served specific sections of the market. This maximized innovation: “the great pathbreaking inventions ... were crucial not because they themselves had necessarily a huge impact on production, but because they increased the effectiveness of microinventive activity” (Mokyr, 1998, p.1). This is what made the 2IR pervasive. Nonetheless, it was in large corporations that the most significant transformation of the labour process associated with the 2IR came about. It came to be known as Taylorism. It was essentially the organization and By 1870, technology with roots in the 1IR had established an extensive infrastructure for trade and commerce: a network of harbours, particularly on the northern Atlantic, and railway and telegraph networks in Europe and North America, had shifted “the large technological system from an exception to a commonplace. 18 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION management of workers to maximize productivity in mass production factory environments. In 1911, Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, based on his task analysis and study of work methods, as supervisor of machinists at Bethlehem Steel and other engineering companies. Influenced by early behaviourists, his principles included: 1. Select workers specifically for each discrete task in a scientifically determined division of labour. Take this notorious quotation, for example: “a man who is fit to handle pig iron … [must] be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type… the man who is mentally alert and intelligent is … unsuited to … the grinding monotony of work of this character” (Taylor, 1911, p.59). 2. Select and train each worker, as opposed to leaving him (sic) “passively” to train himself. 3. Give detailed instructions to and supervise each worker in the performance of his specific task. 4. Increase the number of managers to ensure workers actually perform the tasks. (Taylor, 1911) The key innovation that was introduced by Taylor into factories was the assembly line. The notion that specific tasks be allocated to specific workers underpinned this transformation of the labour process in large factories. Taylorism was implemented and managed ‘scientifically’ in the capitalist economy of the USA and the commandist economy of the Soviet Union (Scoville, 2001). Another part of Taylor’s research was on interchangeable parts – the precise manufacture of different components of a whole, assembled, manufactured product, so that any component could be fitted by a worker into any such product on an assembly line: Interchangeable parts was not an ‘invention.’ It was eventually to become a vastly superior mode of producing goods and services, facilitated by the work of previous inventors, especially the makers of accurate machine tools and cheap steel. To be truly interchangeable, the parts had to be identical, requiring high levels of accuracy and quality control in their manufacture. (Paxton, 2012, p.9) This led to the famous, perhaps infamous, collaboration between Henry Ford and Taylor (Paxton, 2012). I say infamous because Taylor’s critics (e.g. Braverman, 1998) accuse him of dehumanizing workers, of deskilling them, by focusing only on the control of labour and the cheapness of products (Webster, 1991. p.55). The Ford Motor Company hired Taylor in 1913 to study its workers to determine the most efficient and time-saving methods to increase productivity, and later that year introduced precision machine tools and assembly lines into its factories. Ford adopted Taylor’s methods, taking them further by introducing a moving conveyor belt into each assembly line. Soon, Ford was rolling out up to 10,000 Model T Fords a day. The automated assembly line is regarded as a key feature of the 2IR. In this model of the labour process, a product moves along a conveyor belt, and workers install individual components one-by-one. There were numerous examples of assembly lines being introduced in foundries, and engineering, machine tool, motor car, locomotive and clothing factories, in this period. Obviously, some industries did not mechanize in this way (e.g. mining, transport, construction), but there was still evidence of ‘the principles of scientific management’ influencing the labour process in them (Hobsbawm, 1989, p.115). The factory system was, by 1865, ubiquitous in the industrialized nations of the world; in the period that followed, large factories became common, and giant factories increasingly evident. With Taylorism’s emphasis on management, the hierarchy of the factory floor was now one of workers – supervisors – bosses, with the interests of these different classes still distinguishable from each other, fundamentally in the case of workers and bosses, and more ambiguously in the case of supervisors. In the 2IR, these changing relations in the workplace became the norm. The result was the most significant change in the social relations of the workplace in history: the legalization and formal consolidation of the trade union. Thousands of British workers had formed trade unions in the 1IR, but these were repressed by force and curtailed by law. In 1799, the Combination Act was passed, “to prevent unlawful combinations of workmen”, banning trade unions and It was in large corporations that the most significant transformation of the labour process associated with the 2IR came about. It came to be known as Taylorism. It was essentially the organization and management of workers to maximize productivity in mass production factory environments. 19DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION collective bargaining. The ensuing period, well into the 1800s, saw many strikes in England and Scotland which were severely repressed. In the USA and parts of Europe, similar events occurred. However, factory outputs were also negatively affected, and politicians and capitalists began to consider whether trade unions could not serve their interests as well. A political debate had started amongst them about whether trade unions could be part of ordered society. Their ordered society. In 1848 (in a period when rising socialist politics was closely linked to trade unions, and at the time Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto), the liberal John Stuart Mill wrote: If it were possible for the working classes, by combining among themselves, to raise or keep up the general rate of wages, it needs hardly be said that this would be a thing not to be punished, but to be welcomed and rejoiced at. … If they could do so, they might doubtless succeed in diminishing the hours of labour, and obtaining the same wages for less work. (Mill, cited by Ekelund and Tollison, 1987, p.590) Mill argued that unionized workers should be thought of as “a protected class of working men” which could be “raised up”. But his main problem was that trade unions would push wages up, decrease jobs, and therefore increase the size and political militancy of the broader mass of the working classes. Hobsbawm (1967) engages a debate amongst economic historians about whether the unions themselves, in these debates, shifted towards non- political trade unionism. Was there a “new intellectual ferment within the trade union world in the 1880s reflected in the spread of socialist ideas”, or did an increasingly middle-class trade union leadership succumb to “a gradual schooling of the impracticable elements into a sobered and somewhat bureaucratic collectivism?” (1967, p.359). These political debates and dynamics were carried through into the 2IR. Whatever the case may have been, the general outcome of these political processes was that trade unions were incorporated into the socioeconomic landscape of industrial capitalism by the late 1800s. Britain legalized trade unions in 1872, after a Royal Commission on Trade Unions agreed that their establishment benefited both employers and employees. In France, labour unions were illegal until 1884, but by 1895, the General Confederation of Labour was established and recognized. In Germany, after the repeal of anti-socialist laws, the Free Association of German Trade Unions was formed in 1897. In the USA, the Massachusetts Supreme Court had, already in 1842, ruled labour unions to be legal “provided their purposes and methods are legal”; by 1886, the massive American Federation of Labor was established. The main point, for purposes of this paper, is that the establishment of nationally organized trade unions was the major transformation in the social relations of production that characterized the 2IR. By the late 1800s, trade unions were unbanned across the industrial world and ‘labour aristocracies’ incorporated into the socioeconomic landscape of industrial capitalism (McLennan, 1981). Just as the assimilation of the trade union into the labour relations order was distinctive of the 2IR, so paradoxical stabilization was part of the revolution in the sphere of social and community life. With the growth of capitalism and industrialization since the 1IR, social relations between the rich and poor had obviously become more complicated, often more antagonistic. Yet the 2IR does seem to have improved aspects of social life somewhat, especially in regard to urbanization. Mokyr (1998) is very helpful in understanding the situation in the 2IR, as compared with the rising wealth of the middle classes and the impoverishment of the working classes in the 1IR. He suggests that it is not easy to determine the overall effect of technological progress on livelihoods in the 2IR: Technological changes increased the well-being of the populations of Western Europe and North America, in particular. Yet Industrialization led to urbanization, to the concentration of large numbers of workers in dangerous and unpleasant factories and mines, to alienation, the breaking-up of traditional communities compounded by large waves of emigration… [However] it is clear that until 1914 life was getting better, incomes were rising, work-hours slowly declining, some forms of social insurance emerging, nutrition and housing slowly improving. (Mokyr, 1998, pp.13-14) Mokyr provides compelling demographic and statistical evidence for this claim. Between 1870 and 1914, across Europe and the USA, infant mortality declined significantly, life expectancy increased, working people received somewhat higher incomes, they lived in less congested housing, and had access to running water, sewage, and medical care. And the rich got richer, and prospered even more. 20 DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The 2IR was often styled by those living the upper and middle class good life as la belle époque (‘the beautiful era’); many historians have adopted the term to describe its social and cultural aspects, as they have Veblen’s (1899) notion of the ‘leisure class’ – a social class displaying conspicuous consumption – and Pettigrew’s (1921) description of 2IR America as a ‘plutocracy”, a society ruled by people of great wealth. These concepts capture well the social contradictions of the time: rising prosperity on the basis of all kinds of technologies, and yet an increasing resentment on the part of the working classes about their social situation. It seems no accident that the socialist and labour political parties that have formed the government or chief opposition in most countries since, were formed at the height of the 2IR. Hobsbawm sums up the contradictions of the 2IR thus: It was an era of unparalleled peace in the western world, which engendered an era of equally unparalleled world wars. It was an era of, in spite of appearances, growing social stability within the zone of developed industrial economies, which … [conquered and ruled] over vast empires … It was an era when massive organized movements of the class of wage workers … suddenly emerged and demanded the overthrow of capitalism. But they emerged in highly flourishing and expanding economies … at a time when capitalism offered them slightly less miserable conditions than before. (Hobsbawm 1989, pp.9-10). These contradictions can perhaps best be tracked in relation to the planning and definition of cities in the 2IR. Hobsbawm observed that the haphazard migration to cities that characterized the nineteenth century was “a gigantic process of class segregation, which pushed the new labouring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centres of government and business and the newly specialized residential areas of the bourgeoisie” (1962, p.203). The industrial cities had expanded rapidly, with a proliferation and style of building largely dictated by factory owners. As one might imagine, public health concerns increasingly came to the fore. This, plus a growing social movement focused on poverty and housing, brought about the first concerns with urban planning (Hall, 2014). Hall (2014) suggests that the origins of urban planning lay in the anarchist movement, which placed great emphasis on ideal cities in ideal societies. There were also notable activists, such as the clergyman Andrew Mearns, who published the influential pamphlet, “The bitter cry of outcast London”, in 1883; and Jacob Riis, who in 1890 published How the other half lives, early photojournalism which exposed the squalid living conditions in New York’s tenement slums. The former described inner city London in these terms: pestilential human rookeries … where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have heard of the middle passage of the slave ship … reeking with poisonous and malodorous gases arising from accumulations of sewage and refuse … dark and filthy passages swarming with vermin … dens in which these thousands of beings who belong, as much as you, to the race for whom Christ died, herd together. (Mearns, cited by Hall, 2014, p.15) Urban planning, seen officially as the restoration of order, was now central to the 2IR agenda. In Britain, the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes was established in 1884 for the purpose, as was the House Commission of 1894 in the USA. Commentators generally date the origin of the urban planning movement as being around 1900 (Hall, 2014). The definition of the city, the stabilization of urban life, the provision of basic amenities to curtail the spread of disease, the consolidation of neighborhoods and who lived in them, the zoning of sections of cities for different functions, all of this was now on the public agenda. Such planning originated in Germany, and spread to the USA, Britain, and the rest of Europe. Public health was the most frequently cited rationale for keeping cities organized (Duhl and Sanchez, 1999). Hobsbawm describes the stabilization of the cities that was achieved as “the almost universal European division into a ‘good’ west end and a ‘poor’ east end of large cities” (1962:203). The 2IR was often styled by those living the upper and middle class good life as la belle époque (‘the beautiful era’); many historians have adopted the term to describe its social and cultural aspects, as they have Veblen’s notion of the ‘leisure class’ and Pettigrew’s description of 2IR America as a ‘plutocracy”, a society ruled by people of great wealth. 21DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION As to the relations between the wealthy and the poor on a more global scale, the 2IR (despite the abolition of slavery) simply deepened the colonial relations evident in the 1IR. “The major fact about the nineteenth century is the creation of a single global economy…. an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money and people linking the developed countries with each other and with the undeveloped world” (Hobsbawm, 1989, p.62). It is no historian’s accident that the period of the Second Industrial Revolution and the Age of Imperialism are conventionally dated as being from the 1860s to 1914. The economic and technological prosperity of the 21R was intimately bound up with the subjugation and economic exploitation of the colonized world. Rather than using Hobsbawm’s term, the ‘undeveloped’ world, we should perhaps be using Frank’s (1971) term, ‘underdevelopment’, to recognize that the industrialized nations of the 2IR systematically underdeveloped the people and communities of the rest of the world, creating and maintaining in them a state of dependency. Hobsbawm implies as much: We are therefore in 1880 dealing not so much with a single world as with two sectors combined together into one global system; the developed and the lagging, the dominant and the dependent, the rich and the poor… Even this description is misleading. While the (smaller) first world, in spite of its internal disparities was united by history and as the common bearer of capitalist development, the (much larger) second world was united by nothing except its relations with, that is to say its potential or actual dependency on, the first. (Hobsbawm, 1989, p.16) Industrialization and its attendant ‘civilization’ had developed in a manner that relied on the extraction of commodities from exotic places The burgeoning economies of the west now depended on raw materials which were to be found in ‘remote’ places of the world. Rubber, indigenous to and first extracted from the Amazon forests, was now grown in colonial plantations in the French Congo and Malaya; copper, essential to the electrical industry, was colonized in northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo;19 gold and diamonds came primarily from South Africa. Although oil came mainly from the USA and Europe in the 2IR, the industrial nations were already competing for control of the Middle East oilfields (Hobsbawm, 1989, p.63). Furthermore, ‘colonial goods’ such as sub-tropical fruits, rice, sugar, tea and coffee were demanded by the food markets of Europe, let alone the grains and meat that could be produced more cheaply in the colonies. The reason for that had much to do with exploitable, cheap, often coerced labour (Pollard and Holmes, 1972). And then, of course, colonies provided markets for the purchase of commodities produced at the centre: “the search for and consolidation of markets was a natural by-product of an international economy based on the rivalry of several competing industrial economies, intensified by the economic pressures of the 1880s” (1972, p.67). For example, 45% of 2IR English clothing and cotton exports went to India alone (1972, p.69). All in all, colonial expansionism was very much on the agenda of the industrialized nations at this time. Between 1876 and 1915, about one quarter of the world was colonized by Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the USA, “the global industrial nexus”, between them. In south-east Asia, the period was characterized by ongoing military actions, in which the colonial powers effectively competed with each other for territory. In 1867, the French annexed Cochin China (southern Vietnam) and Cambodia. They then moved northward, seizing Hanoi in 1882. After a war with China (1883–1885), colonized French Indochina was established, across a territory 50 percent larger than France itself. From 1873, the Netherlands engaged in a protracted war with the Sultanate of Aceh, to eventually consolidate Dutch rule over modern-day Indonesia by 1904. In 1898, at the onset of the Spanish-American war, Philippine rebels declared independence from Spain, but the USA refused to recognize it and annexed the territory in 1899. The bloody Philippine-American War (1899–1902) eventually established American colonial authority. By 1913, from its military bases in the long-established colonies of India and Burma, the British had consolidated its colonial occupation of Malaya and Borneo. However, it is the ‘scramble for Africa’ that establishes, beyond doubt, the historical case to place im