Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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to despise England’s “philistine” commercial culture while envying her wealth and power. Their observations convinced them that in the modern world, political power grew not from the barrels of guns but out of a nation’s economic superiority and the energy of its business class.
England was the colossus astride the modern world. “If it is a question of which nation has done most, no one can deny that the English are that nation,” Engels admitted.58 Industry and trade had made her the world’s richest nation. Between 1750 and 1850, the value of goods and services produced in Britain every year—her gross domestic product—had quadrupled, growing more in a hundred years than in the previous thousand.59 The Manifesto emphasized the unprecedented explosion of productive power that Engels and Marx believed would determine political power in the modern world:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together . . . It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.60
Marx and Engels had no doubt that England’s capacity to produce would continue to grow by multiples. But they were convinced that the distributive mechanism was fatally flawed and would cause the whole system to collapse. Despite the extraordinary accession of wealth, the abysmally low living standards of the three-fourths of the British people who belonged to the laboring classes had improved only a little. Recent estimates by Gregory Clark and other economic historians suggest that the average wage rose by about one-third between 1750 and 1850 from an extremely low level.61 True, the laboring classes were now far more numerous, the English population having trebled. And they were not as miserable as their German or French counterparts.
But advances in some areas were balanced by retrogressions elsewhere. For one thing, most of the gain in pay occurred after 1820, and the lion’s share went to skilled craftsmen and factory operatives. Any improvement in the wages of unskilled laborers, including farmworkers, was marginal and was offset, as Malthus had feared, by bigger families. Employment was less secure because manufacturing and construction were subject to booms and busts. Hours were longer, and wives and children were more liable to work as well.
Living standards of urban workers were further undermined by the degradation of the physical environment. The mass migration from the country to the city was taking place before the germ theory of disease had been discovered and before garbage collection, sewers, and clean water supplies were commonplace. Despite the greater poverty of rural England, life expectancy in the countryside was about forty-five versus thirty-one or thirty-two in Manchester or Liverpool. Filth and malnutrition simply weren’t as deadly in less-contagious circumstances. At a time when cities like Liverpool were expanding at rates between 31 and 47 percent every decade, epidemics posed a constant threat. The richest of the rich were not immune—Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, was carried off by typhoid—but the risks were magnified by poor nutrition and crowding. As the influx of migrants into cities accelerated in the first half of the nineteenth century, the health of the average worker stopped improving with income or actually deteriorated. Life expectancy at birth rose from thirty-five to forty between 1781 and 1851, but raw death rates stopped falling in the 1820s. Infant mortality rose in many urban parishes, and adult height—a measure of childhood nutrition, which is affected by disease as well as diet—of men born in the 1830s and 1840s fell.62
Reactionaries and radicals alike wondered if England was suffering from a Midas curse. “This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as yet made nobody rich; it is an enchanted wealth,” thundered Carlyle.63 The economic historian Arnold Toynbee argued that the first half of the nineteenth century was “a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation has ever passed. It was disastrous and terrible, because side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase in pauperism; and production on a vast scale, the result of free competition, led to a rapid alienation of classes and the degradation of a large body of producers.”64
True, as England’s leading philosopher, John Stuart Mill, pointed out, the gradual removal of laws, levies, and licenses that tied the “lower orders” to particular villages, occupations, and masters had increased social mobility: “Human beings are no longer born to their place in life . . . but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.”65 But even Mill, a libertarian with strong Socialist sympathies, could see little improvement in the well-being of most Englishmen: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”66
Thus, in the second year of the potato famine in Ireland, the authors of The Communist Manifesto repeated Engels’s earlier claim that as the nation grew in wealth and power, the condition of its people only worsened: “The modern labourer . . . instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society. . . . The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!67
Having been ejected from France for publishing a satirical sketch of the Prussian king, Marx, his growing family, and the family retainer had been living in Belgium on a publisher’s advance for his economics treatise. At the end of his month-long stay in London, Marx had returned to his suburban villa in Brussels, where he promptly put off the task of writing the final version and threw himself into a lecture series . . . on the economics of exploitation. In January, after league officials threatened to hand the assignment to someone else, he finally picked up his pen. Just before news of fighting in Paris between Republicans and the municipal guard reached Great Windmill Street, his partially finished final draft arrived in the mail. On February 21, the league had one thousand copies of the Manifesto, written in German, printed and delivered to the German border with France. All but one copy was promptly confiscated by the Prussian authorities.
Marx and Engels waited impatiently for Armageddon. Like many nineteenth-century romantics, they “saw themselves as living in a general atmosphere of crisis and impending catastrophe” in which anything could happen.68 John of Patmos, the author of the book of Revelation, had supplied them with the perfect finale for modern society and their Manifesto: society splits into two diametrically opposed camps, there is a final battle, Rome falls, the oppressed receive justice, the oppressors are judged, and the end of history comes.
History did not end in 1848. The French revolution of that year led not to Socialism or even universal male suffrage, but to the reign of Napoléon III. The declaration of the French Republic resulted in Marx’s summary ejection from Belgium and, a few weeks after he had found a new bolt-hole in Paris, persecution by the French authorities. When the Paris police threatened to banish him to a swampy, disease-ridden village hundreds of miles from the capital, Marx objected on grounds of health and began to look around for a country that would take him. In August 1849 he moved to London, that “Patmos of foreign fugitives” and home of the former French king Louis Philippe and countless other political exiles.69 It would be for only a short time, he consoled himself.
Marx’s arrival in London coincided with one of the worst cholera epidemics in the city’s history. By the time it had run its course, 14,500 adults and children had died.70 The outbreak encouraged Henry Mayhew, the journalist, to undertake a remarkable series of newspaper stories about London’s poor.71 A scientist manqué who had a terrible relationship with his father, Mayhew was plump, energetic, and engaging, but absolutely hopeless about money. At thirty-seven, the former actor and cofounder of the humor magazine Punch was still recovering from a humiliating bankruptcy that had cost him his London town house and nearly landed him in jail. After months of grinding out pulp fiction with self-mocking titles such as The Good Genius That Turned Everything into Gold, Mayhew saw a chance for a comeback.
Mayhew’s