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250 The Origin of Cmlisation

There were other equally telling features; Łhe mouement spearheaded by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, known derisiwely as the Impressionists, organised their first exhibition in 1874.¹⁰⁶ Their influence on the twentieth century is almost unquantifiable. Levey writes, "If Gauguin¹s work liberated colour, van Gogh's liberated coloured paint; the bright pigments themselwes writhe, as though mat ter wre on the point of taking life."^l07He sees van Gogh as a patron saint of modern art:

The nineteenth century would have been aurprised to know that two of its most influential bequests to the twentieth were the isolated and tormented figures of Wincent uan Gogh and Sóren Kierkegaard, postumously canonised as the heroes of the agę of anxiety.^lOS

This is a telling link with Chester Starr’s comments on the anxiety syndromes generated in emergent Classical Greece.

The impact of provisiomng on this seminal forty year period is equally instructiwe, for it saw the true synthesis of industrial production for food packaging, preparation and distribution on a mass scalę. Ewidence for food Processing is rampant at this time, simultaneously creating ramifications in several other subsysteros. Canning factories had been set up in America as early as 1817, but it was only after 1868, when hand-made cans were widely superseded by the machine-cut uersions, that giant canning manufacturies were established.¹⁰⁹ Writing of the sequence of events encouraging mass production for food supplies Reay Tannahill suggests a Chain reaction was involved:

Peas, for example, could not be canned economically while they were harvested and prepared by hand. By the end of the nineteenth century, a mechanical gathering and shelling device had been dewised.

Fish, too, at first seemed to present problems beyond the scope of machinery. In the salmon canneries of California, Chinese workers were employed to do the cleamng and boning. But carae the day in 1882 when free Chinese immigration into the United States was banned, and it was not long before the 'iron Chink¹ was inuented.¹¹⁰

lndustrialisation of food generated the eguiualent of a major cultural leap for the emergent armies of mass consumers obtaining a regular money wagę. Ihey were themselwes expanding in numbers as the growing labour force manning the mass production factories, which sprang up in the newly industrialising nat ions of western Europę and the USA. Over the short timeframe that we are now considering wariety, quality and hygiene in food production underwent a wirtual explosive erupt ion. During the '70s and '80s retailing entrepreneurs, like Thomas Lipton emerged.¹ Erom one smali prowisions shop in Glasgow, he deweloped a Chain of grocery Stores right across Scotland and then throughout the UK.^ł,ł He bought tea, coffee and cocoa plantations in Ceylon to supply his retail outlets, which brought these luxury commodities within the price rangę and auailability of miliions. Uentures catering for mass food markets began to mushroom; packing houses for hogs were set up in Chicago, fruit farma and jam factories grew up, bakeries and bacon-curing establishments arose in England.¹¹² Canning for meat rapidly became a secondary alternatiwe when ship-ments of chilled beef from America¹s Atlantic ports to England began in 1875. In 1880, a cargo of 40 tons of good quality frożen beef and mutton arrived at London after sixty-four days sailing from Sydney, Australia.¹¹³ The age of industrial prouisioning was really underway.

In this era the first seeds of the futurę Welfare State were sown; Bismarck was the first politician in a major country to undertake large-scale welfare provision. In 1883, 1884 and 1889 his Reichstag passed measures for insurance against sickness, old age and infirmity¹¹ The expansion of cities was rapid in the generation after 1870. A.J.P.Taylor writea, "the great towns of Europę could not have been maintained without railways, steam power and a rewolution in agriculture, but the mowement to the towns depended just as much on the spread of new ideas which prized men away from their traditional beliefs and traditional surroundings.^1,115 After 1896, another dimension was added, in what Norman Stone deseribes as "an orgy of imperialism," launched by the Italians, which, for the first time, became a popular cause.¹¹⁶

Rostow thinks the trend periods on either side of the mid L890s are best dealt with in a single analysis, as he says, "That t urn ing point was a real watershed."^1l7He sees the spread of railways from the American West to Russia, India, and Australia, from Western Canada to the Argentine pampas as bringing into production sufficient new acreage to generate a surplus capable of feeding Europę down to the First World War.¹¹⁸ The opening up of these new territories for agriculture was itself the background to the cyclical fluct-uations of Capital and large flows of immigrants, although in America the picture was complieated by the rising industrial momentum of the growing economy. The demographic mowements had adwerse effects on Britain and other European nations which experienced large population outflows at this time.¹¹⁹

By the mid-1890s the still rapidly expanding steel industries of the adwanced economies were no longer providing the revolutionary cost reductions that had marked the previous two decades. Yet the prewar years were a period of technical innowation.¹²⁰ The new industries, Rostow¹s 'leading sectors*, were now rubber, gas, electricity, cement and automobil es.¹²¹ The First World War came at the close of this seminal forty years, and helped to accelerate the absorption of the new technologies, most notably the telephone and radio, with a pronounced inerease in industrial diuersification. The dewelopment of auiation also received its first serious boost. Additionally, Rostow notes that the priority claims of a war based economy decreed a radical decline Ln housing construction on a scalę sufficient to create the basis for a postwar housing boom, which duły emerged in the early I920s.¹²²

1

Although William Leuer, later first Viscount Lewerhulme, began his entre-preneurial career manufacturing sunlight soap, his subsequent merger with a Dutch company expanded his interests into wegetable oils, including the manufacture of margarine.