Wedgwood understood that it was women who bought luxuries: ‘Fashion is infinitely superior to merit,’ he mused. ‘You’ve only to make choice of proper sponsors.’ In 1765, when George III’s consort Queen Charlotte ordered a set, he called himself ‘Master Potter to Her Majesty’ and advertised it as ‘Queen’s ware’, producing cheaper sets for the middle classes and pioneering catalogues, money-back guarantees and special offers – in other words, he was the inventor of marketing. In 1767 he built a new modern pottery, Etruria, in Stoke, beside the route of the planned Trent and Mersey Canal in which he invested and which transported his wares.* As his pottery conquered the world – even Catherine the Great ordered sets – Wedgwood opened a showroom in Mayfair, where he displayed ‘various Table & dessert services completely … on two ranges of Tables … in order to do the needful with the Ladys in the neatest, genteelest & best method’. It was the start of a new commercialism that would develop into monumental department stores and, two centuries later, into the online shopping and influencers of today.
Few aristocrats were as entrepreneurial as Bridgewater. Titled magnates were positioned to dominate the emerging new world but they did not. While their incomes were colossal, they frittered their riches away on country houses, addictive gambling and expensive courtesans, while middle-class industrialists invested in new technologies. Many of the textiles for middle-class shoppers were manufactured by Robert Peel, the hard-working, harsh son of Lancashire yeomen who for generations had ‘put out’ cloth to small cottage weavers. Now in his mid-twenties, he used Arkwright pumps to set up a cotton-spinning mill and then at thirty founded the first industrial complex at Radcliffe, housing his workers in a barracks and using child labour to toil ten hours a day.
This intense commercial system offered families undreamed-of opportunities and penalties. The affluent became more restricted by bourgeois convention and the need to earn salaries: men had to work long hours at offices and obey a new sort of master, now known as the ‘boss’ – from the Dutch
Peel, the seventh richest man in Britain, soon a baronet and MP, was decent enough to realize his factories were cruel, and fostered the first legislation to improve working conditions. Determined to make his eldest son Robert a gentleman, he trained him not for business but to join Britain’s rulers, making him repeat sermons after church and sending him to Harrow School. The boy would be the first of the new middle class to rule Britain.
North-western Germany was not far behind Britain. It was now that a woman started the dynasty that would power the rise of German industry. In 1782, Helene Amalie Krupp, fifty-two-years old, whose husband Jodocus had died thirty years earlier, bought out of bankruptcy an iron forge north of Essen in the Ruhr and invested in coal mines to fuel her blast furnace, employing her son as her accountant. The Krupps were an old Ruhr mercantile family – one of them, Anton, had manufactured cannon during the Thirty Years War – sometimes serving as burgermeisters of Essen. But, like Merseyside in Britain, the Ruhr possessed the essential matrix of science, innovation and commerce coupled with coal, water and communications. Widow Krupp’s blast furnace was soon manufacturing kitchenware and cannonballs that she sold to German principalities including Prussia. After the early death of her son, she steadfastly trained her grandson, Friedrich Krupp. When Widow Krupp died at ninety-seven, she left him a fortune – which he managed to lose. The Krupps seemed to have failed, but they would recover.
This industrial ‘revolution’ took over a century to modernize human life in a way we would recognize. ‘The Englishman of 1750,’ wrote David Landes, ‘was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionaries than to his own great-grandchildren.’ It was a century that changed human life more than all those before it and that made humans, long the most powerful animal on earth, so dominant that they started to change earth itself, even its climate – an anthropocene age.
In 1700, an alien could have been certain that China and India would continue to dominate the world. Yet the alien would have been wrong. It was not enough for Europe to succeed; the giants of the east had to fail. The Mughals had already collapsed and, though no one yet knew it, China would follow.
