Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [285]
Bathed in the aura of such a stunning reality—even if the full statistics were not then available—it is hardly surprising that Indian students had usually been more impressed by the material benefits of British methods than the imperishable rewards promised by the Protestant missionaries. The prestige of English in the nineteenth century was elevated to the skies through the same process that had made French the leading language of European culture throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. At root, the thought was: ‘if you’re so rich, how can you not be smart?’
France had had a good natural endowment of fertile farmland and abundant labour on which to found this, but Britain had had quite a modest starting capital. In the early seventeenth century, when the British had first turned up in the East Indies, and tried to get involved in the spice trade, their main problem had been the lack of goods for which there was any local demand. But now, after over two centuries of trading, finagling, shipbuilding and warring, their capital and influence gave them access to pretty much anything they might desire: as the economist Stanley Jevons crowed in 1865:
The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies…66
Britain, as a power, was going to find that some of these other powers, especially one in North America, would have a tendency to shift the terms of trade against it; but this was no loss to the English-language community; if anything it was a net gain when the English-speaking inhabitants of America began to look beyond their own domain, and use their resources, in fertile fields, in productive mines, and in a highly educated and massive population, for schemes of their own devising.
Amid the general splurge of galloping wealth creation, there was a particular surge in the power and speed of communications. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed progress that was unheard of, first in inventing, and then in speedily applying, all over the world, systems for transport of people and merchandise. Perhaps even more impressive is the parallel progress made, largely using electronics, in systems to transmit and store all sorts of information. A hundred and fifty years from 1830 takes us from the first railway engine through the steamboat to mass-market air transport, and from telegraph through the telephone to global broadcasts of radio and television, as well as the first approaches to effective computer networks. In the same period, means were found to store, and to access at will, all kinds of sounds, including speech and music, visual scenes and pictures, and views of events and actions as they took place. Any one of these would have had the potential to transform the world in an earlier age; but in this age, when humanity’s dreams of magical powers came true, they all came together.
Almost every one of these new technologies was invented by a speaker of English—Stephenson, Fulton, Wright, Bell, Baird, Edison—or by a speaker perhaps of another language who had to work in the English-speaking world, as Marconi and Reuter had. And even when they were not—think of Benz’s German internal combustion engine, or the French photograph and motion picture, due to pioneers such as Daguerre and Lumière—it was English-speaking developers, such as Henry Ford or the film-makers of Hollywood, who first demonstrated what could be done