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By Root 1404 0

airplane flew in 1903 when, at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers made the world’s first powered flight using a gasoline engine. The need to fuel the machines began dominating business and governmental decisions worldwide. Oil was the key to both fueling and maintaining the new mechanical world. Without a large supply of oil the machines would die. As electricity became more useful, ways to generate electricity became more valuable. Falling water runs electric generators, but not everyone lives near a big river. Once more, power from burning coal or oil became the answer. As machines came of age, coal and then oil became the gold of the machine era.

Politics

Figure 43 The British Empire in 1923

Britain ruled the sea and an exceptionally large part of the world. She was the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world long before 1800, and her position seemed unassailable. Britain desired free trade and, as a nation, committed herself to keeping the oceans open to shipping, and keeping trade barriers low. All in accordance with Adam Smith’s ideas as set forth in his book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Britain believed the goods and raw materials flowing to England strengthened her as a nation, and strengthened the colonies producing the goods and raw materials. As a whole, Britain ran her colonies well and relatively free of corruption. India, the crown jewel of Britain’s colonial empire, attracted many English citizens to live in the comforts of the imperial possession.

England also advanced on the social front. Under Queen Victoria (1819 to 1901), the second and third Reform Acts passed giving more classes of people the vote, and better labor laws passed to protect working people. In the United States, amendments to the Constitution passed ensuring voting rights and citizenship for blacks and minorities, and social welfare programs expanded to help the poor, the uneducated, and the insane. Powerful business interests operating to the detriment of small enterprise, such as railroads, at last began to face serious regulatory threats from state governments.

France also possessed a great worldwide colonial empire, but it did not add as much to the economy of France as English colonies did for Britain. The French empire was rife with corruption and incompetence. France and England viewed their empires differently. England built schools, hospitals, railroads, and the like for its colonies. Overall, the English colonies received much from the mother country. France did build railroads and generally improved its colonies, but the British did more. France viewed the colonies as benefiting France and little else. Britain viewed the colonies as a two-way exchange where the mother country owed the colonies, and both benefited from the colonial system. While the French did not acutely oppress people in their colonies, they let them know about French superiority in all things.[154] Holland, Portugal, and Germany held colonial empires, but they were a shadow of the English empire. Germany was especially desirous of obtaining more colonies to equal England, its rival for world power. Germany’s numerous problems included coming very late to the colonial game, and being a land power in Central Europe—not a sea power. Sea power brought colonies, and Germany was nowhere near the equal of Britain at sea.

Germany’s ship building program pushed Britain’s policy of having a fleet twice the size of any other nation to the limit. Germany was making headway by building more ships than England. Nevertheless, England’s outstanding naval architects pulled a rabbit out of the hat, outperforming Germany in innovation. Britain’s navy under the First Sea Lord, Fisher, invented a new kind of battleship,[155] the HMS Dreadnought (1906). This revolutionary ship made all other battleships obsolete the instant it hit the waves, because it had more large guns and greater speed than anything else afloat. The Dreadnought’s new turbine engines made the ship amazingly quick. All those many ships Germany constructed to catch up with England became