Spain and Hungary remained among the last to overcome the feudal era thanks to the industrial change, by the outbreak of the First World War (Trebilcock). Considering the different levels of intensity the industrialization came to have during the eighteenth century and up until the First World War and the variations in the way modernization and a global trade system manifested in different parts of Europe, an industrial revolution may be considered an exaggeration in terms of its achievement at a continental level. "it is obvious that nothing so monolithic as 'an industrial revolution in Europe' occurred in the nineteenth century. The experience of industrialization was most certainly not uniform between countries; instead, there was an immense variety of growth rate, technological advance, and managerial expertise" (idem, 2). Feudal and Capitalist societies coexisted for a while after the industrialization phenomenon spread in Europe, producing inequalities and major differences not only between nations, but also between different regions of the same country.
Trebilcock quotes R.W. Goldsmith in his assessment of the situation in Russia, among the huge European economies that were left behind in the dawn of the industrial era: "still an underdeveloped country"(Goldsmith, quoted by Trebilcock, 205) in 1917, at the time of the Revolution. If the autocracy, the feudal structure that left little place for development and modernization kept Russia from a real advancement due to industrialization until the Revolution, the situation in Germany was completely different. Considered by some as the model of everything against backwardness, by the early twentieth century, the German Empire had its obstacles to overcome during the eighteenth century. By the mid eighteenth century, there was a poor movement between the states that composed the German Empire, exchange of any nature being rendered almost impossible. Feudal social relations in states that were functioning as mini-autocracies were still functioning in the eighteenth century. These conditions only increased the separatism promoted by such relations between states and cities, making progress difficult and encouraging uneven development throughout the empire. Moreover, war between the German states kept the empire away from real progress: Deprived of the 'commercial revolution' which had provided some of the basic materials...
Yet if location discouraged the trader, it attracted the soldier all too effectively. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries war appeared as an endemic phenomenon for the German states, imposing high defence costs on strained budgets, souring relations between governments, and thus the prospects for economic integration, and creating -especially in the Thirty Years War -- a measure of urban devastation which greatly limited the possibilities for the growth of an indigenous bourgeoisie (Trebilcock, 24). Still, toward the second half of the eighteenth century, the German states will gradually start to allow investment in the military in sectors other than the military, such as the industry. They started by focusing on the improving of that transportation means between the states and then spread the toward the development of industrial means destined not only to produce armament, but also mass consumption goods.
Russia and Germany, two major powers involved in both World Wars were two examples that always provided material for historians, sociologists and politicians who analyzed the effects of the industrialization at global level, in the context of the tremendous changes that marked the turn of the twentieth century. Foreign policies had to take into account such examples since the explosion of the industrial era came to culminate with the First World War. Richard Sylla and Gianni Toniolo consider the early nineteenth century as the period that definitively marked the changes brought by the industrialization: "Industrialization, a synonym for modern economic growth that focuses on its essential ingredient, changed forever the ways in which people lived and worked, usually for the better but not without attendant political, social, and ideological strains" (Sylla, Toniolo, 2).
Works Cited
Kiely, Ray. Industrialization and Development: A Comparative Analysis. London: UCL Press, 1998
Sylla, Richard, and Gianni Toniolo, eds. Patterns of European Industrialization: The Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1992
Trebilcock, Clive. The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1780-1914. London: Longman,…
