ECONOMIC HISTORY AND JOHN ROWLANDS

ECONOMIC HISTORY AND JOHN ROWLANDS

My followers know that I occasionally putter with events in economic history I find of interest which, for instance, are not directly related to the way economies have evolved to accommodate industrial innovation (e.g., Watts’s steam engine, which gave rise to the so-called “Industrial Revolution,” itself a phrase coined by historian Arnold Toynbee). This essay is about one such unlikely event arising from that “revolution” that caught my attention and prompted this effort.

The Industrial Revolution brought a flood of people into cities in England where the “revolution” started, cities that were not prepared for such a massive invasion. Manchester, England, for instance, grew from 25,000 in 1772 to 367,000 in 1851. Liverpool expanded more than five times in half a century. In 1785 three British cities had populations over 50,000, and by 1860 there were 31 of that size.

Neither employers nor municipal government took responsibility for the predictable results of such a population shift from the rural to the urban in terms of housing, sanitation and clean water. Sewage ran in open trenches down unpaved streets of British cities. In the 1850s London had 200,000 undrained cesspools and the Thames River was a huge flowing sewer and, of course, on dry land horses do what horses do.

In addition to the crowded humanity, the factories that attracted such new arrivals filled the air with dangerous gases and the land with industrial wastes. Newly-constructed railroads beginning in the mid 1850s were built right into the hearts of such cities, bringing with them the roar of engines, exhaust fumes and the rumble of roaring stock. London was a mess, labor (including child labor) was overworked and underpaid, giving rise to great literature by Charles Dickens and providing a background for Karl Marx’s revolutionary chatter. Poorhouses were common, as were debtors’ prisons (where the father of Charles Dickens did some time and a humiliated Charles dropped out of school for a year as a result).

Against this background and in that day, John Rowlands was raised in a Welsh poorhouse, ran away from the poorhouse at age 15, shipped as a cabin boy on a ship bound to New Orleans, and embarked on a most improbable future, hardly one we would expect for a runaway teen-ager from a poorhouse.

To begin, John Rowlands turns out not to be John Rowlands. He was adopted by a merchant named Henry Morton Stanley and took the merchant’s name. He later joined the Confederate army during the American Civil War and was captured by Northern troops at the Battle of Shiloh. Apparently having no particular allegiance, he then joined the United States Navy and saw battle as a sailor (and a Yankee).

After our Civil War was over, the adventurous Stanley became a newspaper correspondent in Europe, Africa and Asia, and is best known for finding Dr. Livingstone on the banks of Lake Tanganyika in Africa. Here is how that happened: Dr. David Livingstone was a medical missionary whose accounts of exploring the Zambezi Rivers and searching for the source of the Nile were published in European and American newspapers. When the dispatches stopped, Livingstone was feared dead. The New York Herald commissioned Henry Morton Stanley to go to Africa and find him. He did find him, and his greeting to the exploring missionary became and still is a household phrase: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

This widely reported encounter and subsequent exploration by Stanley and others spurred European colonization into areas of Africa that had been long ignored, colonization that brought on competition between European powers and wars with natives whose weaponry was no match for European guns and cannons, including Gatling guns. With European brawls over partition of African territories getting worse, 14 major powers, including the United States (which never had any skin in African colonial partitioning but was nevertheless invited to the parley), met in Berlin in 1885. The participants agreed on partitioning of certain parts of the African continent, but no one could enforce the decisions and the squabbles between these European states continued into the 20^th century.

Shortly after “finding” Dr. Livingstone, Stanley explored Africa in a three-year trek that took him from Zanzibar on the east coast to and down the Congo River to the west coast of the continent, a very long trip and one that involved discovery en route of the Ruwenzori – known to us as the “Mountains of the Moon.”

To top off such an adventurous life beginning in a Welsh poorhouse, Stanley later returned to England, was repatriated, and was elected to Parliament. In words of the street, “This guy did it all!”

Though cut from the same cloth as Oliver and David Copperfield (in Dickens’s portrayals in literature) and the horrors of living in a poorhouse during the Industrial Revolution, John Rowlands (aka Henry Morton Stanley) successfully overcame fearsome obstacles on three continents and survived in exercises we can never fully know nor appreciate, and though not a notable figure in economic history such as his British compatriots Ricardo and Adam Smith, he did finally participate to some degree in economic history when he cast his vote for a budget in the House of Commons.

There. I have had my fun with this departure from the usual and will return to discussions of wage inequality, Wall Street travesties, undertaxed and underregulated banks and corporations etc. in due course. Stay tuned.   GERALD     E