ABSTRACT
The Atlantic Revolution and the Industrial Revolution were followed by a century of social and economic progress such as history had never known. Economic growth in the nineteenth century was without precedent. It profoundly impressed contemporaries who were old enough to remember the past and could make comparisons with the present. This is what happened to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the great critics of the capitalist system, who, nevertheless, also lauded capitalism in the Communist Manifesto (1979: 85):
[Capitalism], during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even an inkling that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose
foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. In their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted to it, and by the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.
