Continental Europe

The song has ended but the melody lingers on

In the second half of the 18th century an explosion in scientific experimentation and discovery took place throughout continental Europe and Britain, new chemical elements and compounds were identified and laws, such as those on thermodynamics, were derived and published. In Continental Europe the Napoleonic Wars were finalised, at the battle of Waterloo of 1815, and as a consequence the British naval blockade had been lifted. Maritime trade was resumed but in Britain the trade in foodstuff was now inhibited by the maintenance of legislation, collectively referred to as the Corn Laws , which were protective measures introduced in response to the English agriculturalists’ concern that their high grain prices could not be maintained under peacetime conditions.

Britain was to pioneer the Industrial Revolution and, shortly after the period when its success had become most evident, British technology was being purchased by Continental firms and British engineers were busy selling their industrial skills into Europe. The German, Belgian and Russian industries even received government financial support to promote these new industries in their respective countries. Areas particularly affected were the Ruhr Valley of Germany and the long established industrialised area of Wallonia in Belgium.

Wallonia, with its coal mines to provide energy and coking materials, commenced industrial activity in in the Middle Ages. With its wool spinning and weaving, glass and weapons manufacturing industries it was to have considerable success in adopting the British industrial model and, by the 1820’s, had numerous blast furnaces with their accompanying puddling and rolling mills. The concentration of populations due to industrialisation, as in England, led to the formation of socialist parties and to the establishment of trade unions. In other European countries, such as France, the introduction of industrialisation followed a more gradual progression.

The potato blight arrived in Northern Europe in the mid-1840’s with the areas most affected being those of Flanders and Prussia. Resultant deaths in Belgium were estimated to be from forty to fifty thousand people, in Germany about forty-two thousand and in France about ten thousand. These death rates were much lower than those recorded in Ireland, and to a lesser extent Scotland, where alternative food sources such as rye, wheat or oats were unavailable to the general population.