The following excerpt is from Christopher Dawson’s essay, The Evolution of the Modern City:
THUS it is useless to seek to understand the rise of the industrial city by looking for internal processes of development, such as we can find in the history of the Greek or mediaeval city. The new towns were not self-conscious and self-determining societies; they were the organs of a nationalist-imperialist movement in economic expansion. And as the great age of Roman imperial expansion brought with it the decay of the old municipal life and a terrible degradation of slave labour, so, too, the industrial movement in eighteenth-century England brought with it a similar deterioration, alike in the civic life of the town and in the status of the wage-labourer. The same spirit that manifested itself in the ruthless daring and harsh discipline of the eighteenth-century navy, caused the sacrifice of the amenities of life in the new cities to the national wealth. At the cost of two or three generations of pitiless toil on the part of the people, and of the demoniac energy on the part of the organizers and employers, England established her position as the work-shop of the world.
The true character of this movement has been obscured by the false diagnosis of the economists. For a century after Adam Smith, the preachers of Free Trade and laissez faire in industry gave a liberal and individualistic interpretation to a process which was essentially due to half a century of disciplined national effort. The economic freedom that English trade and industry had secured for themselves was not the abstract liberty of the eighteenth-century philosophers, it was the freedom of a young giant who strips himself of the armour of antiquated restrictions in order to wrestle more freely with his opponents. The real note of the period was not the liberty, but economic conquest and exploitation. England possessed an almost complete monopoly in the new industrial methods and her naval and mercantile power enabled her to find an opening for the new products in all the markets of the world—even in those of India and West Africa—while her potential rivals were still hampered by the old economic restrictions or by the pre-occupation of war and revolution. The economists failed to see that this advantage was essentially temporary. They attributed it to necessary working out of economic laws; and, as they believed in the providentially established harmony between individual gain and national welfare, it was natural for them also to suppose that the British industrial monopoly was ideally adapted to the true needs of humanity in general.
Finally, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the new system achieved its consummation by revolution of the means of transport and communication and by the consequent realization in the practice of the economists’ ideal of the world market. This change, while bringing an enormous accession of force to the industrial movement generally, had a special importance in the development of the industrial city. All the ancient limitations in the size of a city were removed, and the last links that bound the industrial town to its rural environment were broken. The city now lived entirely for and by the world market. It drew its food from one continent, the raw materials for its industries from another, and exported the finished product, perhaps, to a third.
Thus it was no longer in any sense a part or servant of its own region, nor was it organized primarily as a place for its own citizens to live in. It was a cosmopolitan ergastulum for the production of wealth. The desire for gain, which was the creative force behind this new city-development, showed itself in every aspect of its life. Thus the interests alike of the producer and the consumer were subordinated to those of the middleman, the class of financiers, bankers, brokers and merchants, which represented the vital principle of this order in the same way that the knight and the ecclesiastic represented that of the mediaeval state. And the same spirit governed the actual construction of the industrial town: it was built neither for beauty nor for convenience, but for the immediate profit of the ground landlord and the speculative builder. The exploitation ethos, the spirit of Dickens’ Gradgrind and Matthew Arnold’s Mr. Bottles, was a very real force during the nineteenth century, and in its time it moulded civilization in England no less effectually than did the militarist ethos in Prussia.
The typical cities of the industrial age—the Lancashire cotton town of a century ago, the Pittsburgh or Chicago of the last generation or the new Russian factory towns of 1914—were like the great mining camps which grew up on the California and Australian goldfields; not cities, but fortuitous collections of individuals drawn together to exploit the new source of wealth, and one another, and living in chaotic disorder and discomfort without any thought beyond the gain of the moment. And, as the mining camps gave place in time to a comparatively settled and orderly town, so we can see the industrial order gradually passing into something different.
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