The turning point in economic history is 1870. That is the focal point at which transportation, communication, and human invention were sparked in a way that totally revolutionized the economy. Some examples:
-In 1870, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Eastern (the largest ship ever built until 1901) lay the undersea telegraph cable from Yemen to Bombay, completing a single line from London. Rather than months for news to go from London to Bombay and back, after 1870 it only took minutes.
-The first tangible economic use of this happened only a year later, when American financier J. P. Morgan joined Anthony Drexel in forming an investment bank, in charge of brokering deals from capital-rich Britain to resource-rich America. This was possible by the telegraph, which allowed them to control and monitor their investment on a daily basis.
-For transportation, a shipyard in Belfast launched the first steam-powered, screw propeller ship, the RMS Oceanic. The transatlantic journey from Liverpool to New York took 9 days and cost $15, a month and a half’s work for the average factory worker. It was one-third the cost in time and money from only a generation earlier during the Irish Potato Famine, which meant the trip was much more accessible and many more people were likely to survive the voyage.
-Going the other way, refrigeration began to be in wide usage in 1870, allowing exports of grain from the New World back to Europe. The cost of a pound of flour plummeted by half after 1870. Combined with migrations of Europeans to America, Malthus was soundly disproved.
-By 1870, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. There isn’t a single invention to name that caused it, but a surge of inventive activity, especially in Great Britain. Developments in metallurgy, electricity, steam, math, finance, physics, chemistry, medicine, and biology all flowed out of universities and scientists. The common worker could finally dream of high consumption.
-For the common man, the two most important sections come in electricity and medicine. Both meant that people were able to earn more with less effort, and were much less likely to die from smallpox, cholera, dysentery, etc. Being less likely to die and having more energy, naturally, meant more children. And that’s exactly what you see, a population boom in Britain originating from the 1870s and traveling around the world as these benefits were spread.