Truck, Barter and Exchange
By: Weapons Of Reason
Tags: Economics, Politics, History, Industry, Inequality

1757: The Sankey Brook Navigation, the first modern canal, is opened, connecting St Helen’s with the River Mersey.

1769: James Watt patents the steam engine.

1771: Richard Arkwright opens a water-powered cloth mill at Cromford, Derbyshire: the first industrial mill. As land is enclosed, increasing numbers of rural workers are forced to find employment in factories.

1773: The Stock Exchange is formed by a group of stockbrokers in Sweetings Alley, London.

1776: Adam Smith publishes An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in which he suggests that labour rather than land is the source of a nation’s wealth, that imports should be taxed to protect domestic markets, and that the government should not regulate the ‘free’ market.

1785: Edmund Cartwright patents the power loom, the first of its kind to run on steam.

1799–1800: The Combination Acts pass into law, prohibiting the formation of trade unions and making strike action illegal in Britain.

1801: The London Stock Exchange becomes a regulated organisation.

1811: Groups of artisans and craftspeople attack factories in Nottingham, England, destroying machinery that they claim is making their skills obsolete. They call themselves the Luddites.

1812: The Frame-Breaking Act makes machine breaking a crime punishable by death.

1815: The Corn Laws are passed in order to protect the domestic market from competition. They impose a tariff on imported corn.

1825: The first public railway is opened in north-east England, connecting Stockton to Darlington. The carriages are pulled by Robert Stephenson’s engine, Locomotion.

1832: The Reform Act extends the right to vote to all male holders of property worth above £10. Until this time, the election of MPs to a borough was controlled by a single wealthy patron.

1833: The first Factory Act is passed to regulate working conditions in factories. Children under nine are no longer permitted to work in factories, and workers under the age of 18 can work no more than 12 hours a day.

1843: Businessman and banker James Wilson founds The Economist, which campaigns against government regulation of markets, in particular the Corn Laws.

1844: The 1844 Bank Charter Act makes the Bank of England the sole authorised issuer of bank notes and enforces the gold standard for currency, meaning all bank notes correspond to a fixed amount of gold. Samuel Morse sends the first electronic telegraph, separating communication from transport for the first time.

1845: Friedrich Engels publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England, chronicling the appalling conditions of the nation’s industrial workers in Manchester.

1846: The Corn Laws are repealed and the government moves towards a laissez-faire approach to markets.

1867: Karl Marx publishes the first volume of Capital, in which he makes the case that capitalism is inherently flawed as the worker never receives the full value of their work and the capitalist makes money without lifting a finger.

1868: The British Trades Union Congress is formed.

1871: Trade unions are made legal in Britain.

1884: The Fabian Society is founded to address the growing state of inequality in Britain.

1886: Karl Benz patents the first automobile in Germany.

1900: Keir Hardie forms the Labour Party in the UK with the support of the Fabian Society and persuades the Trades Union Congress to support his new party.

1901: JP Morgan and Elbert H Gary create a merger between Federal Steel, the Carnegie Steel Company and the National Steel Company to form US Steel, the world’s first billion dollar company. Such mergers become increasingly common and popular.

1905: Max Weber publishes The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he argues that the spirit of modern capitalism is rooted in a Protestant frame of mind that “strives systematically and rationally in a calling for legitimate profit in accordance with the virtues of punctuality, industry and frugality and honesty”.

1908: The Model T Ford goes on sale in the US, the first car the nation’s middle classes can afford.

1911: The US supreme court rules that John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil is an illegal monopoly and splits it into 33 smaller companies. The initial revenue of these new companies is much greater than that of a single entity, making Rockefeller the richest man in the world almost overnight.

1913: Henry Ford introduces an assembly line form of production into his Model T Ford factory. The line moves work to the worker and speeds up production.

1914: Henry Ford increases his workers’ salaries and reduces their working hours to eight hours a day, five days a week. To develop a market for mass-produced goods, he says, workers must have sufficient salaries to afford them and sufficient leisure time to enjoy them.

1918: The Labour Party’s constitution is amended to reflect its new focus: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

1929: Nine years of debt-fuelled investment and growth in US markets is brought to an end as the great depression begins.

1933: The Glass–Steagall Act is passed, separating US commercial and investment banking.

1936: John Maynard Keynes publishes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in which he outlines a new approach to lifting an economy out of recession. To drive growth, governments should invest in policies that drive, instead of limit, consumer spending. Increasing spending, he says, increases demand and would lift an economy out of recession.

1938: The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) is founded in the US. Its role is to securitise mortgages, allowing mortgage lenders to reinvest their assets and lend to more people, thus increasing home ownership and affordable housing.

1943: Britain’s Tommy Flowers invents the first programmable electronic computer to help break encrypted German messages during the second world war.

1944: The Bretton Woods Agreement creates fixed exchange rates between the world’s major currencies. Each currency is fixed in relation to the dollar, whose value in turn is fixed in relation to gold. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are created to support international economic collaboration and reduce poverty in ‘developing nations’.

1948: The British welfare state is founded, which aims to provide adequate employment, income, education, housing and healthcare to all citizens in exchange for a National Insurance contribution.

1960: The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded.

1962: American economist Milton Friedman publishes Capitalism and Freedom, arguing that political and economic freedom are intrinsically linked. The free market, he says, gives birth to the best expressions of society, and welfare systems hinder the poor.

1965: Diversification becomes a popular form of merger, in which companies merge with or acquire other companies from a variety of different industries instead of the same field, protecting investment and reducing risk.

1968: Fannie Mae is privatised.

1969: In what is one of the earliest examples of a hostile takeover, Victor Posner takes control of the Sharon Steel Corporation against the wishes of its board, milking the company’s assets to fund other investments. By 1987, Sharon Steel files for bankruptcy.

1970: The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) is established to end Fannie Mae’s monopoly on securitised mortgages.

1973: European economic growth means the US can no longer tie the dollar to gold. The Bretton Woods Agreement is overturned.

1978–1979: The coldest UK winter for a decade renders much work impossible. To control inflation, pay rises are limited to below 5%, leading to widespread public sector strikes.

1981: High interest rates and appreciation of the pound lead to a UK-wide recession, particularly hitting UK manufacturing. In response, the government begins to privatise state-owned companies including Jaguar, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, British Aerospace, Britoil and British Gas.

1991: The world wide web is launched by Tim Berners-Lee on the first servers to operate outside of CERN.

1994: Stanford Federal Credit Union becomes the first financial institution to offer online banking services to all of its users.

1999: Congress passes the Financial Services Modernization Act, repealing Glass–Steagall and reducing the regulation of risk-taking among financial firms.

2000: As the number of internet-based companies grows, investment banks make easy profits on their initial public offerings, leading to excessive speculation and investment in tech companies. In 2000, the bubble bursts and many internet companies go bust.

2008: Lehman Brothers investment bank declares bankruptcy following a drawn-out crisis in the US subprime mortgage market, kicking off a chain of crises across global financial markets. The government arranges for the Troubled Asset Relief Program to make $700bn available to buy toxic assets and equity from its banks. In the UK, the government puts together a £500bn package to help rescue its own banks.

2018: Global debt reaches a peak of $164tn, a $50tn increase since the 2008 crisis. Experts begin to suggest that another global recession may hit in 2019.

2019: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯