# Industrial Capitalism — A Ledger Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-industrial-capitalism Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-industrial-capitalism/raw Category: Business Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:02.585Z Tags: catalog, business, industrial, capitalism ## Summary Common fields are fenced; English peasants are dispossessed of customary use-rights. Land becomes a tradable asset and a wage-labour force is freed for the towns. Key sections include: Industrial Capitalism origins of the modern economy; Pre-conditions of an industrial order; The Wealth of Nations; The factory — separation of worker and tool; Banking, credit, and the central authority; The Robber Barons; The critique — Marx and after; The corporation — invention of the legal person; Antitrust — the state pushes back; The welfare state — capitalism, regulated. ## Slide Outline 1. Industrial Capitalism origins of the modern economy 2. Pre-conditions of an industrial order 3. The Wealth of Nations 4. The factory — separation of worker and tool 5. Banking, credit, and the central authority 6. The Robber Barons 7. The critique — Marx and after 8. The corporation — invention of the legal person 9. Antitrust — the state pushes back 10. The welfare state — capitalism, regulated 11. The postwar consensus — managed capitalism 12. The neoliberal turn 13. References & further viewing ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: Industrial Capitalism origins of the modern economy - Folio I · The Master Ledger · Anno 1750 — present - Volume I - Entries 13 - Period c.1600 — 2026 - Auditor K. Ning - — entered this day — - Posted ### Slide 2: Pre-conditions of an industrial order - Folio II - c. 1500 — 1750 - Entry No. 01 — Land - Enclosure - Common fields are fenced; English peasants are dispossessed of customary use-rights. Land becomes a tradable asset and a wage-labour force is freed for the towns. - acts of parliament: ~5,200 - Entry No. 02 — Method - Double-Entry Bookkeeping - Codified by Pacioli (1494). Every transaction recorded twice — debit and credit. Profit, the residual, becomes legible. Capitalism becomes auditable. - debit = credit ∴ balanced - Entry No. 03 — Capital - Joint-Stock Companies - Dutch East India (1602), English East India (1600). Pooled equity, transferable shares, distributed risk — the legal scaffolding for ventures larger than any merchant. - shareholders · perpetual · tradable - Filed ### Slide 3: The Wealth of Nations - Folio III - 5 March 1776 - 1776 - Adam Smith — moral philosopher - Smith observes a pin factory: alone a worker makes perhaps one pin a day; ten workers, each performing one of eighteen distinct operations, produce 48,000 pins. - From this he draws two doctrines that will haunt the next 250 years: - Division of labour — productivity is a function of specialisation, not effort. - Invisible hand — self-interested exchange, under competition, can yield public benefit unintended by any party. - "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Pin Manufactory — daily output - WorkshopHandsPins / day - Solitary artisan11 — 20 - Smith's manufactory1048,000 - Per-hand productivity gain—×2,400 - Source: Wealth of Nations, Bk I, Ch. I. - Audited ### Slide 4: The factory — separation of worker and tool - Folio IV - c. 1780 — 1850 - From workshop to mill - The artisan owned his loom; the factory operative does not. Steam, then water-frame and power-loom, demand fixed capital beyond what any worker can finance. Ownership of the means of production cleaves from the act of production. - Time itself is reorganised: the bell, the shift, the clock-card. Labour ceases to be a task and becomes an interval — sold by the hour. - Cromford Mill, Derbyshire, 1771 — Arkwright's prototype - Manchester cotton spindles, 1830: ~7 million - British child labour reformed only after the Factory Acts (1833+) - Entered ### Slide 5: Banking, credit, and the central authority - Folio V - c. 1694 — 1913 - Capital, mobilised - Industry consumes capital faster than retained earnings can supply. The banker becomes the indispensable intermediary, channeling the savings of widows, gentry, and rentiers into furnaces, rails, and ships. - Bank of England, 1694 — first modern central bank; lender to the Crown. - Rothschilds, c. 1810s — five sons across Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna, Naples; financed Wellington at Waterloo, the British purchase of Suez (1875), and bond issues for half the courts of Europe. - Federal Reserve, 1913 — after the Panic of 1907, the United States accepts what it had twice rejected. - "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." — attrib. M. A. Rothschild - House of Rothschild — selected loans - YearBorrowerAmount (£) - 1815British Govt. (war)9,000,000 - 1822Austrian Empire3,500,000 - 1825Bank of England (rescue)3,000,000 - 1854British Govt. (Crimea)16,000,000 - 1875Britain — Suez shares4,000,000 - Selected total35,500,000 - Paid ### Slide 6: The Robber Barons - Folio VI - United States, c. 1865 — 1900 - After the American Civil War, a continent-sized market and a permissive legal regime concentrate fortunes never before seen. Their builders are admired as titans and despised as feudal lords. - Steel - Andrew Carnegie - Vertically integrates iron, coke, and rail; introduces the Bessemer process at scale. Sells Carnegie Steel to J. P. Morgan in 1901 to form U.S. Steel. - sale price: $480,000,000 - Oil - John D. Rockefeller - Standard Oil refines, ships, and prices kerosene with railroad rebates and predatory cuts. By 1880 it controls roughly 90% of U.S. refining capacity. - peak market share: ~90% - Rails - Cornelius Vanderbilt - Steamships, then railroads. Consolidates the New York Central. Dies in 1877 leaving roughly $100M — about 1/87 of U.S. GDP. - est. fortune: $100,000,000 - Note — the term robber baron is borrowed from the Rhine castles whose lords levied tolls on river traffic; the analogy was deliberate. - Disputed ### Slide 7: The critique — Marx and after - Folio VII - London, 1867 (Capital, Vol. I) - Three ledgers Marx wished to keep - Surplus value — labour produces more value than the wage paid for it; the difference, appropriated by the owner, is the source of profit. - Alienation — separated from the product, the process, fellow workers, and his own species-being, the worker is estranged within his own activity. - Immiseration thesis — competition compels owners to accumulate, mechanise, and depress wages; crises of overproduction recur with deepening severity. - "The worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object… It exists outside him, independently." - Whether the empirical predictions held is contested. The conceptual vocabulary did not go away. - A Marxian T-account — one workday - HourActivityValue - 1 — 4Necessary labour (= wage)£ 4 - 5 — 10Surplus labour£ 6 - Value produced£10 - Wage paid£ 4 - Surplus value (profit)£ 6 - Cross-Posted ### Slide 8: The corporation — invention of the legal person - Folio VIII - England, 1855 — 1856 - Limited Liability - The Limited Liability Act 1855 and the Joint Stock Companies Act 1856 permit any seven persons, by registration alone, to form a company whose shareholders risk only the capital they have subscribed. - The corporation acquires the legal attributes once reserved for natural persons: it can own property, sue and be sued, contract, persist beyond any individual life — yet it cannot be jailed and it has no conscience. - Risk is socialised, reward is privatised. - Investment can scale without partners staking their estates. - The "fictitious person" becomes the dominant actor in the economy. - "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?" — Edward, 1st Baron Thurlow - Registered ### Slide 9: Antitrust — the state pushes back - Folio IX - United States, 1890 — 1911 - Sherman Act, 1890 - "Every contract, combination… or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, is hereby declared to be illegal." Sponsored by Senator John Sherman of Ohio. - For nearly twenty years the Act was used more often against unions than against trusts. Then the Justice Department turned it on Standard Oil. - Standard Oil Co. v. United States, 1911 - The Supreme Court holds, 8 — 1, that Standard Oil is an illegal monopoly. The trust is dissolved into 34 successor companies — among them the ancestors of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Amoco. The shares Rockefeller receives in the breakup make him the richest man in modern American history. - Decreed ### Slide 10: The welfare state — capitalism, regulated - Folio X - 1880s — 1940s - Bismarck's bargain (1880s) - The Iron Chancellor, alarmed by socialist organising, introduces the world's first state social insurance: health (1883), accident (1884), old-age & invalidity (1889). Conservative in motive; transformative in effect. - "Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more easy to handle than one who has no such prospect." - The New Deal (1933 — 1939) - Roosevelt's response to the Depression. Banks recapitalised, securities regulated, public works employment, collective bargaining recognised, and — in 1935 — the Social Security Act. - Capital — Labour Bargain Ledger - YearProgrammeJurisdiction - 1883Health insuranceGerman Empire - 1889Old-age pensionsGerman Empire - 1908Old Age Pensions ActUnited Kingdom - 1933Glass-Steagall ActUnited States - 1935Social Security ActUnited States - 1942Beveridge ReportUnited Kingdom - 1948National Health ServiceUnited Kingdom - Reformed ### Slide 11: The postwar consensus — managed capitalism - Folio XI - 1945 — c. 1973 - The thirty glorious years - The Western settlement after 1945: Keynesian demand management, Bretton Woods fixed exchange rates, an unprecedented expansion of the middle class, and a tacit truce between organised labour and large capital. - U.S. real GDP per capita roughly doubles, 1947 — 1973. - Top marginal U.S. income tax: 91% in 1955. - Union density peaks: U.S. ~35% (1954); UK ~50% (1979). - Decolonisation reorders the world map; the Cold War constrains both blocs. - France: les trente glorieuses - Germany: Wirtschaftswunder - Japan: kōdo seichō - Union density — selected years - YearCountryUnion density - 1954United States~35% - 1979United Kingdom~50% - 1980Sweden~78% - 1980West Germany~35% - 2024United States~10% - A long line, falling. - Settled ### Slide 12: The neoliberal turn - Folio XII - 1979 — 2008 - The oil shocks of the 1970s break the Keynesian settlement. Stagflation — simultaneous inflation and unemployment — is the diagnosis. A new prescription, drawn from Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School, is administered. - U.K., 1979 - Margaret Thatcher - Privatises British Telecom, British Gas, British Steel. Defeats the miners' strike (1984 — 85). Sells council houses. Top income-tax rate falls from 83% to 40%. - U.S., 1981 - Ronald Reagan - Cuts marginal tax rates, deregulates airlines, trucking, finance. Fires 11,345 air-traffic controllers. Volcker's Fed raises rates to 20% to break inflation. - Worldwide - Financialisation - Glass-Steagall repealed (1999). Capital controls fall. Finance's share of U.S. corporate profits rises from ~10% (1947) to ~40% (2002). - The reforms restore profitability and crush inflation. They also widen inequality to levels last seen before the Great Depression — and concentrate financial risk in ways that detonate in 2008. - Re-audited ### Slide 13: References & further viewing - Folio XIII — Final entry - Closing the book - A short bibliography - Adam Smith — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) - Karl Marx — Capital, Volume I (1867) - Karl Polanyi — The Great Transformation (1944) - E. P. Thompson — The Making of the English Working Class (1963) - Eric Hobsbawm — The Age of Capital (1975) - Joel Mokyr — The Enlightened Economy (2009) - Thomas Piketty — Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) - Robert Skidelsky — Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) - Further viewing on YouTube - Industrial capitalism — history (search) - Rockefeller & Standard Oil (search) - Final balance - Folios entered13 - Centuries surveyed~5 - Verdicts pronounced0 - Books closedbalanced - — K. Ning, auditor — - Closed ## Related Decks - [Behavioral Economics — When agents are human](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-behavioral-econ) - [BRAND / How meaning gets attached to things](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-brand-history) - [The Modern Corporation — Annual Report](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-corporations) - [Disruption / Why incumbents lose](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-disruption)