THE GREAT BOOM
The main reason for "The Great Boom" lays in the extraordinary transformation and economic expansion of the years 1848 and the early 1870s. By 1850 British exports had increased more rapidly than in the first seven years of The 1850s this was unprecedented. Between 1851 and 1857 iron exports in Belgium would double. Subsequently between 1853 and 1855 the important rise of prices did not produce disturbances of people except in regions very backward like the north of Italy and Spain what in these states produced the revolution of 1854 , In the rest of the countries the labor front and the increase in wages marked the popular discontent. The combination of a rapid increase in prices with capital sprout achieved that this splendor was satisfactory for traders. In this period the world became capitalist and a minority of countries became industrial economies, the combination of cheap capital with a rapid increase of prices achieved that economic splendor was so satisfying for the merchants eager for Syrian profits since the hand Of work became cheap.
The political consequence of this economic splendor was transcendental, because governments shaken by the revolution gave them an unstable respite. In a word, politics entered a state of hibernation, this process of liberation stimulated private enterprise and contributed to economic expansion. It was important to hibernate for the restored monarchies of the continent as the second empire of Napoleon III as it was consecrated as an emperor, but for the old monarchies and principalities supposed the provision of time for political recovery, also provided income while for the empire Of the Habsburgs assumed that they were capable of administering their territory. The period of calm came to an end with the depression of 1857. In economic terms, this event was a mere interruption to the golden age of capitalist growth that resumed, on a larger scale, in the 1860s and 1871s.
If Europe had still lived in the era of baroque princes, it would have been filled with spectacular masquerades, processions and operas representing at the feet of its ruling allegories of economic triumph and industrial progress. The giants and new rituals of self-satisfaction, the great international fairs were those who initiated and underlined the era of their world victory.
The capitalist economy simultaneously received a series of powerful stimuli. Economic expansion is more adequately measured by statistics and its most characteristic measures in the nineteenth century are steers and associated products of coal and iron. The production of coal had been measured in millions of tons, about half of this production, coming from Great Britain, was the largest producer and with possible comparison.
In 1870 the gigantic expansion of the world economy accelerated. For a generation the construction of the world's railways would continue, the technological potential of the first industrial revolution, the British cotton revolution, coal, iron, and steam engines, seemed vast.
A new era of history, politics and economics opens with the depression of the 1870s. In this industrial era, capitalism became a genuinely global economy and therefore the globe was transformed from geographic expression into constant operative reality.
Eric Hobsbawm, "The Big Boom" in the Age of Capital 1848-1875, Barcelona, Critique, 2010, pp. 41-59.