tion.
Just as the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama gave Europe the strategic
mastery of the ocean and thereby the political mastery of the world, so
the technical inventions of the later eighteenth century which
inaugurated the Industrial Revolution gave Europe the economic mastery
of the world. These inventions in fact heralded a new Age of Discovery,
this time into the realms of science. The results were, if possible,
more momentous even than those of the age of geographical discovery
three centuries before. They gave our race such increased mastery over
the resources of nature that the ensuing transformation of economic life
swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things.

This transformation was, indeed, unprecedented in the world's history.
Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the
exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy
since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our
great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn
Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken
to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the
brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall.
Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave,
harnessed nature's hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the
terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new
material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of
previous generations.

When I say "Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was
concerned, the white man of Europe and its racial settlements overseas.
It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this, and it was
the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two
outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine-industry
with its incalculable acceleration of mass-production, and the
correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these
factors favoured a prodigious increase in economic power and wealth in
Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world. In fact, during
the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semi-rural
continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital,
and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth,
and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and
exchange.