تجارت خارجی و صنعتی سازی اولیه در سلطنت هابسبورگ و انگلستان - دو افراطی در مقایسه

The concept of socio–ecological transitions is used to analyse the quantitative importance of physical imports and exports for the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the Habsburg Empire, a new dataset of foreign trade and social metabolism is presented. For the United Kingdom, the analysis relies on previously published data. Foreign trade volumes increased in both countries in the long run. Total trade volumes were much higher in the United Kingdom throughout the entire time period, on average by around a factor four. Physical factors explaining the disparities in structure and volume of foreign trade in the two countries are differences in (1) the temporal patterns of the socio-ecological transition and (2) domestic resource endowments. In both countries, energy carrying materials, i.e. fossil fuels and biomass, were the dominant resources in physical foreign trade. The analysis focuses on the physically most important material groups: coal, wood and cereals, and discusses the role of imports and exports in relation to domestic resource provision and environmental pressures. Physical foreign trade increased at a faster pace than domestic resource extraction and consumption. The socio–ecological transition was thus accompanied by rising international integration of resource supply.

Industrialisation has been described from a materialist perspective as a “socio–ecological transition” (Krausmann et al., 2008b and Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007), a process of increasing resource use (McNeill, 2000 and Krausmann et al., 2009) which is accompanied by a shift from mainly organic materials to increasing amounts of mineral resources. This transition goes along with specific changes in energy use (e.g. Bartoletto and Rubio, 2008 and Gales et al., 2007) — again, from mostly organic and renewable to more and more non-renewable energy sources, as well as particular changes in land use (Sieferle et al., 2006, Krausmann, 2001, Kuskova et al., 2008, Erb et al., 2008 and Musel, 2009). In many empirical studies on this subject, the role of foreign trade in the transition process is addressed to some extent, usually as proposed within the methodological framework of Material and Energy flow Analysis (see e.g. Schandl et al., 2002 and Haberl et al., 2004). Import and export flows are in this framework considered as one of several socio-economic material or energy flows. But the role of foreign trade in the process of the socio-ecological transition as such was not the focal point of these studies. There is reason to assert that foreign trade did – in various ways – contribute substantially to Europe's industrialisation in the 19th century. O'Rourke and Williamson (1999) even suggest that globalisation in the 19th century was comparable to the present globalisation process in terms of the speed and extent of increasing global market integration. Economic historians have dealt with the history of foreign trade in Europe in most detail. Studies have traced monetary flows of foreign trade between European countries and the rest of the world (e.g. Bairoch, 1973 and Jacks, 2005), others have discussed the (economic) reasons for this development (Olson, 1974 and O'Rourke, 1997). The approach of economic history entails the use of (historical) economic statistics and the application of economic concepts, such as price convergence, while the cognitive interest lies in a better understanding of economic interrelationships. A culturally informed environmental history has dealt with the issue of 19th century foreign trade from a different perspective. Works from this field have been concerned with environmental impacts (or preconditions) of export production in colonised countries (Brannstrom and Gallini, 2004). Most trace the environmental history of a single raw material in a specific producing region, such as Bananas in Central America (Soluri, 2002), sugar in Cuba (Funes Monzote, 2004), rubber in Brazil (Dean, 1987), or ivory in East Africa (Hakansson, 2007). Recently, environmental historians have increasingly taken a more systemic perspective and have attempted to quantify the environmental pressures exerted on the exporting countries by 19th century imports, such as Hornborg, 2006 and Pomeranz, 2000. The focus of these studies was the United Kingdom, the most important 19th century economic power. Ideas from ecological economics were adopted, in particular the notion of “ecologically unequal exchange”: based on world systems theory, studies from this field argue that ecological goods are being exported from the global “South” to the “North” while ecological burdens are being exported (or externalised) in the other direction (Giljum and Eisenmenger, 2004 and Hornborg, 1998). The concept of social metabolism has been used successfully for such analyses, particularly for Latin American countries (Perez-Rincon, 2006, Eisenmenger and Giljum, 2007 and Muradian and Martinez-Alier, 2001), and has shown that Southern countries tend to be net-exporters of raw materials while Northern countries tend to act as net-importers. This research strand has focused mainly on recent periods, starting from the 1970s. This article offers a materialist perspective on the environmental history of foreign trade. It applies the framework of material and energy flow analysis to elucidate the role of foreign trade in two very different European economies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom. It presents new empirical data on physical foreign trade relations of the Habsburg Empire in 1830–1915, including data on domestic resource consumption, and compares them to previously published data for the United Kingdom in 1850–1915 (Schandl and Schulz, 2002). The concept of socio–ecological transitions (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2007, Krausmann et al., 2008a and Krausmann et al., 2008b) is used to analyse the biophysical features of foreign trade in these two economies during the early stage of industrialisation: how was the socio–ecological transition reflected in the foreign trade relations of the two countries? A detailed analysis of the biophysically most important material categories (coal, wood and cereals) serves to discuss how foreign trade in the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom contributed to domestic resource consumption and which international shifts of environmental burdens were associated with foreign trade. With a physical perspective on the history of foreign trade, this article aims to contribute to long-term socio–ecological research (LTSER, see Haberl et al., 2006) and to fill a gap between the quantitative economic history of the 1970s and 80s interested in the (monetary) extent of European foreign trade flows and current research on ecologically unequal exchange, as performed by ecological economics. The article is organised in the following way: In the next section, the two case studies will be briefly introduced. The materials and methods section presents the data sources and the conversion and aggregation procedures which were undertaken to compile the empirical basis of the analysis. The results of the study will be presented, starting with an overview of total physical foreign trade relations in the two countries. Then, a detailed account of the physically most important material categories will be given: coal and biomass (with an emphasis on wood and cereals). The final section draws some general conclusions on the role of foreign trade in the socio – ecological transition.

The analysis has shown that in the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom the early stage of the socio–ecological transition was accompanied by rising volumes of foreign trade. While the total amount of imports and exports differed greatly between the two examined countries – the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom, both import and export volumes in both countries increased dramatically in the long run. The most important material categories in foreign trade were – from a physical perspective — in both countries energy carrying material groups, i.e. fossil fuels and biomass. In these material groups, foreign trade increased even more rapidly than domestic extraction or consumption. Based on the data and analysis presented in this study, two important physical factors can be identified for explaining the differences of foreign trade relations between the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom, which add to the socio–economic differences discussed in economic history literature: Firstly, the stage along the socio–ecological transition impacted the amounts and types of materials traded by a country. Differences in the amount and structure of resource use between the Habsburg Empire and the United Kingdom are reflected in both imports and exports of the two countries. Secondly – and closely related – the endowment with resources, a factor inversely related to population density, affected the relation between foreign trade and resource use. The United Kingdom's higher trade volumes were closely connected to the country's higher resource consumption in general, with coal playing an important role in both domestic consumption and foreign trade. On the other hand, the Habsburg Empire's relative autarky from foreign trade until the mid-19th century was associated to the country's large-scale dependence of domestically-available resources, dominated by biomass. Foreign trade volumes in the Habsburg Empire significantly affected domestic resource supply only when the country's energy base shifted towards the increased use of fossil fuels. These observations lead to the general conclusion that the socio–ecological transition was closely connected to rising foreign trade volumes and a shifting structure of foreign trade. Not only were resource extraction and consumption enhanced during the socio–ecological transition, but also, and even more so, did the exchange of resources between different economies rise. This increasing international integration of resource use went along with a complex transfer of environmental burdens. The question if foreign trade was a prerequisite for the socio–ecological transition (by loosening the links between resource demand and domestic supply) or a consequence of it (e.g. through improvements in transport technology) remains to be investigated. The following are the supplementary materials related to this article.