As every good student of history or economics knows, the industrial revolution began in the early nineteenth century, in the north of England, when spinning machines were invented.  These machines made it possible to manufacture textiles much more quickly, and using a smaller workforce.  Factories were built, and some people made fortunes by owning or investing in the factories, or by developing markets across the newly-accessible world.

There is another version of the story, however.  The textile mills of Victorian Britain were very different places from modern-day factories.  The people who owned them and who worked in them would not recognise today’s industrial landscape.  The other version of the story goes like this:  modern day industrial capitalism began with the car industry.

Nobody really knows exactly who invented the automobile: it appeared towards the end of the 1800s after numerous prototypes and experiments. What is certain however, is that it was the Ford Motor Company who pioneered its modern manufacture.

The huge factories that Henry Ford built, and the invention of the production line process (and the philosophy of “Fordism” which followed it) were the real beginning of mass industry as we know it today.  The same model being churned out over and again, workers in huge factories having one simple job to do repetitively: modern industry has – in many ways – not changed very much since the first Ford factory was opened at the beginning of the twentieth century.  

That said, however, the car industry has changed a lot.  These days, the massive factories are no longer in the United States or Western Europe, but in South America, India and China.  The car companies themselves are no longer owned by a few rich men sitting in boardrooms in Detroit but are owned by multinational conglomerates.  Most car factories are now clean, quiet places, where the chatter of human workers has been replaced by the quiet hum of robots efficiently going about their business, never threatening to take industrial action.

Japan, not America, has long been the world’s largest producer of automobiles.  Changing global wealth means that the image of millions of bicycles in Chinese cities is now very outdated.  The recent launch of the Tata Nano in India shows that a small, fuel-efficient and very cheap car is now a global product, not one just for European consumers.

If you watch the traffic passing on any highway, almost anywhere in the world, the cars all look the same.  In Italy you may see more Fiats, in Germany more Audis, in France more Citroens, but the cars themselves – now all designed by computers, engineers and technicians rather than by inspired artists or designers - resemble each other.  

The car industry, more than being just the starting point of modern industrial capitalism, is in fact a paradigm of that system’s development.