HKB
is growing division of labour among individuals and groups of individuals, so the expansion of the area of competition has brought about a larger and larger amount of local specialisation.
Roughly speaking, the West of Europe and of America has specialised in manufacture, drawing an ever larger proportion of their food supplies from the North-West States of America, from Russia, the Baltic Provinces, Australia, Egypt, India, etc., and their raw materials of manufacture from the southern United States, South America, India, etc., while these latter countries are subjected to a correspondent specialisation in agriculture and other extractive arts. If we take Europe alone, we find certain large characteristics which mark out the Baltic trade, the Black Sea trade, the Danube trade, the Norwegian and White Sea trade. So the Asiatic trade falls into certain tolerably defined divisions of area, as the Levant trade, the Red Sea trade, the Indian, the Straits, and East Indian, the China trade, etc. The whole trade of the world is thus divided for commercial purposes.[117] Though these trade divisions are primarily suggested by considerations of transport rather than of the character of production, the geographical, climatic, and other natural factors which determine convenient lines of transport are found to have an important bearing on the character of the production, and convenience of transport itself assists largely to determine the kind of work which each part of the world sets itself to do.
The establishment of a world-market for a larger and larger number of commodities is transforming with marvellous rapidity the industrial face of the globe. This does not now appear so plainly in the more highly-developed countries of Europe, which, under the influence of half a century's moderately free competition for a European market, have already established themselves in tolerably settled conditions of specialised industry. But in the new world, and in those older countries which are now fast yielding to the incursions of manufacturing and transport machinery, the specialising process is making rapid strides.
Improved knowledge of the world, facile communication, an immense increase in the fluidity of capital, and a considerable increase in that of labour, are busily engaged in distributing the productions of the world in accordance with certain dominant natural conditions. Those industrial forces which have during the last century and a half been operative in England, draining the population and industry from the Southern and Eastern counties, and concentrating it in larger proportions in Lancashire, the West Riding, Staffordshire, and round the Northumbrian and South Wales coal-fields, specialising each town or locality upon some single branch of the textile, metal, or other industries for which its soil, position, or other natural advantages made it suitable, are now beginning to extend the area of their control over the whole surface of the known and inhabited globe.