Competition, <span>Monopolizing, and Lowering Prices</span>
Answer:
Since the debt crisis, the idea that public credit is the first step aimed at the loss of national sovereignty through an economic intervention has expanded. China Qing and the Ottoman Empire were caught in the vicious circle of debt
It is a very similar story that two of the most powerful empires of the pre-modern era became states that depend on international credit in the industrial age. Qing China and the Ottoman Empire suffered a long period of decline that ended their imperial status by 1840.
Explanation:
The two countries suffered some kind of crisis towards the second half of the century that pushed them towards indebtedness abroad, which would lead to the contracting of debt in international markets in order to cope with their long decline, and with the hope of modernize their industry. Following that debt would lead them to accept, foreign intervention.
During the war, the Turks, without an army with the power to confront the Egyptians, had to request the help of their former enemies, forcing the intervention of Britain and Russia. International aid was not free, and its price was through the Balta Treaty, where Turkey agrees to adopt a free market system, withholding taxes on imports.
The case of the Qing dynasty in China was very similar. By 1820, the empire showed symptoms of clear economic damage. Stuck in an extremely restrictive trading system, through which all international trade demanded through the Cohong guild, China collided with Western interests during the First Opium War. The defeat marked the beginning of a long process of decline.
At the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today. After the Civil War, drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. In the South, one third of all landholdings were operated by tenants. Approximately 75 percent of African American farmers and 25 percent of white farmers tilled land owned by someone else.
Every year, the prices farmers received for their crops seemed to fall. Corn fell from 41 cents a bushel in 1874 to 30 cents by 1897. Farmers made less money planting 24 million acres of cotton in 1894 than they did planting 9 million acres in 1873. Facing high interests rates of upwards of 10 percent a year, many farmers found it impossible to pay off their debts. Farmers who could afford to mechanize their operations and purchase additional land could successfully compete, but smaller, more poorly financed farmers, working on small plots marginal land, struggled to survive.
Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Many attributed their problems to discriminatory railroad rates, monopoly prices charged for farm machinery and fertilizer, an oppressively high tariff, an unfair tax structure, an inflexible banking system, political corruption, corporations that bought up huge tracks of land. They considered themselves to be subservient to the industrial Northeast, where three-quarters of the nation's industry was located. They criticized a deflationary monetary policy based on the gold standard that benefited bankers and other creditors.
All of these problems were compounded by the fact that increasing productivity in agriculture led to price declines. In the 1870s, 190 million new acres were put under cultivation. By 1880, settlement was moving into the semi-arid plains. At the same time, transportation improvements meant that American farmers faced competitors from Egypt to Australia in the struggle for markets.
The first major rural protest was the Patrons of Husbandry, which was founded in 1867 and had 1.5 million members by 1875. Known as the Granger Movement, these embattled farmers formed buying and selling cooperatives and demanded state regulation of railroad rates and grain elevator fees.
Early in the 1870s the Greenback Party agitated for the issue of paper money, not backed by gold or silver, with the idea that a depreciating currency would make it easier for debtors to meet their obligations.
Another wave of protest grew out of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (the Southern Farmers Alliance) formed in Lampedusa County, Texas in 1875, and the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance, founded in Chicago in 1880. By the late 1880s, the cooperative business enterprises set up by the Farmers' Alliances had begun to fail due to inadequate capitalization and mismanagement. By 1890, the Farmers Alliances had begun to enter politics. In 1892 the Alliance formed the Peoples' or Populist Party. Among other things, the Populists financed commodity credit system that would have allowed farmers to store their crop in a federal warehouse to await favorable market prices and meanwhile borrow up to 80 percent of the current market price.
