Professor Miles Taylor, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, UK
The Making of Modern Britain
Lectures, May 2013
Britain and the First Industrial Revolution
Lecture outline
Introduction: Prometheus unbound ?
The late 18th c is inextricably associated with the notion of ‘revolution’ – a
political revolution in France in 1789, and an industrial revolution about the same
time, led by Britain, and eventually copied and emulated by the rest of Europe and
America. Indeed, the very phrase ‘industrial revolution’ was coined by Arnold
Toynbee in 1884 because he grew so tired of the French beating their chests about
their own ‘revolution’. France may have transformed the political world, but Britain
was the first industrial nation. Our understanding of the modern world has been
powerfully shaped by this image of the emergence of a new economic order – and
until the early 1980s, it was an interpretation of the late 18th c with which Marxist and
conservative historians could all agree. Since then, however, historical understanding
of economic growth in 18th and 19th c Britain and Europe has been extensively
revised – by new statistical data, new comparative perspectives, and insights from
social and cultural history. It will no longer do to talk of an industrial ‘revolution’ –
‘slow economic growth’, ‘industrious’ revolution, industrial ‘evolution’ are now more in
vogue, and in today’s lecture I shall outline the revisionist view of industrialisation,
by looking at i) the scale of technological change, ii) population growth, and iii) the
growth of commerce in the 18th century. But as historians we must try to build as well
as to destroy, and at the end of the lecture I shall describe some of the ways in which
it is still credible to talk about some fundamental economic changes taking place in
the late 18th century.
1. The age of machinery ?
Let us begin with Britain – not only because as an industrial nation it is often
thought she paved the way, but also the data for measuring her economic
performance has always been much better than anywhere else. To what extent does
Britain deserve her reputation as the first industrial nation ? It rests on three factors:
timing, technological innovation (especially in capital goods such as machines and
factories), and rapid population growth. Most revised economic indicators for Britain
in the late 18th century now radically reject the idea of industrial take-off in the
1780s. We now know that the main index of growth – per capita GNP -- rose steadily
throughout the 18th century, and only really took off dramatically after 1820. We can
see this in greater detail if we look at rates of fixed capital formation – ie: the amount
entrepreneurs were willing to risk in investing in factories, machinery (items that were
expensive to install and maintain, but would reap dividends in the longer-term).
Again, revised estimates produced in the 1970s suggest that it is really only after
1830 that more money was being sunk into the capital sector of the manufacturing
economy, than into the running costs of production (ie: wages, transport, etc). In
other words, Britain only becomes literally a ‘capitalist’ economy in Victorian times,
not 50 years earlier, and this was mainly stimulated by the railways and the
speculative investment via joint stock banking that they encouraged, especially in the
1830s and 1840s.
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We have thus been led astray by popular images of the industrial revolution
as the age of the textile factory – William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’ (from his poem
Jerusalem (1804) ravaging the pastoral landscape – associating 18th c economic
growth with the age of machinery. Yet we now know that machines did not
transform the economy -- replacing skilled labour, requiring huge plants, turning the
workplace into an automated assembly-line, etc. Far from it. Consider, for example
the steam engine – an icon of industrialisation. Invented as far back as 1712, as late
as 1800 only 1500 were in use in Britain – and not in textile factories, but for pumping
out water from flooded mines, or, less usually, as a supplement to running waterpower. A similar story holds for Belgium and France. Steam engines were thought of
as unreliable (they were always blowing up), and costly to repair – not worth the risk.
Instead, the growing manufacturing economy developed innovative machines which
were small, portable, flexible and, most important, could be operated by hand, as the
examples of the spinning jenny, spinning mule, power loom, and (from France) the
Jacquard loom all suggest. Nor was the industrial factory the dominant form of
production. As late as 1841 in Britain, only 1 in 10 cotton mills employed more than
100 workers; as late as 1871 in Britain the average manufacturing establishment had
< 10 employees. Ironically, if there were large factories in the 18th century, they
tended to be state-owned – arsenals (Venice, Woolwich), dockyards (Chatham, St
P), ironworks to supply military hardware (as in Prussian Silesia), etc.
Instead of an ‘age of machinery’, or ‘age of steam’, or ‘age of the factory’
historians now place much greater emphasis on the persistence of artisan and craft
production throughout 18th and 19th century Europe. In most areas the economy
grew along the same lines of development as it had for centuries – small family firms,
using ‘outworkers’ and subcontractors as much as in-house factory workers, skilled
manual labour protected by apprenticeship schemes and guilds, a sharing of capital
items such as motive power and factory space. This was best way to keep production
costs low, adjust to changing fashions, and keep the family division of labour (men’s,
women’s and children’s work) intact. As late as 1850, for example, it has been
calculated that 60% of French industrial output came from small workshop and
household units. The typical worker of the 18th and 19th century economy was not a
factory proletarian, but a shoemaker (followed by carpenters, tailors and publicans –
put together the four trades comprised a larger share of the British workforce than
manufacturing in 1831.
The artisan economy remained the norm – but there were boom regions.
Economic data which is based on national statistics tends to round down our picture
of growth, but within most European countries in the 18th and early 19th centuries,
there were distinct regions which were experiencing rapid economic growth, based
on new forms of energy, technology and less skilled labour – the Pennines, the Black
Country, the Rhine and Meuse valleys, Belgium, Silesia, northern Italy, Catalonia in
Spain. But until the mid-19th c, they were the exception not the rule.
2. Population growth
Let me now turn to population growth, which alongside the transformation of
the manufacturing economy, is indelibly associated with the birth of the modern
European economy in the late 18th century. Indeed, for a long time economic
historians assumed that industrial take-off was impossible without the earth moving in
other ways – more people being born. No-one disputes that the European population
grew exponentially in the 18th and 19th century – most noticeably in Britain, and some
of the regions I have just listed. The growth of the major cities tells its own tale
(London and Barcelona doubling in size, Paris and Vienna almost the same, whilst
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the so-called ‘shock’ cities of the 19th c – Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham etc –
increased by 3, 4 and 5 times in the space of a half-century – truly ‘3rd world’ growth
rates. And contemporary commentators, such as Thomas Malthus (1766-1834),
writing in 1799, feared the sort of ‘3rd world’ famine scenario that we have become
familiar with in Ethiopia and Sudan -- of population growth outstripping agricultural
output – ie: nations unable to feed their hungry hordes. But here too, revisionist
economic – or rather demographic -- historians have been at work, led by the
Cambridge ‘Pop’(-ulation) Group, who in the early 1980s completed a huge survey of
English population history since the 16th century. Whilst their work did not dispute
that the English pop grew from c. 5m to 8.5m between 1700 and 1800, they did point
out two significant differences to the older accounts. Firstly, they calculated a much
more gradual rate of pop growth through the 18th c – there was no crucial leapforward in the 1760s and 1770s as had often been believed. Secondly, Wrigley et al
showed that it was changes in fertility (or rather nuptiality) and not mortality which
lay behind the rise in the population – in other words women – particularly those in
the 15-19 range --were getting married earlier and consequently devoting a greater
part of their child-bearing years to … bearing children. Since then, Wrigley and others
have added a third element to this argument about the distinctive character of
English population growth, namely that pop growth increasingly took place in the
towns, rather than in the countryside, as in the rest of Europe (eg: France and the
Netherlands), where rural-urban migration was the norm, and where there was a
larger town population anyway before 1700.
Now, this new population history of England has very profound implications
for the way we think about economic growth in the late 18th and early 19th c. Above
all, it demonstrates that during the 18th c people were choosing to have larger
families (evidence of an increase in the bastardy rate notwithstanding), for marriage
was essentially an economic transaction, based on a perception that there were
sufficient resources – land, food, jobs – to support a family. This tells us two
important things about the 18th c economy. Firstly, that Malthus was wrong – that
food supply did keep up with population growth in the 18th century. Agriculture
underwent a revolution of its own in the 16th and 17th centuries – ie: before 1700 -especially in Britain. More land was brought under the plough and made fit for
grazing – through large estates, enclosure acts, crop rotation, improved seeds,
reclamation of wetlands (Lincs), woodlands (home counties) and commons. This led
to greater crop yields, and better quality livestock. Agricultural improvement societies
became the rage in the 18th c, championed by men like Arthur Young (1741-1820).
By the early 19th c British agriculture was producing a 1/3 more than France, and
each British farm-worker was producing twice as much as his Russian counterpart.
By the time Malthus wrote in 1799, this leap in productivity was tailing off, but
population growth in the English towns was sustained because of a modernised
agricultural sector.
The second important implication of the new population history is the
emphasis it gives to the role of the urban consumer in the 18th century economy. If
men and women were largely choosing to have larger families, what economic
opportunities did they now enjoy ?
3. Commerce and the growth of towns
If the 18th century European economy was not transformed by machinery and
the coming of the factory, what then was the great engine of change ? In recent
years both economic and social historians have begun to look at the importance of
increased commercial activity – trade, consumption – treating more seriously the
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‘demand’ side of the 18th c economy, where for many decades our picture of
industrialisation had been dominated by ‘supply’ factors, such as pop growth,
technological innovation etc. This approach has made us begin to think about the
18th European economy in two new ways. First, the 18th c European economy was at
the centre of a new global economy. Look again at the cities growing at the fastest
rate in the 19th c. There are the great capitals, but there are also the great Atlantic
ports – London (both capital and port of course), Glasgow, Liverpool – to which might
be added Bordeaux (x 2 1600-1800), Marseilles (40 to 78k), Nantes (25 to 74k).
These were not just Atlantic ports, but until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869
they were gateways to Asia as well. Goods from China and India – textiles such as
calicos and silk, lacquered wares, porcelain – were in great demand in urban Europe,
from whence they were re-exported to the European maritime colonies – Spanish
America, the 13 British colonies, the French settlers in Canada, Louisiana and the
West Indies etc. In turn Asian porcelain and lacquer fuelled rival European
manufactures of the same styles and goods – especially in Prussia and France –
eventually finding a cheaper equivalent back in Britain in the form of Wedgwood –
upmarket tableware for the new townspeople. Great European fortunes were made
out of this commerce – not least the slave trade, which between 1600 and 1820 saw
7.6m Africans ‘exported’ to America, the West Indies and Brazil, where they became
the new serfs of coffee and sugar production on estates and plantations. It is no
coincidence that behind some of the first industrial fortunes in 19th century
Lancashire and on Clydeside, for example, lay money originally derived from slave
trade profit.
Secondly, it is now appreciated that 18th c consumers were becoming
increasingly reliant on a new world of luxury goods. Many of the ordinary items on
the Euro breakfast table of the mid-18th c were luxury items – tea, coffee, sugar (to
which we might add tobacco) from the new world of the Americas, or from Asia. Once
perceived as luxuries – exotic items which only the aristocracy might afford – during
the course of the 18th c they became necessities. In Britain, consumption of tobacco
peaked at 2lbs per head per annum in 1700, but tea consumption increased from
0.32 lbs per head pa in 1730s to 1.36 in 1800. Tea taken with sugar became a habit
of the labouring classes as well. It has been calculated that by the end of the 18th c, a
working man’s family were spending the same on tea, treacle and sugar as they were
on meat.
And this shift in patterns of consumption was not without its political
implications. Increasingly in the 18th c, ancient regime govts sought to tax items of
luxury, and just as frequently, taxes on consumption could lead to political
disaffection. For example, it was a boycott of over-taxed English tea (re-exported
from India) which started the revolt of the American colonies in the 1770s. Here, I
hope, we can begin to see a way back into ways of connecting economic change to
political revolution in the late 18th c.
Conclusion: The Age of Commerce ?
In recent decades historians of the 18th and early 19th c European economy –
especially historians of Britain – have rejected the idea of a ‘big-bang’ industrial
revolution, and looked instead at three main factors:- i) the evolution and extension of
older artisan and craft economies, punctuated by boom regions; ii) population change
caused by endogenous factors (nuptiality, perceived economic benefits); iii) the
growth of demand for consumer goods. Not a revolution perhaps, but a process that
still caused great social and political instability.
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