Industry and Empire: 1750-Present Day (PDF)

 PENGUIN BOOKS INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE Eric J. Hobsbawm was born on 9 June 1917. He was educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of King's College from 1949 to 1955. He was Professor of Economic and Social History at Bir...

 PENGUIN BOOKS INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE Eric J. Hobsbawm was born on 9 June 1917. He was educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of King's College from 1949 to 1955. He was Professor of Economic and Social History at Birkbeck College, University of London, from 1970 to 1982, having also taught at Stanford and M.I.T. He has been Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of London since 1982 and teaches at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1976. His main publications include Primitive Rebels (1959), The Age of Revolution (1962), Labouring Men (1964), Captain Swing (1969; with George Rudé), Bandits (1969), Revolutionaries (1973), The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (1975), The Italian Road to Socialism (1977), The Invention of Tradition (1983; with Terence Ranger), Worlds of Labour (1984), Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990), Age of Extremes (1994) and On History (1997). Professor Hobsbawm, who lives in London, is married, with two children. Chris Wrigley is Professor of Modern British History and Head of the School of History and Art History at Nottingham University. His books include David Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement (1976), Arthur Henderson (1990), Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour (1990) and Lloyd George (1992). He has edited three volumes of A. J. P. Taylor's essays, From Napoleon to the Second International (1994), From the Boer War to the Cold War (1996) and British Prime Ministers and Other Essays (1999), all of which are published in Penguin. He was President of the Historical Association for the period 1996–9.  INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE From 1750 to the Present Day E. J. HOBSBAWM This edition revised and updated with CHRIS WRIGLEY PENGUIN BOOKS For Marlene  PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered O ces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com Commissioned by Penguin Books Ltd and rst published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1968 Published in Pelican Books 1969 Published in Penguin Books 1990 Revised edition 1999 7 Copyright © E. J. Hobsbawm, 1968, 1969, 1999 Chapter 16 copyright © C. J. Wrigley, 1999 All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-14-192620-9  CONTENTS Preface Introduction 1 Britain in 1750 2 Origin of the Industrial Revolution 3 The Industrial Revolution 1780–1840 4 The Human Results of the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 5 Agriculture 1750–18501 6 Industrialization: The Second Phase 1840–95 7 Britain in the World Economy 8 Standards of Living 1850–1914 9 The Beginnings of Decline 10 The Land 1850–1960 11 Between the Wars 12 Government and Economy 13 The Long Boom 14 Society Since 1914 15 The Other Britain 16 A Harsher Economic Climate Conclusion Diagrams Further Reading Index  PREFACE THIS book will certainly be read by some who wish to pass one or other of the numerous examinations in economic and social history which face students today, and I naturally hope that it will help them to do so. However, it is not designed simply as a textbook, nor can it be used very pro tably as a book of reference. It attempts to describe and account for Britain's rise as the rst industrial power, its decline from the temporary domination of the pioneer, its rather special relationship with the rest of the world, and some of the e ects of all these on the life of the people in this country. All these matters should be of interest to any intelligent citizen, and I have therefore tried to write in as non-technical a way as possible and to assume no prior knowledge of any of the social sciences in the reader. This does not mean that the questions asked (and I hope answered) here in ordinary prose could not be reformulated in the more technical language of the various disciplines. However, I have assumed an elementary knowledge of the outlines of British history since 1750. It would be helpful if readers who happen not to know what the Napoleonic Wars were, or are ignorant of names such as Peel and Gladstone, were prepared to nd out on their own. Since neither the questions nor the answers about British economic and social history are universally agreed upon, I am unable to say that this book represents the consensus of scholars. It is pleasant to observe that British economic and social history of the past 200 years is now a subject in which research is intense and discussion lively and sometimes passionate, but of course this makes the task of the historian who wishes to give a general interpretation of the entire period much more di cult. Part of the di culty is due to the curious situation of economic history which, as a specialized eld of enquiry, serves both the needs of historians and of economists, whose paths, or at least whose needs, have increasingly diverged. Economics has become an increasingly specialized mathematical discipline. Since the rst publication of this book a branch of economic history known by such names as ‘new economic history’ or ‘cliometrics’, which essentially uses technically sophisticated quanti cation to verify or falsify the propositions of economic theory as they apply to economic history, has become much more prominent. At the same time the development of an ill-de ned but increasingly large eld of ‘social history’ has pulled a part of the subject matter of economic history, as traditionally practised, in a di erent direction, while new and important elds, such as women's history, have emerged in the same general area – but with more specialized interests. Since the 1960s economic history has also been increasingly observed, with scepticism, by researchers interested less in what happened and why than in how people, and notably current historians, ‘construct’ their theories about it. Fortunately most people interested in economic history believe that it raises questions which require answers, but each of these elds is preoccupied by particular questions to which it gives particular answers. So readers might as well be clear about what questions are asked and (hopefully) answered in this book. The authors assume that the central theme of the economic history of the modern world is that of the development and transformations of the capitalist world economy. Britain was both the rst industrial nation and, from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth, the central pillar in the construction of the world economy. Why this was so, what Britain's relations were with the world of empire and economic dependency, how the country was a ected both by its pioneer achievements and by the rise of other and more modern industrial powers: these are some of the questions Industry and Empire is concerned with. Whether the answers given in this book will prove to be true is uncertain, though naturally I hope they will. Whether they make sense and a coherent whole is something which readers must judge for themselves.  An author who revises a book rst published almost a third of a century ago must ask himself whether the interests of the reader at the end of the century are so di erent from the ones originally envisaged that the book no longer addresses them. When Industry and Empire was written economic historians were preoccupied by the problems of economic development and industrialization. They still are, though in a di erent manner. They were also preoccupied, under the impact of the great movements of the decolonization, by the sharp and growing cleavage between the ‘developed’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘emergent’ world outside Europe, which still lacked both the name and the reality of the NICs (‘newly industrialized countries’). They still are, though in a di erent manner. The problem of the decline of Britain and Britain's role in the world economy is a major theme of the book, and is still a matter of pressing concern. Industry and Empire therefore still has something of relevance to say to readers of the new millennium. This is a work of synthesis, rather than of original research, and therefore rests on the labours of a great many other scholars. Even its judgements are sometimes those of others. To acknowledge all my debts fully would require an elaborate and bulky apparatus of references and, although an act of courtesy to my colleagues, would be of little value to ordinary readers. I have therefore con ned references on the whole to sources of direct quotations and occasionally of facts taken from fairly recondite sources. Nor have I attempted to give full references where, as in some parts of the book, I have relied on primary sources and not secondary works. The guide to further reading and the bibliographical notes attached to each chapter mention some of the works on which I have drawn. These guides do not constitute a proper bibliography. One nal word of warning. Economic history is essentially quantitative, and therefore uses statistics a good deal. However, gures have limitations which are not often understood by laymen and sometimes neglected by specialists who, since they need them, accept them with fewer questions than they might. So it is worth listing a few. There can be no statistics unless someone has rst done the counting. In history often nobody has until relatively recently. (For instance, there are no gures for coal output before 1854, no adequate gures for unemployment before 1921.) In such cases we have no statistics but only informed estimates, or more or less wild guesses. The best we can expect is orders of magnitude. However much we may want to get more out of such gures, we may be unable to. Nobody can build a bridge carrying heavy trucks out of a few rotten planks. Statistics collected for any purpose have a margin of error, and the earlier they have been collected, the less reliable they are. All statistics are answers to speci c and extremely narrow questions, and if they are used to answer other questions, whether in their crude form or after more or less sophisticated manipulation, they must be treated with extreme caution. In other words, readers must learn to beware of the apparent solidity and hardness of tables of historical statistics, especially when presented naked without the elaborate wrapping of description with which the skilled statistician surrounds them. They are essential. They allow us to express certain things with great conciseness and (for some of us) vividness. But they are not necessarily more reliable than the approximations of prose. The ones I have used come largely from that admirable compendium, Mitchell and Deane's Abstract of British Historical Statistics, and its successor, B. R. Mitchell's British Historical Statistics. The original manuscript of this book was read by Kenneth Berrill, who eliminated some errors but is not responsible for those that remain. As the original text ended, for practical purposes, with the advent of the Labour government of 1964, though occasionally glancing beyond it, a new chapter has been added by Professor Chris Wrigley to bring the history of economic events up to date from the 1960s to the 1990s. He has also updated some of the statistics, the notes and the guide to further reading. I have written an entirely new Conclusion. The rest of the text has been modi ed in varying degrees, to eliminate statements which are no longer true, to take account of more recent research and the wisdom of hindsight, and to make at least a nominal attempt to ll the most inexcusable gap in the rst edition: the total failure to pay attention to women. I am grateful to Penguin Books and an army of unknown readers for keeping this book in print without a break since 1968 and for giving me, with the help of Chris Wrigley, the opportunity to take it into the twenty- rst century. E.F.H. London, 1998  INTRODUCTION THE Industrial Revolution marks the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world recorded in written documents. For a brief period it coincided with the history of a single country, Great Britain. An entire world economy was thus built on, or rather around, Britain, and this country therefore temporarily rose to a position of global in uence and power unparalleled by any state of its relative size before or since, and unlikely to be paralleled by any state in the foreseeable future. There was a moment in the world's history when Britain can be described, if we are not too pedantic, as its only workshop, its only massive importer and exporter, its only carrier, its only imperialist, almost its only foreign investor; and for that reason its only naval power and the only one which had a genuine world policy. Much of this monopoly was simply due to the loneliness of the pioneer, monarch of all he surveys because of the absence of any other surveyors. When other countries industrialized, it ended automatically, though the apparatus of world economic transfers constructed by, and in terms of, Britain remained indispensable to the rest of the world for a while longer. Nevertheless, for most of the world the ‘British’ era of industrialization was merely a phase – the initial, or an early phase – of contemporary history. For Britain it was obviously much more than this. We have been profoundly marked by the experience of our economic and social pioneering and remain marked by it to this day. This unique historical situation of Britain is the subject of this book. Economists and economic historians have discussed the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of being an industrial pioneer at great length and with di erent conclusions, depending mainly on whether they have tried to explain why undeveloped economies today fail to catch up with developed ones, or why early industrial starters – and most notably Britain – allow themselves to be outdistanced by later ones. The advantages of making an industrial revolution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were great, and we shall consider some of them in the chapters discussing this period. The disadvantages – for instance, a rather archaic technology and business structure which may become too deeply embedded to be readily abandoned, or even modi ed – are likely to emerge at a later stage; in Britain between the 1860s and the end of the nineteenth century. They will also be brie y considered in the chapters on that period. The view taken in this book is that the relative decline of Britain is, broadly speaking, due to its early and long-sustained start as an industrial power. Nevertheless this factor must not be analysed in isolation. What is at least equally important is the peculiar, indeed the unique, position of this country in the world economy, which was partly the cause of our early success and which was reinforced by it. We were, or we increasingly became, the agency of economic interchange between the advanced and the backward, the industrial and the primary-producing, the metropolitan and the colonial or quasi-colonial regions of the world. Perhaps because it was so largely built round Britain, the world economy of nineteenth-century capitalism developed as a single system of free ows, in which the international transfers of capital and commodities passed largely through British hands and institutions, in British ships between the continents, and were calculated in terms of the pound sterling. And because Britain began with the immense advantages of being indispensable to underdeveloped regions (either because they needed us or because they were not allowed to do without us), and indispensable also to the systems of trade and payments of the developed world, Britain always had a line of retreat open when the challenge of other economies became too pressing. We could retreat further into both Empire and Free Trade – into our monopoly of as yet undeveloped regions, which in itself helped to keep them unindustrialized, and into our functions as the hub of the world's trading, shipping and nancial transactions. We did not have to compete but could evade. And our ability to evade helped to perpetuate the archaic and increasingly obsolete industrial and social structure of the pioneer age. The single liberal world economy, theoretically self-regulating, but in fact requiring the semi-automatic switchboard of Britain, collapsed between the wars. The political system which corresponded to it, and in which a limited number of Western capitalist states held the monopoly of industry, of military force and of political control in the undeveloped world, also began to collapse after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and very much more rapidly after the Second World War. Other industrial economies found it easier to adjust themselves to this collapse, for the nineteenth-century liberal economy had been merely an episode in their development. Indeed their emergence was one reason for its eventual breakdown. Britain found itself much more profoundly a ected. It was no longer essential to the world. Indeed, in the nineteenth-century sense there was no longer a single world to be essential to. What new base for its economy could be found? Unsystematically, often unintentionally, the country did indeed adjust itself, changing rapidly from an unusually small-scale and uncontrolled into an unusually monopolist and state-controlled economy, from relying on export-based basic industries to home- market-based ones, and, rather more slowly, from older technologies and forms of industrial organization to newer ones. Yet the great question remained unanswered: how would such a national economy t into the world economy of the twenty- rst century? For that economy had not only reduced the status of Britain dramatically from the third-largest national economy (as it still was in 1960) to the sixth in 1995, but it also reduced the economic role of all but the most enormous nation-states. What was to be the future of Britain in the supranational economic unit of the European Union, and in the transnational or frontier- crossing global economy which seemed to become ever more dominant from the 1970s? Social historians have discussed the peculiarities due to Britain's pioneer start less often than economists. Yet they are very marked. For Britain combines, as everyone knows, two at rst sight incompatible phenomena. Its social and political institutions and practices maintain a remarkable, if super cial, continuity with the pre-industrial past, symbolized by all those things which, by their very rarity in the modern world, attract the foreign sightseer and a fortunately increasing amount of foreign tourist currency: Queen and Lords, the ceremonials of long-obsolete or archaic institutions and the rest. At the same time this is in many respects the country which has broken most radically with all previous ages of human history: the peasantry most completely eliminated, the proportion of men and women earning their living purely by wage (or salaried) labour higher than anywhere else, urbanization earlier and probably greater than elsewhere. Consequently this is also the country in which class divisions were, at least until recently, more simpli ed than elsewhere (as indeed were regional divisions). For in spite of the usual existence of a fairly large number of levels of income, status and snobbery, most people in fact tend to work on the assumption that there are only two classes which count, namely the ‘working class’ and the ‘middle class’, and the British two-party system re ected this duality to a considerable extent until the late 1990s, when the numerical decline of the manual working class and the rise of a large and mainly poor minority of the permanently non-employed, caused all major parties to focus their attention on the middle class. Both phenomena are evidently connected with Britain's early economic start, though their roots go back, at least in part, to a period before the one dealt with in this book. How drastically the formal political and social institutions of a country are transformed in the process of turning it into an industrial and capitalist state depends on three factors: on the exibility, adaptability, or the resistance of its old institutions, on the urgency of the actual need for transformation, and on the risks inherent in the great revolutions, which are the normal ways in which they come about. In Britain the resistance to capitalist development had ceased to be e ective by the end of the seventeenth century. The very aristocracy was, by continental standards, almost a form of ‘bourgeoisie’, and two revolutions had taught the monarchy to be adaptable. Since Britain actually became the model of industrial capitalism and world economic empire, the argument that British capitalism would somehow have been more wholeheartedly capitalist if it had not found the old institutions more willing to adapt to it – for instance, if Oliver Cromwell's Republic had proved to be lasting – is implausible. Oddly enough it has, for opposing political reasons, been put forward both by a section of the extreme left and the extreme free-market right. As we shall see, the technical problems of industrialization were unusually easy, and the extra costs and ine ciencies of handling them with obsolete institutional equipment (and especially a grossly obsolete legal system) were easily tolerable. And when the mechanism of peaceful adjustment worked worst, and the need for radical change seemed most urgent – as in the rst half of the nineteenth century – the risks of revolution were also unusually great, just because if it got out of control it looked like turning into a revolution of the new working class. No British government could rely, like all nineteenth-century French, German or American governments, on mobilizing the political forces of country against city, of vast masses of peasants and small shopkeepers or other petits-bourgeois against a minority – often a scattered and localized minority – of proletarians. The rst industrial power of the world was also the one in which the manual working class was numerically dominant. To keep social tensions low, to prevent the dissensions among sectors of the ruling classes from getting out of hand, was not merely advisable, but seemed essential. It also happened, with brief exceptions, to be quite practicable. Britain thus developed the characteristic combination of a revolutionary social base and, at least at one moment – the period of militant economic liberalism – a sweeping triumph of doctrinaire ideology, with an apparently traditionalist and slow- changing institutional superstructure. The immense barrier of power and pro t built up in the nineteenth century protected the country against those political and economic catastrophes which might have forced radical changes upon it. We were never defeated in war, still less destroyed. Even the impact of the greatest non-political cataclysm of the twentieth century, the Great Slump of 1929–33, was not as sudden, acute and general as in other countries, including the USA. The status quo was sometimes shaken, but never utterly disrupted. We have so far su ered erosion, but not collapse. And whenever crises threatened to become unmanageable, the penalties of allowing them to get out of hand were always present in the minds of the country's rulers. Until the era of Mrs Thatcher, who discovered that parts of the manual working class, already on the way to losing its majority status, could also be politically attracted to Conservatism, there had hardly been a moment when the politically decisive section of rulers forgot the fundamental political fact of modern Britain, namely that this country could not be run in at de ance of its working-class majority, and that it could always a ord the modest cost of conciliating a crucial section of this majority. By the standards of other leading industrial countries hardly any blood has been shed in Britain (as distinct from colonies or dependencies) in defence of the political and economic system for more than a century.* This evasion of drastic confrontations, this preference for sticking old labels on new bottles, should not be confused with the absence of change. In terms both of social structure and of political institutions the changes since 1750 have been profound, and at certain moments both rapid and spectacular. They have been concealed both by the taste of moderate reformers for advertising negligible modi cations of the past as ‘peaceful’ or ‘silent’ revolutions,† of all respectable opinion for disguising major changes as additions to precedent, and by the very striking traditionalism and conservatism of so many British institutions. This traditionalism is real, but the word itself covers two quite distinct phenomena.  The rst of these is the preference for maintaining the form of old institutions with a profoundly changed content; indeed in many cases the creation of a pseudo-tradition and a pseudo- customary legitimacy for quite new institutions. The functions of the monarchy today have very little in common with those of the monarchy in 1750, while the ‘public schools’ as we now know them barely existed before the middle of the nineteenth century, and their incrustation of tradition is almost entirely Victorian. The second, however, is the marked tendency for once-revolutionary innovations to acquire the patina of their own tradition by the length of their existence. Since Britain was the rst industrial capitalist country, and was for long one in which changes were comparatively sluggish, it has provided ample opportunities for such industrialized traditionalism. What passes for British Conservatism is, ideologically, the laissez-faire liberalism which triumphed between 1820 and 1850, and except formally, this is also the content of the age-old and customary Common Law, at all events in the eld of property and contract. So far as the content of their decisions is concerned, most British judges should be wearing top hats and mutton-chop whiskers rather than full- bottomed wigs. So far as the way of life of the British middle classes is concerned, its most characteristic aspect, the suburban house and garden, merely goes back to the rst phase of industrialization, when their ancestors began to move out from the smoke and fog of the polluted town centres to the hills and commons beyond. So far as the working class is concerned, as we shall see what is called its ‘traditional’ way of life is if anything more recent still. It is hardly found complete anywhere before the 1880s. And the ‘traditional’ mode of life of the professional intellectual, garden suburb, country cottage, intellectual weekly and all, is more recent still, since that class itself hardly existed as a self-conscious group before the Edwardian period. ‘Tradition’ in this sense is not a serious obstacle to change. Often it is merely a British way of giving a label to any moderately enduring facts, especially at the moment when these facts are themselves beginning to change. After they have been changed for a generation, they will in turn be called ‘traditional.’ I do not wish to deny the autonomous power of accumulated and fossilized institutions and habits to act as a brake upon change. Up to a point they have this power, though it is counteracted, at least potentially, by that other ingrained British ‘tradition’, which is never to resist irresistible changes, but to absorb them as quickly and quietly as possible. What passes for the power of ‘conservatism’ or ‘traditionalism’ is often something quite di erent: vested interest and the absence of su cient pressure. Britain is in itself no more traditionalist than other countries; less so in, say, social habits than the French, much less so in the o cial in exibility of obsolete institutions (such as an eighteenth-century Constitution) than the USA. It has so far merely been more conservative, because the vested interest in the past has been unusually strong, more complacent, because more protected; and perhaps also more unwilling to try new paths for its economy, because no new paths seem to lead to half so inviting a prospect as the old ones. These may now be impassable, but other roads do not appear very passable either. This book is about the history of Britain. However, as even the past few pages will have made clear, an insular history of Britain (and there have been too many such) is quite inadequate. In the rst place Britain developed as an essential part of a global economy, and more particularly as the centre of that vast formal or informal ‘empire’ on which its fortunes have so largely rested. To write about this country without also saying something about the West Indies and India, about Argentina and Australia, is unreal. Nevertheless, since I am not here writing the history of the world economy or of its British imperial sector, my references to the outside world must be marginal. We shall see in later chapters what Britain's relations to it were, how Britain was a ected by changes in it, and occasionally, in a brief phrase or two, how dependence on Britain a ected those parts of it which belonged directly to the British satellite or colonial system: for instance, how the industrialization of Lancashire prolonged and developed slavery in America, or how some of the burdens of British economic crisis could be passed on to the primary-producing countries for whose exports we (or for that matter other industrialized countries) were the only outlet. But the purpose of such remarks is simply to remind the reader constantly of the inter-relations between Britain and the rest of the world, without which our history cannot be understood. It is no more. However, another kind of international reference cannot be avoided either. The history of British industrial society is a particular case – the rst and at times the most important – of the general phenomena of industrialization under capitalism, and if we take an even broader view, of the general phenomenon of any industrialization. Inevitably we must ask how typical of this phenomenon the British example is; or in more practical terms – for the world today consists of countries trying to industrialize rapidly – what other countries can learn from the British experience. The answer is that they can learn much in principle, but rather little in actual practice. The very priority of British development makes this country's case in most respects unique and unparalleled. No other country had to make its industrial revolution virtually alone, unable to bene t from the existence of an already established industrial sector of the world economy, to draw on its resources of experience, skill, or capital. Both the extremes to which, for instance, British social development was pushed (for example the virtual elimination of the peasantry and the small-scale artisan producers) and the highly peculiar pattern of British economic relations with the undeveloped world may well be largely due to this situation. Conversely, the fact that Britain made its industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, and was reasonably well prepared for making it, minimized certain problems which have been acute in later industrializers, or in those which faced a greater initial leap from backwardness to economic advance. The technology with which developing countries must operate today is more complex and expensive than that with which Britain made its industrial revolution. The forms of economic organization are di erent. The political context is di erent. The history of Britain is therefore not a model for the economic development of the world today. If we seek any reasons for studying and analysing it, other than the automatic interest which the past, and especially past greatness, holds for many people, we shall nd only two very convincing ones. Britain's past since the Industrial Revolution still lies heavily on the present, and the practical solution of the actual problems of our economy and society therefore require us to understand something about it. More generally, the record of the earliest, the longest-lived industrial and capitalist power cannot but throw light on the development of industrialization as a phenomenon in the history of the world. For the planner, the social engineer, the applied economist (in so far as he does not concentrate his attention on British problems), this country is merely one ‘case-study’, and for twentieth-century purposes not the most interesting or relevant. For the historian of human progress from the cave-man to the wielders of atomic power and the cosmic travellers, it is of unique interest. No change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialization. It came, inevitably and temporarily, in the form of a capitalist economy and society, and it was probably also inevitable that it should come in the form of a single ‘liberal’ world economy depending for a time on a single leading pioneer country. That country was Britain, and as such it stands alone in history.  1 BRITAIN IN 1750 1 WHAT the contemporary observer sees is not necessarily the truth, but the historian neglects it at his peril. Britain – or rather England – in the eighteenth century was a much-observed country, and if we are to grasp what has happened to it since the Industrial Revolution, we may as well begin by trying to see it through the eyes of its numerous and studious foreign visitors, always anxious to learn, generally to admire, and with ample leisure to pay attention to their surroundings. By modern standards they needed it. The traveller who landed around 1750 at Dover or Harwich after an unpredictable and often lengthy crossing (say thirty-odd hours from Holland) would be well advised to rest the night in one of the expensive, but remarkably comfortable, English inns which invariably impressed him very favourably. He would travel perhaps fty miles by coach the next day, and, after another night's rest at Rochester or Chelmsford, would enter London in the middle of the next day. Travel at this rate required leisure. The alternative for the poor man walking or coastal shipping – was cheaper and slower, or cheaper but unpredictable. Within a few years the new rapid mail coaches might get him from London to Portsmouth between morning and nightfall, from London to Edinburgh in sixty-two hours, but in 1750 he would still have to reckon on ten to twelve days for the latter journey. He would immediately be struck by the greenness, tidiness, the apparent prosperity of the countryside, and by the apparent comfort of ‘the peasantry’. ‘The whole of this country’, wrote the Hanoverian Count Kielmansegge in 1761 of Essex, ‘is not unlike a well-kept garden,’2 and he spoke for most other tourists. Since the usual English tour con ned itself to the south and middle parts of England, this impression was not quite accurate, but the contrast with most parts of the continent was real enough. The tourist would then, equally invariably, be deeply impressed by the immense size of London, and quite rightly, for with something like three quarters of a million inhabitants it was by far the largest city in Christendom, perhaps twice the size of its nearest rival, Paris. It was certainly not beautiful. It might even strike the foreigner as gloomy. ‘After having seen Italy,’ observed the Abbé Le Blanc in 1747, ‘you will see nothing in the buildings of London that will give you much pleasure. The city is really wonderful only for its bigness.’ (But he, like all others, was ‘struck with the beauties of the country, the care taken to improve lands, the richness of the pastures, the numerous ocks that cover them and the air of plenty and cleanliness that reigns in the smallest villages’.) 3 Nor was it a clean or well-lit city, though rather better in this respect than centres of industry like Birmingham, where ‘the people seem so entirely engrossed by their business within doors that they care very little what sort of an appearance is made without. The streets are neither paved nor lighted.’4 There were no other English cities which could even faintly compare with London, though the ports and commercial or manufacturing centres of the provinces were, unlike in the seventeenth century, expanding rapidly and visibly prospering. No other English town had 50,000 inhabitants. Few of them would be worth the non-commercial visitor's attention, though if in 1750 he had gone to Liverpool (which the London stage coach had not yet reached) he would doubtless have been impressed with the bustle of that fast-rising port, based, like Bristol and Glasgow, largely on the trade in slaves and colonial products – sugar, tea, tobacco, and increasingly cotton. Eighteenth-century port cities prided themselves on their solid and new harbour installations, and on the provincial elegance of their public buildings, forming as the visitor would approvingly note ‘a pleasing epitome of the metropolis’.5 Their less elegant inhabitants might see more of the tough brutality of the waterside, lled with taverns and prostitutes for the seamen ush o the ships, or about to be shanghaied by labour contractors or by His Majesty's press-gang for the Navy. Ships and overseas trade were, as everyone knew, the lifeblood of Britain, the Navy its most powerful weapon. Around the middle of the eighteenth century the country owned perhaps six thousand mercantile ships of perhaps half a million tons, several times the size of the French mercantile marine, its main rival. They formed perhaps one tenth of all capital xed investments (other than real estate) in 1700, while their 100,000 seamen were almost the largest group of non- agricultural workers. In the middle of the eighteenth century the foreign tourist would probably pay rather less attention to manufactures and mines, though already impressed with the quality (though not the taste) of British workmanship, and aware of the ingenuity which so strikingly supplemented its hard work and industry. The British were already famous for machines ‘which’, as the Abbé Le Blanc noted, ‘really multiply men by lessening their work…. Thus in the coal pits of NEWCASTLE, a single person can, by means of an engine equally surprising and simple, raise ve hundred tons of water to the height of a hundred and eighty feet.’6The steam engine, in its primitive form, was already present. Whether the British gift for using inventions was due to their own inventiveness, or to their capacity to use other people's innovations, was a matter of argument. Probably the latter, thought the sagacious Wendeborn of Berlin, who travelled the country in the 1780s, when industry was already the object of very much more interest. Still, as with most tourists, the word ‘manufactured’ brought into his mind chie y such cities as Birmingham, with its variety of small metal goods, She eld, with its admirable cutlery, the potteries of Sta ordshire, and the woollen industry, widely distributed throughout the countryside of East Anglia, the west country and Yorkshire, but not associated with towns of any large size except the decaying Norwich. This was, after all, the basic and traditional manufacture of Britain. He barely mentioned Lancashire, and that only in passing. For if the farming and manufactures were prosperous and expanding, they were clearly, in the eyes of foreigners, much less important than trade. England was, after all, ‘the nation of shopkeepers’, and the merchant rather than the industrialist was its most characteristic citizen. ‘It must be owned’, said the Abbé Le Blanc, ‘that the natural productions of the country do not, at most, amount to a fourth part of her riches: the rest she owes to her colonies, and the industry of her inhabitants who, by the transportation and exchange of the riches of other countries continually augment their own.’7 The commerce of the British was, by the standards of the eighteenth-century world, a very remarkable phenomenon. It was both businesslike and warlike, as Voltaire observed, in the 1720s, when his Letters from England set the fashion for admiring foreign reportage of these islands. More than this: it was closely linked with the unique political system of Britain, in which kings were subordinate to Parliament. British historians rightly remind us that that Parliament was controlled by an oligarchy of landowning aristocrats rather than by what was not yet called the middle classes. Yet, by continental standards, what unaristocratic nobles! How strangely – how ridiculously, thought the Abbé Le Blanc – inclined to ape their inferiors: ‘At London masters dress like their valets, and duchesses copy after chambermaids.’ How remote in spirit from the aristocratic ostentation of really noble societies: One does not nd the English set up for making a gure, either in their clothes or equipages; one sees their household furniture as plain as sumptuary laws could prescribe it… and if the tables of the English are not remarkable for their frugality, they are at least so for their plainness.8 The whole British system was based, unlike that of less-go-ahead and certainly less prosperous countries, on a government concerned for the needs of what the Abbé Coyer called ‘the honest middle class, that precious portion of nations’.9 ‘Commerce’, wrote Voltaire, ‘which has enriched the citizens of England has helped to make them free, and that liberty in turn has expanded commerce. This is the foundation of the greatness of the state.’10 Britain then struck the foreign visitor chie y as a rich country, and one rich primarily because of its trade and enterprise; as a powerful and formidable state, but one whose power rested chie y on that most commercially-based and trade-minded weapon, a Navy; as a state of unusual liberty and tolerance – both of which were yet again closely linked with trade and the middle class. Though perhaps de cient in the aristocratic graces of life, in wit, and in joie de vivre, and given to religious and other eccentricities, it was unquestionably the most ourishing and progressive of economies, and one which more than held its own in science and literature, not to mention technology. Its common people, insular, conceited, competent, brutal and given to riot, appeared to be well-fed and prosperous, by the modest standards which were then applied to the poor. Its institutions were stable, in spite of the remarkable weakness of the apparatus for maintaining public order, or for planning and administering the country's economic a airs. For those who wished to put their own countries on the road to economic progress there was clearly a lesson in this visible success of a nation based essentially on private enterprise. ‘Meditate on this,’ cried the Abbé Coyer in 1779, ‘oh you, who still support a system of regulations and exclusive privilege’, 11 as he observed that even roads and canals were constructed and maintained by the pro t motive.* Economic and technical progress, private enterprise, and what we would now call liberalism: all these were evident. Yet nobody expected the imminent transformation of the country by an industrial revolution – not even travellers who visited Britain in the early 1780s, when we know that it had already started. Few expected its imminent population explosion, which was about to raise the English and Welsh population from perhaps six and a half millions in 1750 to over nine millions in 1801, and to sixteen millions by 1841. In the middle of the eighteenth century, and even some decades later, men were still arguing whether the British population was rising or stagnant; by the end of the century Malthus was already assuming as a matter of course that it was growing much too fast.  If we look back on 1750 we shall no doubt see many things which were overlooked by contemporaries, not obvious to them (or on the contrary too obvious for remark), but we shall not nd ourselves in fundamental disagreement. We shall note, above all, that England (Wales and large parts of Scotland were still somewhat di erent – compare Chapter 15) was already a monetary and market economy on a national scale. A ‘nation of shopkeepers’ implies a nation of producers for sale on the market, not to mention a nation of customers. In the cities this was natural enough, for a close and self-su cient economy is impossible in towns above a certain size, and Britain was – economically – lucky enough to possess the greatest of all Western cities (and consequently the largest of all concentrated markets for goods) in London, which by the middle of the century contained perhaps fteen per cent of the English population and whose insatiable demand for food and fuel transformed agriculture all over the south and east, drew regular supplies by land and river from even the remoter parts of Wales and the north, and stimulated the coalmines of Newcastle. Regional price variations in non- perishable and easily transportable foodstu s like cheese were already small. What is more important, England no longer paid the heaviest penalty of self-su cient local and regional economies, famine. ‘Dearth’, common enough on the continent, hardly forgotten in Lowland Scotland, was no longer a serious problem, though bad harvests still brought sharp rises in the cost of living and consequent rioting over large parts of the country, as in 1740– 1, 1757 and 1767. What was already so startling about the British countryside was the absence of a peasantry in the continental sense. It was not merely that the growth of a market economy had already seriously undermined local and regional self-su ciency, and enmeshed even the village in a web of cash sales and purchases, though this was, by contemporary standards, obvious enough. The growing use of such entirely imported commodities as tea, sugar and tobacco measures not only the expansion of overseas trade, but the commercialization of rural life. By the middle of the century about 0.6 lb. of tea was legally imported per head of the population, plus a considerable amount smuggled in, and already there was evidence that the drink was not uncommon in the countryside, even among labourers (or more precisely, their wives and daughters). The British, thought Wendeborn, consumed three times as much tea as the rest of Europe put together. It was also that the owner-occupying small cultivator, living substantially on the produce of his family-worked holding, was becoming notably less common than in other countries (except in the backward Celtic fringe and a few other areas, mainly of the north and west). The century since the Restoration of 1660 had seen a major concentration of landownership in the hands of a limited class of very large landlords, at the expense both of the lesser gentry and the peasants. We have no reliable gures, but it is clear that by 1750 the characteristic structure of English landownership was already discernible: a few thousand landowners, leasing out their land to some tens of thousands of tenant farmers, who in turn operated it with the labour of some hundreds of thousands of farm- labourers, servants or dwarf holders who hired themselves out for much of their time. This fact in itself implied a very substantial system of cash-incomes and cash sales. What is more, a good deal – perhaps most – of the industries and manufactures of Britain were rural, the typical worker being some kind of village artisan or smallholder in his cottage, increasingly specializing in the manufacture of some product mainly cloth, hosiery, and a variety of metal goods and thus by degrees turning from small peasant or craftsman into wage-labourer. Increasingly, villages in which men spent their spare time or seasons weaving, knitting or mining, tended to become industrial villages of fulltime weavers, knitters or miners, and eventually some but by no means all developed into industrial towns. Or more likely, the little market centres whence merchants issued to buy up the village products, or to distribute (‘put out’) the raw material and rent out the looms or frames to the cottage workers, became towns, lled with workshops or primitive manufactories to prepare and perhaps nish the material and goods distributed to and collected from the scattered out-workers. The nature of such a system of rural ‘domestic’ or ‘putting-out’ industry spread it widely throughout the countryside, and tightened the meshes of the web of cash transactions which spread over it. For every village which specialized in manufactures, every rural area which became an industrial village area (like the Black Country, the mining regions, and most of the textile regions), implied some other zone which specialized in selling it the food it no longer produced. This wide scattering of industry throughout the countryside had two linked and important consequences. It gave the politically decisive classes of landlords a direct interest in the mines which happened to lie under their lands (and from which, unlike on the continent, they rather than the king drew ‘royalties’) and the manufactures in their villages. The very marked interest of the local nobility and gentry in such investments as canals and turnpike roads was due not merely to the hope of opening wider markets to local agricultural produce, but to the anticipated advantages of better and cheaper transport for local mines and manufactures.* But in 1750 these improvements in inland transport had hardly begun: ‘turnpike trusts’ were still being set up at the rate of less than ten a year (between 1750 and 1770 they appeared at the rate of over forty a year) and canals hardly began at all until 1760. The second consequence was that manufacturing interests could already determine government policy, unlike in the other great commercial country, the Netherlands, where the interests of the merchant were supreme. And this in spite of the modest wealth and in uence of the budding industrialists. Thus it was estimated that in 1760 the poorest class of ‘merchants’ earned as much as the richest class of ‘master manufacturers’ (the wealthiest earned on average three times as much), and that even the top stratum of the much more modest ‘tradesmen’ earned twice the income of the equivalent stratum of ‘master manufacturers’. The gures are guesswork, but they indicate the relative standing of commerce and industry in contemporary opinion.† In every respect trade seemed to be more lucrative, more important, more prestigious than manufactures, especially overseas trade. Yet when it came to choosing between the interests of commerce (which lay in freedom to import, export and re-export) and those of industry (which at this stage lay, as usual, in protecting the British home market against the foreigner and capturing the export market for British products), the domestic producer prevailed, for the merchant could mobilize only London and a few ports in his interest, the manufacturer the political interests of large stretches of the country and of government. The matter was decided at the end of the seventeenth century, when the textile-makers, relying on the traditional importance of woollen cloth to British government nance, secured the prohibition of foreign ‘calicoes’. British industry could grow up, by and large, in a protected home market until strong enough to demand free entry into other people's markets, that is ‘Free Trade’. Yet neither industry nor commerce could have ourished but for the unusual political circumstances which so rightly impressed the foreigners. Nominally, England was not a ‘bourgeois’ state. It was an oligarchy of landed aristocrats, headed by a tight, self- perpetuating peerage of some two hundred persons, a system of powerful rich cousinages under the aegis of the ducal heads of the great Whig families – Russells, Cavendishes, Fitzwilliams, Pelhams and the rest. Who could compare to them in wealth? (Joseph Massie in 1760 estimated the incomes of ten noble families at £20,000 a year, of twenty at £10,000, and another 120 at £6– 8,000, or more than ten times what the richest class of merchants was supposed to earn.) Who could compare with them in in uence in a political system which gave any duke or earl who chose to exercise it almost automatic high o ce, and an automatic bloc of relatives, clients and supporters in both houses of parliament, and which made the exercise of the least political rights dependent on the ownership of landed property, which was increasingly hard to come by for those who did not already own estates? Yet, as the foreigners saw much more clearly than we may do, the grandees of Britain were not a nobility comparable to the feudal and absolutist hierarchies of the continent. They were a post-revolutionary élite, the heirs of the Roundheads. Honour, bravery, elegance and largesse, the virtues of a feudal or court aristocracy, no longer dominated their lives. A medium-sized German Funker might have a larger train of servants and domestic dependants than the Duke of Bedford himself. Their parliaments and governments made war and peace for pro t, colonies and markets and in order to stamp on commercial competitors. When a genuine relic of an older era irrupted into England, like Charles Edward Stuart, the ‘Young Pretender’ in 1745, with his army of loyal, but strictly uncommer- cial Highlanders, the distance between Whig England, however aristocratic, and more archaic societies became obvious. The Whig grandees (though not so much the lesser Tory country squires) knew quite well that the power of the country, and their own, rested on a readiness to make money militantly and commercially. It so happened that in 1750 not a great deal of money was yet to be made in industry. When it was, they would have no great di culty in adjusting themselves to the situation. Yet, if we placed ourselves in the Britain of 1750 without the wisdom of hindsight, would we have predicted the imminent Industrial Revolution? Almost certainly not. We should, like the foreign visitors, have been struck by the essentially ‘bourgeois’, commercial, nature of the country. We should have admired its economic dynamism and progress, perhaps its aggressive expansionism, and we might have been impressed with the remarkable results of its multifarious and hardly controlled private entrepreneurs. We would have predicted an increasingly prosperous and powerful future for it. But would we have expected its transformation – still less the ensuing transformation of the world? Would we have expected that in less than a century the son of a ‘master-manufacturer’ – and one who in 1750 was only just abandoning the countryside of his yeomen ancestors to settle in a smallish Lancashire town – would be Prime Minister of Britain? We would not. Would we have expected the quiescent England of 1750 to be rent by Radicalism, Jacobinism, Chartism, Socialism? Looking back, we can see that no other country was as well- prepared for the Industrial Revolution. But we must still see why in fact it burst out in the last decades of the eighteenth century, with results which, for good or ill, have become irreversible. NOTES 1. See the works of Langford, Hudson, and Deane and Cole in Further Reading, 2 and 3. See also Figures 1, 3, 8, 10, 11, 24, 26 and 35. 2. Count Friedrich Kielmansegge, Diary of a Journey to England 1761–2 (London 1902), p. 18. 3. Mons. L’Abbé Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations (London, 1747), Vol. I, p. 177. 4. (Anonymous) A Tour through England, Wales and part of Ireland made during the summer of 1791 (London, 1793), p. 373. 5. ibid., p. 354. 6. Le Blanc, op. cit., I, p. 48. 7. ibid, II, p. 345. 8. ibid., I, p. 18; II, p. 90. 9. Abbé Coyer, Nouvelles observations sur l'Angleterre (1779), p. 15. 10. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, Letter X. 11. Abbé Coyer, op. cit., p. 27.  2 ORIGIN OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION1 THE problem of the origin of the Industrial Revolution is not an easy one, but it is made even more di cult if we fail to clarify it. So it is as well to begin with a little clari cation. First, the Industrial Revolution is not merely an acceleration of economic growth, but an acceleration of growth because of, and through, economic and social transformation. The early observers, who concentrated their attention on the qualitatively new ways of producing – the machines, the factory system and the rest – had the right instinct, though they sometimes followed it too uncritically. It was not Birmingham, a city which produced a great deal more in 1850 than in 1750, but essentially in the old way, which made contemporaries speak of an industrial revolution, but Manchester, a city which produced more in a more obviously revolutionary manner. In the late eighteenth century this economic and social transformation took place in and through a capitalist economy. As we know from the twentieth century, this is not the only form industrial revolution can take, though it was the earliest and probably, in the eighteenth century, the only practicable one. Capitalist industrialization requires in some ways a rather di erent analysis from non-capitalist, because we must explain why the pursuit of private pro t led to technological transformation, and it is by no means obvious that it automatically does so. In other ways, doubtless, capitalist industrialization can be treated as a special case of a more general phenomenon, but it is not clear to what extent this is helpful to the historian of the British Industrial Revolution. Second, the British revolution was the rst in history. This does not mean that it started from zero, or that earlier phases of rapid industrial and technological development cannot be found. Nevertheless, none of these initiated the characteristic modern phase of history, self-sustained economic growth by means of perpetual technological revolution and social transformation. Being the rst, it is therefore also in crucial respects unlike all subsequent industrial revolutions. It cannot be explained primarily, or to any extent, in terms of outside factors such as – for instance – the imitation of more advanced techniques, the import of capital, the impact of an already industrialized world economy. Subsequent revolutions could use the British experience, example and resources. Britain could use those of other countries only to a very limited and minor extent. At the same time, as we have seen, the British revolution was preceded by at least two hundred years of fairly continuous economic development, which laid its foundations. Unlike, say, nineteenth- or twentieth-century Russia, Britain entered industrialization prepared and not virtually unprepared. However, the Industrial Revolution cannot be explained in purely British terms, for this country formed part of a wider economy, which we may call the ‘European economy’ or the ‘world economy of the European maritime states’. It was part of a larger network of economic relationships, which included several ‘advanced’ areas, some of which were also areas of potential or aspiring industrialization, and areas of ‘dependent economy’, as well as the margins of foreign economies not yet substantially involved with Europe. These dependent economies consisted partly of formal colonies (as in the Americas) or points of trade and domination (as in the Orient), partly of regions which were to some extent economically specialized in response to the demands of the ‘advanced' areas (as in some parts of eastern Europe). The ‘advanced’ world was linked to the dependent world by a certain division of economic activity: a relatively urbanized area on one hand, zones producing and largely exporting agricultural products or raw materials on the other. These relations may be described as a system of economic ows – of trade, of international payments, of capital transfers, of migration, and so on. The ‘European economy’ had shown marked signs of expansion and dynamic development for several centuries, though it had also experienced major economic setbacks or shifts, notably in the fourteenth to fteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless it is important to observe that it also tended to be divided, at least from the sixteenth century, into independent and competing politico-economic units (territorial ‘states’) like Britain and France, each with its own economic and social structure, and containing within itself advanced and backward or dependent sectors and regions. By the sixteenth century it was fairly obvious that, if industrial revolution occurred anywhere in the world, it would be somewhere within the European economy. Why this was so cannot be discussed here, for the question belongs to an earlier era of history than the one with which this book is concerned. However, it was not clear which of the competing units would turn out to be the rst to industrialize. The problem of the origins of the Industrial Revolution which concerns us here is, essentially, why it was Britain which became the rst ‘workshop of the world’. A second and connected question is why this breakthrough occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century and not before or after. Before setting about the answer (which remains a matter of debate and uncertainty), it may be useful to eliminate a number of explanations or pseudo-explanations which have long been current, and are still sometimes maintained. Most of them leave more unexplained than they elucidate. This is true of theories which attempt to account for the Industrial Revolution in terms of climate, geography, biological change in the population or other exogenous factors. If (as has been held) the stimulus for the revolution came from, say, the unusually long period of good harvests in the earlier eighteenth century, then we have to explain why similar periods before this date (and they have occurred from time to time throughout history) had not similar consequences. If Britain's ample reserves of coal explain her priority, then we may well wonder why her comparatively scant natural supplies of most other industrial raw materials (for example iron ore) did not hamper her just as much, or alternatively why the great Silesian coal elds did not produce an equally early industrial start. If the moist climate of Lancashire is to explain the concentration of the cotton industry there, then we ought to ask why the many other equally damp regions of the British Isles did not also attract or hold it. And so on. Climatic factors, geography, the distribution of natural resources operate not on their own, but only within a given economic, social and institutional framework. This is true even of the strongest of such factors, ease of access to the sea or to good rivers, that is to the cheapest and most practicable – indeed for bulk goods the only economic form of transport in the pre-industrial age. It is almost inconceivable that a totally landlocked region should have pioneered the modern Industrial Revolution; though such regions are rarer than one thinks. Nevertheless, even here non-geographic factors must not be neglected: the Hebrides have more access to the sea than most of Yorkshire. The problem of population is somewhat di erent, for its movements may be explained by exogenous factors, by the changes in human society, or by a combination of both. We shall consider it further below. At present we need note merely that purely exogenous explanations are not at present widely held by historians, and are not accepted in this book. Explanations of the Industrial Revolution by ‘historic accidents’ ought also to be rejected. The mere fact of overseas discovery in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries does not account for industrialization, and neither does the ‘scienti c revolution’ of the seventeenth.* Neither can explain why the Industrial Revolution occurred at the end of the eighteenth century and not, let us say, at the end of the seventeenth, when both the European knowledge of the outer world and scienti c technology were potentially quite adequate for the sort of industrialization which developed eventually. Nor can the Protestant Reformation be made responsible for it, either directly or via some special ‘capitalist spirit’ or other change of economic attitude induced by Protestantism; not even for why it occurred in Britain and not in France. The Reformation occurred more than two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. By no means all areas which converted to Protestantism became pioneers of industrial revolution, and – to take an obvious example – the parts of the Netherlands which remained Catholic (Belgium) industrialized before the part which became Protestant (Holland).* Lastly, purely political factors must also be rejected. In the second half of the eighteenth century practically all governments in Europe wanted to industrialize, but only the British succeeded. Conversely, British governments from 1660 on were rmly committed to policies favouring the pursuit of pro t above other aims, but the Industrial Revolution did not occur until more than a century later. To reject such factors as simple, exclusive, or even primary explanations is not, of course, to deny them any importance. That would be foolish. It is merely to establish relative scales of importance, and incidentally to clarify some of the problems of countries setting about their industrialization today, in so far as they are comparable. The main preconditions for industrialization were already present in eighteenth-century Britain, or could be easily brought into being. By the standards generally applied to ‘underdeveloped’ countries today, England was not underdeveloped, though parts of Scotland and Wales were, and Ireland certainly was. The economic, social and ideological links which immobilize most pre- industrial people in traditional situations and occupations were already weak, and could be easily severed. To take the most obvious example, by 1750 it is as we have seen already doubtful whether we can any longer speak of a landholding peasantry in large parts of England, and it is certain that we can no longer speak of subsistence agriculture.† Hence there were no major obstacles to the transfer of men from non-industrial to industrial pursuits. The country had accumulated and was of su cient size to permit investment in the necessary, but before the railways not very costly, equipment for economic transformation. Enough of it was concentrated in the hands of men willing to invest in economic progress, while relatively little was in the hands of men likely to divert resources to alternative (and economically less desirable) uses, such as mere display. There was neither a relative nor an absolute shortage of capital. The country was not merely a market economy one in which the bulk of goods and services outside the family are bought and sold but in many respects it formed a single national market. And it possessed an extensive and fairly highly developed manufacturing sector and an even more highly developed commercial apparatus. What is more, problems which are acute in modern underdeveloped countries setting about their industrialization were mild in eighteenth-century Britain. As we have seen, transport and communications were comparatively easy and cheap, since no part of Britain is further than seventy miles from the sea, and even less from some navigable waterway. The technological problems of the early Industrial Revolution were fairly simple. They required no class of men with specialized scienti c quali cations, but merely a su ciency of men with ordinary literacy, familiarity with simple mechanical devices and the working of metals, practical experience and initiative. The centuries since 1500 had certainly provided such a supply. Most of the new technical inventions and productive establishments could be started economically on a small scale, and expanded piecemeal by successive addition. That is to say, they required little initial investment, and their expansion could be nanced out of accumulated pro ts. Industrial development was within the capacities of a multiplicity of small entrepreneurs and skilled traditional artisans. No twentieth- century country setting about industrialization has, or can have, anything like these advantages. This does not mean that there were no obstacles in the path of British industrialization, but only that they were easy to overcome because the fundamental social and economic conditions for it already existed, because the eighteenth-century type of industrialization was comparatively cheap and simple, and because the country was su ciently wealthy and ourishing to be untroubled by ine ciencies which might have crippled less fortunate economies. Perhaps only so lucky an industrial power as this could have ever a orded that distrust of logic and planning (even private planning), that faith in the capacity to muddle through, which became so characteristic of Britain in the nineteenth century. We shall see below how some of the di culties of growth were overcome. The important thing to note at the outset is that they were never crucial. The question about the origin of the Industrial Revolution which concerns us here is not, therefore, how the material for the economic explosion was accumulated, but how it was ignited; and we may add, what stopped the rst explosion from zzling out after an impressive initial bang. But was a special mechanism necessary at all? Was it not inevitable that a su ciently long period of accumulating explosive material would, sooner or later, somehow, somewhere, produce spontaneous combustion? Perhaps so. Nevertheless it is the ‘somehow’ and ‘somewhere’ which must be explained; all the more so as the way in which an economy of private enterprise brings about industrial revolution raises a number of puzzles. We know that in fact it did so in some parts of the world; but we also know that it failed to do so in other parts, and took a rather long time doing so even in western Europe. The puzzle lies in the relationship between making pro t and technological innovation. It is often assumed that an economy of private enterprise has an automatic bias towards innovation, but this is not so. It has a bias only towards pro t. It will revolutionize manufactures only if greater pro ts are to be made in this way than otherwise. But in pre-industrial societies this is hardly ever the case. The available and prospective market – and it is the market which determines what a businessman produces – consists of the rich, who require luxury goods in small quantities, but with a high pro t-margin per sale, and the poor, who – if they are in the market economy at all, and do not produce their own consumer goods domestically or locally – have little money, are unaccustomed to novelties and suspicious of them, unwilling to consume standardized products and may not even be concentrated in cities or accessible to national manufacturers. What is more, though a market for ‘the middling sort of people’▓could develop in the prosperous eighteenth century, the true mass market is not likely to grow very much more rapidly than the relatively slow rate of population increase. It will make more sense to dress princesses in haute couture models than to speculate on the chances of capturing peasants' daughters for arti cial silk stockings. The sound businessman, if he has any choice, will produce very expensive jewelled timepieces for aristocrats rather than cheap wrist-watches, and the more expensive the process of launching revolutionary cheap goods, the more he will hesitate to risk his money in it. A French millionaire in the mid nineteenth century, operating in a country in which the conditions for modern industrialism were relatively poor, expressed this admirably. ‘There are three ways of losing your money,’ said the great Rothschild, ‘women, gambling and engineers. The rst two are pleasanter, but the last is much the most certain.’2 Nobody could accuse a Rothschild of not knowing the best way to the biggest pro ts. In a non-industrialized country it was not through industry. Industrialization changes all this, by enabling production – within certain limits – to expand its own markets, if not actually to create them. When Henry Ford produced his model-T, he also produced what had not existed before, namely a vast number of customers for a cheap, standardized and simple automobile. Of course his enterprise was no longer as wildly speculative as it seemed. A century of industrialization had already demonstrated that mass-production of cheap goods can multiply their markets, accustomed men to buy better goods than their fathers had bought and to discover needs which their fathers had not dreamed of. The point is that before the Industrial Revolution, or in countries not yet transformed by it, Henry Ford would not have been an economic pioneer, but a crank, inviting bankruptcy. How then did conditions come about in eighteenth-century Britain which led businessmen nevertheless to revolutionize production? How did entrepreneurs come to see before them, not the modest if solid expansion of demand which could be lled in the traditional manner, or by a little extension and improvement of the old ways, but the rapid and limitless expansion which required revolution? A small, simple and cheap revolution by our standards, but nevertheless a revolution, a leap into the dark. There are two schools of thought about this question. One emphasizes chie y the domestic market, which was clearly by far the largest outlet for the country's products, the other stresses the foreign or export market, which was equally clearly, far more dynamic and expandable. The right answer is probably that both were essential in di erent ways, as was a third, and often neglected factor: government. The domestic market, large and expanding as it was, could grow in only four important ways, three of which were not likely to be exceptionally rapid. There could be growth of population, which creates more consumers (and, of course, producers); a transfer of people from non-monetary to monetary incomes, which creates more customers; an increase of income per head, which creates better customers; and a substitution of industrially produced goods for older forms of manufacture or imports. The question of population is so important, and has in recent years been the subject of so large and ourishing a concentration of research, that it must be brie y discussed here. It raises three questions of which only the third is directly relevant to the problem of market expansion, but all of which are important for the more general problem of British economic and social development. They are: (1) What happened to British population and why? (2) What e ect did these population changes have on the economy? (3) What e ect did they have on the structure of the British people?  Reliable measures of the British population hardly exist before about 1840, when the public registration of births and deaths was introduced, but its general movement is not in much dispute. Between the end of the seventeenth century when there were perhaps ve and a quarter million inhabitants of England and Wales, and the middle of the eighteenth century, it rose only very slightly, and may at times have been static or even falling. After the 1740s it rose substantially and from the 1770s very rapidly indeed by contemporary, though not by our standards.* It doubled in fty to sixty years after 1780, and again in the sixty years from 1841 to 1901, though in fact both birth and death rates began to drop rapidly from the 1870s. However, these global gures conceal very substantial variations, both chronological and regional. Thus for instance, while in the rst half of the eighteenth century, and even up to 1780, the London area would have been depopulated but for massive immigration from the countryside, the future centre of industrialization, the North-West, and the East Midlands were already increasing quite rapidly. After the real start of the Industrial Revolution, rates of natural increase of the major regions (though not of migration) tended to become similar, except for the murderous environment of London. These movements were clearly not much a ected, before the nineteenth century, by international migration, not even of the Irish. Were they due to variations in the rate of births or in mortality, and what were the causes of these? Quite apart from the de ciency of our information, these questions, though of great interest, are immensely complicated.* They concern us here only in so far as they throw light on the question of how far the rise in population was a cause, how far a consequence of economic factors, for example how far people married or conceived children earlier because of better chances of getting a piece of land to cultivate or a job or – as has been argued – because of the demand for child labour, how far their mortality declined because they were fed better or more regularly or because of environmental improvements. (Since one of the few facts we know with any certainty is that most of the fall in death rates was due to fewer infants, children and perhaps young adults dying, rather than to any real prolongation of life beyond the biblical span of three score years and ten,† such falls might entail a rise in the birth rate. For instance, if fewer women die before, say, thirty, more of them are likely to have the children they might be expected to have between thirty and the menopause.) We cannot answer these questions with certainty, but it seems fairly clear that such population growth as there was – rapid by previous Western standards, but not by those to which we have become accustomed in the twentieth century – was due primarily to a rise in the birth rate. Young women married earlier – on average at the age of twenty-three in 1825–49, compared to over twenty-six in 1700–24 – and therefore had a longer child-bearing period. There was also a substantial rise in illegitimate births. It seems clear that people were much more responsive to economic factors in marrying and/or having children than had sometimes been supposed, and that some social changes (for instance, the decline in the practice of workers ‘living in’ with their employers) must have encouraged, or even required, earlier and perhaps larger families. It is also clear that a family economy which can be balanced only by the labour of all its members, and forms of production which used child labour, would also encourage population. Contemporaries certainly thought of population as something which responded to changes in the demand for labour. Mortality, especially infantile mortality, did not decline signi cantly until quite late in the nineteenth century, and when it did, it was almost certainly for economic, social or other environmental reasons. Medical progress can have played no part in its reduction, except maybe for the reduction in deaths from smallpox. What were the economic e ects of these changes? More people means more labour and cheaper labour, and it has often been supposed that this is in itself a stimulus to economic growth, at any rate under capitalism. As we can see in many underdeveloped countries today, it is not. It may produce merely distress and stagnation, perhaps catastrophe, as in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the early nineteenth century (see pp. 284–7 below). Cheap labour may actually retard industrialization. If in eighteenth-century England a growing labour force assisted development, as it undoubtedly did, it was because the economy was already dynamic, not because some extraneous demographic injection made it so. In any case population grew rapidly all over northern Europe, but industrialization did not occur everywhere. On the other hand more people certainly means more consumers, and it has been argued with more force that this certainly provides a stimulus both for agriculture (for they must be fed) and for manufactures. But as we have seen, the national population grew only very gradually in the century before 1750, and its rapid rise coincided with the Industrial Revolution but did not (except here and there) precede it. If Britain had been a less developed economy, there might have been more room for sudden and large transfers of people from, say, a subsistence to a cash economy, or from domestic and artisan manufacture to industry. But, as we have seen, England was already a market economy with a large and growing manufacturing sector. The average English income probably increased substantially in the rst half of the eighteenth century, thanks if anything to a stagnant population and labour shortage, so that this period is rightly described in the Vicar of Bray's song as ‘pudding time’. People were better o and could buy more; what is more, they probably at this time included a smaller percentage of children (who divert the expenditure of poor parents sharply towards the purchase of necessities) and a larger proportion of young small-family adults (who have income to spare). It is quite likely that in this period many Englishmen learned to cultivate new wants and establish new levels of expectation, and there is some evidence that around 1750 they began to prefer to take out their extra productivity in more consumer goods rather than in more leisure. Some excessively enthusiastic historians have gone so far as to speak of a ‘consumer revolution’. Still, this increase also resembled the movement of a respectable river rather than the exhilarating leaps of a waterfall. It explains why so many English towns were rebuilt (without any technological revolution) in the rural elegance of classical architecture, but not in itself why there was an industrial revolution. Except perhaps in three special cases: transport, food and capital goods, particularly coal. Very substantial and expensive improvements in inland transport – by river, canal and even road – were undertaken from the early eighteenth century, in order to diminish the prohibitive cost of moving goods overland: in the middle of the century twenty miles' land transport might double the cost of a ton of goods. How important these were for the development of industrialism is uncertain, but there is no doubt that the impetus for them came from the home market, and more especially from the growing demand of the cities for food and fuel. The landlocked manufacturers of household goods in the West Midlands (potters in Sta ordshire, makers of various metal goods in the Birmingham region) also pressed for cheaper transport. The di erence in transport costs was so dramatic that major investments were patently worth while. Canals cut the cost per ton between Liverpool and Manchester or Birmingham by eighty per cent. Food industries compete with textiles as the pace-setters of private-enterprise industrialization, because a vast market for both exists visibly and (at least in the cities) at all times, merely awaiting exploitation. The least imaginative businessman can realize that everybody, however poor, eats, drinks and wears clothes. The demand for manufactured food and drink is admittedly more limited than that for textiles, except for such products as our and alcoholic drinks, which are domestically manufactured only in rather primitive economies, but on the other hand food products are much more immune to foreign competition than textiles. Their industrialization therefore tends to play a rather more important part in underdeveloped than in advanced countries. Still, our-milling and beer-brewing were important pioneers of technological revolution even in Britain, though they attract less attention than textiles, because they do not so much transform the surrounding economy as appear, like giant monuments of modernity, within it, as the Guinness brewery did in Dublin and the celebrated Albion steam mills (which so impressed the poet William Blake) in London. The larger the city (and London was by far the greatest in Western Europe), and the more rapid the urbanization, the greater the scope for such developments. Was not the invention of the beer-handle, known to every drinker in Britain, one of the rst triumphs of Henry Maudslay, one of the great pioneers of engineering? The home market also provided a major outlet for what later became capital goods. Coal grew almost entirely with the number of urban – and especially metropolitan – replaces; iron – to a much smaller extent – re ected the demand for domestic pots, pans, nails, stoves and the like. Since the quantities of coal burned in British homes were very much greater than their needs of iron (thanks in part to the unusual ine ciency of the British replace compared to the continental stove), the pre-industrial base of the coal industry was much sounder than that of the iron industry. Even before the Industrial Revolution its output could already be measured in millions of tons, the rst commodity to which such astronomic criteria were applicable. And steam-engines were the product of the mines: in 1769 a hundred ‘atmospheric engines’ had already been erected round Newcastle-on-Tyne, and fty-seven were actually at work. (However, the more modern engines of James Watt's type, which were really the foundation of industrial technology, made their way only slowly in the mines.) On the other hand the total British consumption of iron in 1720 was less than 50,000 tons, and even in 1788, after the Industrial Revolution was well under way, it cannot have been much more than 100,000 tons. The demand for steel was negligible at the then price of this metal. The greatest civilian market for iron was probably still agricultural – ploughs and other implements, horse- shoes, wheel-rims, and so on – which increased substantially, but was hardly large enough yet to start an industrial transformation. In fact, as we shall see, the real Industrial Revolution in iron and coal had to wait until the era of the railway provided a mass market not only for consumer goods but for capital goods. The pre- industrial domestic market, and even the rst phase of industrialization, did not yet do so on a su cient scale. The main advantage of the pre-industrial home market was therefore its great size and steadiness. It may not have promoted much in the way of industrial revolution, but it undoubtedly promoted economic growth, and what is more, it was always available to cushion the more dynamic export industries against the sudden uctuations and collapses which were the price they paid for their superior dynamism. It came to their rescue in the 1780s, when war and the American Revolution disrupted them, and probably again after the Napoleonic Wars. But more than this, it provided the broad foundations for a generalized industrial economy. If England thought tomorrow what Manchester thought today, it was because the rest of the country was prepared to take its lead from Lancashire. Unlike Shanghai in pre-communist China, or Ahmedabad in colonial India, Manchester did not remain a modern enclave in the general backwardness, but became the model for the rest of the country. The domestic market may not have provided the spark, but it provided fuel and su cient draught to keep it burning. Export industries worked in very di erent, and potentially much more revolutionary conditions. They uctuated wildly – up to fty per cent in a single year – so that the manufacturer who could leap in fast enough to catch the expansions could make a killing. In the long run they also expanded much more, and more rapidly, than home markets. Between 1700 and 1750 home industries increased their output by seven per cent, export industries by seventy-six per cent; between 1750 and 1770 (which we may regard as the runway for the industrial ‘take-o ’) by another seven per cent and eighty per cent respectively. Home demand increased – but foreign demand multiplied. If a spark was needed, this is where it came from. Cotton manufacture, the rst to be industrialized, was essentially tied to overseas trade. Every ounce of its raw material had to be imported from the sub-tropics or tropics, and, as we shall see, its products were to be overwhelmingly sold abroad. From the end of the eighteenth century it was already an industry which exported the greater part of its total output – perhaps two thirds by 1805. The reason for this extraordinary potential of expansion was that export industries did not depend on the modest ‘natural’ rate of growth of any country's internal demand. They could create the illusion of rapid growth by two major means: capturing a series of other countries' export markets, and destroying domestic competition within particular countries, that is by the political or semi-political means of war and colonization. The country which succeeded in taking over other people's export markets, or even in monopolizing the export markets of a large part of the world in a su ciently brief period of time, could expand its export industries at a rate which made industrial revolution not only practicable for its entrepreneurs, but sometimes virtually compulsory. And this is what Britain succeeded in doing in the eighteenth century.* Yet conquering markets by war and colonization required not merely an economy capable of exploiting those markets, but also a government willing to wage war and colonize for the bene t of British manufacturers. This brings us to the third factor in the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, government. Here the advantage of Britain over her potential competitors is quite evident. Unlike some of them (such as France) she was prepared to subordinate all foreign policy to economic ends. Her war aims were commercial and (what amounted to much the same thing) naval. The great Chatham gave ve reasons in his memorandum advocating the conquest of Canada: the rst four were purely economic. Unlike others (such as the Dutch), her economic aims were not completely dominated by commercial and nancial interests, but shaped also, and increasingly, by the pressure group of manufacturers; originally the scally important woollen industry, later the rest. The tussle between industry and commerce (represented most dramatically by the East India Company) was decided in the home market by 1700, when British producers won protection against Indian textile imports; it was not won in the foreign market until 1813, when the East India Company was deprived of its monopoly in India, and that subcontinent opened to deindustrialization and the massive import of Lancashire cottons. Lastly, unlike all its other rivals, British policy in the eighteenth century was one of systematic aggressiveness – most obviously against the chief rival, France. Of the ve great wars of the period, Britain was clearly on the defensive in only one.† The result of this century of intermittent warfare was the greatest triumph ever achieved by any state up to that time: the virtual monopoly among European powers of overseas colonies, and the virtual monopoly of world-wide naval power. Moreover, war itself – by crippling Britain's major competitors in Europe – tended to boost exports; peace, if anything, tended to slow them up. Furthermore, war – and especially that very commercially- minded and middle-class organization, the British Navy – contributed even more directly to technological innovation and industrialization. Its demands were not negligible: the tonnage of the Navy multiplied from about 100,000 in 1685 to about 325,000 in 1760, and its demand for guns grew substantially, though in a less dramatic manner. War was pretty certainly the greatest consumer of iron, and rms like Wilkinson, the Walkers, and the Carron Works owed the size of their undertakings partly to government contracts for cannon, while the South Wales iron industry depended on battle. More generally, government contracts, or those of vast quasi-government bodies like the East India Company, came in large blocks and had to be lled on time. It was worth a businessman's while to introduce revolutionary methods to supply them. Time and again we nd some inventor or entrepreneur stimulated by so lucrative a prospect. Henry Cort, who revolutionized iron manufacture, began in the 1760s as a Navy agent, anxious to improve the quality of the British product ‘in connexion with the supply of iron to the navy’.3 Henry Maudslay, the pioneer of machine-tools, began his career in the Woolwich Arsenal and his fortunes (like those of the great engineer Marc Isambard Brunel, formerly of the French Navy) remained closely bound up with naval contracts.* If we are to sum up the role of the three main sectors of demand in the genesis of industrialism, we can therefore do so as follows. Exports, backed by the systematic and aggressive help of government, provided the spark, and – with cotton textiles – the ‘leading sector’ of industry. They also provided major improvements in sea transport. The home market provided the broad base for a generalized industrial economy and (through the process of urbanization) the incentive for major improvements in inland transport, a powerful base for the coal industry and for certain important technological innovations. Government provided systematic support for merchant and manufacturer, and some by no means negligible incentives for technical innovation and the development of capital goods industries. If we nally return to our original questions – why Britain and not another country? why at the end of the eighteenth century and not before or after? – the answer cannot be so simple. By 1750, indeed, there was not much doubt that if any state was to win the race to be the rst industrial power it would be Britain. The Dutch had retired to that comfortable role of old-established business, the exploitation of their vast commercial and nancial apparatus, and their colonies. The French, though expanding about as fast as the British (when the British did not prevent them by war), could not regain the ground they had lost in the great era of economic depression, the seventeenth century. In absolute gures they might look – until the Industrial Revolution – like a power of equivalent size, but per capita their trade and manufactures were even then far behind the British.  On the other hand this does not explain why the industrial breakthrough came when it actually did – in the last third or quarter of the eighteenth century. The precise answer to this question is still uncertain, but it is clear that we can nd it only by turning back to the general European or ‘world’ economy of which Britain was a part,* that is to the ‘advanced’ areas of (mainly) Western Europe and their relations with the colonial and semi- colonial dependent economies, the marginal trading partners, and the regions not as yet substantially involved in the European system of economic ows. The traditional pattern of European expansion – Mediterranean, and based on Italian merchants and their associates, Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, or Baltic, and based on German city states – had perished in the great economic depression of the seventeenth century. The new centres of expansion were the maritime states bordering the North Sea and North Atlantic. The shift was not merely geographical, but structural. The new kind of relationship between the ‘advanced’ areas and the rest of the world, unlike the old, tended constantly to intensify and widen the ows of commerce. The powerful, growing and accelerating current of overseas trade which swept the infant industries of Europe with it – which, in fact, sometimes actually created them – was hardly conceivable without this change. It rested on three things: in Europe, the rise of a market for overseas products for everyday use, whose market could be expanded as they became available in larger quantities and more cheaply; and overseas the creation of economic systems for producing such goods (such as, for instance, slave-operated plantations) and the conquest of colonies designed to serve the economic advantage of their European owners. To illustrate the rst fact: around 1650 one third of the value of East India goods sold in Amsterdam consisted of pepper – the typical commodity in which pro ts are made by ‘cornering’ a small supply and selling it at monopoly prices – by 1780 this proportion had fallen to eleven per cent. Conversely, by 1780 56 per cent of such sales consisted of textiles, tea and co ee, whereas in 1650 they had only amounted to 17.5 per cent. Sugar, tea, co ee, tobacco and similar products rather than gold and spices were now the characteristic imports from the tropics, as wheat, linen, iron, hemp and timber were those from the east of Europe, and not furs. The second fact can be illustrated by the expansion of that most inhuman tra c, the slave trade. In the sixteenth century fewer than half a million Negroes