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

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Commissioned by Penguin Books Ltd and first published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1968

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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 profitably as a book of reference. It attempts to describe and account for Britain's rise as the first 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 effects 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 find 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 difficult. Part of the difficulty is due to the curious situation of economic history which, as a specialized field 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 first publication of this book a branch of economic history known by such names as ‘new economic history’ or ‘cliometrics’, which essentially uses technically sophisticated quantification 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-defined but increasingly large field of ‘social history’ has pulled a part of the subject matter of economic history, as traditionally practised, in a different direction, while new and important fields, 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 fields 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 first 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 affected 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 first 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 different 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 different 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 different 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 confined 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 final word of warning. Economic history is essentially quantitative, and therefore uses statistics a good deal. However, figures 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 first done the counting. In history often nobody has until relatively recently. (For instance, there are no figures for coal output before 1854, no adequate figures 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 figures, 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 specific 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 modified 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 fill the most inexcusable gap in the first 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-first century.

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 influence 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 different 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 modified – are likely to emerge at a later stage; in Britain between the 1860s and the end of the nineteenth century. They will also be briefly 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 flows, 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 financial 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 affected. 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 fit into the world economy of the twenty-first 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 first sight incompatible phenomena. Its social and political institutions and practices maintain a remarkable, if superficial, 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 simplified 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 reflected 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 flexibility, 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 effective 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 inefficiencies 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 first 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 first 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 profit 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 suffered 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 flat defiance of its working-class majority, and that it could always afford 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 modifications 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 first 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 first 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 field 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 first 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 different: vested interest and the absence of sufficient 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 official inflexibility 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 first 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 affected by changes in it, and occasionally, in a brief phrase or two, how dependence on Britain affected 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 first 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 benefit 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 different. The political context is different.

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 find 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.

*The few exceptions – Trafalgar Square 1887, Featherstone 1893, Tonypandy 1911 – stand out in the history of British labour dramatically.

†Thus the achievements of the Labour governments of 1945–51, which marked, if anything, a retreat from the effectively socialist wartime economy of Britain, were at one time advertised as such a ‘revolution’, and so was the educational progress of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, which strikes the observer as unusually hesitant.

BRITAIN IN 1750¹

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 fifty 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 confined 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 flocks 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, filled with taverns and prostitutes for the seamen flush off 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 fixed 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 five 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 chiefly such cities as Birmingham, with its variety of small metal goods, Sheffield, with its admirable cutlery, the potteries of Staffordshire, 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 find the English set up for making a figure, 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 chiefly 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 chiefly 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 deficient 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 flourishing 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 affairs. 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 profit 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 find ourselves in fundamental disagreement. We shall note, above all, that England (Wales and large parts of Scotland were still somewhat different – 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-sufficient 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 fifteen 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 foodstuffs like cheese were already small. What is more important, England no longer paid the heaviest penalty of self-sufficient 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-sufficiency, 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 figures, 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.

INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1

BRITAIN IN 17501

BRITAIN IN 1750¹