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