Studies in Economic and Social History

Essays Presented to Professor Derek Aldcroft

Michael Oliver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138746688
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351732536
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This title was first published in 2002: There are few students of European economic history who will not have come across the writings of Derek H. Aldcroft. His contributions to the field of economic and social history are vast and distinguish him as one of the most prolific economic historians of the 20th century. This volume honours Derek's contribution to the literature of economic and social history and its contents reflect his wide-ranging interests, particularly on issues relating to transport history and the growth and structural change in economies. From transport in the Industrial Revolution to late 20th-century international financial architecture, the essays in this book, contributed by leading economic historians, are a tribute to a remarkable scholar.

Chapter One
British Transport History: Shifting Perspectives and New Agendas

Simon P. Ville

It is appropriate that Derek Aldcroft's Festschrift should begin with a chapter on British transport for it was this topic that first caught the attention of Aldcroft's fertile mind and established him as a leading scholar of economic history. Although his most recent research work has emphasized human capital, employment and industrial relations, it was in the field of transport history that Aldcroft's research first flourished. In the quarter century from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s he wrote a flurry of articles for leading journals, together with nine authored and edited books on British transport. This chapter will assess Aldcroft's contribution to British transport history, examine how the topic has developed more recently and suggest some further research agendas that might be addressed by future scholars.

Aldcroft as transport historian

Aldcroft was a key contributor to a golden age of writings on British transport history during the quarter century beginning in the early 1960s, a process facilitated by the establishment of new specialist journals and the availability of the records of the British Transport Commission in the preceding years. Other notable writers during this period included Jack Simmons, Michael Robbins, Ralph Davis, Jim Dyos, Bill Albert, Theo Barker, Baron Duckham, Peter Cain, Roy Church, Terry Gourvish, Robin Craig, John Chartres, Gerard Turnbull, Peter Davies, Gordon Jackson, Philip Bagwell, Gary Hawke and Michael Freeman. Between them, they produced an attractive field of study that blended the enthusiast's thirst for detail with the scholar's pursuit of general and sustaining hypotheses. As an undergraduate who later came to work in the field, British transport history stood out to me as the most energetic and enticing aspect of our national economic history. The Journal of Transport History, from its origins in 1953, provided one of the key outlets for much of this work. Aldcroft's contributions featured regularly in the journal, which included a reputation as a challenging book reviewer. By the 1970s, he took a leading role in the editorial group.

The field was made the more engaging by evidence all around of continuing change and development in transport systems. As Aldcroft and Dyos wrote from Leicester on 11 August 1968 in the introduction to their joint volume,

Today, the last train to be hauled by a steam locomotive on British railways has made the journey from Lime Street, Liverpool to Carlise and back. It is a reminder that transport history is still being made and we would like to think that this volume will give historical perspective to the far-reaching changes now taking place. (Aldcroft and Dyos, 1969, p. 16).

They might equally have mentioned the container revolution affecting shipping, the post-war development of jet airliners, or even space travel that was to achieve the first lunar landing in the following year.

Aldcroft wrote broadly on many topics of modern British transport history, spanning the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. He particularly focused on the railways but also wrote about shipping and road transport, and was a pioneer in the neglected field of aviation history. Favourite themes of his included the impact of war and of government intervention, intermodal competition, the economic efficiency of transport and the nature of technological change. From this work emerged a number of important historical insights. He compared the government's handling of rail and coastal shipping during and after the First World War, contrasting the well-planned de-control of the railways under the 1921 Act with the disorganized and rushed return of shipping to private control that contributed to post-war port congestion and excess tonnage construction (Aldcroft, 1961a; 1961b). This theme was linked to the issue of road, rail and shipping competition in the inter-war period to account for the sustained depression in coasting (Aldcroft, 1963). The theme of intermodal relations was maintained with Aldcroft's study of rail and air in the 1930s (Aldcroft, 1964a; 1965), which revealed the ownership dominance that railway companies held over the embryonic aviation firms. The impact of this was to foster rationalization of service provision but not of ownership, with many small firms, unable to yield economies of scale, surviving in the industry. He returned to the question of government's role by analysing post-war railway policy, drawing attention to the shortcomings of management by the British Transport Commission and the oscillating approaches of competition and integration by Conservative and Labour governments in the 1960s (Aldcroft, 1968a).

Questions of economic efficiency have come out strongly in his work on railways (Aldcroft, 1968b), where he argued that the poor performance in the half century to the First World War was partly the result of filling in the network with necessarily less productive lines. It also derived from a managerial perspective that was more concerned with building empires than operational efficiency. The poor performance of the railway companies after the First World War was attributed to falling revenue as a result of road competition and depression in the staple industries. With high levels of fixed costs it was difficult for the companies to reduce expenditures In line with lower revenues (Aldcroft, 1968a). Although this explanation appears to be based upon economic factors external to the companies, Aldcroft again attributes many problems to managerial failure, including the late technological shifts from steam to diesel and electric traction (Aldcroft, 1969). Aldcroft was somewhat more sympathetic towards shipping managers but doubts whether they were as skilful and persistent as their German counterparts (Aldcroft, 1968c). His broad criticism of transport management, which was part of his general theme of entrepreneurial failure in the British economy (Aldcroft, 1964b), never led him to undertake the close and sustained analysis of British railway management that Chandler (1965) provided for American counterparts; this has had to await the subsequent attention of British business historians, as we shall see below.

Besides extending our knowledge and understanding of particular areas of British transport, Aldcroft has demonstrated great deftness in synthesizing the work of other writers and presenting it in a succinct and balanced manner (Aldcroft, 1975; Aldcroft and Dyos, 1969). British transport history has attracted a vast and diverse literature from amateur and professional historians alike, challenging the skills of the best adapter. Nor has he shied from using and acknowledging the work of amateur historians, 'whose labours have so often been of immense value to us' (Aldcroft and Dyos, 1969, p. 15). At the other extreme, Aldcroft engaged debates over the more technical aspects of transport history including the issue of social-saving developed by Fogel (1964). Whilst admitting a high degree of scepticism of the social saving concept, his close understanding of the issues positioned him effectively to contribute to the hail of criticism that followed Fogel. On one celebrated occasion, he criticized one of Fogel's followers for producing an analysis based on slender evidence and fragmentary data (Aldcroft, 1972).

In 1974 Aldcroft edited a volume that contained his key articles of the last decade and a half. The highwater mark of his contribution, however, came in the following year with his well-considered survey of British transport in the twentieth century, which employed a wide range of sources and drew carefully upon his accumulated experience and understanding of the subject. It provided a more extensive treatment of civil aviation and brought up to date the coverage of all sectors with a particular focus on the 1950s and 1960s to complement the emphasis of most of his earlier work on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aldcroft found space for some of the earliest work on the neglected topic of road haulage and a thoughtful account of intermodal changes in the post-war pattern of transport demand. On the negative side, the post-war containerization of shipping was inadequately covered, and there followed further poorly specified criticisms of shipping management relying heavily upon negative assumptions about personal management and business networks that have since been rigorously challenged. He concluded the book by drawing attention to the historic improvements to transport's infrastructure that had been occurring since the 1960s. A few general survey articles followed, together with the two volumes edited with Freeman on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British transport (Aldcroft and Freeman, 1983; 1988). The latter were intended to 'refine, update and expand' (Aldcroft and Freeman, 1983, p. ix); Aldcroft's sole contribution, beyond the often demanding task of editor, was in the preface to the first volume. Aldcroft also edited, with Phil Cottrell (1981), Ralph Davis's Festschrift in 1981 on the themes of shipping, trade and commerce, but again without contributing his own chapter.

Subsequent developments in British transport history

In the two decades since Aldcroft completed his main studies on transport history there have been many important developments in the subject, broad and narrow, in methodology and in conclusions. Rather than try to detail each of these developments, which are recorded in regular reviews of the subject, the rest of this chapter will focus upon how approaches to the subject have altered since the Aldcroft era and where we might consider further shifts in perspective.

Perspectives

Writers have been drawn to particular perspectives when writing about transport history, notably focusing upon an individual mode, eschewing comparisons with communications and largely ignoring the multiple vertical layers of the industry. In this section we draw attention to some of the risks and shortcomings associated with these perspectives.

The transport mode as a unit of analysis Much of the post-war boom in transport history has been built around using individual transport modes as the unit of analysis. Thus, most articles have focused on an individual mode and most books, where multimodal, have dealt with a separate transport form in each chapter. This is also reflected in the organization of most surveys of the state of transport history (Barker, 1993; Crompton, 1993; Gourvish, 1993; Lyth, 1993; Williams, 1993). In the pursuit of deepening the narrative of transport history, this type of approach appears sensible. This perspective has also extended to submodal academic specialization. In the shipping industry, for example, Armstrong is particularly well known for his work on coastal shipping. Such has become the demarcation of modal and submodal specialization and differentiation that Armstrong, for example, has criticized other writers where they do not consider coastal shipping in detail separately from other shipping routes, despite the overlap in operators, infrastructure and vessels (Armstrong, 1998, pp. 113–14). Maritime history is also heavily demarcated between naval and mercantile studies. Whether transport history is best served by further pursuing relatively specialized and self-contained perspectives is a worthy matter for debate.

The manner in which transport has been divided into particular modes has sometimes been inconsistent and poorly justified. For example, pre-twentieth century road transport has been frequently analysed separately from modern motorized road transport. This has led to different focuses in the study of road transport that have made intertemporal comparisons difficult. In other words, while study of the pre-motorized period has concentrated on the condition and extent of the roads, the motor vehicle itself, particularly its production, has dominated the modern study of road transport, with only limited attention to the road system and hauliers (Scott, 1998). This has begun to change more recently with Gerhold's (1996) analysis of the importance of better horses and better stagecoach design for improved road transport productivity before 1840 and Scott's (1998) account of modern road haulage. Inland water transport is rarely analysed in association with coastal and overseas transport despite the overlap in services and technology between waterways and coasting. It is suggested here that where modal-based discussion is pursued, forms of transport might usefully be distinguished by the technology of their pathway; in other words by road, rail, water and air.

The modal approach to most transport history has also generated an imbalanced historiography with shipping and the railways continuing to attract the bulk of studies in the two decades since the Aldcroft era. Indeed, a detailed companion to railway history has recently been published (Simmons and Biddle, 1997) which builds upon existing bibliographies of the topic and Aldcroft and Freeman's (1985) railway atlas as evidence of the extensive literature in this area. Some of the Cinderella areas have begun to receive more attention recently, particularly through the work of Lyth (1993; 1996), Hayward (1989) and Edmonds (1999) on the aviation industry. Commercial road haulage, motorcycles and bus services have all received recent boosts to their meagre coverage (Barker and Gerhold, 1993; Koerner, 1995; Scott, 1998; Singleton, 1995).

The limited number of studies that have sought to compare different modes have done so largely from a competitive point ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Derek Howard Aldcroft
• 1 British Transport History: Shifting Perspectives and New Agendas
• 2 Reflections on British Entrepreneurship, c. 1870–1914: Aldcroft Revisited
• 3 Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century
• 4 The Debt Constraint on British Economic Policy and Performance in the 1920s
• 5 The Masses in the Feature Film: The USA and the UK, 1930–50
• 6 British Economic Policy and Performance since 1950: An Early Twenty-first-century Assessment
• 7 The Economics of Discouraging Irregular Immigration
• 8 The International Financial Architecture in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
• Publications by Derek H. Aldcroft, 1961–2001
• Index