The Origins of Modern English Society

Harold Perkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134425495
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Bringing together subjects such as culture, religion, morals, politics, economics, and mentality, Perkin presents and applies a holistic concept of social history in the tradition of great historians of the past.

In this classic text of social history, Harold Perkin explores the emergence of a new form of class society in Victorian England, which differed radically from early modern society. He locates the origins of the modern English class system in the Industrial Revolution, the impact of which went beyond economy and technology, and changed the ways of living and perceptions of the English people in many ways.

Origins of Modern English Society maintains its influence as a comprehensive and integrative survey of a crucial period in the development of English society.

X
Entrepreneurial Society: Ideal and Reality

BY mid-century the entrepreneurial class could feel well pleased with the new society which they had created and persuaded the other classes to accept. In May 1853 Absolom Watkin, Manchester cotton merchant and one of the leading lights of the Anti-Corn Law league, wrote in his diary:

This is the last day of Whitsun week, and the people of Manchester have never enjoyed it more, nor have I seen clearer evidence of general well-being. Our country is, no doubt, in a most happy and prosperous state. Free trade, peace, and freedom. Oh, happy Englan d! Mayest thou know and deserve thy happiness.¹

The result of nearly a century of revolutionary industrialism and material progress was that Britain was the richest and most powerful country in the world, the world’s workshop, carrier and banker, and head of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

Palmerston in 1850 explained Britain’s strength and happiness in terms of the viability and openness of its society:

We have shown the example of a nation, in which every class in society accepts with cheerfulness the lot which Providence has assigned to it; while at the same time every individual of each class is constantly striving to raise himself in the social scale—not by injustice and wrong, not by violence and illegality, but by preserving good conduct, and by the steady and energetic execution of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his Creator endowed him.¹

Here was the aristocratic statesman who almost personified mid-Victorian England embracing on behalf of his order the entrepreneurial ideal of a viable class society tempered by social mobility. The entrepreneurial society had indeed arrived.

But what was the reality underlying the ideal of mid-Victorian society? Was it quite so progressive and prosperous as it has been painted? Or were there already signs of a slackening of industrial growth and technological innovation? Was it, as its champions believed, the best possible society not merely for increasing wealth but for sharing it out more equally between the classes? Or were the rich becoming richer and the poor, if not absolutely, then relatively poorer? Was poverty a relatively minor problem to be solved by individual exertion, or was it a massive one involving a substantial fraction of the population? If upward mobility was the chief compensation for poverty and inequality, how much of it was there, and was it expanding or contracting? If the answers to these questions prove unsatisfactory, then the tensions between ideal and reality were undermining the stability of entrepreneurial society and storing up trouble for the future.

There are still more fundamental questions, however. Did the ideal view of the social structure itself correspond to the reality? Or were changes taking place in the middle class, especially the business middle class, which were transforming the outlook and attitudes of some entrepreneurs and, indeed, evolving them into a new and rather different class of big, corporate business men, the harbingers of the new plutocracy of late Victorian and Edwardian England?

Finally, could the entrepreneurial ideal escape unscathed these tensions and changes in society? Or was it coming under attack from without and defection from within which would ultimately discredit it? And if the ideal lost its grip on society, could the society itself survive unchanged?

So far we have traced the rise of the new class society created by industrialism. In this last chapter we must look, admittedly beneath the surface, for the first signs of its decline.

1.
PROGRESS AND POVERTY

The ideal assumed, first of all, that this was the best of all practicable societies for economic growth. In the 1880’s, when the economic system came under open attack for the first time in a generation, Sir Robert Giffen, the representative orthodox economist of his age, told the Statistical Society:

Whatever may be said as to the ideal perfection or imperfection of the present economic régime, the fact of so great an advance having been possible for the masses of the people in the last half-century is encouraging. It is something to know that whether a better régime is conceivable or not, human nature being what it is now (and I am one of those who think that the régime is the best, the general result of a vast community living as the British nation does, with all the means of healthy life and civilisation at command, being little short of a marvel if we only consider for a moment what vices of anarchy and misrule have had to be rooted out to achieve this marvel); still, whether best or not, it is something to know that vast improvement has been possible with this régime. Surely the lesson is that the nation ought to go on improving on the same lines, relaxing none of the efforts which have been so successful. Steady progress in the direction maintained for the last fifty years must soon make the English people vastly superior to what they are now.¹

It is true that Britain was a much wealthier country than fifty years before; in terms of real national income per head, nearly twice as wealthy, and nearly three times as wealthy as at the beginning of the century. As we saw in Chapter I, it was the defining characteristic of an Industrial Revolution to raise by a multiple both the population and their average real income. Yet there were already signs in the mid-Victorian age that the great acceleration of economic growth inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution had passed its peak and, though it had by no means exhausted itself, was beginning to slow down. General economic growth actually reached its lowest rate for the century in the middle decades centred on the 1850’s, the worst decade of all, and although it regained and even topped the old maximum in the late Victorian age, that was due to the increasing shift from slow growing agriculture to faster growing industry and services rather than to greater productivity in any particular sector.¹ More significantly, industrial production itself, on which everything else hinged, achieved its maximum rate of growth, at 3.5 per cent per annum, in the previous generation, from the 1810’s to the late 1840’s, and though from then until the early 1870’s it was only slightly lower, at 3.2 per cent per annum, in the last few years of the period it slumped to 1.7 per cent per annum, only half the peak rate of the Industrial Revolution.²

To a large extent this slackening of the rate of growth was disguised by an increase in the proportion of production exported and in ‘invisible exports’ like shipping, banking, insurance and overseas investments, the returns from which paid for a considerable but somewhat smaller increase in the rate of growth of imports, until foreign trade too slackened off in the later 1870’s.³ Britain’s phenomenal success as firstcomer in the new industrialism was reflected in her record 38 per cent share of the world trade in manufactures in 1876–80, and in her overseas capital balances which quadrupled between 1850 and 1873.⁴ But none of this could disguise the fact that it was in the mid-Victorian age that Britain ceased to be the world’s only workshop, and that other countries, Belgium, France, Germany and the U.S.A., ‘took off’ into industrialism, and began, in the last two cases, to achieve rates of growth much faster than anything Britain had ever achieved, which woul...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION TO THE 2002 EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE FOOTNOTES
• I. THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
• II. THE OLD SOCIETY
• III. THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM
• IV. THE REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
• V. THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM
• VI. THE BIRTH OF CLASS
• VII. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS
• VIII. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL
• IX. THE RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY
• X. ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY