Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850

Richard Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138408180
• eBook ISBN: 9781134982769
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

For both contemporaries and later historians the Industrial Revolution is viewed as a turning point' in modern British history. There is no doubt that change occurred, but what was the nature of that change and how did affect rural and urban society? Beginning with an examination of the nature of history and Britain in 1700, this volume focuses on the economic and social aspects of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike many previous textbooks on the same period, it emphasizes British history, and deals with developments in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland in their own right. It is the emphasis on the diversity, not the uniformity of experience, on continuities as well as change in this crucial period of development, which makes this volume distinctive. In his companion title Richard Brown completes his examination of the period and looks at the changes that took place in Britain's political system and in its religious affiliations.

1
The nature of history

‘A SOCIAL NECESSITY’

Much has been written about the uses of history.¹ Understanding of the present and the potential of the future is impossible without a temporal perspective. History is to society what remembered experience is to an individual. Marwick sees it as ‘a social necessity’. There are three practical advantages to society from the study of the past. First, it alerts people to the sheer variety of human mentality and achievement and thus to the range of possibilities people have now. History provides imaginative range but is also an inventory of assets whose value may only be realized by later generations. Secondly, it is a source of precedent and prediction. Though this is primarily a justification for contemporary history, the drawing of historical analogies, often half-consciously, is a habitual and unavoidable dimension of human reasoning. Comparisons across time can illuminate the present by highlighting both what is recurrent and what is new, what is durable, transient and contingent on our present conditions. Finally history provides a critique of the myths that pervade society. It has a crucial corrective function in that by removing myths, it can act as the conscience of society.

HISTORY—A DEFINITION

History is about people in society, their actions and interactions, their beliefs and prejudices, their pasts and presents. ‘People in society’ means people as individuals, communities, groups, institutions, states and nations. Individuals can be simultaneously members of a community (the village where they live), an institution (the church they attend), a group (the occupational group they belong to), a nation (Wales, Scotland, Ireland or England) as well as a member of the United Kingdom. ‘Actions and interactions’ mean the ways in which people behave as individuals and communities and the ways they react to each other. ‘Beliefs and prejudices’ mean the ways in which individuals and communities perceive(d) ‘their worlds’, the values upon which ‘their worlds’ are based and the consequences of this in terms of their own perceptions of others and others’ perceptions of them. ‘Pasts and presents’ provide people in society with an individual and collective memory, a storehouse of experience through which to develop their sense of social identity, to judge present actions and assess future prospects.

HISTORIANS ON HISTORY—DIFFERING METHODOLOGIES

History is also about how historians examine and interpret the past.² Although there are more than ‘two kinds of history’ the recent debate between Fogel and Elton brings out some of the different ways in which historians approach their study. Fogel sees ‘traditional historians’ as aspiring

to portray the entire range of human experience, to capture all of the essential features of the civilizations they were studying, and to do so in a way that would clearly have relevance to the present. They were continually searching for ‘synthesising principles’ that would allow them to relate in a meaningful way the myriad of facts that they were uncovering.³

In their analysis, he maintains, historians turn to the social sciences for insights into behaviour. But they recoil from its analytical methods because these threaten history’s intrinsic qualities: ‘its literary art, its personal voice and its concern with the countless subtle questions that are involved in the notion of individuality’.⁴

Fogel believes that this is the result of the way ‘traditional’ historians evaluate evidence. They use a ‘legal model’ which is well suited to examining specific events and individuals but which is suspicious of statistical evidence and scientific method. So how do ‘cliometricians’ like Fogel approach their study of the past? First, they want it to be based on explicit models of human behaviour. Secondly, they believe that all historians use behavioural models in relating the facts of history to each other. The difference is that for traditional historians these are implicit, vague and incomplete whereas for the cliometrician they are explicit, specific and complete. They allow historians to cut through the diversity of experience and behaviour that characterize human activity and to make judgements as to why people are likely to have behaved as they did. Thirdly, this approach often leads cliometricians to represent behaviour in mathematical equations which are then verified or refuted with quantitative evidence. However, quantification is not the universal characteristic of this approach. The crux of the difference between these two methods is that

many traditional historians tend to be highly focused on specific individuals, on particular institutions, on particular ideas, and on nonrepetitive occurrences…they make only limited use of explicit behavioural models and usually rely on literary models. Cliometricians tend to be highly focused on collections of individuals, on categories of institutions and on repetitive occurrences…. These involve explicit behavioural models and…quantitative evidence.⁵

The traditional historian may want to explain why Thomas Edwards of Risby, Suffolk stole four hen’s eggs in 1864 whereas the cliometrician would wish to understand why egg-stealing expanded in the nineteenth century. Both types of history are concerned with explaining the past. Both search for meaning using evidence that is often incomplete, inconsistent and ambiguous. Historians can and should use any method, concept, or model which help them to do this.

HISTORY AND ITS CONCEPTS

Historians examine the past through a number of methodological concepts. First, historians need to have an understanding of historical context, a sense of time and chronology. Secondly, the nature of events, their causation and consequences needs to be made clear. Piecing together what happened in the past will, thirdly, result in narrative, analysis and synthesis. Fourthly, historians examine the past in terms of change and continuity, progression, regression, evolution or revolution and discrete phenomena as ‘agents’ or ‘inhibitors’ of change. It is now fashionable to emphasize the continuities in historical experience and to play down the importance and effects of change and discontinuities in the past.⁶ Finally, history is less about truth than about possible and tentative interpretations on the basis of the available evidence.

What concepts can historians use to examine people in the past? These can be divided into—

1. understanding people in the past as individuals and social groups.
2. understanding the role of specific individuals and social groups.
3. understanding the actions, values, beliefs, attitudes and decisions of individuals.
4. understanding people in their local, regional, national and global context.
5. understanding the various choices open to individuals and groups at particular times and why they opted for one direction rather than another.
6. understanding the different dimensions of life which people in the past have experienced and the relationship between them—I will highlight economic, social, political, cultural (including religious), technological and scientific and environmental experiences.
7. understanding that people live different lives within the same time-scales—the diversity of contemporary experience.
8. understanding that the historical process is one of development, that, despite appearances, it is not static and that development may be resisted.
9. understanding the relationships, tensions and conflicts that exist between individuals and social groups.

Through the use of these concepts, and the available evidence historians can attempt to explain what happened in the past.

PEOPLE IN HISTORY

Individuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived in various types of association. There were quite definite forms of the family, marriage, religious worship, property and inheritance, economic organization, governmental procedures and so on and these formed something more than the individuals who lived and behaved within their contexts.

These associational forms were interconnected. Together they made up a total social system and it is important that they are examined as part of that system. Three points make this clear. First, a social system came into being and regulated the activities and experiences of people who shared the same collective conditions of life—who worked out a particular pattern of life in relation to the same ecological constraints, economic resources and historical experiences. In eighteenth-century Britain this was evident not just in the collective conditions of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England but in different regional experiences and expectations. Secondly, associational forms were essentially forms of regulation. Each association had its own set of rules—some implicit, others formalized—by which some individuals exercised authority which others were obliged to obey; by which different tasks were defined; through which satisfactory work or behaviour was rewarded and the unsatisfactory punished. Finally, the place of a particular association within the social system was made even more clear by the existence of institutions which actually linked and inter-penetrated them all. ‘Marriage’, for example, was not just a familial one but was also a religious, legal, political and economic institution.

Associations and social systems are essentially characterized by meanings and values. Every social institution contains a set of values at its core: it forbids certain things and requires, upholds and encourages others. Although not all individuals agreed or abided by all the values embodied within social institutions, the network of regulation was a moral condition.

Individuals born within a particular social system with particular associational forms have a multi-dimensional private experience from birth to death quite different from those born within another. The experience of a Welsh farmer was different from a Scottish one. These different private experiences are articulated, understood and expressed in terms of the language with which they are familiar. The collective conditions and social systems shared by individuals have played a large part in making private experience and in shaping the nature of individuals. This view does not negate the role of individuals in the past but places them in a context that did influence, though did not determine, their responses to particular circumstances. For example, in periods of high food prices those whose standard of living was directly affected were likely to riot for the restoration of the ‘moral economy’. But similar circumstances did not always bring about the same individual response.

Associations and the social system will be inherited by generation after generation. Although certain aspects will be sustained and continued, others will be gradually, or in some cases radically, altered. This ‘heritage’ plays an important part in the way that individuals perceive their presents. It establishes systems of culture based upon inherited symbols, meanings, sentiments, values, ideologies and sanctions. Through cultural hegemony, control over values and beliefs, the governing association in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain was able to maintain its dominant economic and political position. Inherited experience underpins existing cultural values.

HISTORY AND CHANGE

This can help historians understand features of importance in a society at a particular point in time. But it does not explain the dynamics of change within that society. There is a surprising amount of agreement between social theorists about how societies change. First, the contemporary social experience (at any point in history) was, they maintain, the result of social evolution. Secondly, they agree on the central importance of the transition from a predominantly ‘traditional’ to a predominantly ‘rational and contractual’ social order. Thirdly, the promise and threat of this transformation is recognized, as is the necessity for the deliberate reconstruction of associations and institutions. These theories have a direct relevance in explaining the development from a pre-industrial society (though whether it was a ‘tra...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• 1. THE NATURE OF HISTORY
• 2. BRITAIN IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
• 3. THE REVOLUTION IN NUMBERS—DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE 1700–1850
• 4. CHANGE ON THE LAND
• 5. THE REVOLUTION IN TECHNOLOGIES—INDUSTRIAL CHANGE
• 6. THE REVOLUTION IN INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION
• 7. THE REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATIONS—LAND AND WATER
• 8. THE REVOLUTION IN OVERSEAS TRADE
• 9. CAPITAL AND BANKING
• 10. THE SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES FOR ECONOMIC CHANGE
• 11. RAILWAYS—THE GREAT CONNECTORS
• 12. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTIONS—AN OVERVIEW
• 13. RENT
• 14. CAPITAL
• 15. WAGES
• 16. THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH—A SOCIAL REVOLUTION?
• 17. THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH—CHANGE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE 1700–1850
• 18. THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH—THE URBAN EXPLOSION 1700–1850
• 19. CULTURE, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGE 1700–1850