Social Theory and Economic Change

Tom Burns, Professor S B Saul, S. B. Saul, Tom Burns, Professor S B Saul, S. B. Saul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136444401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1967 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

British Personality and the Industrial Revolution: The Historical Evidence

EVERETT E. HAGEN

Some readers of a book of mine, On the Theory of Social Change (1962), have drawn from it the conclusion that I believe that there can be no increase in innovational activity in a society without change in personality between generations, resulting from change in childhood environment. In that book I do not summarize my argument, but rather let it develop in a somewhat complex way. Because of this, and because of the stress I place on personality change as a neglected element in historical explanation, to draw that conclusion is reasonable. I should like, therefore, to note at the beginning of this paper that it is incorrect. I do not believe, and did not believe when I wrote that volume, that personality change is the only possible or important cause of an increase in innovational activity.

In many historical cases of an increase in the level of mnovational activity by a social group, the best explanation seems to be that the group was faced with a new problem in circumstances in which its old pattern of response was not possible. Examples of circumstances which have produced these results are the colonization of 'empty lands', such as those of North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and drastic disruption of the social order by war. During the Second World War, the people of Germany, Japan, France, and Italy received severe psychological shocks. The social order proved impotent. Probably the people of these countries were, so to speak, jolted out of old psychological and social ruts. Especially in Germany and Japan, extensive physical destruction also occurred, so that producers could not continue in old technical ruts. Surely these shocks are plausible partial explanations of the sharp increase in the rate of technical innovation in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan since the war. In these instances, no doubt there were also personality changes from one generation to the next, and perhaps within the same generation, for severe social traumata may change men's emotional mechanisms; but apart from these changes in personality the pace of innovation probably increased simply because, blasted out of old ruts, individuals were forced to struggle towards new solutions.

But one person may also solve problems more successfully than another because he is a better problem-solver. Moreover, the source of this ability is not necessarily that he inherited better mental equipment. Rather, during his early years, his parents and the other persons important to him in his home may have provided a secure and supporting environment for the use of his initiative; may have stimulated and rewarded him when he solved problems; and, when his neuro-muscular development was such that he could do various tasks for himself, may have penalized him by displeasure when he failed to do them. If so, he may have learned confidence and satisfaction in the use of his judgement, may have a firm sense that the world is an orderly place which may be expected to respond satisfactorily to his initiative, and a sense of unease when he depends on someone else for action. Because of these traits, all his life he may be drawn towards opportunities to make improvements by solving difficulties or rearranging the elements in the circumstances around him. He will act upon difficulties not merely to gain an end but because it is fun to do so (or because a sense of unease within him is at least somewhat relieved while he is working at a problem).

Another person, whose early environment was an emotionally undependable or an anxious and confining one, or one that compulsively pressed him to achieve the many difficult learning tasks of infancy and childhood before his neuro-muscular development had reached the necessary stage, may have learned to feel anxiety whenever he faces a problem. If so, he may, throughout his later life, neglect to notice opportunities for change. Thus he avoids anxiety. Or, having discovered a procedure that works well, he may cling compulsively to it even when circumstances have changed and the procedure is no longer appropriate.¹

Since creativity is greatly influenced by the family environment which impinges upon an individual during his early formative years, and since family environment, methods of child training, and later childhood environment may all differ among societies and from one era to another, it follows that the incidence of somewhat greater than average creativity may be higher among one people than among another, in any given historical epoch. The same may be true of other aspects of personality. Hence differences among societies with respect to personality may be an important historical force.

The main thesis of this paper is that differences in personality rather than differential circumstances are the central explanation of Britain's primacy in the Industrial Revolution. In my judgement, the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England and Wales not simply because the circumstances facing Britain were different from those facing Continental countries but because British people were inwardly different from those of the Continent. I shall suggest that between, say, A.D. 1200 and 1800 the British people solved problems in several fields more successfully than did their Continental contemporaries, that the most plausible cause of their greater effectiveness is a difference in personality, and that the difference in personality that is thus manifested is also the probable cause of the greater British success in technical innovation. I shall not speculate here concerning the possible causes of the difference in personality.¹ I shall merely summarize the historical facts which suggest to me that it existed.

One consideration in favour or any explanatory hypothesis in any field is the weakness or incompleteness of the alternatives. It would therefore be appropriate to consider here the conventional (mainly economic) explanations of Britain's primacy. However, though these explanations seem to me to consist mainly of a not very convincing sort of 'retrospective inference' ('something must have caused Britain's primacy in time, so presumably the earlier conditions overtly observable did'), I cannot, within the scope of the present paper, undertake their criticism. Rather, I must merely suggest some evidence of differences in personality, and let other scholars make such comparative evaluations as seem justified. Even in presenting the positive evidence, I shall necessarily write in broad sweeps. The sketch below is not a closely reasoned historical argument; to put forward such an argument concerning the complex question under discussion would require a large volume. In this paper, then, I am merely offering a hypothesis for research. But since it is the broad trends in a society's development with which one would expect the personality characteristics of the members of the society to be associated, painting with a broad brush is not entirely inappropriate.

The evidence, being historical, is necessarily diffuse. With regard to any explanation in history except the proximate cause of a specific event, that is the only sort of evidence there is, and hence is the sort one must put up with.

Before the eighteenth century, Britain was technically behind one or another Continental country in almost all fields. By the seventeenth century, she had caught up with the Dutch and Flemish in spinning and in most kinds of weaving, but the Flemish were still ahead in dyeing and finishing and in some specialized weaving. The Dutch were pre-eminent before the eighteenth century in many crafts: printing and type-founding, glass-making, etc. They were the world's leaders in the carrying trade. They were the world's best merchant shipbuilders. (So surprising is this fact to some observers that it is worth repeating that even at the end of the seventeenth century the British were not the best shipbuilders. They were still copying technical advances developed on the Continent.) The Dutch were the world's leaders in the management of government finance, in financial organization, and in business management. By 1625 the Amsterdam exchanges were greatly facilitating trade and capital transactions by quoting uniform prices for more than three hundred commodities, and for the shares of Dutch trading companies. And in 1690, in an English-Dutch campaign in Ireland against an opposing coalition, a Dutch firm was hired to supply the English-Dutch army. There seems to have been no British firm capable of managing the logistics involved.

In the sixteenth century, the Germans were ahead of the British in almost all branches of mining and metallurgy, and apparently (though this is not clear) they maintained their superiority in a number of fields in the seventeenth. In the seventeenth century, better iron-casting was done on the Continent than in Britain, and, when steel of the best quality was wanted, Britain imported it from Sweden. (The Swedes had a natural resource advantage: their iron ore was more free of sulphur; but their metallurgy was also extremely good.) Apart from clocks, Germany led Britain in the making of precision instruments until the last quarter of the seventeenth century.

However, for several centuries Britain had been catching up. Her faster pace of advance is noticeable from at least the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, under Hawkins's brilliant leadership, she evolved the world's best naval organization. In the sixteenth century also, and a little earlier in the century than the Dutch, she devised joint stock companies and thus greatly increased her ability to carry on risky trading and colonizing ventures. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Britain reared sheep and exported raw wool, mainly to the Flemish. She could not compete in its processing. In the fifteenth century, however, English craftsmen became able to spin and weave as efficiently as those on the Continent, and England began to export grey goods. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a goodly share of the technical innovations in spinning and weaving occurred first in England —perhaps not a larger number than on the Continent as a whole, but certainly more than in any other one country.¹ In the seventeenth century, Britain overtook the Flemish in the dyeing and finishing of wool and other textiles.

In this century also, having seen the advantages, for a variety of purposes, of the cotton goods produced in India, England made the technical changes necessary for cotton-weaving far sooner than did her Continental rivals. She gained almost a world monopoly in the industry, not because her fleet prevented other countries from exporting (it did not), but because England began to make an unrivalled product. There seems to be some basis for the Indian claim that, when the East India Company forced its way into India, India was the world's best producer of cotton textiles, and that to provide a market for their goods in India the British suppressed the Indian industry by force. However, Britain's great and long-continuing world advantage in the cotton textile industry did not result merely from her alertness in seeing the good qualities of the cotton textiles of India, but because of her technical advances. When Britain had been behind the Continental countries technically in the wool textile industry, she advanced upon them and surpassed them, because of her continuing more effective innovation. However, when the Continental countries perceived the advantages of Britain's new cotton textile industry, they were unable to catch up with her, because they were first too sluggish in turning to the new industry and then insufficiently innovational to overcome the British lead. On the contrary, that lead widened from the introduction of the weaving of all-cotton textiles in England in the seventeenth century throughout the eighteenth century.

While Britain's industries in general were advancing in the seventeenth century relative to those of other countries, her iron industry was not. During the last half of the century, many forges were closed, because they could not compete with the Continental producers. Output expanded slowly again in the eighteenth century, but Ashton (1951, pp. 20-21 and 60) accepts the estimate that between 1700 and 1775 it increased by not more than 1 per cent per year (while output elsewhere was increasing at a much faster rate). British ironmasters attributed their absolute decline in the last half of the seventeenth century and their relative decline in the eighteenth to the superior advantages (presumably in iron ore and coal deposits) and lower wages of the Continental industry. But with this exception the relative industrial growth was widespread, as is evidenced by the fact that in 1660 Britain produced five times the coal production of the other countries of the world combined.¹

The great advances of the eighteenth century are too well known to need listing here. But it is pertinent to mention one aspect of Britain's eighteenth-century technical achievements that is not sufficiently stressed in some accounts, namely, their diversity. Important though the steam engine was, the Industrial Revolution was not the result merely of a few great Inventions and their corollaries. Rather, there were varied advances in many fields: textiles; iron and steel; chemistry (it was perhaps too early to speak of chemical engineering); power; coal-mining; the construction of canals, roads, and bridges; civil engineering; mechanical engineering; botany, agronomy, and many other aspects of agriculture; business organization and management; and, above all, a phenomenon not fully included in any or all of these fields, the invention of a great variety of new machines and productive processes. A gradually swelling stream widened and deepened into a great rushing river. But the change was not nearly as abrupt as accounts that take the mid-eighteenth century as their starting-point sometimes imply. What occurred was an acceleration of a process that had long been going on.

So blase have we become about modern technical progress that we tend to think of the advances of the eighteenth century as the natural result, given sufficient economic incentive, of the cumulating progress of physical knowledge. They were not. They were the products of technical ingenuity far more than of scientific logic. There is no connexion between the law of universal gravitation or the three laws of motion and the fly shuttle, the steam engine, or Cort's puddling and rolling process of purifying steel — except that they all manifest an unusual degree of creativity.

Of the four great Asian nations, Japan possesses the poorest natural resources, and during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries had both the least investment from the West and the least contact with the West. Yet Japan led the others in industrialization. It is difficult to account for that fact except by saying, 'The Japanese are different'. Once one accepts within the framework of one's thinking the concept of differences among societies with respect to personality, such a difference in personality also becomes one plausible explanation of the diverse and long continued superiority of Britain in technical innovation during the early modern era and the eighteenth century.

Among the relevant evidence of a difference in personality between the British people and those of the Western Continental countries, during the several centuries before the Industrial Revolution, is the comparative behaviour of the British and the Continental societies in the field of government.

Two characteristics of persons who are innovationai in social affairs are pertinent. One, sketched briefly above, is trust in one's own capacity, and a resulting willingness to approach the world around one and operate upon it. Another characteristic of most innovational persons, which is of especial importance in social innovation, is the ability to stand apart from oneself, so to speak, and perceive oneself as a thinking and emotion-feeling organism. Persons who have the ability to do this, rather than to assume that their view of the world is the one true and objective view, also have the ability to understand the attitudes and reactions of other persons, and thereby to adapt social institutions to new situations and achieve social advance.

The history of the later Middle Ages and the early modern era demonstrates fairly convincingly, it seems to me, that, in comparison with the Continental societies, far more individuals in Britain, in all social classes except the serfs and not fully free cultivators, possessed these abilities. In their struggles with each other for power, the English nobility and most English kings showed not only self-trust and resourcefulness but also an empathy for each other's views. This can be deduced, not from their statements, but from their actions. Moreover, the growing middle classes — not merely their leaders — displayed much greater trust in their own ability to arrive at judgements in public affairs than did the corresponding classes on the Continent, and worked resourcefully and effectively to alter institutions in order to transfer progressively increasing power to control their own political destinies into their own hands. Furthermore, increasingly they spoke and acted as representatives of the lower classes down to the free cultivators. And the upper classes felt an unvoiced understanding of the middle-class attitudes, sufficient to make them yield steadily to them without extreme measures of resistance.

On the Continent, even into the nineteenth century, not only peasants but also the members of many urban groups seemed not to regard themselves as of the proper status to have ideas about national affairs, even those closely affecting themselves. They were somewhat like the Middle Eastern peasant after the Second World War, who, when asked, 'What would your do about your country's problems if you were the king (or president)?', could reply only, 'Me the king? How can you say such a thing? I am only a peasant.'¹ Repeatedly during this era these classes in one country or another felt a deep sense of wrongful treatment. When their resentment burst bonds, they responded with violence, but often their violence was only a meaningless and hopeless expression of fury, and when their revolt did depose or displace an authoritarian ruler, to a far greater degree than in Britain they merely turned to a rival authoritarian individual ...