The Transformation of England (Routledge Revivals)

Essays in the economic and social history of England in the eighteenth century

Peter Mathias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136464393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

First published in 1979, The Transformation of England discusses the creation in late eighteenth century England of the industrial system and thereby the present world. Professor Mathias poses questions about the nature of industrialization, social change and historical explanation, issues that are his principal scholarly concern. This series of essays is divided into two groups. The first group of essays focuses upon general themes such as the 'uniqueness' in Europe of the industrial revolution, capital formation, taxation, the growth of skills, science and technical change, leisure and wages, and diagnoses of poverty. In the second section, Professor Mathias focuses on the social structure in the eighteenth century, considering the industrialization of brewing, coinage, agriculture and the drink industries, advances in public health and the armed forces, British and American public finance in the War of Independence, Dr Johnson and the business world.

PART I
THEMES

1
BRITISH INDUSTRIALIZATION: UNIQUE OR NOT?

Some conceptual issues

The issues raised by such a provocative title deserve to be tackled operationally, rather than methodologically, in terms of the business of economic history. But certain conceptual problems do exist and merit prior discussion. Clearly in the strict sense every country’s economic development has been a unique, one-off sequence, with distinguishing characteristics from all others. This will be true, in the absolute sense, of direct economic criteria—rates of inter-sectoral structural change, the exact mix of the constituents of industrial output, and the like—though the higher the degree of aggregation then the greater likelihood of statistical conformities existing between national case histories. The total rate of growth, or rate of investment or population growth may approximate in different instances; it is, however, much less likely that the disaggregated constituents of these conglomerate indices will conform: the share of industry, primary production, services, income from abroad which collectively make up an aggregate rate of growth; the exact mix of capital accumulation in different sectors which forms the aggregate investment rate; the balance of net migration and natural increase (itself a function of age-specific birth and death rates translated against age structures) which lies behind the rate of change of the aggregate population index. Tracking back a little further, we may rest even more assured that the more contextual aspects of economic growth have national specificity; and these, we are appreciating more and more clearly, are crucially important aspects—part and parcel—of the processes of economic change: institutional developments, political, legal, processes and the like; the extent and rapidity of urbanization, the pattern of resource endowment.

As historians concerned with processes of change and the dynamics of growth we should also be suspicious about statistical resemblances and correlations in the profile, or silhouette, of industrialization presented by different countries. Comparable rates of growth (for example, between the United States and Canada, or Norway and the United Kingdom, or Japan and Denmark between 1870–1913), or similar ratios, for values in foreign trade to national income (for example, Germany and Australia in 1911–13, France and Sweden, Japan and Italy) may conceal profound differences in the dynamics of the relationships which underlie these ratios. It would be even more true where similar ratios for two countries exist at widely different points in time (and therefore context). Comparable growth rates emanating from economies which have a markedly different balance between primary production and industrial output, or with a very different export dynamic (or great differences in the pattern of exports between highly processed goods or primary products) are similar masks hiding very different realities. The dynamics of growth, despite similar aggregate statistical contours to an economy, will also be profoundly different if the process of growth is mainly determined by expansion in the public sector, financed directly or indirectly by resources officially mobilized, rather than being primarily responsive to market forces and privately organized capital accumulation.

A further source of contrast in the dynamics of growth, despite statistical uniformities, is that of the differential size of economies, which strongly influences the locus of the forces for change or stagnation. A super-economy, covering half a continent, is more likely to have balanced resources and a large enough population to create a powerful internal market to make the main impetus for its growth indigenous—and the role of foreign trade in its development is consequently likely to prove less strategic. With micro-economies—the tax havens, oil sheikdoms, off-shore concession centres, gambling islands and the like—almost all the impetus for development must derive from the specialized services they provide for external demands. The same logic applies with lesser force but similar relevance to such economies as Holland and the Scandinavian countries who received much impetus for their own progress from demands made upon their resources by the heart-lands of European industrial development in Britain and Germany. Thus, even where the statistical profiles show comparable rates of growth of national income, industrialization or urbanization the sources of impetus may differ profoundly. Regional diversities within national aggregates can also complicate the pattern. Where great disparities lie on either side of a mean or average then the national aggregates may conceal more significance than they disclose about processes of growth.

One further logical trap in comparative history needs to be mentioned in relation to the uniqueness or otherwise of particular case histories. It is very common to see a comparison drawn between one particular aspect of the development process in different countries, which are then compared, and their effectiveness judged in isolation from other aspects of development. One looks at the role of agriculture, for example, in the development (or in the constraints upon the development) of Denmark and Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. One compares the role of banks in capital formation and entrepreneurial initiative in Germany and Britain in the later nineteenth century. Taking the last example in illustration, so often the lines of comparison run thus: German industrial banks were more active in these roles than British banks. British economic development was, in certain respects, more sluggish than development in Germany in these same years. Conclusion: (a) British development was being held back by—? amongst other things—an unenterprising banking system; and/or (b) the British economy would have profited from the adoption of German banking organization and practices. Perhaps. But isolating the operations of a single factor, or institution, assessing performance in different contexts and then assuming that both efficiency and roles can be transferred to other contexts without ‘frictions’ is methodologically naive. Such inferred transplants contain heroic assumptions.

The Anglo-German example fails to recognize the very different organization of the capital markets in the two countries; that German banks were fulfilling functions of mobilizing capital which were institutionalized in Britain in a largely independent way through the stock market, with its own associated specialized intermediaries of brokers, jobbers, provincial stock exchanges with links of their own to the London money market, etc. This does not negate the point that, if capital accumulation is conducted through a handful of powerful industrial banks, there may be a greater propensity for more exacting standards of efficiency and initiative to be imposed upon management in the firms receiving capital and long-term credit through this mechanism, rather than through the stock exchange, but it does question the assumption that one banking system can adopt the role performed by another in a different context. The fact that the British banking system did not adopt these roles is not, per se, any demonstration of inefficiency or lack of initiative on the part of British banks. These roles were being performed in a different way in Britain; the criteria of judgement are therefore different. To put the point in a more general way: there is so much inter-relatedness in the institutional development of an economy, with role and structure so intimately linked, that it becomes difficult to compare and assess roles which relate to different structures, or structures which relate to different roles.

Even where identities are discovered, in such comparisons the significance of these identities is questionable. It appears, for example, that the average size of household in England, in numbers of persons per household, has not changed very much over several centuries, standing between 4 and 5 probably since the thirteenth century, and has been similar in many different countries. Such an identity, over such very different national and historical contexts, is important for refuting unwarranted assumptions, such as that industrialization broke up the ‘extended family’ in Europe, but it is difficult to see what positive implications it may have for comparative history.

One assumption has lain concealed beneath many discussions of the uniqueness of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. It is that of the potential, as distinct from the actual, specificity of the process of industrialization in the period 1700–1830 (the latter date being chosen to avoid complicating the issue by extending the assumptions to include the existence of railways). Do we assume that there was only one path possible towards effective, self-sustaining, ongoing industrial development in this period; one pattern for the structural combination of factors which allowed an industrial revolution, i.e. the pattern developed by Great Britain? Do we assume that no substitutability between factors and relationships was possible? Do we judge our historical logic by results; by the fact that only this combination of factors, with the pyramid of specific relationships upon which each main aspect of it rested, in fact paid off. If so, why? What are the criteria which have been implied to create and justify this assumption? Or is the potential logic more flexible, when in the perspective of later times and differences in context we see that other procedures, other combinations, other institutional frameworks, other strategic forces promoting industrialization could succeed?

In the later nineteenth century there is Professor Gerschenkron’s typology showing exactly such different combinations, different modes of substitution of factors, combined with different institutional arrangements to promote industrialization in different European countries. [1] If this was possible and operative for that period of European economic development, why not for industrialization in the eighteenth century? In certain ways this methodology in interpreting the Industrial Revolution and the uniqueness of England is curiously reminiscent of an earlier assumption about the interpretation of political revolution in the eighteenth century and the uniqueness of France. Halévy, and radical historians more recently, for example, seemed to argue sometimes as follows: France had a political revolution at the end of the eighteenth century; hence, all respectable European nations ought to have had a revolution. There must therefore be a special, identifiable variable which prevented England from having one. Having thus predetermined the role, we can discover an actor—Methodism.

Transferring the assumption from political revolution in France to industrial revolution in England this line of argument prompts us to ask, not so much why England was unique, but the complementary enquiry into what constraints prevented equivalent industrial development elsewhere. If one accepts that a range of factors and relationships were required, as a syndrome, that each was necessary but not sufficient, then one can seek to identify that major constraints existed elsewhere in Europe. For example, Holland, so favoured in other ways, was without the crucial resource base for the technological pattern developing in an age when the logistics of transport and energy inputs gave major advantages in factor costs to the economy with easily exploitable coal and metal ores close to water carriage. Commercial priorities in Holland also acted against economic policies which might have counteracted this. A package of skills was intimately associated with this resource base in a long-developing industrial tradition. It is a commonplace to remark that Britain had been fortunate in her scarcities since the sixteenth century. Of course, the contents of the package of necessary conditions required to make it collectively sufficient changed over time and in accordance to context.

If, in seeking to establish typologies of industrialization, we give prominence to differences in the extent to which market forces and institutions developing spontaneously in response to market forces—institutionalizing such market forces in effect—were the carriers of the process of industrialization then a further general question arises. Clearly, in later times, industrialization has proceeded under ‘command economies’ with a spectrum of case histories showing different degrees of dirigisme by the state, with equivalently different institutional patterns. When so many states were so active in eighteenth-century Europe in seeking to capitalize upon the new industrial skills, what were the constraints operating against the success of promoting industrialization in this style in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? There is no single cause explanation, I think. Unfavourable factor prices, of course, may well have made the new techniques uneconomic in a market setting so that they would not be tempted to escape from the enclaves of favoured state reception centres into which they had been transplanted—the state manufacturies, national monopolies, and specially favoured firms. But there are institutional and administrative reasons also, which are currently rather unfashionable amongst economic historians. In the case of economic institutions controlled by European states in the eighteenth century, given the political processes of the day, functional efficiency was commonly not given the highest priority. It enjoined a rather higher priority in the case of the army and navy because there was a greater immediate premium on success and a greater direct penalty against functional inefficiency. But, in time of peace, functional efficiency was by no means a transcendent priority for the choice of generals in the British army. An efficient, ambitious, career-soldier could be dangerous politically. The dictates of political patronage and clientship, dynastic claims, family responsibilities and the like often meant that the priorities lay elsewhere. State patronage of economic institutions meant that they were tributary to the political process and that their role in the political cohesion of the state was often fulfilled at the expense of their functional efficiency. The Church and the judicature in England fall under this heading as well as economic and financial institutions.

The education of the market and the discipline of the market were absent in an age when modern administrative methods did not exist as alternatives. When the statement is made, therefore, that the crucial distinguishing mark of the Industr...