England as the Workshop of the World

The Crystal Palace Seen From The Serpentine by William Wyld, 1852

I will continue to quote from 'Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology' (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. The following quote is from the fourth chapter, which is titled England as the Workshop of the World. "The onset of the Industrial Revolution, while an epochal transformation in any longer view, involved no sudden or visible overturning of the established order. Many contributory streams of change had converged and unobtrusively gathered force during the first two-thirds or so of the eighteenth century. Leading elements of technological change presently began to stand out - in engines and applications of rotary power, in the production of iron and steel, and most importantly in new textile machinery. But their sources and significance lay primarily in interactions with a wider matrix of other, earlier or contemporaneous changes. As we have seen, these other changes were largely of a non-technological character. While highly diverse, the most important can be briefly summarized. Among them were the consolidation of large landholdings and the commercialization of agriculture; the widening web of international trade; unprecedented urban growth; rising, increasingly differentiated internal demand and the development of markets to supply it; intensified applications of oversight and discipline in prototypes of a factory system; growing concentration of wealth and the socially sanctioned readiness to invest it in manufacturing; and, not least, the discovery of common interests and meeting grounds by inventors, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Not as anyone’s conscious intention, it was out of such diverse elements - and the even broader and more diffuse shifts in cultural predispositions that underlay many of them - that an era of profound irreversible change was fashioned. This chapter will sketch the main outlines of how it happened and the role that technology occupied along the leading edges of change. But no less important than England’s taking of commanding leadership was how it slipped away in the later nineteenth century. We will discover that this was no internally determinate, quasi-biological cycle of youthful vigor, maturity, and decline. It mostly had to do instead with the diffusion and further development of core features of the Industrial Revolution itself. External competitors could quickly assimilate the English example while escaping some of its natural shortcomings as a pioneer. Uncapitalized, the term industrial revolution denotes a significant rise in manufacturing productivity and an ultimately decisive turn in the direction of industrial growth, anywhere and at any time. So used, it applies to all of the sequential phases of modernization on a technological base that, at a still-accelerating pace, have cumulatively transformed the world since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, when stated as the Industrial Revolution, it is widely used, and is used here, to refer specifically to the founding epoch of machine-based industrialization in England that began around 1760 and lasted there for something less than a century. There is no dispute that this was a time of sustained, cumulatively substantial change. Within a human lifetime of seventy years or so England moved forward without serious rival into the status of “workshop of the world.” As such, it came not only to dominate world trade but to transport much of that trade in its ships. Industrialization directly and profoundly altered the fabric of life for many, drawing a rural mass not only into urban settings but into factories and other new, urban-centered modes of employment. Population, having risen only slowly until late in the eighteenth century, turned sharply upward by the early nineteenth and rose by 73 percent (from 10.5 to 18.1 million) between 1801 and 1841. Markets proliferated, and popular dependence on them both deepened and widened. Travel beyond one’s local community or district came within an ordinary wage earner’s reach. National income rose precipitately, although the significance of this for any notion of “average” income or well-being is undermined by growing inequities of distribution. Important as these largely material changes were in their own right, we must not overlook their intersections - but also their differences - with others in the realm of ideas. Introduced in the wake of the American and French Revolutions were new aspirations for individual rights, equality before the law, and widened political participation. Echoing great themes of popular unrest that had risen to the surface in the seventeenth century and never been completely submerged, they gave ideological form and content to the protests of working-class movements as they emerged to meet the new challenges of the factory system. Similarly energizing were the great nonconformist religious movements that from the mid-eighteenth century onward began to challenge the established Church of England. And differentially directed against each of these streams was a backlash, chronicled at length by Edward Thompson who saw it as a ‘political counter-revolution,’ that continued for four decades after 1792. The growing commercial role of coal as a vital resource is one of the central economic trends of the seventeenth century. Without assured, relatively cheap access to this new fuel, London, growing by almost 45 percent in the last half of the seventeenth century, almost certainly could not have become the largest city of Europe. During that period, a growing demand for coal for industrial use was simultaneously added to its already well established reliance on coal for domestic consumption. As a result, by 1700 British production had climbed to the level of 2.5-3 million tons annually, estimated to have been “five times as large as the output of the whole of the rest of the world.” Half of the entire tonnage of the British merchant fleet was by then engaged in the coal trade. Huge forces were at work here, even though the linear succession of their effects is far more anonymous and difficult to document in any way than the line of scientific advances that laid some of the groundwork for - but stopped short of - the Newcomen engine. It is certainly in this economic context, I submit, that we must look for the stimulus to the steam engine as an epoch-making invention. With almost equal certainty, we must assume the existence of a wide, diffuse, relatively unknown circle of entrepreneurs, experimenters, skilled mechanics, and would-be inventors. This, and not the more elevated circle of gentlemen in the Royal Society, was Newcomen’s proper setting and source of creative sustenance. “In round numbers,” E. A. Wrigley estimates that London “appears to have grown from about 200,000 in 1600 to perhaps 400,000 in 1650, 575,000 by the end of the century, 675,000 in 1750 and 900,000 in 1800.” Across the span between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, in other words, London had risen from housing about 7 percent to an unprecedented 11 percent of England’s total population. Lacking effective provisions for sanitation or for the prevention and treatment of many endemic and epidemic diseases, London of course had a significantly higher mortality rate than the country at large. By all reckonings, Watt’s multiple improvements in the Newcomen engine ultimately came to occupy a place at the very core of the Industrial Revolution. His first (1769) patent added a separate condenser and made related changes greatly to increase its pumping efficiency, immediately making possible the deeper and cheaper mining of coal. Later patents in the early 1780s provided vital adaptations of it for driving machinery of all kinds, stimulating more continuous operations and an expansion of scale in virtually every industry. The city of Manchester, widely regarded as the first citadel of the Industrial Revolution, powered its largest spinning and weaving factories with Boulton & Watt engines. Fundamental as Watt’s contributions proved to be, it is important to recognize that, even with Boulton’s joint efforts, their commercial success was neither immediate nor assured. The economy and reliability of his steam engine as a power source took time to establish, and waterwheels continued for many years to provide a highly competitive alternative. As has often been the case, cumulative smaller improvements in older and competitive technologies substantially delayed the adoption of the new and seemingly superior one. In particular, advances in waterwheel design for which Smeaton had been responsible greatly extended the aggregate reserves of water power available to accommodate new industrial growth. Dominating popular understanding of the Industrial Revolution is an impression of sustained, transformative growth. In the preceding account also, attention has been focused on technological and economic advances. But what has been said may leave the sense of a rising tide that, if at somewhat different rates, surely was managing to raise all boats. Is this impression accurate? The gross disproportion in the levying of the tax burden might suggest otherwise. It had almost doubled by 1815 (to more than 18 percent) as a share of national income, as a result of war expenditures that had spiraled upward from the time of the American Revolution. Excise duties on domestically produced goods and services were principally called upon to sustain the increase. Although they also impacted on the cost of decencies and luxuries for those with discretionary incomes, these duties fell more heavily on price-inelastic necessities for factory workers. By contrast, with relatively minor and temporary exceptions, “There was no effective tax on wealth holders throughout the period.” How disproportionate, in fact, were the respective allocations of the benefits of growth to different groups within British society? What are we to make of the great waves of popular protest, including especially the Luddite movement that aimed at the destruction of textile machinery in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the working-class movement for parliamentary reform in the late 1830s and 1840s that was known as chartism? Were they only transitory episodes of conspiratorially incited unrest, as was repeatedly proclaimed by the courts and aristocracy in suppressing them with considerable severity? Or were they instead manifestations of deep-seated, broadly felt grievances over declining living standards and a loss of security that was in increasingly sharp contrast with growing national wealth? In impressive detail, Edward P. Thompson’s massive work on The Making of the English Working Class (1963) argues the “pessimistic” case for what he regards as the preponderantly negative impact of the Industrial Revolution on England’s working people. Beyond this, Thompson also records the repressive legal climate with which virtually any form of individual or organized speech or action to obtain redress of political or economic grievances was received. Drawing upon “political and cultural, as much as economic, history” across the half-century or so after 1790, he argues that this forged a working class able self-consciously to identify and struggle for its own strategies and interests. That outgrowth of resistance and self-discovery was, for him, “the outstanding fact of the period.” But Thompson’s emphasis on the centrality of class formation is sharply disputed by some other authorities and is, in any case, not one on which it can be said that any consensus has emerged. More immediately relevant to our concerns is a further judgment reached by Thompson. The working class did not come into existence, he insists, as a spontaneously generated response to an external force - the factory system, or the technological advances of which factories were an outcome. That would imply that the class itself was composed of “some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity,” lacking common, historically derived aspirations and identifying symbols of its own solidarity. “The working class made itself as much as it was made.” It is strongly implied in most contemporary accounts that there was widespread aversion to factory employment. Those whose skills made them members of the “aristocracy of labor” no doubt constituted an at least partial exception. For the mass of less skilled and unskilled workers, however, factory jobs may have been seen as the only alternative following loss of rural livelihoods as a result of enclosures and the consolidation of smaller workshops. No doubt people often entered the mills in the (usually illusionary) conviction that such work was only a temporary expedient and hence could be briefly tolerated. Symptomatic of this is a textile factory owner’s complaint in the 1830s about the “restless and migratory spirit” of his mill workers. Long, closely supervised shifts were, after all, a starkly unpleasant departure from periodically demanding but on the whole far more intermittent agricultural labor schedules. Moreover, the factories themselves often bore a disturbing resemblance to parish workhouses for pauper women and children - from which, in fact, not a little of the early factory labor force had been involuntarily recruited. The pauper apprenticeship system, barbarous as it was in terms of “children working long hours for abysmal wages,” was in any case short-lived. The need for it was greatest prior to the general shift of spinning factories to the more advanced Crompton’s mules driven by steam power. For as long as the availability of waterpower was a requirement, the necessary location of some mills in remote settings had isolated them from the rapidly growing potential work force that was congregating in the new industrial cities. Some, but not all, of the deterioration that had occurred in the material conditions of life can reasonably be laid at the door of the conscious discretion of industrial owners and managers. That applies, for example, to the sometimes almost unbelievably harsh conditions of exploitation of child labor that Thompson cites, and perhaps to some deliberate manipulation of skilled and unskilled, male and female groups of factory operatives in order to depress wages by maintaining an unemployed but dependent reserve. We must not forget that the science of public health was in its infancy. The effects of urban congestion on endemic and epidemic diseases were only beginning to be understood. No body of experience made it possible to gauge the combined effect of malnutrition, pollution, and extended hours of daily employment on expectant mothers and especially on the health and growth of children. It has remained for late twentieth-century analysts to discern such indirect consequences as declining human stature, and persistent high rates of infant mortality, rising illiteracy, precisely in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution when the incomes of male factory operatives are supposed to have risen. The general impression thus is left that there was little or no improvement in living standards before mid-century, “despite the optimists’ evidence of rising real wages.” To whatever degree a product of innocent or willful ignorance, the cumulative effect was that “wherever comparison can be made… staggering differences in life expectancy appear, amounting in the worst decades to an average of twenty years of life expectancy lost by the average male urban wage-earner; and whatever horrors the English statistics showed, the Scottish were invariably even worse.”"