Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Support for an account that gives domestic market relations a central role in driving economic change comes also from Jan de Vries, who suggests that the industrial revolution was preceded by an “industrious revolution,” that is by a decision on the part of many ordinary people to devote more of their time and effort to productive activity for the market, in order to increase their income and thus their ability to consume available goods. Such a strategy required becoming more diligent and efficient in work (although it was not necessarily incompatible with binge-type consumption by men in taverns), as well as increasing the time devoted to market-oriented work on the part of women. “A shift from relative self-sufficiency toward market-oriented production by all or most household members necessarily involves a reduction of typically female-supplied home-produced goods and their replacement by commercially produced goods. At the same time the wife was likely to become an autonomous earner.” De Vries suggests that such strategies allowed some working-class families to maintain a certain level of consumption even in times of falling real wages, as was the case between around 1815 and 1850; but in England between 1760 and 1790 wage rates were rising, and McKendrick observes a somewhat similar pattern of behavior in working-class families in those years, with wives working in order to add to family money income and thus to buying power. Both writers suggest that there were untapped productive energies available to be drawn on by changes in work patterns in pre-industrial Europe, and that attractive and available consumer goods could push people to produce more in order to buy more, thus furthering the development of market relations and the innovations they encouraged.20

  How much weight such an analysis deserves in accounting for industrial change is difficult to decide; much depends on just what we are trying to understand or explain. If the object of inquiry is the world of modern industry and mass consumption that came into being in the course of the nineteenth century, then earlier changes like those just noticed do not belong at the center of the story. Only a rise in productivity on the scale accomplished by the substitution of fossil fuels for human and animal energy could bring national income to a level able to support the kind of long-term growth in both output and demand evident in the quarter-century before 1900. Not industriousness but inventiveness was the basis for change of that type and magnitude, and the story of the application of steam and later electrical power to industry had only barely begun to unfold by 1800.21 But that is just what needs to be highlighted: the English economy, not only in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, but even until the last three decades of the nineteenth, remained traditional in ways its famous innovations often obscure.

  Among recent writers the one who has made this point in the clearest and most suggestive way is Richard Price. In the helpful terms he provides, what existed in England before around 1870 was not an “industrial economy” in which machine production and non-human sources of energy were the central determinants but an “economy of manufacture,” a structure in which producing goods for the market gave the tone to economic activity as a whole, but whose chief features still reflected the etymology of manufacture as hand-work. To be sure, the roots of the later economic regime were already at work in the earlier one, and many lines of continuity crossed the boundaries between them. I think the best way to reconcile the distinction Price puts in place with the features of economic history that seem to undermine it is to recognize that the history of what has long been called the industrial revolution needs to be recounted not from one but from two perspectives. The first puts in relief England’s role as the pioneer industrial nation, the forerunner whose path other countries would seek to follow, but at a distance. This story can be read off from the statistical record: between 1800 and 1852 annual pig iron output in Britain increased nearly tenfold, to 2.7 million tons; in the same period the capacity of steam engines went from around 10,000 horsepower to well over a million, three-quarters of it in locomotives on the railways whose future impact was already evident; by 1870 engine capacity had doubled again, and mechanization had become dominant in nearly every branch and stage of the textile industry. Other similar figures could be cited; no other country exhibited advances on this scale.22

  But from the second perspective England itself would not become a modern industrial economy before the last decades of the nineteenth century either. Before 1850 people who stood open-mouthed before the radically new conditions had their eyes on a very few places, the exploding northern cities such as Manchester (the locale of Engels’s Condition of the Working-Class in England) or Oldham (Dickens’s Coketown of Hard Times). Manchester was, as Asa Briggs puts it, the “shock city” of the 1840s, disrupted by mushroom-like growth (its population of around 140,000 in 1831 was roughly six times what it had been in 1770), and buffeted about by cycles of boom and bust in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. But these places, revelatory as they were, bore little resemblance to life in the rest of the country; indeed the heightened local and regional differences to which they testified were themselves a distinctive feature of the period, one that would recede later (in ways I will consider below). In his classic study of Victorian Cities, Briggs contrasted Manchester with Birmingham, also a center of manufacture, but based on small workshops, a more skilled labor force, closer relations between owners and workers, and a political life marked by greater cooperation between middle-class and working-class groups. Lest it be thought that such emphasis on the limited applicability of the factory model to England in this period is a tack taken by defenders out to show that conditions were not so bad as critics claimed, it should be noted that one of the most powerful accounts of the persistence of traditional methods of work before 1850 comes from a distinguished socialist historian, Raphael Samuel. In colorful and often wrenching detail, Samuel makes clear that it was human muscle, male and female, not machine power, that did the work on which society depended in this period, making goods, building cities, roads, and railroads, and providing food. The toil of miners, construction workers, and iron workers was often painfully hard, particularly the “puddlers” who had to employ great strength and withstand extreme heat in order to produce cast iron free of the ore’s impurities (steel only became practical much later). In many trades the chief difference between nineteenth century labor and its earlier forms lay not in any use of machines, but in the higher degree of organization required to utilize the larger numbers of workers involved, and the more demanding oversight and discipline to which they were subjected. Many writers have pointed out that the largest categories of workers enumerated in the census of 1851 were still agricultural laborers and domestic servants. Retailing in particular remained as it had been for centuries, based on small-scale units, limited demand, and a predominance of craftspeople with special knowledge about the things they sold.23

  All these conditions support Price’s characterization of the British economy before 1870 as an “economy of manufacture” rather than a modern “industrial economy.” What distinguished this economy from other countries’ was not mechanization but the much greater weight that market relations exerted within it, and the mix of pressures and opportunities that access to markets, both foreign and domestic, provided. The advantage large firms enjoyed over smaller ones in this period did not come from investments in machines, but from their ability to organize access to markets, gathering information and using agents and salesmen to establish connections to supplier and buyers. “The key to economic survival in an increasingly complex domestic market structure was access to distribution networks both for the raw material and the product … There was an inexorable tendency for small producers to be separated from their markets and for middlemen and merchants to control the channels of distribution,” leaving the lesser players in an increasingly unfavorable position. Independent artisans who felt pressured and endangered by these conditions between around 1790 and 1840 were thus right to blame middlemen for their plight, not factory owners; indeed Price observes that the chief reference for the term cap
italist in this period was to middlemen, not industrialists.24

  Factory production, sometimes involving hundreds of workers, was surely part of this “economy of manufacture,” but in the form it would still largely retain through most of the nineteenth century: that is, most “factories” were assemblages of workers using traditional methods in a single place, where their work could be more closely overseen and better organized. Factories could operate, employ large numbers of workers and begin to apply machine technology to production only because they were tied to suppliers and consumers by less easily discernible webs of connection. They were and are (the description fits cities as well and helps to account for their growth) aggregations of means inside networks of means, and it made sense to assemble the first only because they could be inserted into the second. The conditions in which such factories operated have been well described by Price:

  Factory and workshop were locked in a relationship of close interdependence. Mechanization and larger-scale units complemented rather than displaced small-scale production. Many of the machines were ancillary to hand labor, rather than its substitute … At the heart of manufacturing lay a combination of small and large units of production bound together by many layers of subcontracting with labor processes that were highly subdivided and dominated by hand technology.

  Water power remained the chief non-animal source of energy until the steam turbine became widely available in the 1880s, and gains in productivity came much less through technical innovations than through more intensive use of traditional methods. The proportion of men working in industries that relied significantly on machine technology was still only 1 in 10 in 1831, and even in 1851 only 27 percent of male and female laborers as a whole were employed in such branches. One reason factories by themselves have often been portrayed as the chief source of change is simply that they were concrete and visible, striking in their size, their noise, the changes they made in the landscape, the disruptions they brought to people’s lives. The emphasis on factories sometimes causes historians to forget that (especially in the period before the railroad network was completed) their expansion depended on the simultaneous growth of another kind of business that did not generate quite the drama they did, namely warehouses. Even in Manchester, as Briggs pointed out, the warehouses were more impressive than the factories; some of them operated by foreign firms with connections to Europe and beyond, such as the family enterprise in which Friedrich Engels was active for many years.25

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, these methods were being employed on a scale and with a dynamism that marked a new stage, distinct from the productive regime operative earlier in England, and still dominant on the continent. The fact that the economy drew a much higher proportion of the population into manufacture than elsewhere was largely responsible for a marked rise in national income and well-being. By 1700 British per capita income had already reached a level that Sweden would achieve only in 1870. (How different conditions would be by the later date becomes evident when we note that Swedish national income did not begin to rise from traditional levels until around 1850, after which point it took only twenty years to accomplish the rise that required the whole of the seventeenth century for Britain in pre-modern conditions. Other countries exhibited similar rhythms in the nineteenth century.) The number of households with middle-class income levels (defined as those having revenues between £50 and £400 per year) rose significantly, from around 15 percent in 1750 to some 25 percent in 1780. Release from the subsistence economy that tied population growth to agricultural conditions and thus to the cycle of harvests meant that England was no longer subjected to the traditional “scissors” pattern of demographic increase followed by painful contraction still evident elsewhere. Many people still lived in wretched and precarious conditions, to be sure, especially in small villages and towns, but the overall improvement was sufficient for British population (and British cities in particular) to grow steadily through the eighteenth century, a period when other areas still exhibited the old pattern of alternating rise and fall.26

  All the same, the dominant productive methods were not yet those that would more fully transform life later on. This was reflected in the conviction shared by almost all observers and theorists, even in the face of relative prosperity, that natural conditions set strict limits to economic development. It was this widespread and pessimistic sense of limits that earned economics its sobriquet, “the dismal science.” David Ricardo and Robert Malthus agreed in regarding land as the ultimate determinant of well-being: the first on the ground that its extent and quality determined the level of rents and thus the flow of revenues and investment; and the second because the supply of land set limits to the food supply. On this basis both believed that growth would soon reach its endpoint. These views grounded Malthus’s conviction that the poor were responsible for their own plight, given that they brought children into the world who could not be supported by the labor available to working-class families, as well as his conclusion that only a reduction in the number of births could alleviate the problem. It made no sense to expect manufacturers to provide for the needs of the burgeoning numbers of poor, he maintained, because there was no way to expand production and incomes beyond their natural bounds. Since the rich did “not in reality possess the power of finding employment and maintenance for the poor,” the latter could not “in the nature of things possess the right to demand them.”27 We will see later that such views waned from around 1870.

  Despite this pessimism, however, it is crucial for understanding the place of this period in the broader history of modernity to recognize that it was on this basis that the British economy achieved the increased productivity and vitality on which the remarkable rise in national income rested, providing greater well-being for many people, and creating the conditions within which later and still larger changes would take place. Not fossil-fuel technology but the effect of long-developing networks that drew increasing numbers of people into distant relationships provided the foundation on which the distinctive features of English live rested. Much the same can be said of the special quality of British political relations.

  State power, national integration, and public opinion

  Historians were long wont to regard the eighteenth-century British state as weak, especially in comparison to France, but this view was largely demolished by John Brewer’s demonstration that British naval might rested on well-developed state institutions, including an efficient corps of tax collectors. The older position was not mere Whiggish fantasy, however, since the English state before the nineteenth century never directed local affairs through a body of provincial administrators comparable to the French intendants; local government remained in the hands of Justices of the Peace, holders of royal commissions but only nominally servants of the crown, since they were people with independent standing in their areas, and their appointments were under the control of county aristocrats and upper gentry. The strength Brewer rightly attributes to the British state did not derive from an imposition of royal power on resistant subjects, which had always constituted one important dimension in the growth of the French monarchy, but precisely on the precocious national integration described above, and on the cooperative and synergistic relation between central and local power that found its paradigmatic expression in Parliament. However paradoxical it may sound, the enabling key to the British state’s impressive strength in the eighteenth century was the defeat of Stuart absolutism and the establishment of Parliamentary supremacy from the 1680s. In one crucial regard Brewer’s revision makes no significant departure from the traditional Whiggish view: if British rural and urban people paid taxes more willingly and at a higher rate based on their national income than the French did, they did so because royal policy was responsive both to the interests represented at Westminster and to the demands for accountability often voiced there.28

  All the same, as the state’s fabric grew stronger and its threads wove themselves more thickly i
nto national life, relations between its means and ends began to reveal new patterns. One of these involved a move away from traditional aristocratic forms of office-holding toward more rationalized bureaucratic procedures. In the seventeenth century government departments were often run by officials who obtained their posts by patronage, and who then staffed the office with a body of clients who performed lesser tasks under their direction and whose salaries they paid out of their income. Government offices in such a system were the personal preserve of those who obtained them, so that state resources were channeled toward shoring up established social hierarchies, just as the position of master artisans and merchants was perpetuated in the guild economy. After the 1690s these practices became much less common. Agencies increasingly hired their personnel individually and paid their salaries directly; managers, clerks, and tax collectors were subject to standard rules and given advancement according to how their work was evaluated. To be sure, neither personal influence nor poor performance disappeared from the system, and they would later provoke outcries for reform, especially as higher government expenditures occasioned by the renewed outbreak of warfare after 1790 opened up new opportunities for enrichment to individuals both responsible and unscrupulous; but in the mid eighteenth century Parliamentary oversight kept abuses in check and bodies such as the Admiralty and Navy Boards were “too vital to the national interest to be held hostage by the forces of graft and corruption.”29 We shall see below that comparable developments were taking place in both France and Germany by the end of the eighteenth century: in all three places state activities formerly organized so as to benefit people whose claims rested on inherited social standing were coming to be directed by principles generated out of the evolving structure of government operations themselves. In France, however, these changes were not sufficient to rescue the state from the crushing burden of its obligation to social powers whose goals were often in conflict with its own, and with which it had been forced into damaging compromises over the centuries. In Germany they operated inside territorial states whose mutual competition preserved the country’s traditional fragmentation.