The importance of England’s early integration in making possible the features that distinguished it from France is evident in the famously unique system of government finance it set up. The keystone of the structure was the Bank of England, established in 1694 to provide credit for government operations through bonds sold to the public. Because the bonds were backed by tax revenues, they were highly successful in mobilizing economic resources and creating an identity of interest between well-off people and the state. The taxes in turn were collected more readily and easily, and at a higher per-capita level than anywhere else in Europe, largely because Parliamentary government generated a measure of trust and allowed for a degree of oversight no other state achieved. The chief levies were three: a land tax, customs duties, and an excise tax. It was the third of these that became the most important during the eighteenth century, collected on a wide range of consumer goods by a body of centrally appointed officials who manned local offices, and whose manner of recruitment and employment have just been noted. Parliament was able to enforce a considerable degree of oversight on the taxation system, subjecting it to a degree of public scrutiny that contrasted with the veil of secrecy the French monarchy cast over its finances.30 All these features of the British taxation system – its efficiency, its uniformity, its relative openness to view – heightened the confidence in government that Parliamentary supremacy bred in wide segments of the upper-classes, strengthening the state’s ability to borrow money from those who had it to lend. The state’s ability to borrow directly from the public allowed the government to meet needs for more funds when they arose and reduce its obligations at other times, thus tapping the resources of the country far more efficiently than other countries were able to do. As Niall Ferguson has recently argued, it was this ability to marshal resources effectively that accounted for British military success through much of the modern period, since overall the country was less wealthy than its larger rival, France.31
The relationship between such a system and the general features of English society and politics highlighted here was close. What stood in the way of a uniform mode of revenue collection elsewhere was the system of venal offices, making state service a source of investment and profit for those with sufficient capital to buy into it, and of tax privileges too, creating both inequality and inefficiency in state finance. In France many kinds of taxes (and attempts to bypass exemptions led to repeated creation of new ones, most of them quickly assimilated to the same baroque system) were farmed out to people who often became visibly (and to many suspiciously) rich, profiting from the difference between the purchase price of their “farm” and the revenue they could squeeze out of it. Venal offices were not unknown in Britain, but they receded during the seventeenth century just when they were expanding in France, partly through the lucky circumstance that expenses for war were less crushing. But the whole system put down much shallower roots in Britain also because monarchical power there did not have to expand by buying off nobles with privileges in exchange for allowing the royal administration to take over local functions; here we see what Brewer recognizes as the “strength of a national system of provincial governance which relied for its implementation on local dignitaries,” people whose willingness to accept central power did not depend on gaining special privileges and immunities for themselves. This does not mean that British aristocrats were unable to manipulate the system to their advantage: one reason why the excise tax became the chief levy was that large holders preferred it to the land tax, whose burden fell largely on them. But they were not exempt, and taxation did not shine a powerful spotlight on social privilege and inequality as it did across the Channel.
All the same, considerable criticism of this system developed almost as soon as it was set up, and the terms in which it was couched bear a revealing relationship to the ones I am employing here. The critics were, in general, “country” rather than “court” people, that is, ones who had not been part of the Whig coalition of landed and commercial interests that brought William and Mary to replace the Stuarts in 1688. Still tied to an older and more exclusively agrarian ideal of life, they were fearful that the powerful resources mobilized in the new fiscal system would raise the state too high and open the way to corruption, giving the government resources with which to manipulate individuals in return for favors; but a second and more insidious malignity in their eyes was the public market in government bonds spawned by the system of funded debt. The prices of these securities rose and fell in response to both domestic and international affairs, creating unprecedented possibilities for venturesome investors to gain or lose large sums. Critics often condemned the resulting situation in terms drawn from classical republican theory, contrasting the menace the new system posed with an idea of virtue in which devotion to public good excluded the pursuit of private, individual interest. The votaries of such virtue often compared it to that displayed by citizens of ancient city-states, but they recognized that it could only be maintained by those with sufficient means to rise above the temptations fostered by opportunities for speculative gains. The vocabulary these “country” critics employed sometimes seemed to make commerce and money responsible for the evils they bewailed, but as J. G. A. Pocock has argued, it was the system of state finance, not commercial expansion, that they most feared:
It was not the merchant trading upon his own stock who transformed and corrupted the relation of property to government … The danger lay with the owner of capital, great or small, who invested it in systems of public credit and so transformed the relations between government and citizens, and by implication those between all citizens and all subjects, into relations between debtors and creditors. It was not the market, but the financial market, which precipitated an English awareness, about 1700, that political relations were on the verge of becoming capitalist relations … The merchant became involved in the indictment of capitalism, and the credit society became known as the “commercial society,” because it was observed that there was a fairly obvious relation between trade and credit.32
Some might regard such an account as one-sided, giving too little weight to fears engendered by market agriculture and the attitudes it was nurturing (as in the defense of enclosures already considered). But the significance of the opposition Pocock identifies does not depend on his being wholly correct about the primacy of political relations over commercial ones (although I believe he largely is). What matters is the way that the new system of state finance, and its connection to markets more generally, moved people to contrast the situation they saw developing around them, in which personal and social fates were caught up in extended networks of relations that threatened to impose their own patterns everywhere, with an opposite one where virtue had been guaranteed by people’s insertion in local relations and contexts whose patterns remained under their more immediate control. Such a view of the past was only partly accurate, since it left out of the account the degree to which institutions such as the state, the Church, and commerce had long fostered and relied on distant networks. But because the earlier ones were still in principle teleocratic, structured in obedience to norms rooted outside them, they had not bred the same kind of anxieties; the relations fostered by the new and more autonomous web of financial connections appeared problematic because the flow of resources it facilitated had a more abstract character and was no longer under the control of identifiable superiors.
The new power the British state was able to gain from its system of funding and taxation did not lead only to a centralization of power, however. It was accompanied by a simultaneous and remarkable diffusion of power, one that provided a further testimony to the way that the thickening of the web of political interaction altered the principles under which it operated. Recognizing both the power of Parliament and its need for cooperation from citizens, people worked to influence the state on behalf of their interests, creating an extensive system of lobbies. The interests such organizations served were sometimes religious, sometimes commerci
al or fiscal (makers of certain goods called for reductions of the excise imposed on them), sometimes local (there were many pleas for aid in constructing turnpikes), but all aimed to influence members of Parliament and government officials to pass legislation they favored. Some sent representatives to London to meet with political figures, others employed solicitors, some of whom began to specialize in representing such groups. Many of them were well organized and operated in more than one region, or cooperated with people in other areas in presenting petitions; as Brewer notes, “The levying of indirect taxes which imposed nationally uniform rates on commodities, encouraged the emergence of organizations which transcended local and regional boundaries.” One common tactic of such groups was to present their cases in either local or national newspapers (the latter printed in London and distributed to other places, their circulation unimpeded after Parliament’s decision in 1694 not to renew the Licensing Act that regulated publication before), arguing that their own interest was also the public interest, especially if their first appeals to Parliament did not succeed. “The emergence of special interest groups willing to lay their case before the public was in part a consequence of Parliament’s claim to be the sole body to adjudicate what was pro bono publico. When lobbies failed in Parliament they transferred their appeal to a more public court.”
Thus there developed a regular debate on the nature of the public interest and its relationship to various private ones. To be sure many participants had no compunction about seeking their own advantage under the cloak of high-sounding rhetoric (the same was true of the seventeenth-century debates considered earlier), and critics like Adam Smith sought to unmask their self-centered claims. But one consequence of these debates was that individuals began to see the defense of their own interests and rights, in the face of Parliamentary power that might be used against them, in a way that echoed and extended the claims of the 1688 revolutionaries to safeguard the rights of the nation against the king. The political redirection of governmental power effected in the seventeenth century was now replayed on a broader social plane, so that “government intervention helped to create new social forms in civil society.”33
In this way the expansion of the web of governmental institutions controlled from the center gave birth to further networks of means, whose operation both implicitly and explicitly introduced other principles into the system of gathering and directing resources. As the network of connections between Parliament and the public developed, their extent and thickness opened up possibilities for using the resources they provided not only from the center, but from a growing number of points outside it. The relatively democratic character of British politics – Parliamentary supremacy and a degree of local independence – was partly responsible for this but not wholly, since, as we shall see, certain rather similar things were taking place in France, where attempts by the monarchy to expand its power, but on a basis that did not involve representative institutions, also called forth strategies for turning an administrative and communicative network set up by the monarchy to purposes it had not envisioned. We shall see, however, that the language in which the appeal to public opinion and principle was carried out would be significantly different there, reflecting the contrasting nature of the connections on which national integration rested.
Divisions and linkages
The close ties between the various forms of integration that marked eighteenth-century England – economic, political, and cultural – are evident in a number of phenomena characteristic of the time. One was the energetic and multifaceted campaign mounted in favor of the anti-monarchical critic and Parliamentary reformer John Wilkes in the 1760s. Wilkes (who was jailed for attacking George III and prevented from taking the seat in Commons to which he was elected) was supported by a widespread network of clubs, some of which had ties to existing voluntary organizations partly devoted to furthering trade, and to self-help for their members. The activities in his favor involved not just pamphlets, speeches, and meetings (often held at taverns, whose owners profited from the agitation), but the sale of a wide variety of artefacts and souvenirs, including ceramics, clothing, pipes, pots, cakes, and candlesticks. Newspapers were central to the movement, so that there is reason to believe that by 1770 the public appetite for political news was so great that editors who refused to provide it would have faced failure as a result.34
Not everyone welcomed these changes to be sure; many people felt challenged or weakened by them. The divisions apparent in the criticism of the post-1688 fiscal system studied by John Pocock, between a form of existence in which an elite rooted in local independence gave the tone to social life and one reshaped by the power of more remote and abstract relationships, made itself felt in other respects too. In his study of the culture of British towns and urban building in this period, Peter Borsay noted how the spread of literacy and reading led to a split between those still oriented toward locally based attitudes and pursuits and those whose preferences were growing more cosmopolitan. “Traditional culture focused inwards on local customs and practices, whereas … its polite counterpart looked outwards towards London and the continent.” One expression of this difference took form in the contrast between older vernacular architecture and the international Palladian classicism that inspired many urban rebuilding projects; another appeared in the awareness that newspapers drew people into a world outside the local one. A satirical poem described the scene in a Bath coffee-house:
CHREMES sits scheming on affairs of state,
And on his shoulders bears all Europe’s weight;
He cannot drink his coffee with a goût,
‘Till he has read the papers thro and thro …
RATTLE, joined by a whole unthinking crowd,
At least once ev’ry day calls out, aloud,
Boy, does the London post set out? I pray:
Papers were read and discussed in local clubs and associations (some of them of the kind that would provide support for the Wilksite movement), and a sort of informal or invisible society grew up, joining local readers of papers to their counterparts elsewhere in the county; editors encouraged this connection by running competitions, giving public replies to readers’ questions, and printing their letters and contributions, tactics that would still seem novel and strikingly modern when taken up by much later publications.35
Dror Wahrman has drawn on this and similar descriptions of eighteenth-century life to argue that a series of social and political conflicts and controversies in which the sides do not correspond to the often-invoked opposition between landed and commercial classes turn out to pit people with largely local orientations against others more involved in national networks. Thus a study of Justices of the Peace finds a division between one group whose members rested their position largely on private ties that bound them to the communities they inhabited, and another that sought prestige through cultural and institutional connections to their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Sometimes local political struggles (in places as distant from each other as Middlesex and Wales, for instance) seem to have involved a clash between people of similar social position, ranging some with interests and connections in London against others who sought support through their more immediate ties to neighbors. Borsay notes that a significant current of gentry culture drew those involved in it away from local customs and practices in favor of amusements and manners learned from connections to London or other outside centers; for example, literate Welsh landowners abandoned the local language still spoken by most of their countrymen in favor of English. Such people contrasted with others in the same places, and at the same social level, who remained committed to traditional sports and pastimes.36 Thus the growth of national networks in politics and culture led to divisions between those who found opportunities in them and others who for whatever reason sought to ward off their influence, giving a new form to the old split between “court” and “country.”
Well before industrial innovations provided means to generate new forms o
f social power, and before government was formally democratized, the effects of living in a situation permeated by distant linkages spread a precocious modernity through English life. It was because networks of all kinds drew people at different social levels into similar kinds of social relationships that commercial and industrial activities and the people involved in them assumed an ever-larger place in English life, not in opposition to aristocrats and landowners but in ways that provided power and resources to both groups. This was the situation that makes understandable the mix of what otherwise might seem paradoxical qualities I highlighted at the start, making England at once the most bourgeois country and the least.
A digression: empire and nation
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 9
