Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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The Origins of Modern English Society

‘A remarkable, original, spiky book of major significance…compels the reader

to give voice in admiration and in protest…splendidly bold, structured,

stimulating and provocative.’

Gwyn A.Williams, New Society

In this classic text of social history, Harold Perkin explores the emergence of a

new form of class society in Victorian England, which differed radically from

early modern society. He locates the origins of the modern English class system

in the Industrial Revolution, the impact of which went beyond economy and

technology, and changed the ways of living and perceptions of the English

people in many ways.

Bringing together subjects such as culture, religion, morals, politics, economics,

and mentality, Perkin presents and applies a holistic concept of social history in

the tradition of great historians of the past. The Origins of Modern English

Society maintains its influence as a comprehensive and integrative survey of a

crucial period in the development of English society.

Harold Perkin is Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University,

Evanston, Illinois, Professor Emeritus at Lancaster University and Honorary

Professor at Cardiff University.

The Origins of Modern

English Society

Second Edition

Harold Perkin

London and New York

First published as a Routledge Paperback 1972

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Second edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of

thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,

or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-41270-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-72094-6 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-29890-3 (Print Edition)

For Joan—

Helpmate for over fifty years

It is not more than seventy or eighty years since, that a few humble

mechanics in Lanarkshire, distinguished by scarcely anything more than

mechanical ingenuity and perseverance of character, succeeded in forming

a few, but important mechanical combinations, the effect of which has

been to revolutionize the whole of British society, and to influence, in a

marked degree, the progress of civilization in every quarter of the globe.

‘A MEMBER OF THE MANCHESTER ATHENAEUM’, 1844

Contents

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2002 EDITION viii

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xii

ABBREVIATIONS xv

I THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 1

II THE OLD SOCIETY 14

1. A Classless Hierarchy 14

2. Property and Patronage 32

3. A Dynamic Society 47

III THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 52

1. Society and the Ancillary Causes 52

2. Society and the Economic Factors 60

3. The Problem of Timing 80

IV THE REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 87

1. The Rise in the Scale of Organization 87

2. ‘Petty’s Law’ 101

V THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INDUSTRIALISM 109

1. The Revolution in Living Standards 109

2. Industrialism and the Family 121

3. Urbanization and Society 131

VI THE BIRTH OF CLASS 144

1. Industrialism and Class Conflict 145

2. ‘The Abdication on the Part of the Governors’ 150

3. The Mid wife of Class 160

4. The Delayed Birth 171

VII THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE IDEALS 180

1. The Entrepreneurial Ideal 182

2. The Working-Class Ideal 190

3. The Revival of the Aristocratic Ideal 196

4. The Forgotten Middle Class 209

VIII THE TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 224

1. The Moral Revolution 225

2. The Battle for the Mind 240

3. The Battle for the State 255

4. The Professionalization of Government 264

IX THE RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 280

1. The Role of Religion 285

2. The Institutionalization of the Middle Class 300

3. The Institutionalization of the Working Class 313

X ENTREPRENEURIAL SOCIETY: IDEAL AND REALITY 336

1. Progress and Poverty 337

2. The Emerging Plutocracy 353

3. The Decline of the Entrepreneurial Ideal 360

INDEX 376

vii

Introduction to the 2002 Edition

IN 1959, prompted by a commission from Colin Franklin of Routledge and

Kegan Paul, I set out to discover the origins of modern English society. By this I

meant the beginnings not only of the class society of Victorian England but also

of the new society I felt in my bones was beginning to take shape in the

aftermath of the Second World War. This was a society dominated no longer by

agricultural landlords and bourgeois industrialists but by a new race of specialists

—corporate managers, bureaucrats and the purveyors of intellectual services to a

much more complex and sophisticated population. So confident was I in my

sense of the direction in which social evolution was tending that I called the

proposal ‘the rise of professional society’. Little did I know then that this modest

task would take some thirty years and split into two parts: the rise of Victorian

class society from the old pre-class society of early modern times, and its

replacement in the twentieth century by professional society itself.

The time span was not entirely due to the scale of the research and writing but

had to be achieved in the interstices of a busy career, inaugurating the first

undergraduate and postgraduate courses in social history in Britain, editing a

series of monographs in the subject, founding the Social History Society,

engaging in discussions with government in the Robbins expansion of higher

education, negotiating salaries for the Association of University Teachers,

helping the new University of Lancaster get off the ground, writing and

presenting two series of programmes on the impact of modern transport and

communications on people’s lives for Granada Television, participating in

international studies in higher education, and writing several other books and

articles in between.

The first book, completed in 1967 and published in 1969, reissued here with

this new introduction, found the origins of modern English society in the

Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That, I took

to be a much more than industrial, technological and economic revolution. It was,

I argue below, a social revolution with a social process and profound social

effects: a revolution in living standards, in the way people lived, in the size and

shape of the communities they lived in, in how they earned their living and spent

their incomes, in the ways they cooperated and clashed in their dealings with

each other, the way they were governed and fought wars, engaged in the arts and

sciences, in their religion and morals, and the class ideologies through which

they saw their neighbours and the world.

It was, I believed, the second great revolution in human history, succeeding

the Neolithic revolution in settled agriculture that provided a regular surplus of

food to support specialist rulers, priests, warriors, craftsmen and traders, and so

the growth of towns and the instruments of civilisation. This provided the basis

for a system that lasted at least 4,000 years, from the days of Troy and Jericho to

the great Eurasian empires of the nineteenth century, dominated by landlords,

warriors and priests who controlled the scarce resource of land. The second

revolution raised the plane of existence still further, producing an increase in

productivity in both manufacture and agriculture that freed a majority of a larger

population for work in the towns, which outgrew the rural dwellers and created a

plutocratic elite and a proletarian populace, with a growing layer of business men

and professional specialists in between. It improved the quality of life but at the

cost of severe social problems of poverty, public health, crime, and class

conflict. It took longer than the French Revolution that was its role model,

however. Taking place over two or three generations, it was recognised by

contemporaries like Friedrich Engels and the elder Arnold Toynbee as

sufficiently striking to deserve its name.

Since the book was published, the very concept has undergone a buffeting, as

Peter Mathias has remarked in the new introduction (2001) to his seminal The

First Industrial Nation: The Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914. First the

cliometricians of the ‘New Economic History’, Nobelist Robert Fogel, Jonathan

Hughes, Nick Crafts and others, reduced it to numerical analysis and found it to

be lacking in swiftness and the acceleration of economic growth, so that it was

more an evolution dating back to Tudor or medieval times rather than a

revolution. Number-crunching failed to live up to its promises, however, and did

not convince those who followed Tawney’s advice to put on their boots and look

around them on the ground. They found that great towns and cities, canals,

railways and steamships, large joint-stock companies and government

departments, heavily armed forces and great warships, and the clash of warring

classes did not wait upon statistical tables but changed people’s lives and

transformed irreversibly the scale of existence. ‘Il faut compter’, as the Annales

school’s Robert Mousnier remarked, but it is also necessary to know what you

are counting. Some of the cliometricians were counting ‘counter-factuals’—

events that did not happen, like the economic effects of the non-building of

railroads in the United States—which is rather like counting imaginary sheep.

You cannot wish away an elephant by ignoring it, and the Industrial Revolution

would not go away.

It was brought back to life by the new ‘institutional economics’ of Douglas

North and co., who pointed out that economic growth depended on other factors

besides investment and productivity, that qualitative inputs by government,

property law and social mores enabled the factors of production to operate more