Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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the sake of the better food, the whiter bread, the flesh meat, and the new cottons,

the pottery, utensils and household goods which industrialism was producing in

larger and cheaper quantities, a sufficient body of men and women were prepared

to work long hours, which were not new, under unwonted discipline, which was.

For this readiness to earn and spend the credit must go once again to the nature

and structure of English society. But this brings us to the most important economic

factor in the genesis of industrialism, consumer demand.

Consumer demand was the ultimate economic key to the Industrial Revolution,

calling into action the factors of land, capital and labour and sustaining them

through the vicissitudes of economic change. So powerful was the pressure of

contemporary demand that the classical economists took it for granted, and

concentrated on the factors of production. Only Malthus glimpsed its

significance: without ‘a considerable class of persons who have both the will and

power to consume more material wealth than they produce…the mercantile

classes could not continue profitably to produce so much more than they

consume.’

But Malthus was thinking of the demand of the leisured rich for

luxury goods, while industrialism required a rapid expansion of the demand for

mass consumer goods. Foreign trade could aid this expansion, but it was most

likely to operate on the foundation of an expanding home market. That France

led the field in luxury production throughout the British Industrial Revolution

and beyond was no accident, but the result of the pattern of demand generated by

the French social structure, a structure characterized by a small class of luxury

consumers and a large mass of consumption-resisting peasants. Peasants when

they have a surplus rarely spend it, but hoard it for an emergency, to replace an

ox, dower a daughter, purchase an extra half-acre, or buy out the birthright of the

younger son. Not only had Britain practically no peasants, but its social structure

might have been designed for the spontaneous and rapid generation of demand

for cheap consumer goods.

It was in the elasticity of consumer demand that English society came into its

own, and acquired the decisive economic advantage over Continental countries.

The graduated hierarchy with its social mobility, together with the diffusion of

spendable incomes down to levels scarcely touched by the money economy

elsewhere, generated the social emulation, the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, the

competitive spending which infected all levels of society from the aristocracy

down to the very labourers. In the 1720’s Defoe commented on ‘the alteration

which the Humour of the People, and their luxury’ had given to the shopping

streets of London:

Cf. F.Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (trans. W.H. Chaloner and

W.O.Henderson, Oxford, 1958), pp. 24, 88; and see below, chap. iv, § 2.

Ashton, 18th Century, p. 214.

Malthus, Principles, p. 466.

74 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

the same flourishing pride has dictated new methods of living to the

people; and while the poorest citizens live like the rich, the rich like the

gentry, the gentry like the nobility, and the nobility striving to outshine one

another, no wonder all the sumptuary trades increase.

Sixty years later, Henry Meister, a Swiss journalist from Paris on a visit to this

country, observed:

There is as great an inequality of ranks and fortune in England as in France;

but in the former the consequence and importance of a man as a member of

society is far more respectable. Individuals of the lower classes are better

cloathed, better fed, and better lodged than elsewhere; and often, as far as I

could learn, with no better means than the same classes enjoy with us.

Pride and a desire to preserve the public esteem seem to force upon them

that attention to their conduct and outward appearance.

Emulative spending was the real target of the familiar attack on ‘luxury’ from

Defoe to Cobbett. According to Trusler in 1796,

the great degree of luxury to which this country has arrived within a few

years, is not only astonishing, but almost dreadful to think of. Time was,

when those articles of indulgence, which now every mechanic aims at

possession of, were enjoyed only by the Baron or Lord of a district.

William Green declared in 1800:

The rapid increase of vanity and extravagance, in this island is a subject

pregnant with mischief and alarm. Commercial monopoly and Eastern

opulence…have already fostered dissipation and immorality into monsters

of colossal magnitude, that every moment threatens (sic) the humbler

classes of independence, with ruin. That frugality which once characterized

the middling and lower classes of society amongst us is no more: the little

tradesman and mechanic of the present day, fatally though impotently, ape

the luxuries and fashionable vices of their superiors.

The ‘luxuries’ and ‘Eastern opulence’ were of course white bread, tea, china

cups, cotton prints and muslins, and the like. Cobbett thundered at ‘the Italian-

like effeminacy’ of the modern farmer, who preferred music meetings to

hunting, as well as at the tea and sugar of the labourer (because they replaced, he

Defoe, Complete English Tradesman (1841 ed.), II. 239.

Meister, op. cit., p. 8.

J.Trusler, The Way to be Rich and Respectable (1796), p. 3.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 75

optimistically thought, the beef and beer of an older England).

On such

‘luxuries’ industrial revolutions are based.

English snobbery, long notorious in the old society, bore witness to the

emulative social structure. Snobbery is more than pride in rank: it is an active

device for preventing upstart inferiors from treading too closely upon one’s heels.

The British Magazine declared in 1763:

The present rage of imitating the manners of high-life hath spread itself so

far among the gentlefolks of lower-life, that in a few years we shall

probably have no common people at all.

Henry Fielding blamed emulation inter alia for ‘the late increase in robbers’:

while the Nobleman will emulate the Grandeur of a Prince: and the

Gentleman will aspire to the proper state of a Nobleman; the Tradesman

steps from behind his Counter into the vacant place of the Gentleman, Nor

doth the Confusion end here: It reaches the very Dregs of the People…

Another observer, in the London Chronicle, 1773, supported them:

each of the different ranks of men are perpetually pressing upon that above

them…even the lower class both in town and country are so much infected

with this preposterous ambition, that all ranks and degrees of men seem to

be on the point of being confounded…

Fashions in dress were an obvious vehicle for snobbery and emulation:

The vanity of the great will ever be affecting new modes, in order to increase

that notice to which it thinks itself exclusively entitled. The lower ranks

will imitate them as soon as they have discovered the innovation…. The

pattern is set by a superior; and authority will at any time countenance

absurdity. A hat, a coat, a shoe, deemed fit to be worn only by a great

grandsire, is no sooner put on by a dictator of fashions, than it becomes

graceful in the extreme, and is generally adopted from the first lord of the

Treasury to the apprentice in Houndsditch.

W.Green, Plans of Economy, or the Road to Ease and Independence (1801); a MS. begging

letter attached to the copy in the Manchester Central Reference Library shows the author

to be ‘a melancholy inhabitant of the King’s Bench Prison’.

Cf., inter alia, Political Register, VI. 617–19, XXIX. 164, LXIV. 712, LXVI. 181;

Cottage Economy (1821), Advice to Young Men (1829) and Legacy to Labourers (1835). I

owe these references to Mr. J.F.Goodridge of Lancaster University.

76 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

Indeed, the fashion cycle aptly illustrates the exact degree of difference between

England and the rest of Europe. Since it can only flourish in a society with

sufficient openness and emulation between its upper ranks, it was peculiar to

European civilization. Beginning in the fifteenth century at the break-up of strict

feudalism, with cycles of perhaps half a century, it gradually speeded up until in

the eighteenth century it went round about once every decade. Within this

European context the peculiarity of English society was that the fashion cycle by

the eighteenth century reached so much further down the scale. Foreigners like

P.J.Grosley and Per Kalm noticed that the very servants and labourers wore the

paniers and sacks, the knee-breeches and occasionally even the peruques, of their

betters,

and their observations are amply confirmed by the paintings and prints

of Hogarth, Stubbs, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and Gillray. Alone amongst

European nations, including the Celtic fringe, England was without a ‘national

costume’, that euphemism for peasant dress. With the significant exception of

the smock-frock, the working overall worn by the agricultural labourers in the

more backward parts of southern England, where the gap between the ‘labouring

poor’ and their ‘betters’ survived down to the late Victorian age, the common

people, at work and especially at leisure, wore a conscious imitation of the dress

of their immediate superiors.

Cotton was the leading industry of the Industrial Revolution because it

admirably suited the demands of the emulative fashion cycle. So versatile and

yet, potentially, so cheap a fabric, variable in colour, pattern and texture, yet

washable and hard-wearing, could make endless reappearances in the salons of

high fashion, and just as repeatedly spread down the social scale. Wool was less

versatile, yet mass consumer demand played a significant part in the rise of the

West Riding and the decline of the older areas: the decline of the West Country

cloth industry has been attributed less to the competition of machine-production

—which a number of West Country manufacturers adopted—than to the shift in

taste from their solid, expensive cloths to the cheaper and lighter woollens and

worsteds of the Yorkshire mills.

In the pottery trade Josiah Wedgwood

consciously used the ‘lines, channels and connections’ of his noble and royal

clientèle to spread the fashion for his wares to the rest of society: ‘Few Ladies,

you know, dare venture at anything out of the common style till authorized by

their betters—by Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton’; and he sought out

Queen Charlotte’s patronage not so much for his artistic productions as for his

Queensware, the plain cream earthenware with which to woo the mass market.

British Magazine, 1763, IV. 417; H.Fielding, Enquiry into the Causes of the late

Increase of Robbers (1750), p. 6; London Chronicle, 1773, XXXIV. 213a; Vicesimus

Knox, Works (1824), I. 374; Hecht. op. cit. pp. 204–5.

P.J.Grosley, A Tour to London (trans. T.Nugent, 1772), I. 75; P.Kalm, An Account of his

Visit to England…in 1748 (trans. J.Lucas, 1892), p. 52; Dorothy Marshall, English People

in the 18th Century (1956), p. 178.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 77

And even in agriculture and the brewing industry the technical revolutions were

due not merely to the increase in population, but to the increasing preference of

the ‘lower orders’ for the fresh meat and wheaten bread of their superiors, and

the shift in taste from the lighter ales to the strong, dark, highly-brewed, mass-

produced porter.

Indeed, social emulation could even operate in bad times, in

the refusal to lower standards under the harshest pressure: in the near-famines of

the war years the agricultural labourers of the south refused to accept oats or

potatoes in place of wheaten bread, and the poor law authorities had to concur.

Mass consumer demand was obviously less directly important in the heavy

industries. War was the great stimulator of innovation in metallurgy. But if war

had been a sufficient cause of industrialism, the great Continental powers with

their much heavier military commitments and their urgent search for

improvements in munitions—France in the late eighteenth century sent missions

to try and discover the secret of Britain’s superiority in iron and cannon

production

—would have succeeded long before Britain. War, like foreign trade,

was an economic stimulus available to everyone who could respond to it. The

peace-time market for heavy industry was clearly the foundation of success even

in war. If Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling process, developed in the production

of iron for the Navy, was called forth by the demands of war, the invention

which made it possible, Darby’s coke-smelting process, was evoked by the

demand for cast-iron pots, pans, firebacks, and similar mass consumer goods.

the production of capital goods could only be indirectly affected by consumer

demand, the effect was no less real for that. Even the steam engine owed

something to one brand of social emulation, the gradual spread of cleanliness

down the social scale from the Restoration period to the Victorian age: ‘People

now have such a rage for washing their b—ms,’ wrote Watt to Robert Milne,

engineer of the New River Water Company in the 1790’s, that more water and

therefore more pumping engines were bound to be needed.

To quote Malthus

again,

Inventions to save manual labour are generally called forth by the wants of

mankind in the progress of improvement; and therefore seldom exceed

those wants. But the same laws apply to machinery as to fertile land: a full

use cannot be made of either without an adequate market;

and again:

K.G.Ponting, The West of England Cloth Industry (1957), pp, 147–50.

N.McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood: an 18th-Century Entrepreneur in Sales-manship and

Marketing Techniques’, Ec.H.R., 1960, XII. 415, 418.

Ashton, 18th Century, p. 216; Mathias, Brewing Industry, pp. xxi–xxii, 12–13

Cf. Hammond, Village Labourer, I. 119–29.

78 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

In general it may be said that demand is quite as necessary to the increase

of capital as the increase of capital is to demand. They mutually act upon

and encourage each other, and neither can proceed with vigour if the other

be left far behind.

If consumer demand, then, was the key to the Industrial Revolution, social

emulation was the key to consumer demand. By the eighteenth century nearly

everyone in England and the Scottish Lowlands received a money income, and

nearly everyone was prepared to spend a large part of it in ‘keeping up with the

Joneses’. Even the entrepreneurs, whose emulative spending mainly took the

long-term form of capital investment in the hope of raising themselves in the

social scale and of ultimately becoming ‘new men’, were not immune to

competitive consumption. The Strutts, for example, filled their home with

pictures, books and musical instruments, and they were by no means unusual

amongst the entrepreneurs who supported the Lunar and other literary and

philosophical societies.

As for the workers, although there was in the actual

take-off period no spectacular rise in average wages, they were, as we shall see,

sufficiently maintained to enable the wage-earners to purchase more of the

cheaper consumer goods such as cottons, and in a rising population to expand

their aggregate demand significantly. The self-accelerating velocity of circulation

resulting from social emulation was the engine which drove the expansion of

demand, and so set in motion the take-off into self-sustained economic growth.

From whatever angle we look at the causation of the Industrial Revolution,

then, whether from the broader political, scientific or religious, or from the

narrowly economic point of view, it was the nature and structure of English

society which gave the various causes their opportunity, and set them to work in

spontaneous harmony.

By way of postscript, the experience of the ‘Celtic fringe’ provides a contrast

and a test. It was not alone the lack of material resources which frustrated an

industrial revolution in Ireland (apart from Belfast and the Lagan Valley) and the

Scottish Highlands. Switzerland with no more came to mount one of the earliest

and most successful. What thwarted it was the nature of their societies: peasant

societies still half immersed in tribalism, dominated by near-feudal or alien

landlords, remote and often absentee, and almost completely without the varied

prosperous, energetic ‘middle ranks’ which characterized Anglo-Saxon society in

England, the Scottish Lowlands and the Ulster plantation. As long as land was

plentiful such peasant societies expanded not by industrialism but by the

Cf. the activities of Antoine-Gabriel Jars, 1732–69, Pierre Grimal et al., Dictionnaire

des Biographies (Paris, 1958), I. 765.

A.Raistrick, Dynasty of Ironfounders: the Darbys and Coalbrookdale (1953), pp. 2, 37.

I owe this reference to the Boulton and Watt Papers to Dr. W.H.Chaloner.

Malthus, Principles, in Works and Correspondence of Ricardo (ed. Sraffa), II. 349, 350.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 79

proliferation of holdings. When, however, by the pressure of population and the

imposition of an alien land-law—the Anglo-Saxon concept of absolute property

vested in the landlord—land became scarce, the hard-pressed and embittered

peasants were driven out in large numbers, to seek new holdings in the colonies

or to join the industrial proletariat in the Anglo-Saxon South and East.

Wales, with mineral resources and a similar but slightly more advanced

society, is a still more interesting test case. There, handicapped in the early

stages by lack of capital, lack of entrepreneurs and lack of a potential proletariat,

industrialism had to be induced from outside. The result was a semi-colonial

economy in which capital was provided in large blocks by English capitalists,

encouraged by favourable concessions from local mineral owners, and recruiting

over long distances a heterogeneous and at first partially migratory labour force.

Hence the importance of London and Bristol merchants, the long, beneficial

mineral leases, and the excessive friction of Welsh industrial relations. Hence too

the sense of exploitation by an Anglophile gentry and an alien capitalism. As a

contemporary English observer ingenuously put it, ‘it was rather curious to

observe how few of the inhabitants of South Wales have benefited from the

extraordinary wealth their country contains and that the Saxon race of men

should have been almost the sole adventurers which have in later times brought

this wealth into action, and by their ingenuity, perseverance and adventurous

spirit have raised many a noble fortune and laid the foundation of many more.’

If South Wales was gradually brought into the mainstream of industrialism, its

economy still bears today the scars of its semi-colonial past.

THE PROBLEM OF TIMING

There still remains the problem of timing. The old society, the open aristocracy

based on property and patronage, lasted a long time, from the decline of

feudalism in the fourteenth century to the rise of a class society in the nineteenth.

If it was the ideal society for generating a spontaneous industrial revolution, why

did it not generate it earlier?

The short answer is that the life-cycle of a society takes time. Before one society

can give birth to another it must first come to maturity itself. This the old society

only achieved with the final triumph of the landowners in the constitutional

struggles of the seventeenth century. Even then, there is no inherent reason why

Fitton and Wadsworth, op. cit., pp. 178–9.

K.H.Connell, The Population of Ireland, 1750–1845 (Oxford, 1950), esp. chaps. v and

vi; J.Prebble, The Highland Clearances (1963); Ian Grimble, The Trial of Patrick Sellar:

the Tragedy of the Highland Evictions (1962).

C.Hassall, General View of Agriculture in the County of Monmouth (1812), quoted by

John, op. cit., p. 24; for rest of this paragraph, cf. ibid. chap. vi.

80 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

a mature society as dynamically stable as the English should not have gone on

expanding without fundamental changes of structure indefinitely, at least until

the rate of expansion became too great to be contained within the old structure.

This, indeed, is precisely what happened, with only temporary setbacks now and

then of perhaps a generation long, from the Reformation until the reign of

George III. As Adam Smith remarked in 1776:

Since the time of Henry VIII the wealth and revenue of the country have

been continually advancing and, in the course of their progress, their pace

seems rather to have been gradually accelerated than retarded. They seem,

not only to have been going on, but to have been going on faster and

faster.

Yet Adam Smith no more expected the fundamental change in the traditional

structure of the economy and society which had actually begun before his death

in 1790 than he did the sudden onset of the millennium. On the contrary, he

thought that the natural goal towards which this and other advancing countries

were moving was ‘the stationary state’, in which the existing methods of

production had been carried as far as they could be made to go, and economic

growth ceased.

And in the world of 1776, in spite of a handful of water-driven

factories and ‘fire engines’ used exclusively for pumping purposes, this was a

thoroughly reasonable expectation.

For economic growth is at first a long, slow, cumulative process, which takes

time to reach the critical point at which further advance required a change of

structure:

It is with nations as it is with individuals who are in train of acquiring

property. At first progress is slow until a certain amount is obtained, after

which, as wealth has a creative power under skilful and judicious

management, the accumulation becomes more and more rapid, increasing

often beyond a geometrical ratio, expanding in all directions, diffusing its

influence wherever talents and industry prevail, and thereby extending the

resources by which riches are obtained by communicating the power of

acquiring it to thousands, who must have remained without wealth in

countries less opulent.

Thus Colquhoun in 1814 expressed what had happened to the British economy

during his lifetime: within the last three decades the long, slow acceleration

which had been going on since the limit of human memory had suddenly, like a

steam-engine coming to the boil, an atomic reactor becoming critical, or an

aeroplane taking off, reached the point at which self-intensifying forces began to

Op. cit., I. 70–4, 91.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 81

come into operation, and a completely new level of activity achieved. In

contemporary, non-metaphorical language Colquhoun was anticipating Rostow’s

notion of the take-off into self-sustained economic growth.

Yet, it may still be asked, why after the old society had reached maturity at the

Revolution did it take nearly a century to reach the critical point? There were,

indeed, signs of a significant surge of economic growth in the late seventeenth

century which seemed to contain the promise of an industrial revolution.

And

there was an upturn in all the curves of growth around 1745 which, although it

produced no immediate change in the fundamental structure of economy and

society, may be regarded as the initial acceleration of the run-up for take-off.

Nevertheless, why so long between taxi-ing and take-off, promise and fulfilment,

ripeness and harvest?

If demand was the critical factor, then we must look not only for the causes of

the exceptional increase in demand in the last twenty years of the eighteenth

century, but also for those which before that date held it within the bounds of

buoyant but unrevolutionary growth. In the last two decades of the century there

were additional reasons for an acceleration of demand, over and above the

normal buoyancy of the old society. Foreign trade, itself stimulated by home

demand for foreign goods, took a great leap forward in the recovery from the

American War, the only war of the century in which Britain temporarily lost

control of the seas, and was then carried further by the Revolutionary Wars,

which benefited the only remaining great sea power at the expense of its

Continental competitors. Both home and foreign trade were stimulated by profit

inflation, which disproportionately benefited merchants, industrialists, farmers

and landowners, the very ranks in which emulative demand began and responded

most readily to the new manufactures which, against the general trend, were

falling in price. At the same time, although average wages were not rising as fast

as profits and rents,

aggregate wages were expanding steeply with the rapid

growth of the labour force, which was now reaching a critical stage, as we shall

see in a moment. Thus there were seemingly fortuitous reasons for the crucial

increase in demand between 1783 and 1802.

Yet that they were not so fortuitous as they seem becomes clear when we turn

to the main factor holding back demand before the take-off. For the answer to the

problem of timing is most likely to be found in the one factor so far left out of

account, except as the most important effect of industrialism: population growth.

Population growth is the most fundamental of social factors, and its ultimate drives

are psychological and historically inaccessible. Between population and

economic growth the relationship is never a simple, one-way, causal link but a

Treatise on…British Empire, p. 51.

D.C.Coleman et al., ‘The Origins of the Industrial Revolution’, Past and Present, 1960,

No. 17, pp. 71–2.

Deane and Cole, op. cit., pp. 46–7.

82 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

sensitive, two-way servo-mechanism, which transmits from one to the other the

shock of every change of momentum. Varying rates of population growth due to

external factors were sufficient to retard or to accelerate the operation of all the

causes converging to produce the critical change in the British economy.

Certainly, the comparative stagnation of population in the first half, and

especially the second quarter, of the eighteenth century, whether it was due to

gin, bad weather, a resurgence of endemic disease, notably smallpox, or to the

chain reaction throughout the economy of the depression in agriculture, was

enough to cancel out all the favourable factors making for a further acceleration

of economic growth.

For the Industrial Revolution required, in addition to all the ancillary and

economic factors brought into operation by the peculiar structure of English

society, a very delicate adjustment of population growth: not too fast, for that

would cheapen labour to the point of deadening demand and suppressing the

need for labour-saving machinery; nor too slow, for that too would discourage

demand while making labour expensive and fractious.

That just such a buoyant rate of growth obtained in the second half of the

eighteenth century is beyond doubt. What caused it is a matter for controversy

amongst demographers and historians. Indeed, the whole question of the

mechanics of population growth during the Industrial Revolution is in dispute.

Was the dynamic factor a declining death rate, whether due to medical

improvements or to more general environmental causes; or was it an expanding

birth rate, due to a lowering of the age of marriage and increased employment

opportunities? This larger question must be left to the specialist demographers.

Meanwhile, the ultimate significance of the Industrial Revolution for population

growth is not in doubt: whatever caused the mid-eighteenth-century surge it

could not, but for the extra food and jobs created by industrialism, have led to a

revolutionary increase in population. Without them it must soon have received

the Malthusian check which had blocked or reversed most population surges in

the history of the human race, and which was still to operate in the case of

Ireland. Until the famine of 1845, however, the case of Ireland, like that of

contemporary Sweden and most of Western Europe, goes to show that a

considerable population surge was possible without touching off an industrial

revolution. To this extent industrialism in Britain was undoubtedly the long-term

cause of the permanent increase in population, and not vice versa.

In the short run, however, the initial spurt of population growth in the third

quarter of the eighteenth century was the trigger which, given the favourable

complex of ancillary and economic causes, set the process in motion. Its causes

are still obscure. Such statistics as exist are so open to question that we cannot

say with certainty whether the decline in the death rate was greater or less than

Cf. P.Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1955), p. 31; and see below,

chap. iv, § 2.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 83