Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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the acknowledged rise in the birth rate.

Even if we could, birth and death rates

are not themselves causes but merely the effect and the measure of complex,

multiple causes operating through them. Some of the improvement in the death

rate may be the merely statistical effect in a younger, healthier population of the

high mortality of the second quarter of the century. Equally, some of the rise in

the birth rate may be due to the greater numbers in such a population in the child-

bearing age groups. In either case, the more stable rate—a comparatively

stagnant death rate in the face of a briskly rising birth rate, or a comparatively

stationary, but high, birth rate maintained in spite of a declining death rate,

especially among infants—may well be the more dynamic factor needing to be

explained. And whatever the mechanism of growth, the answer may lie

elsewhere: given the philoprogenitive tendency of humanity, growth may as

Malthus believed be the norm, and the question turn not on what made the

population grow more rapidly after 1750 but on what prevented it from doing so

until then.

The field at any rate may be narrowed. Immigration can be ruled out as a major

cause. Medical improvements cannot have contributed much until the nineteenth

century, but better health and survival may have resulted from improvements in

the environment: cleaner, more easily washable clothes; dryer, solider, more

vermin-proof housing; and the disappearance of the plague-carrying black rat

and other pests. More births may have resulted from a lowering of the age of

marriage consequent upon the decline in the custom of apprenticeship and the

earlier attainment of full wages; and even from the very losses of the high

mortality period which, by making cottages and jobs more available, may have

encouraged marriages and births beyond the strict needs of population

replacement. Finally, food was of crucial importance: whether or not the amount

per head increased, greater aggregate quantities would certainly be necessary.

Here the agricultural revolution, which began, in Norfolk, half a century or more

before the industrial, having contributed to the overproduction and low prices of

For this whole discussion see D.V.Glass and D.E.C.Eversley, Population in History

(1965), Part II, ‘Great Britain’, esp. the essays by H.J.Habakkuk, D.V.Glass, T.McKeown

and R.G.Brown, J.T.Krause and J.D.Chambers; and E.A.Wrigley, ed., An Introduction to

English Historical Demography (1966).

Cf. Habakkuk, loc. cit. 147–58; and J.T.Krause, ‘Changes in English Fertility and

Mortality, 1781–1850’, Ec.H.R., 1958, XI. 52–70, where, however, the effects of the

expansion of Dissent on the under-registration of baptisms and burials are exaggerated by

assuming the numbers of chapels licensed for worship in each decade from 1771–80 to

1841–50 to be cumulative, and therefore to show the rise of Dissent to ‘a peak in the 1810’s

or 1820’s’, followed by a decline to the 1840’s, when the comparative link with the civil

registers comes to be made.

Cf. Habakkuk, loc. cit., p. 158; G.S.L.Tucker, ‘English Pre-Industrial Population

Trends’, Ec.H.R., 1963, XVI. 212–14; P.E.Razzell, ‘Population Change in 18th-Century

England: a Reinterpretation’, Ec.H.R., 1965, XVIII. 312–31.

84 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

the agricultural depression of the second quarter of the century, may just in the

third quarter have begun to have effect. Even more important than the quantity of

food, perhaps, was the greater regularity of supply resulting from the winter

feeding of cattle; and the increased nutritional value of fresh meat, milk and

vegetables available to more, if not to most people, which may have had an

effect not only on health but, through improved conception and pregnancy, on

fertility also, and on the survival of infants to baptism and beyond.

Whatever the causes, there can be little doubt that the nature and structure of

English society contributed to them. Socially the key to a permanent expansion

in the number and size of families is the placing of surplus sons in a position to

raise a family. Without access to income opportunities the more abundant food,

cleaner clothing, better accommodation, and the rest, are of no avail. In

practically all Western European countries, at least from the end of the middle

ages, marriage was late, since the younger sons, whether of aristocrats, bourgeois

or peasants, were restricted by social as well as by economic barriers in their

opportunities of employment and therefore of marriage.

In England, by contrast,

the only barriers to marriage and a family apart from the declining custom of

apprenticeships, were the purely economic ones of income opportunity. As we

have seen, the provision of income opportunities was very elastic: the early

disappearance of a peasant society had necessitated an alternative outlet, notably

in domestic outwork industry, for the surplus population, while the upflow of

new men into the landed gentry opened up opportunities all the way down the

scale for newcomers. There already existed, therefore, a flow of younger sons

into new positions which, by earlier marriage, could respond to every slight

improvement in economic prosperity or opportunity.

England was therefore better placed than any European country for exploiting

the smallest population surge when it appeared and turning it into a large and

permanent one. Whatever the immediate cause of the initial upturn of the third

quarter of the eighteenth century, it was seized upon by the dynamic forces

operating in English society and sustained long enough to set going the self-

reinforcing process of industrialization. For a generation the delicate adjustment

of population growth to resources, buoyant enough to expand demand and labour

supply, stable enough to intensify the search for labour-saving devices and bring

them into practical operation, was maintained. Its role was to concentrate, to

compress, to bring to a critical conjunction the built-in forces of economic

growth generated by English society. At the end of a generation all that was

needed for the final break-through was a suitable cyclical trade boom of a not

much more than average kind. That boom came in the 1780’s, with the end of the

Cf. McKeown and Brown, loc. cit., pp. 304–7; cf. Habakkuk, loc. cit., pp. 269–84;

Chambers and Mingay op. cit., chap. iii.

J.Hajnal, ‘European Marriage Patterns in Perspective’, in Glass and Eversley, ed., op.

cit., pp. 101–43.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 85

American War and the re-opening of the ocean trade, swept to greater heights by

the Revolutionary Wars.

The crucial factor, however, was not the boom itself but the acceleration of

population growth, which by then was just sufficient to turn one of the most

difficult of economic tricks: to expand aggregate consumer demand without

raising labour costs too high for rapid economic growth. This it did by hitting the

critical rate of growth squarely in the middle: slow enough to maintain, and even

slightly improve, average real wages and encourage labour-saving innovation,

fast enough to keep down labour costs and to expand aggregate demand for food

and the new cheap manufactured goods. Thus the contemporary profit inflation,

which was redistributing income, relatively and on average, away from wages

and towards profits and rents,

was prevented from having a self-defeating effect

on aggregate demand, and for once an expansion of investment and conspicuous

consumption on the part of the upper and middle ranks could take place without

a corresponding shrinkage of aggregate demand on the part of the lower orders.

The effect was to remove the built-in brake from the economic system and allow

its built-in dynamism full play. In other words, after a long period of acceleration,

the lift at last overcame the drag, and the machine was airborne.

Only a machine of the right shape and power, however, could have succeeded

in taking off. The economic boom and the population surge were European if not

world-wide, and presented an opportunity for any Western European country to

seize. In the event only Britain was equipped to seize it. That she was so was due

to the unique nature and structure of her society.

Cf. Deane, op. cit., p. 31.

86 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

The Revolution in Social Organization

THE Industrial Revolution was a social revolution with social causes and social

effects. So far we have been concerned with the social causes, in the form of the

impact upon industry and economic growth of the unique nature and structure of

the old society in England. The rest of the book is concerned with the impact of

industrialism upon the nature and structure of English society. In this chapter we

attempt to sketch, all too briefly, the central features of the social revolution

itself, which consisted in a rise in the scale of human organization, not only in

industry, transport and commerce, but in almost every other social activity, from

religion to government. This revolution in organization inevitably entailed the

migration of large numbers of people between occupations, between industries

and sectors of the economy, and between communities, above all between the

country villages and the towns.

THE RISE IN THE SCALE OF ORGANIZATION

In industry itself the rise in scale consisted chiefly in the gradual replacement of

the domestic system by the factory system. The emphasis must fall on the word

system. All the features of the factory were known long before Arkwright opened

his first mill at Cromford in 1771: concentration of labour under one roof or in

one place, the use of ‘ingenious machines’, the application of mechanical power

which, in the form of the water wheel, goes back to Domesday Book and

beyond, and even large-scale capitalist production, in the sense of large numbers

of domestic craftsmen employed by a single merchant-employer. By the

eighteenth century it was common for domestic capitalists to employ hundreds

and even thousands of outworkers:

In 1736 two brothers employed 600 looms and 3,000 persons in the

Blackburn district; a little before 1750 a Warrington sailcloth manufacturer

employed 5,000 persons; in 1758 a small group of Manchester check

weavers employed a great many of the weavers of Ashton, Oldham and

Royton, and one spoke of employing 500 himself.

But features do not make a system. Thirteenth-century fulling mills were

scarcely factories, but a mere adjunct to domestic industry. Sixteenth-century

weaving sheds with hundreds of looms, if they existed, were large workshops,

examples of unnecessary gigantism doomed to extinction. As Max Weber

pointed out,

The real distinguishing characteristic of the modern factory is in general…

not the implements of work applied, but the concentration of ownership of

workplace, means of work, source of power and raw material in one and

the same hand. This combination was only exceptionally met with before

the eighteenth century.

Indeed, the first real factory in Britain was almost certainly the Lombe brothers’

silk-throwing mill at Derby in 1719, and, though it was imitated, factories

remained rare until Arkwright’s time.

When they came they represented a rise in scale not because they employed on

average more workers than the domestic capitalist—on the contrary, they usually

employed fewer—but because they increased the size, complexity and degree of

organization of the real unit of production, the working team under the control

and leadership of one man. Under the domestic system the merchant merely ‘gave

employment’, often through agents and intermediaries who themselves were not

necessarily in his employ, to domestic craftsmen who were independent of his

direct control and discipline, and with whom he was in a purely commercial

relationship. The real unit of production was the craftsman’s domestic workshop,

and the working team the members of his household, including any apprentice or

journeyman he might employ. The parallel is with peasant agriculture, in which

the unit of production is the family holding, whether or not a merchant supplies

the seed and buys the produce, or a landlord shares the cost and the harvest with

the métayer.

The true comparison, therefore, is between the domestic workshop, with its

handful of comparatively unspecialized workers and its  2– 3 worth of

equipment, and the factory, with its scores or even hundreds of highly

specialized operatives and its  40– 50 of fixed capital per worker. By contrast

with the half dozen or so workers in the average domestic weaver’s household

the average labour force of 41 Glasgow cotton spinning mills in 1816 was 244,

of 43 in and around Manchester nearly 300. The average for all cotton mills

inspected in 1838 was 137, and in the more comprehensive returns of 1871 177.

A.P.Wadsworth and J.de L.Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–

1780 (Manchester, 1931), p. 211; S.Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (1956),

p. 7, to which book some of the industrial detail, though not the general conception, of

this section is indebted.

M.Weber, General Economic History (1928), p. 302; Pollard, op. cit., p. 7.

88 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

In 1784 the loom, two spinning wheels and two pairs of hand cards of a

Rossendale flannel weaver were valued at  1 16s.

Arkwright claimed in 1783 that

the investment in factory spinning amounted to  40 per operative, while another

estimate in 1833 amounted to  53 per operative.

Even the central warehouse of

the merchant-employer was modest by comparison. Samuel Oldknow as a muslin

merchant in 1784 possessed equipment worth  57 10s. in a warehouse which he

doubled in size at a cost of  90. As a factory spinner in 1805 his Mellor mill and

estate were valued at  160, 584, though this was a giant, and the average mill as

late as 1833 was estimated at only  21,000.

Other textile industries followed belatedly behind cotton. In 1871 woollen

mills averaged only 70 workers, but by 1833 Yorkshire mills averaged over 200,

at least five of them over 500, and so did another seven in the West Country.

Worsted mills came to vie with cotton: only 80 in the West Riding in the 1830’s,

they reached a national average of 175 in 1871. In silk the typical throwing mill

in 1833 had 200–300 operatives; the average establishment in 1871 had 68, but

nearly half of these were ribbon shops with an average of only 10. John

Heathcote’s bobbin lace factory at Tiverton employed 800 in 1833, when his

agent, William Felkin estimated the average factory at 200 workers and  10,200

in fixed capital. The average in 1871 was only 37, but this included many

workshops. The first hosiery factory, Hine and Mundella’s, was built only in

1851, but the average, including workshops, in 1871 was 71 workers. Flax and

jute were on a still larger scale, with 202 and 291 workers respectively in 1871.

Most other industries followed the revolution in textiles. Pottery even

preceded it: ‘near 150 separate potteries’ in and around Burslem in 1762

employed ‘near 7,000 people’, an average of about 47, and by the 1830’s 130.

North Staffordshire works averaged 165, seven of them employing 500–1,000

each, though the national average in 1871 was only 84. Brewing, at least in

London, was contemporary with cotton: in 1785 half a dozen London porter

brewers with capitals of over  100,000 and staffs of over 100 each produced

more than 100,000 barrels. In 1871 the 44 ‘factory breweries’ had an average of

219, but there were still 929 workshop breweries, and several thousand brewing

victuallers and beer-sellers. Engineering closely followed. The prototype heavy

engineering works, Boulton and Watt’s Soho Foundry, was worth  30,000 in

1797 and twice that in 1830, and grew from about 100 men in 1821 to 251 in

1831. One hundred and fifteen Lancashire engineering firms in 1841 averaged 91

workers, but this included Hibbert and Platt’s with 900 and Nasmyth’s with 500.

J.H.Clapham, ‘Some Factory Statistics of 1815–16’, Ec.J., 1915, XXV 475–9, and

Economic History of Modern Britain (1964), II. 117; H.D.Fong, The Triumph of the

Factory System in England (Tientsin, 1930), p. 18.

G.H.Tupling, Economic History of Rossendale (Manchester, 1927), p. 190n.

E.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), pp. 191, 342–3.

G.Unwin et al., op. cit., pp. 13–15, 202.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 89

By 1871 machine making averaged only 85, but it included many small

workshops, as well as vast concerns like Armstrong’s and Whitworth’s. The

largest-scale industry of all, iron shipbuilding, was a sort of engineering, with an

average in 1871 of 571 workers, in Scotland alone of 800 workers.

Even those industries which had passed beyond the domestic scale before the

Industrial Revolution experienced a rise in scale just as profound. A large

ironworks in the early eighteenth century, Coalbrookdale or Dowlais, was worth

 2,000– 4,000 and employed perhaps a score of workers. By the early

nineteenth century, the average was over  50,000 and over 100 men, and giants

like Cyfarthfa or John Foster’s at Stourbridge would employ up to 5,000 men

and be worth half a million pounds or more. The Quaker London Lead Company

between 1815 and 1865 employed several hundred smelters besides an average of

865 miners. Thomas Williams, the ‘copper king’, who in 1800 controlled half the

British copper industry, employed 1,200–1,500 in his Anglesey mines, besides

smelters at half a dozen refineries, on a capital approaching one million pounds.

The four Swansea companies which dominated the industry in 1840 had capitals

over  200,000.

Even the little metal fabricating shops of the Birmingham and Sheffield nail,

toy and cutlery trades, with averages in 1871 of only 8, 9.5 and 21.5 workers began

to go into the factory. In 1841, for example, four steel screw factories employed

an average of 200 workers.

Many other industries, new and old, followed suit;

glass, chemicals, rubber, boots and shoes, ‘slop’ clothing, and so on. By 1871,

the average for all the 23,346 factories in the United Kingdom was 86 workers,

that for the 106,988 workshops in the returns only 5.

At that point the transition

from workshop to factory represented a roughly seventeen-fold rise in the size of

the unit of production.

By means of the rise in scale, with its twin principles, of specialization within

a large working team and the application of fixed capital in the form of labour-

saving machinery—which, indeed, was merely specialized labour in frozen or

concrete form—what Marx called the massive and colossal productive forces

slumbering in the lap of social labour were awakened,

and with them the vast

increase in productivity which was the Industrial Revolution in its narrower,

Pollard, op. cit., pp. 94–6; Baines, op. cit., pp. 342–3; Clapham, Economic History, II.

117; Charlotte Erickson. British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery, 1850–1950 (1959), p.

94.

Clapham, Economic History, II. 117–19; Mathias, Brewing Industry, pp. 25–6, 36;

Pollard, op. cit., p. 79.

Ashton, Iron and Steel, p. 100; Fong, op. cit., p. 141; Pollard, op. cit., p. 73; Barker and

Harris, op. cit., pp. 77–81; John, op. cit., p. 31.

Fong, op. cit., p. 149.

P.P., 1872, [c. 602], XVI. 37, Reports of Inspectors of Factories and Workshops, pp. 82–

90 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

technological aspect. According to an estimate of 1827 750 specialized operatives

in a cotton mill could produce as much yarn as 200,000 hand spinners. Thomas

Bell’s calico-printing machine, operated by one man and a boy, replaced a

hundred hand-block printers. Heath-cote’s bobbin-net machine reproduced 2,000-

fold, later 10,000-fold, the skilled movements of the pillow-lace maker.

Yet

however productive the machine, it could not install, supply, and operate itself or

dispose of its own products. What mattered was the social unit of production, the

divided and re-integrated labour of the working team, under the direction and

control of the organizer himself, the entrepreneur.

The entrepreneur, the active, working capitalist who both owned and managed

his own enterprise, was the key figure in the revolution in organization. He it

was who had to see and seize the market opportunity presented by the new

technology within the context of existing or potential demand, who had to

procure the capital or persuade partners to invest, find a site with, in the early

stages, a suitable fall of water and adequate communications, superintend the

building of the factory and the making and installation of the machinery, recruit,

train, direct and discipline the workers, and purchase the raw materials and

dispose of the finished article at remunerative prices. The trials and tribulations of

Arkwright, Wedgwood, Boulton, Owen, Oldknow, Heathcote and a great many

other early entrepreneurs are well known. On top of all the usual cares and

responsibilities of the merchant-employer, notably the mercantile functions of

buying and selling, they had the continuous control and direction of what

amounted to a whole new community of human beings. They might well have to

build houses for them, supply them with water and means of sewage and refuse

disposal, provide shops or a market, a church or chapel and a school, procure

legislation and build a turnpike road or a canal, maintain law and order, or even,

as in the case of the parish apprentices, feed, clothe and lodge the workers.

But whether or not they assumed these extraneous, communal responsibilities

—and time, usage, steampower and the factory town all tended to reduce them—

they could not escape their managerial functions within the factory itself. So

onerous were these functions, and so unlike anything that the merchant-capitalist

had met with before, that many preferred to continue with the old, less

productive system rather than, as the 1806 Committee on the Woollen

Manufactures put it, ‘submit to the constant trouble and solicitude of watching

over a numerous body of Workmen.’

Enforcing punctuality and regularity of

attendance and steady application to the work, upholding standards of quality

and quantity of output, preventing drunkenness, quarrelling, promiscuity,

unnecessary conversation, over-lengthy meal breaks or even too frequent visits to

Communist Manifesto (1848), in Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit., p. 138.

J.Farey, A Treatise an the Steam Engine (1827); Mantoux, op. cit., p. 250; W.Felkin,

‘Lace and Hosiery Trades of Nottingham’, Stat.J., 1866, XXIX. 540; Fong, op. cit., pp.

41, 204.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 91

the lavatory, awarding praise and very occasionally prizes to the diligent and

skilful, and fines or other punishment to the idle and clumsy, these were the

functions of the entrepreneur which the merchant-capitalist did not have to think

about.

In theory they could have been left to a salaried manager, as Adam Smith

suggested when distinguishing the ‘profits of stock’ from the ‘wages of

inspection and direction’:

In many great works almost the whole labour of this kind is committed to

some principal clerk. His wages properly express the value of this labour

of inspection and direction.

In practice honest, efficient, loyal managers without themselves a stake in the firm

—which would have made them entrepreneurs themselves—could rarely be

found until the later stages of the Industrial Revolution, one of the functions of

which was to create the professional manager.

In 1796 an ironfounder declared

that

the proprietor of these works by residing on the spot and being brought up

to the business in all its subordinate detail may make a livelihood, but that

it would never, I say never, answer conducted by a Manager.

And in 1816 the elder Sir Robert Peel declared:

It is impossible for a mill at any distance to be managed, unless it is under

the direction of a partner or superintendant who has an interest in the success

of the business.

The training and supervision of adequate managers and foremen was, as

Wedgwood found, just one more of the multitudinous functions of the

entrepreneur, and it is the considered opinion of the leading authority on the

subject that as a result of the Industrial Revolution

There were well-defined groups of managers in many industries: there

was, by 1830, as yet hardly a managerial profession as such.

Cf. S.Pollard, ‘The Factory Village in the Industrial Revolution’, E.H.R., 1964,

LXXIX. 312f.; Unwin et al., op. cit., chaps, ix, xi, xii, xiv, xvi.

P.P., 1806, III. 268, S.C. on the Woollen Manufacture of England, p. 10.

Cf. Pollard, Management, chap. v; Baines, op. cit., pp. 184–5; N.McKendrick,

‘Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline’, Hist.J., 1964, IV.

Smith, op. cit., I. 49–50.

Cf. Pollard, Management, esp. chap. iv.

92 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

By the mid-Victorian age, it is true, the scale of organization had risen in several

industries so far as to make delegation to salaried managers inescapable, and to

lift the capitalist himself in many cases beyond the plane of the simple owner-

manager. But until the rise of the big corporate capitalist in the second half of the

nineteenth century—a theme which will be taken up in Chapter X—the

entrepreneur was to be the typical business man of the new industrial system.

The new system spread only slowly to many industries, and was by no means

complete by the conventional end of the Industrial Revolution, but it had gone

far enough to dominate the economy:

in 1840 the factory system had become the prevalent system…in textiles

such as cotton, woollen, worsted, silk, flax and hemp; in metals such as

iron, engine-and-machine, button, screw, steel pen, needle, pin; and in

paper, pottery, and glass. In other manufactures, in metals such as nail,

anchor and chain, clock and watch, cutlery and gun; in clothing products

such as lace, ribbon, glove, hat and wearing apparel, the system was

making rapid headway…. In short, in the English manufactures…including

about one half of the manufacturing population of England in 1840, the

factory system had become the predominant system of industrial

organization.

By the time of the comprehensive factory and workshop returns of 1871–72

(which exclude the remaining domestic workers), four out of five of the workers

returned worked in factories, representing about half those engaged in

manufacturing of all kinds, and a much larger part of the total output.

The revolution in organization could not be confined to manufacturing, and its

reverberations were felt throughout the economy. The demand for coal,

especially with the general spread of steam power and railways in the second

quarter of the nineteenth century, meant deeper mines, larger and more efficient

pumping engines, winding gear, ventilation systems, and haulage and handling

facilities which, at different times and rates according to the geology and

accessibility of the different fields, increased the size, labour force and capital

investment of the average colliery. In the north-east, the first field affected, a

single pit in 1787 was said to have cost  20,000 to sink, and another by 1833

 70,000. By 1829 41 Tyneside collieries employed 12,000 men, an average of

A.Birch, ‘The Haigh Ironworks 1789–1856’, Bulletin of John Rylands Library, 1953,

XXXV. 330.

P.P., 1816, III, S.C. on Children employed in the Manufactories of Great Britain, p. 136;

Pollard, Management, p. 21.

Ibid., p. 159.

Fong, op. cit., p. 21.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 93