Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

efficiently or, indeed, at all. These could be subsumed under ‘transaction costs’

and ‘agency relations’, that is the human inputs involving mutual trust and

confidence on which all business and government depend. This approach,

interestingly, echoed the insights of Arthur Lewis and Walt Rostow in the 1950s

noticed below, who saw the importance of ‘preconditions’ like societal change,

social overhead capital, the role of women, and the effects of rising living

standards on birth rates and population growth. Economic history had come full

circle, to bring back the social contribution to productivity and growth. In other

words, the Industrial Revolution was once again restored as a social revolution.

More recently, social history, like all ‘positivist’ history, has been assailed by

postmodernism, the ‘linguistic turn’, and the cultural approach. Some of its

protagonists, like Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow, more interested in theory

than in historical evidence, have even prophesied ‘the possible end of history and

ethics under the impact of the postmodern’. They believe that history is a text, a

literary construct, and is therefore no different from fiction, to be read according

to each reader’s whim. Of course, in one sense it is: we all construct our own

version of how we see the past. But that is only one meaning of history, which is

not merely ambiguous but ‘triguous’. It has three, not two, meanings. History 1

is what happened, which no longer exists and, as the postmodernists rightly say,

is ultimately irrecoverable. History 3 is what we make of it, in our literary

accounts which have all the flaws of selection, omission and bias that we bring to

them. But the pivot of the balance is History 2, the evidence of the past, not only

in written archives which are only a tiny fraction of the record but also in the

physical environment all around us in the buildings, artifacts, towns and cities,

and in the immaterial remains in the ideas, habits and customs we inherit from

our forbears. History 3 may be a construct but it is neither random nor arbitrary

since it has to be compatible with History 2, the still existing visible and invisible

evidence. Like all knowledge, scientific as well as ‘common sense’, it is of

course provisional, but it will serve until the evidence disproves or modifies it or

makes it irrelevant.

Moreover, postmodernists were by no means the first to deal with the cultural

dimension. All the great historians of the past, from Thucydides and Tacitus

through Gibbon and Macaulay, had a holistic view that took account of all

aspects of the past including the social and the cultural. The text below includes

topics as cultural as religion and morals, family life and fashion, and the

‘mentalités’ of social classes. This, however, exposes the ambiguity at the heart

of the cultural turn: the difference between culture in its aesthetic and

anthropological meanings. The first, art, literature, music, drama, sport and

leisure, is embraced by social history; the second, the life of human beings in

communities, is what but social history itself. Either way, social history survives

the onslaught and comes away unscathed.

This book was conceived as a total social history in the tradition of the great

holistic historians of the past. As such, it does not exclude any human activity

that happened in society, not even politics and economics, political and social

thought, the arts and sciences where they are relevant. In my mind was the

expectation that if my approach to social history succeeded it would work itself

out of a job and restore the kind of comprehensive history that once occupied

historians before the Victorians dissected and fragmented it into discrete

disciplines. That expectation has not been fully achieved. Rather, with the

expansion of the academy and the proliferation of professors, the subject has

been further centrifuged into a hundred isotopes. That, given the enormous

public interest in historical programmes in the media, from ‘Timewatch’ to

‘Meet the Ancestors’, is no bad thing, as long as it can be brought together again

in people’s minds, as the diverse aspects of our lives have to be integrated in our

own experience. Since everything happens in society, social history is the best

place for its reintegration. This book is a small contribution to that desirable aim.

Little Venice, W2 HAROLD PERKIN

March, 2002

Preface to the First Edition

SOME years ago I argued the case for social history as a vertebrate discipline

built around a central organizing theme, the history of society quâ society, of social

structure in all its manifold and constantly changing ramifications. I added that

this kind of comprehensive social history should—indeed, could only—deal with

one society at a time and over a finite period.

By thus nailing my historical

colours to the mast I took on the obligation of attempting such a comprehensive

social history. This book is the result—the inadequate result, it goes without

saying, where both the society and the period are so large and complete

comprehension unattainable—of that attempt. It concerns the emergence in

England of that modern class society which we in the twentieth century have

inherited from our Victorian predecessors, and are engaged in reshaping in ways

which fall outside the compass of this volume. The origins of modern English

society, as indeed of all modern developed and developing societies, go back to

the seminal period both for Britain and for the rest of the world which we

inadequately call the Industrial Revolution.

The central organizing theme of the book is the belief that the Industrial

Revolution was no mere sequence of changes in industrial techniques and

production, but a social revolution with social causes and a social process as well

as profound social effects. It was a revolution in human productivity, in the

capacity of men to wring a living from nature, and therefore in both the number

of human beings who could be supported on a given area of land and the

abundance of their means and enjoyment of life. Since it was the first and only

spontaneous industrial revolution of modern times, it required a society of a

peculiar, not to say unique, kind to generate it, and the first three chapters lay out

the problem of its causation, attempt to delineate the peculiarities and uniqueness

of pre-industrial society in England, and explain the specific ways in which, if it

did not create, it at least drew together into productive harmony the traditional

economic, technological, political, intellectual and cultural causes of

industrialism. Chapter IV deals, all too briefly, with the social process of

‘Social History’, in H.P.R.Finberg, ed., Approaches to History (1962), pp. 51–82.

industrialization, through the rise in the number, size and complexity of human

institutions, political and administrative, educational and even religious, as well

as purely industrial and economic, and the migration of people from old to new

communities, jobs and social roles which it entailed. Chapter V summarizes the

more obvious social effects of industrialism, upon living standards, family life,

and the growth of towns. The most important social effects, however, and the

heart of the book, are the growth of a new social structure within and its ultimate

replacement of the old, the birth of a new society based on the horizontal

solidarities of class in place of the old vertical connections of dependency or

patronage (chapter VI), and its growth through the violent conflicts of its early

nineteenth-century adolescence into the viable class society of its mid-Victorian

maturity (chapters VII–IX). Finally, chapter X explores the tensions between the

ideal and the reality of this viable class society, and the underlying instability

which brought it, by 1880, to the threatened loss of viability and a further round

of social change.

Comprehensive social history of this kind, however limited its success,

obviously cannot be the unaided work of one historian. Ideally, perhaps, it should

be teamwork, with many specialists, and not only historians, contributing their

expertise, though the whole at the end best refined in the reverberating furnace of

a single mind. Failing that, the lone historian, as in this case, must gather his raw

or semi-finished materials—and, occasionally, highly finished components—

wherever he can, and from whoever can supply them. As will be apparent from

the footnotes, a vast number of historians have contributed, unwittingly for the

most part, to the making of this book, and I should like to thank all of them

unreservedly for their invaluable help, while freely absolving them from any

responsibility for the author’s errors. Amongst so many names it would be

invidious to anticipate any here, but I cannot forbear to mention my debt to the

other authors in the Series to which this book belongs for what I have learned as

editor from them, especially from those who have written on aspects of the same

period. I am also indebted to numberless friends and colleagues, some of them far

removed from my own field, for patiently discussing and constructively

criticizing some of my themes and views, notably W.H.G. Armytage,

T.C.Barker, D.E.C.Eversley, H.E.Hallam, J.F.C.Harrison, E.J.Hobsbawm,

H.G.Koenigsberger, J.M.Lee, Gordon Leff, J.D.Marshall, G.E.Mingay, A.E.

Musson, Henry Parris, Eric Robinson, W.W.Rostow, Brian Simon, Frank Glover

Smith, E.P.Thompson, F.M.L.Thompson, Penry Williams, and the late

R.H.Tawney. Some went further still, and undertook the onerous burden of

reading and commenting on part or all of the manuscript, and these deserve a

special thank-you: Asa Briggs, J.D.Chambers, R.J.White, T.S.Willan, and my

colleagues A.H.Woolrych, J.A.Tuck and G.A.Phillips. I should also like to

record my gratitude to Sir William Mansfield Cooper, Vice-Chancellor, and the

Council of the Victoria University of Manchester for granting me two sabbatical

terms in 1965, which proved invaluable for collecting material and writing part of

xiii

the work before the exciting but laborious demands of an appointment in a new

university engulfed me.

To my teachers I owe a special debt and would like to express my special

gratitude: above all to Mr. J.C.W.Ludlow, formerly senior history master at

Hanley High School, Stoke-on-Trent, and now of Worthing, who first showed

me that the Industrial Revolution was important and a problem, to Professor

Charles Wilson of Jesus College, Cambridge, who showed me the breadth and

unity of modern British history, and to Mr. R.J. White of Downing College,

Cambridge, who showed me the crucial historical role of social ideas and beliefs,

and the centrality of the Regency period in the transition from pre-industrial to

industrial society. Finally, I should like to single out for gratitude as large, if that

is possible, as his boundless encouragement and support, Professor Asa Briggs,

Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and doyen of English

social historians, who showed the way and travelled most of it— though not, he

would agree, in quite the same manner—before me.

Borwicks, HAROLD PERKIN

Caton,

Lancaster.

September 1967.

xiv

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE

FOOTNOTES

Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine

B.J.Sociology British Journal of Sociology

C.R.O. County Record Office

D.N.B. Dictionary of National Biography

E.H.R. English Historical Review

Ec.H.R. Economic History Review

Ec.H. (Ec.J.) Economic History (Supplement to Economic Journal)

Ec.J. Economic Journal

Edin.Rev. Edinburgh Review

H. of C. House of Commons

H. of L. House of Lords

Hist.J. Historical Journal

Int.Rev. of

Soc.Hist.

International Review of Social History

J.Ec.H. Journal of Economic History

J.Mod.H. Journal of Modern History

P.P. Parliamentary Papers

Q.R. Quarterly Review

R.C. Royal Commission

S.C. Select Committee

Stat.J. Journal of the London (later Royal) Statistical Society

Trans.N.A.P.S.S

Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of

Social Science

Trans.R.H.S. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

West.Rev. Westminster Review

NOTE: in citing periodicals no reference is made to new, second or subsequent

series, the date and volume number being deemed sufficient identification.

xvi

The More Than Industrial Revolution

MODERN society in Britain, as in all the ‘developed’ societies of East and

West, stems directly from that ‘vast increase of natural resources, labour, capital

and enterprise’

which began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and,

spreading outwards from there like the ripples on a pond, is still in process of

transforming the whole world. The effects of the Industrial Revolution, as it is

inadequately called, are still working themselves out, not only on the global

stage, but in Britain itself, the first country affected by it and, with the exception

of the United States, the one which it has most completely transformed. Much of

what we recognize around us as most contemporary, most characteristic of the

mid-twentieth century, not merely in the achievements of science and technology

but in the most recently recognized trends in social and political organization, is

the direct, logistic development of forces set in motion in the Britain of George

III. Modern society, no less than its immediate predecessor, the half-way house of

Victorian industrial capitalism, has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, and so

it is with the Industrial Revolution that we must begin.

Contemporaries were aware of the remarkable acceleration of economic

growth which began in Britain in the last decades of the eighteenth century. ‘An

aera has arrived in the affairs of the British Empire, discovering resources which

have excited the wonder, the astonishment, and perhaps the envy of the civilized

world,’ wrote Patrick Colquhoun in 1814, and went on to describe ‘the

accumulation of property, extensive beyond all credibility, and (during a war of

unexampled expense) rapid in its growth beyond what the most sanguine mind

could have conceived…. It is scarcely necessary to enter into details for the

purpose of proving that the prosperity of the British nation has been rapid beyond

all example, particularly within the last sixty years.’

Whether or not we accept

all the implications of Rostow’s ‘take-off in to self-sustained economic growth’

between 1783 and 1802,

it is clear that these years spanned the central phase of

a transition which was to carry the British economy from a lower to a higher

T.S.Ashton, ‘Some Statistics of the Industrial Revolution in Britain’, Manchester

School, 1948, XVI. 215.

plane of productiveness, and create the framework of the modern industrial

system. Between 1780 and 1800 British foreign trade, whether measured in

shipping tonnage cleared from the ports or in export and import values, nearly

trebled. Between 1750 and 1800 coal production doubled, from under five to ten

million tons. Between 1788 and 1806 pig iron production, already four times that

of 1740, almost quadrupled again, from 68,000 to 250,000 tons. Most

spectacular of all was the growth of the pioneer machine industry, cotton:

between 1781 and 1800 raw cotton imports quintupled, from 10.9 to 51.6 million

pounds.

Though other industries were not advancing so rapidly, and the growth

industries are perhaps overweighted in the figures, total industrial production in

the last twenty years of the century is estimated to have doubled,

and the

transition to modern industrialism had begun.

The acceleration of that transition, let us remind ourselves, was astonishing.

During the course of the nineteenth century the British economy grew

prodigiously. Exports rose sevenfold (allowing for falling prices, tenfold) from

about  40 million to over  280 million a year; imports still faster, from about

 30 million to over  500 million a year; while the widening gap between them was

filled to overflowing by the growth of the ‘invisibles’—shipping, banking,

insurance, and returns on investments—which rewarded the first competitor in

the field, and built up an accumulated balance of overseas credit which grew

nearly a hundredfold, from  25 million in 1816 to  2,400 million in 1900.

Production in the leading industries advanced in step with trade: coal output rose

more than twentyfold, from 10 to 225 million tons a year; pig-iron more than

thirty-fold, from 250,000 to 9 million tons; raw cotton consumed more than

thirtyfold, from 52 to 1,624 million pounds; paper more than forty-fold, from

under 15,000 to over 600,000 tons. Older industries—agriculture, wool and

worsted, silk and linengrew less fast, but newer ones—engineering, steel,

chemicals, gas and electricity—still faster. Total industrial production may have

grown as much as four teen-fold during the century—a rough indicator, but one

which gives some idea of the unprecedented scale of economic growth which the

Industrial Revolution set in motion.

P.Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire

(1814), p. 49.

W.W.Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1960), p. 38.

T.Chalmers, An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain (1803), pp.

231f.; P.Deane and W.A.Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1962),

p. 321; T.S.Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (Oxford, 1948), p. 39;

G.R.Porter, The Progress of the Nation (ed F.W.Hirst, 1912), pp. 237–8; J.A.Mann, The

Cotton Trade of Great Britain (1860), p. 93.

W.G.Hoffmann, British Industry, 1700–1950 (trans. W.H.Chaloner and

W.O.Henderson, Oxford, 1955), table 54: indices of total industrial production 1780 and

1800, excluding building, 2–43 and 5–65; including building, 3–67 and 8.87 (1913=100).

2 THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The Industrial Revolution, however, was more than an expansion of

commerce, more than a series of changes in the technology of certain industries,

more even than an acceleration of general economic growth. It was a revolution

in men’s access to the means of life, in control over their ecological

environment, in their capacity to escape from the tyranny and niggardliness of

nature. At the material level it can be described as a rise in human productivity,

industrial, agricultural and demographic, on such a scale that it raised as it were,

the logarithmic index of society: that is, it increased by a multiple (rather than a

fraction) both the number of human beings which a given area of land could

support, and their standard of life, or consumption per head of goods and

services. In the course of six centuries after the Norman Conquest the population

of England and Wales perhaps quadrupled, while for the majority of the people

the standard of life fluctuated between actual starvation and mere poverty, and

rose, when at all, with painful slowness. During the nineteenth century

population more than trebled, while per capita industrial production and real

income quadrupled. Such a rise in the scale of life required, involved and implied

drastic changes in society itself: in the size and distribution of the population, in

its social structure and organization, and in the political and administrative

superstructure which they demanded and supported. It was in brief a social

revolution: a revolution in social organization, with social causes as well as

social effects.

This view implies that the Industrial Revolution was—and is—a unique phase

of historical development: the one-way road which, if travelled successfully,

leads from the undeveloped society’s comparative poverty, insecurity, and

dependence on the bounty of nature to the comparative wealth, security and

freedom of choice of the developed society. It is an irreversible revolution, in that

any return to lower levels of productiveness would involve a catastrophe of such

magnitude as almost certainly to bring down civilization with it, if not to destroy

human life itself, and one compared with which the hydrogen bomb would be

but a preliminary disaster.

On this view, the discovery of industrial revolutions wherever there occurred

considerable technological changes, however innovatory and dramatic, such as

thirteenth-century fulling mills, sixteenth-century blast furnaces, or early

eighteenth-century silk-throwing mills, is unjustified. Important as such

technical innovations undoubtedly were, they did not have the profound, large-

scale implications for the whole of society of the Industrial Revolution. For a

parallel worthy of the name we have to go back to pre-history, to the Neolithic

Revolution which substituted for the hunting and food-gathering economy settled

agriculture and stock-rearing, raised the maximum population the land could

Porter, op. cit., pp. 222, 242, 309, 477, 520; A.H.Imlah, ‘British Balance of Payments

and Export of Capital, 1816–1913’, Ec.H.R., 1952, V. 234–8; Hoffmann, table 54 and

sources cited pp. ix–xi.

THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 3