Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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support from perhaps four to upwards of twenty-five per square mile, and

provided surplus resources for the first towns, and so for the advent of

civilization itself.

The Neolithic Revolution was a precisely similar revolution in human

productivity, with similarly profound implications for social organization and

political and military power. The process of change was fundamentally the same:

an advance in technology involving a more refined division of labour which

released from the production of food much larger numbers of more variegated

specialists in the arts and crafts, religion and science, government and warfare. It

thus increased the collective power for construction and destruction, good and evil,

life and death, for organized human welfare and for the organized exploitation of

human beings. And the increased collective power over nature was bought at the

cost of a loss of simplicity and ‘wholeness’ and an added burden of social

discipline for the individual. The parallel even extends to the problems of

prehistorian and historian: in both cases knowledge of the origins and process of

change is limited by the fact that the means of knowledge, in the one case written

language, in the other precise social and economic statistics, were only produced

in the course and as a consequence of the revolution itself.

But here the parallel ends, for the Neolithic Revolution was but a partial

emancipation from the tyranny and niggardliness of nature. Starvation and

premature death were held at bay, not within human power to conquer, and the

wealth, leisure, knowledge and culture of the few were bought by the poverty,

drudgery, and ignorance of the many. Culture and civilization were not possible

in the pre-industrial world without exploitation, of slaves, serfs, or the ‘labouring

poor’. Though industrialism in the short run increased the possibility and perhaps

the degree of exploitation, in the long run it abolished the necessity. The

uniqueness of the historical Industrial Revolution is that it opened the road for

men to complete mastery of their physical environment, without the inescapable

need to exploit each other. If life and the ends of life are more than the material

means, it was a more than material revolution: in principle at least, it made it

possible that all men might have life, and might have it more abundantly, in that

wider choice of ends hitherto restricted to the few.

Only since the Second World War have economists and economic historians,

faced with the politically urgent problem of the under-developed majority of

countries, turned their attention to the comparative study of industrialization and

its causes. What has emerged most clearly from the attempt is the total

inadequacy of purely economic explanation of economic growth. The two most

brilliant and clear-sighted approaches to the problem, Arthur Lewis’s Theory of

Cf. V.G.Childe, ‘The Birth of Civilisation’, Past and Present, 1952, no. 2, and Man

makes Himself (1956), esp. chap. v.

For the origins of modern analytical statistics see Stat.J., 1838, I, Introduction, pp. 1–5,

and Annals of the Royal Statistical Society, 1834–1934 (1934), chap. i.

4 THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Economic Growth and W.W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, rapidly

move beyond the economic causes to the social and political factors underlying

them. Professor Lewis keeps in the forefront throughout his book the

fundamental role, in encouraging or inhibiting growth of the non-economic

institutions: the family, religion, property law, social class, government, and so

on, and the human attitudes and beliefs which shape them. Professor Rostow

defines the ‘take-off into self-sustained economic growth’ as the period in which

‘the economy and the society of which it is a part transform themselves in such

ways that economic growth is, subsequently, more or less automatic’; and its

fundamental characteristic—together with ‘a rise in the rate of productive

investment from, say, 5 per cent or less to over 10 per cent of national income

(or net national product)’ and ‘the development of one or more substantial

manufacturing sectors, with a high rate of growth’—as ‘the existence or quick

emergence of a political, social and institutional framework which exploits the

impulses to expansion…and gives to growth an on-going character.’

Both Lewis

and Rostow reject out of hand the naïve assumption that capital investment alone

is the sole necessary and sufficient cause of economic growth.

Yet neither of them offers a satisfactory alternative analysis of the causes of

the pioneer Industrial Revolution in Britain. Professor Lewis does not set out to

do so: his suggestive work, though bursting with ideas for such an analysis, seeks

only ‘to provide an appropriate framework for studying economic development’

in the world today. Professor Rostow’s model is a descriptive not a causal one, in

which the stages of the process are delineated but the causes lie outside, largely

in the deliberate choice of societies to industrialize. Aside from his economic

contribution of ‘sectoral analysis’, the nearest approach to consideration of the

antecedent causes is in the first stage, that of the ‘preconditions’ of take-off.

These preconditions are, on the economic side, a rise in productivity in

agriculture and the extractive industries, and the building of ‘social overhead

capital’ in the form of railways, ports and roads; on the non-economic side,

certain types of ‘societal change’, notably the lifting of the ‘horizon of

expectations’, the readiness of certain groups to invest and of others to accept

industrial training, and the appearance of a new élite of entrepreneurs and their

allies, able to divert flows of income into creative investment and exploit the

elasticities of consumer demand. Neither kind of precondition has the status of an

autonomous cause, even acting in conjunction with the other. For historians

concerned less with establishing the concept of take-off than with the origins of

industrialization, the changes in agriculture, mining and transport are an integral

part of the Industrial Revolution, not some antecedent cause, and are therefore

part of the thing to be explained. As for the non-economic preconditions, we may

Rostow, ‘The Take-off into Self-Sustained Economic Growth’, Ec.J., 1956, LXVI. 25,

and Stages, p. 39 (my italics); cf. W.A.Lewis, Theory of Economic Growth (1955), pp. 84–

90.

THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 5

readily accept as axiomatic that industrialization required fundamental changes

in the traditional society, but this does not answer the crucial causal question.

Why did such changes occur? What brought them about? And why did they occur

in one society rather than another?

Rostow’s answer to these questions is in terms of the deliberate choice of

societies to industrialize, and, leaving aside the small group of nations ‘born

free’ as offshoots of a Britain already in possession of the preconditions, he

attributes this choice in practically all cases to a ‘reactive nationalism’ against

intrusion or the threat of intrusion by industrially and militarily more advanced

societies.

As Rostow is aware, this explanation is more satisfactory for all later

examples than it is for the pioneer industrial revolution, that of Britain. It is easy

to see, once the pattern and potentialities of industrialism had been exemplified

in one tremendously successful case, why undeveloped societies should seek

development, and how industrial revolutions in Western Europe, America, Japan

and Russia could be motivated by envy and engineered by imitation. But the

pioneer country had no such ready-made blueprint and no such patent motivation.

The Industrial Revolution in Britain was an unsought, unplanned, unprecedented

phenomenon. Why did it happen at all? Why when it did? And why in Britain

first, and not some other country?

The causes of the Industrial Revolution are so complex and manifold as at first

sight to constitute almost the whole antecedent history of Britain. Which causes

are to be given primacy depends on the level of explanation demanded and found

satisfying.

At the first level, the immediate cause of the increase in productiveness was

undoubtedly technological. The factory system and all that went with it was

manifestly the product of the great inventions in metallurgy, cotton-manufacture,

and powered machinery: Darby’s coke-smelting of iron, Huntsman’s spring

steel, Cort’s puddling and rolling process, Hargreave’s jenny, Arkwright’s water-

frame and carding engine, Crompton’s mule, Cartwright’s power-loom, the

Fourdriniers’ paper-making machine, Bramah, Maudslay, Nasmyth and

Whitworth’s machine tools, above all the great development of the steam engine

from Savery and Newcomen to Watt and Stephenson.

But the technological factor has only to be stated for it to be seen to be a

necessary but not a sufficient cause. Underlying it and making its operation

possible was a wealth of factors equally material. First there were the favourable

natural circumstances: a healthy, boisterous climate, with abundant supplies of

water for power and processing; the proximity of large deposits of coal, iron ore

and limestone; an island position with good harbours and ready access to

navigable water and the ocean trade routes. Next came the peculiar combination

of economic factors enjoyed by Britain at the critical period: a population

expanding fast enough to provide both an expanding working force and a

Ibid. pp. 17, 34–5.

6 THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

vigorous, elastic home demand for cheap consumer goods, yet slowly enough to

provide incentives for labour-saving inventions, and to avoid the Malthusian

threat of population outrunning resources; cheap and plentiful supplies of capital

and extraordinarily low rates of interest; land owned in conveniently large blocks

by owners willing to develop it; above all perhaps, a body of active and willing

entrepreneurs ready to seize opportunities of profit wherever they occurred.

Together these natural, technological and economic advantages enabled

Britain to take the decisive lead among European nations in exploiting the

enormous expansion of international trade, the springs of which can ultimately

be traced back to the geographical discoveries of the post-medieval period,

which transposed Britain from the periphery to the cross-roads of the

commercial world. It has been argued that the growth of the international

market, slowly ripening up to 1780, was ‘the most vital circumstance for the first

industrial revolution’, presenting a glittering prize for the first country in the

European trading area able to seize it by the mass-production of some line of

cheap consumer goods, a prize which would within a very short time have been

seized, if not by Britain, then by Belgium, France, the Prussian Rhineland, or

some other well-placed Continental country with adequate resources and access

to maritime trade.

The argument has the important merit of re-emphasizing the

ecumenical, even the world-wide economic context of the British transition, and

the inadequacy of tackling economic growth in terms of close homogeneous

societies. Though it has not quite the same logical status, it is of course as

incontrovertible as the proximate technological causation of industrialism:

without the rapid growth of foreign trade the British economy could not have

expanded so fast, and a fortiori might not have ‘taken off’.

Large exports of manufactures, nevertheless, can be mounted only on the basis

of a substantial home market. From the 1770’s to the 1840’s overseas trade,

according to the best available estimates, kept roughly in step with total industrial

production, the index of relationship standing much the same in the 1840’s as in

the 1770’s and 1790’s. In the crucial decade of the 1780’s it was actually lower

than in the previous three decades, that is, production was expanding faster than

foreign trade.

Moreover, Britain from as early as 1796 was on balance an

importing country, financing allies and building up trading credits by the profits

on the invisible exports of shipping, banking and insurance services.

Thus

throughout the Industrial Revolution by far the greater part, perhaps four-fifths,

of the growing total production, together with the still faster growth of net

K.Berrill, ‘International Trade and the Rate of Economic Growth’, Ec.H.R., 1960, XII.

351–8.

W.Schlote, British Overseas Trade from 1700 to the 1930s (trans. W.H. Chaloner and

W.O.Henderson, Oxford, 1952), p. 51, table 11.

A.H.Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 40–

THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 7

imports, was absorbed by the home market, and it is the remarkable expansion of

home demand which needs to be explained.

Even in cotton, the trade on which this argument heavily leans since an

extraordinarily large proportion of total production was exported, the ratio of

exports to production was scarcely more than a third at the beginning and about

half towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, in spite of a 75-fold increase in

the consumption of raw cotton.

Colquhoun, voicing the cotton manufacturers’

resentment at Indian competition in the crisis of 1787–8, clearly considered the

home market to be the vital one: ‘From the rapid increase in trade, it is plain to

demonstration, that in the common article of apparel there is not room in the

British markets both for home manufacturers, and for the same species of goods

imported from India.’

And the tribulations of the export trade during the great

French Wars of 1793–1815, though they slowed up the rate of growth, did not

apparently prevent the industry from completing its ‘take-off’. Moreover, more

recently, those economies, such as the Southern United States, Arabia, Iran and

Malaya, which have enormously expanded their foreign earnings without an

adequate foundation of home demand have singularly failed to ‘take off’.

Thus the question of foreign trade, like that of technological causation, merely

pushes the problem a stage further back without completely solving it. Why was

Britain so pre-eminently fitted to seize the opportunity offered by expanding

foreign trade? What accounts for the extraordinary elasticity of home demand for

cheap manufactured goods on which the export trade was built? Why was Britain

not merely first in the race, but half a century ahead of the nearest competitor?

To these questions foreign trade, open by definition to all comers, offers a helpful

but necessarily partial and inadequate answer.

The purely material factors, then, prove to be a necessary but insufficient

cause. At a somewhat deeper level of explanation we can point, as patriotic

contemporaries did, to Britain’s political good fortune. Centuries of freedom

from invasion and distracting frontier troubles, save for the interlude of the Civil

War, gave her the best of both worlds, encouragement for the arts of peace

together with the periodical stimulus of safely external war. After 1603 or at

latest 1707, internal unity and freedom from artificial barriers to commercial

intercourse made her the largest free-trade area in Europe, a wide market in

which to practise the enlargement of the division of labour. Entrepreneurs were

encouraged by low internal taxes, high external tariffs and navigation laws, and

by the almost sacrosanct security of property and profits. There was, moreover,

from 1660 onwards an almost complete absence of government interference with

innovating enterprise, which amounted to effective laissez-faire in internal trade

and industry a full century before it was put forward as a conscious object of

E.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), pp. 217–18.

P.Colquhoun, An Important Crisis in the Callico and Muslin Manufactory of Great

Britain Explained (1788), p. 15.

8 THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

policy, here or elsewhere. Laissez-faire may not be the best policy for mounting

a deliberately imitative or reactive industrial revolution, where it may become

‘the inescapable responsibility of the state to make sure the stock of social

overhead capital required for take-off is built’,

but there can be no doubt of the

importance of its role in the British case of a spontaneous revolution in a

dogmatically mercantilist world. Even so, the role of the state was an important

if negative one: to look benevolently on economic innovation, and to permit the

provision in the shape of private enclosure, canal and turnpike bills and the like

of the necessary legislative framework of industrial change. There can be no

doubt that political causes played a highly significant part in the genesis of the

Industrial Revolution. Yet, as with the technological and economic causes we

cannot rest there, but are driven beyond them, to ask why and how the rulers and

the political structure of Britain became so favourable to economic growth?

At a still deeper level of causation, there was the profound change in human

expectations of life in this world and its potentialities for mankind which

stemmed from the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. At this subtlest and

most discreet, yet not the least effective, of levels there was a causal chain,

elusive as gossamer, strong as steel, connecting the Industrial Revolution with

the philosophical transformation of Western man’s outlook on the universe in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How far the new optimistic rationalism had

become part of the texture of common thought can be seen from that

conservative mirror of the age, the Annual Register’s review in 1800 of the

closing century, which confidently expected social progress from the mere

enlargement of ‘the sphere of facts’:

On a general recollection or review of the state of society, or human

nature, in the eighteenth century, the ideas that recur oftenest, and remain

uppermost in the mind, are the three following: the inter-courses of men

were more extensive than at any former period with which we are

acquainted; the progression of knowledge was more rapid; and the

discoveries of philosophy were applied more than they had been before to

practical purposes.

It noted the effect of improved communications in science, commerce, colonial

expansion, psychology, the revolutionary politics of the day, and the increasing

scale of warfare. Even such moral advance as there had been came not from an

increase in Christian morality, which was the same as in ‘harsher centuries’: ‘the

present age may be called the age of humanity. Whence this happy change? Not

from the progressive effects of moral disquisitions and lectures: not even from

the progressive effects of preaching, trimmed up by the artifices of composition

Rostow, Stages, p. 30.

THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 9

taught by professors of rhetoric; but from the progressive inter-courses of men

with men, minds with minds, of navigation, commerce, arts, and sciences?’

The practical application of the ‘discoveries of philosophy’ is familiar from

the well-known evolution of Watt’s steam engine via Newcomen’s atmospheric

engine and Savery’s steam pump from Robert Boyle’s air-pump experiments

before the Royal Society. Such direct causality was rare, however, and since

most inventions were made by practical men with few pretensions to scientific

training, we must fall back on the indirect connection, ‘the impulse to contrive’,

to solve practical problems by rational experiment, which was so large and

fashionable a feature of the age which founded the Society of Arts, and which

interested the rich and influential like Lords Dundonald, Bridge water,

Townshend and Leicester in the humble techniques of metallurgy, civil

engineering and agriculture. Perhaps most important of all was the mere belief in

the worth and possibility of material progress, which the seventeenth century

postulated and the eighteenth century established. As Carl Becker has brilliantly

illustrated, ‘the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers’ was the

future itself.

Whether or not the apotheosis of the future was any more rational

than the apotheosis of the past which it victoriously displaced in the famous

literary battle of the Ancients and Moderns, or than that of some other world than

this, which the Renaissance undermined, it was undoubtedly a more potent

concept for the purpose of changing the present state of the world. In this wide,

general sense the philosophical revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries prepared men’s minds and emotions for profound changes, and so for

both the French and Industrial Revolutions.

Yet we are still bound to ask: why a political revolution in France, and an

industrial one in Britain? The stream of thought which flowed from the

Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, like the expansion of international

trade, fertilized the whole of the western world. As James Keir, the industrial

chemist, pointed out in 1789, ‘The diffusion of a general knowledge, and of a

taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation of Europe, or of

European origin, seems to be the characteristic feature of the present age,’

Only

in Britain did it stimulate before the middle decades of the nineteenth century the

vigorous growth of an industrial civilization; and we are still constrained to ask,

why?

At the deepest level of all, that of the individual’s relation with his God, lie the

religious causes of economic growth. Here we seem to be in the midst of the

inmost springs of human character and purpose, where ‘the capitalist spirit’ and

‘the Protestant ethic’, ‘labouring in one’s vocation’ and ‘the soul naked before

God’ mingle in psychic turmoil. Max Weber’s all-too-famous correlation

between capitalism and Protestantism has raised far more problems than it

Annual Register, 1800, pp. 222, 236.

T.S.Ashton, An Economic History of England: the 18th Century (1955), p. 104.

10 THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

solved. At one extreme stands the problem of medieval commercial and financial

capitalism—far more dangerous to the soul than the industrial variety—which

reached its highest development in the Catholic cities of Italy, the Rhine and the

southern Netherlands and infected the Papacy itself; at the other, the violent

denunciations of usury and profiteering in Luther’s Germany, Calvin’s Geneva

and the England of the Puritans. It requires all the subtlety of a Tawney to draw a

convincing web of interconnection between the two which does not do violence

to either or to history. What remains from the attempt is the original illuminating

but irreducible pair of facts: that the kind of mind which was attracted to

capitalist dealing was often, though not always, attracted to the sterner sorts of

Protestantism; and that the narrowly self-regarding external moral uprightness

enjoined, though not always enforced, by Protestant churches was not

unconducive to success in business. Whichever came first in their experience and

motivation, both capitalism and Protestantism were often found together in the

same person.

In the British Industrial Revolution the role of Dissenting iron-masters,

factory-masters, bankers and the like, is too wellknown to need emphasis.

Whether such men chose industrial enterprise because they were shut out by

their religious affiliation from the accepted roads to social status or prestige, or

whether the exclusion of the social groups whence enterprise could be expected

from the higher reaches of social status and prestige did not prejudice the choice

of their religion will be discussed later. Meanwhile, since, as Rostow points out,

industrial revolutions have occurred in societies with almost every variety of

religious belief and, as Arthur Lewis points out, in most countries religion has

proved to be a brake on economic development, we may conclude that in the

British case the possession of an uninhibiting religion was a significant but

strictly ancillary factor.

So much, then, for the fortuitous combination of geographical, technological,

economic, political, philosophic and religious causes which Rostow calls ‘the

classic answer’ to the ‘interesting historical problem’ of why the first industrial

revolution took place in Britain and not elsewhere. ‘It is, essentially, that in the

late eighteenth century, while many parts of Western Europe were caught up in a

version of the preconditions process, only in Britain were the necessary and

sufficient conditions fulfilled for a take-off. This combination of necessary and

sufficient conditions for take-off in Britain was the result of the convergence of a

number of quite independent circumstances, a kind of statistical accident of

history which, once having occurred, was irreversible, like the loss of

innocence.’ He too finds the answer not completely satisfying, and refuses to

C.L.Becker, The Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers (New Haven, Conn.,

1932).

J.Keir, Dictionary of Chemistry (1789), p. iii; A.E.Musson, and E.Robinson, ‘Science

and Industry in the late 18th Century’, Ec.H.R., 1960, XIII. 222.

THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 11

believe that the conjunction of circumstances was altogether accidental. His own

answer to the ‘deeper questions’ of why Britain was specially fitted to enjoy and

exploit these advantages ‘places Britain back in the general case, to some

significant degree,’ as ‘a society modernizing itself in a nationalist reaction to

intrusion or the threat of intrusion from more advanced powers abroad’—the

Roman Church and Spain in the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the seventeenth,

the French in the eighteenth. Thus ‘British nationalism…may have been a major

force in creating a relatively flexible social matrix within which the process of

building the preconditions for take-off was hastened in Britain; and in that

limited sense the first take-off takes its place, despite many unique features, with

the others.’

While this answer gives a hint of the direction in which a solution might be

found, it is no more satisfactory than the rest. What European country in the

turbulent post-medieval rise of nation-states was not threatened by and forced to

react against powerful neighbours? Where in that age of mercantilist competition

did nationalism not play a part in economic policy? Did government economic

policy in fact play any positive part in mounting the first industrial revolution? And

if so, why did it not occur in France, where both government policy and

government control of industry were consciously directed towards economic

growth? Most pertinent of all, how and why did a reactive nationalism lead to a

flexible social structure in Britain when elsewhere (except in Holland) it so

patently led to the reverse, to the entrenched survival of exclusive, reactionary

military aristocracies? Rostow’s answer raises more problems than it solves, and

no more accounts for the social adaptability and economic opportunism of

Britain in the critical period than the fortuitous ‘classic answer’.

Fortunately, there is a hint here of the one level of explanation in which all the

other levels can be said to meet, and which not only united the foregoing necessary

and ancillary causes and brought them into convergent and harmonious operation

but made them collectively sufficient. That central, integrating cause was the

nature and structure of English society. As W.H.B.Court has said of the Industrial

Revolution, ‘the first requisite of increased wealth is a society of the kind

required to produce it.’

The only spontaneous industrial revolution in history

occurred in Britain because Britain alone amongst the nations with the full

complement of economic resources and psychological attitudes had the right

kind of society to generate a spontaneous industrial revolution. (Holland, the

only other country with the right kind-of society, had the psychological attitudes

but not the natural resources.) As we shall see in Chapter III, whether we

consider the general, predisposing political, philosophic and religious factors or

the narrowly economic factors of labour, land, capital, enterprise and invention,

what brought them to bear in the concrete world of practical realities were the

unique institutional features of British society. What those dynamic features

Rostow, Stages, pp. 31–5.

12 THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

were, how they came into being, and how they differed from those of all

Continental countries except Holland, is a matter of concrete history. To

understand them and their part in the genesis of industrialism we must begin,

therefore, by considering the nature and structure of the society which generated

the first Industrial Revolution.

W.H.B.Court, A Concise Economic History of Britain from 1750 to Recent Times

(Cambridge, 1954), p. 16.

THE MORE THAN INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 13