Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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the Statute Book and the actual administration of parish officers there was, in the

eighteenth century, only a casual connection’, could be applied pari passu to all

branches of social and economic legislation.

As Davenant put it in 1699,

‘Nowadays Laws are not much observed, which do not in a manner execute

themselves.’

For the landowners by abolishing the prerogative courts had drawn

the teeth of the monarchy, and effectively prevented the Crown from backing up

its control over those whom it did not actually pay for their services, by any

other means than the weak, haphazard and dilatory processes of the common law.

Laissez-faire a hundred years and more before the publication of The Wealth of

Nations was the direct consequence of the breakdown at the Civil War of the

‘Privy Council system’ of central control.

Not that the new landed rulers of England deliberately chose a laissez-faire

policy. On the contrary, they continued to hold the view, common to all their

European contemporaries, that it was the duty of a nation’s rulers to take positive

action to increase its wealth and power relative to its neighbours. From the

Restoration right down to the end of the eighteenth century they reserved the

right to regulate internal industry and consumption for mercantilist ends: for

example, by the notorious law of 1666 (echoing a proclamation of 1622)

requiring burial in woollen, those of 1698 against the use of stuff buttons, of

1700 against Indian calicoes, and of 1726 against home-printed calicoes; or the

attempts at regulation of the Kidderminster cloth industry in 1670, of the

Yorkshire industry in 1708, 1711 and 1726, and of the treatment of hides outside

London as late as 1800.

Yet none of these internal controls was more than a

capricious remnant of the general regulation of production and consumption by

the Tudors and early Stuarts. The very name ‘mercantilism’, derived from Adam

Smith’s attack on ‘the Mercantile System’, is a reminder that, in England as

distinct from the Continent, effective State control could only be exercised over

foreign trade, and in internal economic affairs was little more than a sporadic

nuisance. The reason is to be found in practical administration rather than

deliberate policy: the State controlled external trade through professional

officials at the ports; when it attempted to control internal trade and industry it

was compelled to work through amateur officials who could frustrate it with

impunity.

And the reason for this in turn was the paradoxical relationship of the

landowners to the government which they dominated.

The paradox lies in the unique example of a ruling aristocracy jealous of its

own creature, the State. Although the landowners had defeated the old monarchy

and replaced it by one more to their liking, they still had no wish to rule in its

place. Central government in their eyes was still the king’s, and all they asked, as

the Revolution settlement with its emphasis on impeachment and other post hoc

S. and B.Webb, English Poor Law History, Part I, The Old Poor Law (1927), p. 149.

C.Davenant, Essay upon…the Ballance of Trade (1699), p. 55.

E.F.Hecksher, Mercantilism (trans. M.Schapiro, 1935), I. 265–6, 297–301.

54 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

controls goes to show, was that the king and his ministers should govern in a way

which they could sanction and approve.

That in the course of the eighteenth

century powerful ministers should transform this simple-minded and

impracticable arrangement into a sophisticated working partnership between

themselves, the Crown and a manipulated Parliament, in no way detracted from

the effect: the opposition of the great body of landowners to all effective

governmental interference with themselves. So jealous of its power were they

that they denied the State any permanent standing army or effective professional

police, preferring to rely for the defence of property on their own social power

and the loyalty of the lower orders. Least of all would they entrust the State, with

the sole exception of the customs officials at the ports and the purely fiscal

excise officers inland, with a local bureaucratic civil service through which to

outflank their territorial power.

It was, therefore, the peculiar relationship of the English landed aristocracy to

society and hence to the State which created the political climate for the

germination of industrialism. Out of pure self-interest they created the political

conditions —personal liberty, absolute security of property, the minimum of

internal intervention, and adequate protection from foreign competition—best

suited for generating a spontaneous industrial revolution. More than this, they

used their political power to provide the ‘preconditions’, in agriculture, mining

and transport, for the take-off. But this leads us on from the ancillary to the

necessary economic causes of the industrial revolution, which will be dealt with

in the next section.

The domination of landed patrons played a similar role in the intellectual and

scientific causation of industrialism, automatically making available to others the

advantages they pursued for themselves. If England had the edge on

neighbouring countries in giving concrete shape to the ‘spirit of improvement’,

the profound change in human expectations stemming from the Renaissance and

the scientific and philosophical revolutions, it was because of the more rapid

diffusion and application of practical ideas made possible by the structure of

English society. Gentlemen amateurs motivated by curiosity, but not unaware of

the value of material progress to the wealth of the nation and themselves, did not

disdain to mingle with practical business and professional men and even with

skilful artisans with an interest in the new science.

The Royal Society itself symbolized the ease of intercourse between the

different levels of English society. Courtiers and landed gentlemen like Lords

Wealth of Nations, II. 178,413. The Excise officers, from 1733, were concerned with

very few commodities, and their activities were effectively restricted by the unpopularity

of the system. Control at the ports facilitated a considerable increase in tariffs, and therefore

in protection to home industry—cf. R.Davis, ‘The Rise of Protection in England, 1689–

1786’, Ec.H.R., 1966, XIX. 306–17.

Cf. Bill of Rights, 1689.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 55

Brouncker and Brereton, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Gilbert Talbot, John Evelyn and

Robert Boyle mingled without restraint or embarrassment with dons like Newton,

Wilkins and Wren, physicians like Timothy Clark, George Ent and Jonathan

Goddard, lawyers like Dudley Palmer, business men like the clothier and dyer

William Petty, and even shopkeepers like John Graunt. The Society ‘freely

admitted Men of different Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life’, and

looked for ‘Noble Rarities to be every day given in not onely by the Hands of

Learned and profess’d Philosophers; but from the Shops of Mechanicks; from

the Voyages of Merchants; from the Ploughs of Husbandmen; from the Sports,

the Fish-ponds, the Parks, the Gardens of Gentlemen….’

Similarly, the Royal Society of Arts, which by its premiums and bounties did

much ‘for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce in Great

Britain’, reads from its early membership lists like a cross-section of mid-

eighteenth-century society, from dukes to clockmakers, admirals to actors,

bishops to Dissenting ministers, bankers to booksellers, judges to schoolmasters.

Its founders in 1754 were a microcosm of English society: Lord Romney and his

brother-in-law Lord Folkestone (the latter a ‘new man’, the son and grandson of

Turkey merchants), the botanist and clergyman Stephen Hales, Defoe’s son-in-

law Henry Baker, journalist and pioneer teacher of the deaf-and-dumb, together

with a director of the Bank of England, a surgeon, an optician, a watchmaker, and

—the moving spirit, and beneficiary of Lords Romney and Folkestone’s

patronage— the Northampton drawing-master, William Shipley.

The patronage

of the brilliant but lowly-born, most notably in the person of Humphry Davy and

Michael Faraday, also characterized the Royal Institution, founded in 1799 by

Count Rumford in the house of the celebrated gentleman-amateur (and third-

generation ‘new man’) Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society.

There

were, of course, foreign counterparts of such learned societies, but they did not

span the whole range of society to anything like the same degree.

The personal interconnections of English society, both between different

levels and between the metropolis and the provinces, helped in the second and

still more practical wave of the diffusion of scientific ideas. The numerous

philosophical societies which sprang into being in Birmingham, Derby,

Manchester, Bristol, Bath and many other towns in the last quarter of the

eighteenth century were a spontaneous growth, founded, like the Manchester

Literary and Philosophical Society in 1781, by ‘a few Gentlemen, inhabitants of

the town,… inspired by a taste for Literature and Philosophy’, who ‘formed

themselves into a kind of weekly club, for the purpose of conversing on subjects

of that nature’.

The membership was naturally concentrated in the middle ranks

of urban society, the professions, especially medicine, being strongly represented,

while in industrial towns like Manchester ‘the great majority of the members

Sprat, op. cit., pp. 53–5, 62–3, 71–2, and Appendix A.

H.T.Wood, History of the Royal Society of Arts (1913), pp. 7–17, 28– 46.

56 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

were either engaged or interested in the extension of Science and Art to

manufacturing purposes’.

Yet they were not without personal encouragement

from the aristocracy, as attested for example by Sir Brooke Boothby’s membership

of the Derby Society, nor without personal contact with fashionable metropolitan

science, through the overlapping membership of leading figures with the Royal

Society: James Keir and James Watt of the Birmingham Lunar Society, William

Strutt, John Whitehurst and Josiah Wedgwood of the Derby Society, John Dalton,

Thomas Henry, Charles White and George Walker of the Manchester Society,

and so on. Nor, on the other side, did they fail to make contact with ‘the superior

class of artisans’, through the extensive provision of scientific lectures, chiefly

by itinerant lecturers such as Caleb and John Rotherham, James Ferguson,

Gustavus Katterfelto, and the Adam Walkers, father and son, under the auspices

of the Societies.

The third and final wave in the diffusion of the new science and technology,

through the Mechanics’ Institutes and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful

Knowledge from the 1820’s onwards, though it coincided with the rise of violent

social conflict and the division of society into antagonistic classes, benefited

nevertheless from what remained of the old vertical personal connections. The

Mechanics’ Institutes became part of a middle-class mission to the working

classes in general, not confined to technical instruction but extending to moral

and political education, and their comparative failure at this level will be

discussed in Chapter VIII. Meanwhile, their initial success in spreading scientific

knowledge amongst the works managers, foremen and skilled workers of the

newer industries depended to a large extent on the personal relations between their

middle-class founders and patrons and their aspiring working-class membership.

In Yorkshire, for example, the Institutes founded and fostered by middle-class

leaders like John Marshall and Benjamin Gott, the Leeds industrialists, and the

Edward Bainses, father and son, editors of the Leeds Mercury, prospered; the few

which came under working-class control, like Bradford, collapsed, and had to be

refounded on the middle-class model.

More important than the institutional forms taken by personal connection,

however, was the direct part taken by patronage in fostering scientific and

technical innovation. The lonely inventor, the Crompton or Hargreaves working

in isolation, was not a typical figure, and was all too likely to fail or see others

reap the harvest of his sowing. The backing of capital, enterprise or influence

W.H.G.Armytage, Civic Universities (1955), pp. 162–4; D.N.B., XIV. 187f., XVIII.

190f.; see also H.Bence Jones; The Royal Institution (1871) and T. Martin, The Royal

Institution (1948).

Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Memoirs, 1785, I. viii; A.E. Musson and

E.Robinson, ‘Science and Industry in the 18th Century’, Ec.H.R., 1960, XIII. 223.

A.A.Mumford, The Manchester Grammar School, 1515–1915 (1919), p. 218; Musson

and Robinson, loc. cit.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 57

was essential to success, and it was here that the manifold links of patronage,

kinship and connection came into their own. Given the keen amateur interest of a

sufficient number of patrons in science and industry, the patronage system might

have been designed to encourage scientific and technical genius. The relations at

critical stages in their careers of Sir John Denham to Wren, Hooke and Savery to

Newcomen, the Duke of Bridgewater to Brindley, Sir William Pulteney to

Telford, the Anderson brothers to Watt, Dr. Edwards to Davy, and Davy to

Faraday, to mention only a few examples of technological patronage, are a

sufficient proof of its importance.

The mutual expectations of patronage shaded

imperceptibly at the lower margin into those of straightforward partnership, in

which kinship, religion, apprenticeship, and other forms of personal connection

played a significant part. But here again we encroach on the economic causation

of industrialism, to be dealt with later.

Finally, the domination of the landowners played a perverse part in the

religious causes of industrialism. Their partial toleration or ineffective

intolerance helped to divert the energies of the Dissenters away from politics and

towards labouring in their vocations of industry and trade. Nonconformist iron-

masters, bankers, brewers, and millowners repaid their exclusion from

university, local government, army and navy, parliament and Cabinet by practical

education and economic exertion. The iron industry, for example, benefited from

every variety of non-conformist endeavour: from the Quaker Darbys, Reynolds,

Huntsmans, and Lloyds, through the Independent Roebucks and Dawsons and

the Presbyterian Foleys and Hanburys to the Methodist Guests of Dowlais. The

Quaker banking and brewing dynasties of Gurney, Fox, Barclay and Perkins are

famous, as are the Unitarian cotton millowners, the M’Connells, Gregs and

Potters.

A single tiny industrial town like Glossop could exhibit in its capitalists

the whole gamut of Dissent from Roman Catholic to Methodist.

However the

Dissenters’ challenge to economic exertion operated, whether through superior

practical education, labouring in one’s vocation, the material rewards of high

moral conduct, or the mere exclusion of unprofitable distractions, the religious

structure of English society gave it a helping hand

Ibid. pp. 222–44; E.Robinson, ‘The Derby Philosophical Society’, Annals of Science,

1953, IX. 359–67; R.E.Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham (Oxford, 1963),

passim; N.A.Hans, New Trends in 18th Century Education (1951), pp. 158–60.

J.W.Hudson, History of Adult Education (1851) ; J.F.C.Harrison, Learning and Living,

1790–1960 (1961), pp. 57–62.

D.N.B., VI, 345f., XIV. 187f., XVIII. 190f., XL. 326f., LVI. 9f., LX. 51f., LXIII. 80f.

Cf. the list of innovators and religious affiliations in E.E.Hagen, On the Theory of Social

Change (1964), pp. 303–8.

H.J.Perkin, ‘The Development of Modern Glossop’, in A.H.Birch, Small Town Politics

(Oxford, 1959), pp. 18–19.

58 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

The argument can, however, be pushed too far. Not every enterprising

business man was a Dissenter, nor every Dissenter a successful business man.

There were Anglican ironmasters like Crowley, Anglican bankers like the

Hoares, Anglican brewers like the Whitbreads, Anglican cotton spinners like

Arkwright, Strutt and Peel. And the town of Glossop had in the Woods and

Sidebottoms its quota of Anglican millowners. Dissent was of course stronger

amongst entrepreneurs than amongst the population in general, but not so much

stronger than in the middle ranks alone: a recent sample survey has shown that

49 per cent of the principal inventors and innovators were Dissenters, compared

with perhaps a fifth of the population in 1811, and of course a much larger

fraction of the middle ranks.

And, as we saw in Chapter II, it is at least as

arguable that they turned to Dissent because their social status excluded them

from the politics and social life of their ‘betters’ as that they were so excluded by

their choice of religion. Certainly, the barriers to their occupation of public

offices, after the 1718 Act protecting them after six months from prosecution, or

the almost annual indemnity acts after 1727, were frequently surmounted by

Dissenters of sufficient wealth and status. They became mayors of towns, high

sheriffs of counties, members of the Common Council of London, and even in a

few cases Members of Parliament.

The alacrity with which many ‘new men’

changed their religion with their status is a further indication of the connection

between social and religious motivations. And, finally, the key part played by

religious antagonism in the formation of the mutually hostile social classes which

emerged during the Industrial Revolution (a theme which will be taken up in

Chapter VI) confirms that Dissent was in the old society the characteristic form

assumed by the latent social envy and hostility of the middle ranks for the landed

aristocracy. Meanwhile, to beat the morally inferior but socially superior

landowners at the game of getting rich was a challenge which rationalized the

toil of ambition. Perhaps, after all, the most important economic effect of

religious dissidence was the added piquancy it gave to material success and

social emulation.

One thing at least is certain, that the English system of partial toleration, or

intolerance tempered by inefficiency, was more conducive to economic

innovation than the almost universal contemporary suppression of heresy, on

both sides of the religious iron curtain. What the expulsion of the Huguenots cost

France in purely material terms cannot be calculated, but the price cannot have

been light; while that of the draconian uniformity of religion further east and

south defies all speculation. In England dissenting entrepreneurs were neither

expelled nor blighted in the bud, but challenged to prove their moral and economic

superiority. In so far as their peculiar situation stemmed from the self-interest of

Hagen, loc. cit.; Halévy, op. cit., I. 428.

Henriques, op. cit., p. 59.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 59

a dominant landed aristocracy in confident rapprochement with its society, the

religious cause of their industrial exertions becomes a social one.

SOCIETY AND THE ECONOMIC FACTORS

Ultimately, however, any interpretation of the Industrial Revolution stands or

falls not by the explanation of its ancillary political, scientific and religious

causes but by that of its direct, immediate and necessary economic causes, the

essential factors of production, to which we should add the most immediate and

necessary of all economic factors, the factor of demand. What part did the nature

and structure of English society play in the operation of land, capital, labour, and

demand?

Of the factors of production, land has been most taken for granted by

historians, since in Britain it presented no obstacle to development. Yet in

underdeveloped societies the system of land tenure is often one of the most

intractable problems. In Britain, by contrast, the land was owned—and by the

seventeenth century, owned absolutely—in large viable blocks by a

comparatively small number of owners, alert to their interest in every extension

of economic activity. By the triumph of their concept of absolute property, the

landed aristocracy had determined that land could be freely bought, sold or

leased on a wide variety of tenures, for every kind of industrial or ancillary

purpose. Even where land was voluntarily tied up in strict family settlements—

which from the Civil War became stricter as a result of Bridgeman and Palmer’s

invention of ‘trustees to preserve contingent remainders’—ample provision was

usually made for building and other leases beneficial to the estate.

There is no

example in the British Industrial Revolution of an industrial project being

ultimately frustrated for lack of the necessary land.

Moreover, whatever else they were interested in, landed gentlemen were

interested in increasing the returns from their estates. Some of them turned

industrialists themselves: the Earl of Derby operated a cotton mill in Preston, the

Earl of Dundonald a famous chemical plant, the Sneyds of Staffordshire their own

coal-mines, ironworks and brickworks, and a large number, like Lords Dudley,

Fitzwilliam, Gower and Middleton, directly exploited their own coal.

Few of

them, of course, had the temperament or incentive for industrial management

and, in that age of the individualist entrepreneur when honest and efficient

managers were hard to come by, were nearly always forced to sell or turn such

enterprises, other than coal-mines, over to lessees.

Their role, however, was not

direct industrial enterprise. It was rather to provide both the land, including on

occasion the buildings and other fixed capital such as mining gear, and the

‘preconditions’ for the enterprise of others.

Their most positive economic contribution was in the sphere of the

‘preconditions’ of industrialism, in agriculture, mining, transport, and town-

building, which in later industrial revolutions had so often to be provided by the

60 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

State or not at all. Out of pure self-interest they spontaneously provided the

foundations upon which the new manufacturing industries could rise. The

revolution in agricultural techniques without which the expanding industrial

population could not have been fed was their responsibility. They were not

themselves the chief innovators: this was the work of entrepreneurs, small

landowners and large farmers like Jethro Tull, Robert Bakewell and the Colling

brothers, from much the same social levels and with much the same ambitions

and motivations as their industrial counterparts. But without the inspired

advertising of the new methods by great landlords like the Earl of Leicester, the

Duke of Bedford and Coke of Holkham, and without the example,

encouragement, and persistent pressure upon their tenants of the great majority

of ordinary landlords, it is doubtful whether market opportunities alone would

have transformed the traditional methods of the average farmer and

revolutionized agricultural yields.

Further, in so far as the new methods pre-

supposed the enclosure of the open fields—and in that individualist age it would

have required an unlikely degree of tenant co-operation to avoid it—the self-

interested action of the landowners was indispensable. The moving spirit in

every enclosure was the local landowner; and the ultimate sanction for it, whether

by private act, Chancery suit, or unregistered agreement, was a Parliament of

landowners. The social and political power of the landowners, inside and outside

Parliament, determined the pace and process of agriculture change. Pursuing

higher rents via expanding agricultural profits they incidentally, as it were,

provided the means of life for increased millions. In mining, absolute property

still more clearly differentiated the English landowners’ role from that of their

Continental counterparts. In Britain alone in Western Europe all minerals, save

gold and silver, belonged by a judgment of 1568—a significant step in the

development of the English concept of property—to the owner of the soil.

The

landowners, therefore, had a personal stake in their exploitation. Large-scale

ownership made State intervention, to grant access to large deposits or to foster

joint-stock enterprise, unnecessary. Opportunity and incentive went hand in hand

W.S.Holdsworth, History of English Law (1925), VII. 112–13; Habakkuk, op. cit.,

Trans. R.H.S., 1950, XXXII. 17.

Derby Muniments, Ledgers 1981–3 (1795–99), entries re ‘Preston factory’; A. and

N.L.Clow, The Chemical Revolution (1952), pp. 100–3; Sneyd Papers, Col. Walter

Sneyd’s Estate Accounts, 1798–1800, 1882–29, entries re collieries, furnace, and tile-

works; G.E.Mingay, English Landed Society in the 18th Century (1963), pp. 191–6;

T.S.Ashton and J.Sykes, The Coal Industry of the 18th Century (Manchester, 1929), pp.

45, 154.

e.g. Derby was forced by the inefficiency or dishonesty of the manager, Leeming, to let

the Preston factory—Derby Muniments, DDK 1687, Weekly Notes of Steward’s

Correspondence, 1796–1802, 20 November 1796; for ‘the persistent tendency for mineral

landowners to withdraw from their enterprises into the more secure position of rentiers’

cf. F.M.L.Thompson, English Landed Society in the 19th Century (1963), p. 264.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 61

wherever minerals were found in Britain to make landowner and mining exploiter

practically synonymous. Along the Tyne, Tees and Wear, for example,

landowner in practice meant colliery proprietor, and vice versa. Not every coal-

owner directly exploited his own coal, for even in this least complex of industrial

operations, direct enterprise through bailiffs or managers was not always

compatible with a leisured social life, and a lease was often found to be more

profitable. In Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in 1811, for example, the Duke of

Devonshire, Lords Middleton and Manvers, and Messrs. Maundy, Lowe,

Morewood, and D’Ewes Coke were the only considerable landowners who

commercially worked their own coal, and the majority of pits were on lease.

Either way, it was the self-interested initiative and drive of landowners like the

Dukes of Argyll and Hamilton in Scotland, the Curwens and Lowthers in

Westmorland, the Delavals, Lambtons, Liddells and Ellisons in the North East,

the Duke of Norfolk and the Marquess of Rockingham in Yorkshire, Lords

Dudley and Granville and the Sneyds and Gresleys in Staffordshire, or Lords

Uxbridge and Bute and the Mansels, Bayleys, Symmonds and Protheros in

Wales, which touched off the great expansion of the mining and metallurgical

industries.

Mining, with its concentration of heavy loads over well-defined routes, gave

many landowners an additional interest in improved transport. Most of the early

canals and ‘navigations’, from the famous Bridgewater to carry the Duke’s coal

from his Worsley mines to Manchester to the little Apedale to carry Sir Nigel

Gresley’s four miles to Newcastle-under-Lyme, were backed if not initiated by

local landowners. Improved transport was a precondition beyond the resources

of most individuals, and demanded the co-operation of many others besides the

landowners, in turnpike trusts, and canal, dock and railway companies, notably

entrepreneurs like Wedgwood, Oldknow, Boulton and Watt, the Crawshays and

Guests, and many more. Yet without the active participation of the local

landowners no improvement scheme could be set on foot, and the larger landlords

with their immense prestige, political influence, local contacts, and material

stake in every extension of economic activity on and around their estates were

admirably placed to act as impresarios in the early, crucial stages of the transport

revolution. The role of Bridge water was paralleled by the Marquess of Stafford,

who built a canal from his ironworks in Shropshire, by the Earl of Thanet who

Mingay, op. cit., pp. 163–71, 186–8; J.D.Chambers and G.E.Mingay, The Agricultural

Revolution, 1750–1880 (1966), chap. iii.

Ashton and Sykes, op. cit., p. 1, citing Royal Commission on Mining Royalties, Final

Report (1893), p. 3.

J.Farey, General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire (1811), I. 182.

Cf. Ashton and Sykes, op. cit., pp. 2–6; A.H.Dodd, The Industrial Revolution in North

Wales (1933), pp. 154–5; A.H.John, The Industrial Development of South Wales, 1750–

1850 (Cardiff, 1950). 7–10, 30, 37; E.Hughes, op. cit., I. chap. v, II, chap. v.

62 SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM

built one to connect his limestone quarries with the Leeds and Liverpool canal,

and by the Dukes of Marlborough and Buccleuch and Lords Guilford, North and

Spencer, who invested in the Coventry and Oxford canal project of 1768.

Occasionally a landowner might oppose a particular scheme, as the Earl of

Kent opposed the Wye navigation to protect the local monopoly of his ironworks,

but opposition could be bought off, or overridden by more powerful

combinations of landowners, locally or in Parliament. Even the railway

companies, which belonged to a phase when the scale of investment and the

balance of landed to other fixed capital had greatly altered, still had to win over

or buy off the bigger landlords, who formed a considerable proportion of their

shareholders and directors—like the Marquess of Stafford who surrendered his

opposition to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in exchange for three seats

on the board.

Without the active support and, in many cases, the initiative of the

landowners individually and in Parliament the transport revolution could scarcely

have occurred.

Finally, the landowners played an important part in the process of

urbanization. Apart from keeping alive the organizational and technical skills of

large-scale building—between the age of cathedral-building and that of the

factories, the great country houses were almost the only large buildings raised in

Britain—they were in effect the only available planning authorities to direct and

control the building of towns. It is commonly assumed that the new or greatly

expanded towns of the Industrial Revolution mushroomed haphazardly, without

plan or purpose. In some cases this was true, but it was so mainly in those towns

without an overriding ground landlord, or manageably small group of them,

where the pattern of ownership was a patchwork of competing building plots.

Elsewhere it was the ground landlord who controlled development, laid out the

streets and squares, set aside land for market, town hall, jail and other communal

purposes, and leased the building plots for specified and approved development.

The plans were not always well-considered, or sufficiently far-seeing to

anticipate the needs of future expansion on an unprecedented scale, and they put

rentable value high amongst their priorities; but in the contemporary nature of

things they were the only ones available, and served at least to prevent chaos.

Occasionally, where the economic pressures were not against it, as in the West

End estates of the Grosvenors, the Cavendish-Bentincks and the Russells, those

of the Duke of Devonshire in Eastbourne or Buxton or those of such lesser

landlords as Sir George Tapps-Gervis at Bournemouth, the planning could be

elegantly effective. In the industrial towns themselves landlords such as the

Dukes of Devonshire and Buccleuch in Barrow-in-Furness, the Lowthers at

Mingay, op. cit., p. 196

T.S.Willan, River Navigation in England, 1600–1750 (1936), p. 36.

C.F.Dendy Marshall, Centenary History of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway

(1930), p. 13.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 63