CHAPTER 2

The Industrial Revolution in Britain

In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manu-
facture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode of production
—the factory system. During these years, other branches of industry
effected comparable advances, and all these together, mutually rein-
forcing one another, made possible further gains on an ever-widening
front. The abundance and variety of these innovations almost defy
compilation, but they may be subsumed under three principles: the
substitution of machines—rapid, regular, precise, tireless—for human
skill and effort; the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of
power, in particular, the introduction of engines for converting heat
into work, thereby opening to man a new and almost unlimited supply
of energy, the use of new and far more abundant raw materials, in
particular, the substitution of mineral for vegetable or animal sub-
stances.
These improvements constitute the Industrial Revolution. They
yielded an unprecedented increase in man's productivity and, with it,
a substantial rise in income per head. Moreover, this rapid growth was
self-sustaining. Where previously, an amelioration of the conditions of
existence, hence of survival, and an increase in economic opportunity
had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually con-
sumed the gains achieved, now for the first time in history, both the
economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a con-
tinuing flow of investment and technological innovation, a flow that
lifted beyond visible limits the ceiling of Malthus's positive checks.
The Industrial Revolution thereby opened a new age of promise. It
also transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between
nations, and between civilizations; revolutionized the social order; and
as much changed man's way of thinking as his way of doing.
In 1760 Britain imported some 2^ million pounds of raw cotton to
feed an industry dispersed for the most part through the countryside of
Lancashire and existing in conjunction with the linen manufacture,
which supplied it with the tough warp yarn it had not yet learned to
produce. All of its work was done by hand, usually (excluding dyeing
and finishing) in the homes of the workers, occasionally in the small
shops of the master weavers. A generation later, in 1787, the consump-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 42 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
tion of raw cotton was up to 22 million pounds; the cotton manufacture
was second only to wool in numbers employed and value of product;
most of the fibre consumed was being cleaned, carded, and spun on
machines, some driven by water in large mills, some by hand in smaller
shops or even in cottages. A half-century later, consumption had in-
creased to 366 million pounds; the cotton manufacture was the most
important in the kingdom in value of product, capital invested, and
numbers employed; almost all of its employees, except for the still
large number of hand-loom weavers, worked in mills under factory
discipline. The price of yarn had fallen to perhaps one twentieth of
what it had been, and the cheapest Hindu labour could not compete in
either quality or quantity with Lancashire's mules and throstles. British
cotton goods sold everywhere in the world: exports, a third larger than
home consumption, were worth four times those of woollens and
worsteds. The cotton mill was the symbol of Britain's industrial great-
ness; the cotton hand, of her greatest social problem—the rise of an
industrial proletariat.
Why did this revolution in the techniques and organization of manu-
facture occur first in Britain ? A few theoretical considerations may help
us to organize the argument. Technological change is never automatic.
It means the displacement of established methods, damage to vested
interests, often serious human dislocations. Under the circumstances,
there usually must be a combination of considerations to call forth such
a departure and make it possible: (1) an opportunity for improvement
due to inadequacy of prevailing techniques,1 or a need for improvement
created by autonomous increases in factor costs; and (2) a degree of
superiority such that the new methods pay sufficiently to cover the
costs of the change. Implicit in the latter is the assumption that, however
much the users of older, less efficient methods may attempt to survive
by compressing the costs of the human factors of production, entrepre-
neurial or labour, the new techniques are enough of an improvement
to enable progressive producers to outprice them and displace them.
The technological changes that we denote as the 'Industrial Revolu-
tion' implied a far more drastic break with the past than anything since
the invention of the wheel. On the entrepreneurial side, they necessi-
tated a sharp redistribution of investment and a concomitant revision of
the concept of risk. Where before, almost all the costs of manufacture
had been variable—raw materials and labour primarily—more and
more would now have to be sunk in fixed plant. The flexibility of the
older system had been very advantageous to the entrepreneur: in
1
The criterion of adequacy would, for my purposes, be marginal costs. Steeply
rising costs per unit of one or more factors of production under conditions of growing
demand would imply an opportunity for and incentive to technological improvement.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 43
time of depression, he was able to halt production at little cost, resuming
work only when and in so far as conditions made advisable. Now he
was to be a prisoner of his investment, a situation that many of the
traditional merchant-manufacturers found very hard, even impossible,
to accept.
For the worker, the transformation was even more fundamental, for
not only his occupational role, but his very way of life was at stake.
For many—though by no means for all—the introduction of machinery
implied for the first time a complete separation from the means of pro-
duction; the worker became a 'hand . On almost all, however, the
machine imposed a new discipline. No longer could the spinner turn
her wheel and the weaver throw his shuttle at home, free of supervision,
both in their own good time. Now the work had to be done in a
factory, at a pace set by tireless, inanimate equipment, as part of a large
team that had to begin, pause, and stop in unison—all under the close
eye of overseers, enforcing assiduity by moral, pecuniary, occasionally
even physical means of compulsion. The factory was a new kind of
prison; the clock a new kind of jailer.
In short, only the strongest incentives could have persuaded entre-
preneurs to undertake and accept these changes; and only major advan-
ces could have overcome the dogged resistance of labour to the very
principle of mechanization.
The origins of the entrepreneurial interest in machines and factory
production must be sought in the growing inadequacy of the older
modes of production, an inadequacy rooted in internal contradictions,
themselves aggravated by external forces.
Of these pre-factory forms of organization, the oldest was the
independent craft shop, with master often assisted by one or more
journeymen or apprentices. Fairly early, however—as far back as the
thirteenth century—this independence broke down in many areas, and
the artisan found himself bound to the merchant who supphed his raw
materials and sold his finished work. This subordination of the pro-
ducer to the intermediary (or, less often, of weak producers to strong
ones) was a consequence of the growth of the market. Where once the
artisan worked for a local clientele, a small but fairly stable group that
was bound to him personally as well as by pecuniary interest, he now
came to depend on sales through a middleman in distant, competitive
markets. He was ill-equipped to cope with the fluctuations inherent in
this arrangement. In bad times he might be completely idle, with no
one to sell to; and when business improved, he usually had to borrow
from his merchant the materials needed to get started again. Once
caught on a treadmill of debt—his finished work mortgaged in advance
to his creditor—the craftsman rarely regained his independence; his

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 44 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
work sufficed to support him—no more—and he was in fact if not in
principle a proletarian, selling not a commodity, but labour.
Aside from his pecuniary difficulties, the local artisan was in no
position to know and exploit the needs of distant consumers. Only the
merchant could respond to the ebb and flow of demand, railing for
changes in the nature of the final product to meet consumer tastes,
recruiting additional labour when necessary, supplying tools as well as
materials to potential artisans. It was largely in this way that the rural
population was drawn into the productive circuit. Very early, urban
merchants came to realize that the countryside was a reservoir of cheap
labour: peasants eager to eke out the meagre income of the land by
working in the off-season, wives and children with free time to pre-
pare the man's work and assist him in his task. And though the
country weaver, nail-maker, or cutler was less skilled than the guilds-
man or journeyman of the town, he was less expensive, for the marginal
utility of his free time was, initially at least, low, and his agricultural
resources, however modest, enabled him to get by on that much less
additional income. Furthermore, rural putting-out was free of guild
restrictions on the nature of the product, die techniques of manufacture,
and the size of enterprise.
The above description of a long and complex historical process
inevitably oversimplifies. If it seems reasonable to assert that, taking
Europe as a whole, most putters-out came from the mercantile side, it
is important to note the many exceptions: the weavers who became
clothiers by hiring their less enterprising neighbours; the fullers and
dyers who had accumulated capital in the finishing processes and
integrated backwards by contracting directly for yarn and cloth. In some
areas, most notably the region around Leeds in the West Riding of
Yorkshire, rural artisans organized their own small weaving sheds,
joined when necessary to create common facilities, and sold their
pieces as independent clothiers in the weekly cloth halls. But even in
Yorkshire, this fragmentation of enterprise was characteristic primarily
of the woollen trade; in the worsted manufacture, where capital
requirements were greater, the productive unit was larger and the
merchant putter-out more important. 1
The English textile industry built its fortune in the late medieval and
1
In his discussion of the shift from urban to rural industry, P. Mantoux, The
Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1928), pp. 64.-6, conveys the
impression that the putting-out system was the result of the decay of what he describes
as domestic manufacture , that is, dispersed independent cottage industry of the kind
found in Yorkshire. Often, as we noted, this was true, but even more often, probably,
putting out was the product of mercantile initiative seeking new sources of labour
and drawing the rural population into the commercial circuit.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 45
early modern periods on rural manufacture. No centre of production,
except perhaps Flanders, was so quick to turn from the towns to the
countryside; it is estimated that as early as 1400 over half the output
of wool cloth was accounted for in this manner.1 The trend continued:
by the mid-eighteenth century, the great preponderance of the British
wool manufacture was cottage industry, of" all the towns immemorially
associated with the wool trade, only Norwich remained as an important
urban centre, and it was rapidly declining in relative importance.
Allowing for such regional variations, moreover, and for occasional
pauses, the industry as a whole had prospered impressively. In the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, at a time when the Italian
manufacture was a shadow of its former self, when Dutch cloth output
was shrinking steadily, and when France was in the throes of a pro-
longed depression, British consumption of raw wool was growing at
the rate of about 8 per cent a decade; and from about 1740 to 1770, the
decennial increase was 13 or 14 per cent.2
This growth merits detailed attention, for it was the principal pre-
cipitant of the changes we denote by the Industrial Revolution, and
understanding it may help us understand the reasons for British pre-
cedence in technological and economic development. In part the wool
industry grew because of favourable^ conditions of production. Thus
no country had so abundant a supply of raw wool, particularly the
long wool required for the lighter, harder, worsted fabrics. And rural
manufacture, largely unhampered by guild restrictions or government
regulation, was in a position to make the most ofthis resource advantage
by suiting its product to demand and changes in demand. In particular,
it was free to develop cheaper fabrics, perhaps less sturdy than the
traditional broadcloths and stuffs, but usable and often more comfort-
able. This freedom to adjust and innovate is particularly important in
light industry, where resources and similar material considerations
often are less important as locational factors than entrepreneurship. A
good example from within the British wool industry is the rapid
growth of the Yorkshire worsted trade, to the point where it passed the
1
H. L. Gray, 'The Production and Exportation of English Woollens in the
Fourteenth Century', English Historical Review, xxxix (1924), 32.
1
P. Deane, 'The Output of the British Woollen Industry in the Eighteenth
Century ',J. Econ. Hist, xvn (1957), 220. Thesefiguresare derived from informed con-
temporary guesses and are therefore gross approximations. But it is the trend that
interests us here. On this, compare the much slower growth of the Venders- Hodimont
area near Liege, one of the most enterprising centres of wool manufacture on the
Continent. P. Lebrun, L'Industrie de la lame a Verviers pendant le XVIIIe et le debut du
XlXesihle (Liege, 1948), pp. 518-19. Note also die difference in size ofoutput between
Yorkshire alone (aulnage returns in T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1955), pp. 249-50) and the Verviers area.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 46 THE UNBOUND PROMETHBUS
older centre of East Anglia in the course of the eighteenth century;
compare Clapham's explanation: 'the ordinary case of a pushing, hard-
working locality with certain slight advantages, attacking the lower
grades of an expanding industry'.1 We shall have occasion to remark
comparable examples of the advantages of entrepreneurial freedom
when we turn to toe continental countries. In the meantime, we may
note that the British wool manufacture profited the more from its
liberty because some of its most dangerous competitors across the
Channel were being subjected in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries to increasing regulation and control.
Finally, one should cite the relative freedom of British industry from
the disturbance and destruction of war, the uneven but long and often
rich inflow of skilled foreign artisans, and the access of the producing
centres to water transport, hence distant markets—all factors conducive
to lower costs of manufacture and distribution.
On the demand side, the British wool manufacture was comparably
favoured. The population of the kingdom was not large, but it was
growing, faster probably by the middle of the eighteenth century than
that of any of the countries across the Channel. From not quite
6 millions around 1700, it rose to almost 9 millions in 1800; 70-90 per
cent of the gain came in the second half of the period.2 What is more,
the absence of internal customs barriers or feudal tolls created in
Britain the largest coherent market in Europe. This political unity was
confirmed by the geography of the island: the land mass was small; the
topography, easy; the coastline, deeply indented. By contrast, a
country like France, with more than three times as many people, was
cut up by internal customs barriers into three major trade areas, and by
informal custom, obsolete tolls and charges, and, above all, poor com-
munications into a mosaic of semi-autarkic cells.
Moreover, what nature bestowed, man improved. From the mid-
seventeenth century on, there was a continuous and growing investment
of both public and private resources in the extension of the river system
and the construction of new roads and bridges. By 1750 there were
over a thousand miles of navigable streams in Britain; and Parliament

1
J. H. Clapham, 'The Transference of the Worsted Industry from Norfolk to the
West Riding , Bam.], x x (1910), 203. Eric M. Sigsworth, Black Dyke Mills: a History:
with Introductory Chapters on the Development of the Worsted Industry in the Nineteenth
Century (Liverpool: University Press, 1958), p. 17, subscribes to this point of view.
1
For different but roughly concordant estimates of this increase, see Phyllis Deane
and W . A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959: Trends and Structure (Cambridge,
1962), p. 5, n. 3. In the same period, the population of France went from about 20 to
27i millions. E. Levasseur, La population francaise (3 vols.; Paris, 1889), 1, 201-^,
215-18.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 47
had been passing turnpike acts at the rate of eight a year for half a
century. Impressive as this development was, it was inadequate to the
needs of the economy, and the pace of investment increased markedly
in the fifties and sixties. These years saw the first canals (Sankey
Navigation, 1755-9; Duke of Bridgewater's canal, 1759-61) and turn-
pike acts at the rate of forty a year. In two decades (1760-80), navigable
water and solid roads linked the major industrial centres of the North
to those of the Midlands, the Midlands to London, and London to the
Severn basin and the Atlantic.
Within the market of Britain, purchasing power per head and stan-
dard of living were significantly higher than on the Continent. We
have no precise measures of national income for the eighteenth century,1
but there is an abundance of impressionistic testimony by travellers
from both sides of the Channel to the greater equality of wealth, higher
wages, and greater abundance to be found in Britain. Thus one of the
best signs of comfort in Europe is the consumption of white bread; in
the nineteenth century, one can almost follow the rise in per capita
income and the diffusion of higher living standards among the poorer
sections of the population, into rural areas, and into central and eastern
Europe by the wheat frontier. In the eighteenth century England was
known as the country of the wheaten loaf. This was an exaggeration: in
large areas, particularly in the Midlands and North, rye and barley were
the staple grains, especially in the early part of the century. Even there,
however, the bread grew whiter over the years, and nowhere was there
anything like the reliance one found across the Channel on coarser
cereals like buckwheat and oats. Similarly, there was much myth in
the image of John Bull, beefeater. Yet when Arthur Young sat down to
soup in the Pays Basque—'what we should call the farmer's ordinary'—
he received 'ample provision of cabbage, grease, and water, and about
as much meat for some scores of people, as half a dozen English farmers
would have eaten, and grumbled at their host for short commons'. 2
Even workhouse menus, hardly designed to make life agreeable for the
residents, provided for meat daily or at least several times a week.3
The English labourer not only ate better; he spent less of his income
on food than his continental counterpart, and in most areas this portion
was shrinking, whereas across the Channel it may well have risen
1
See, however, the article of P. Deane, "The Implications of Early National
Income Estimates for the Measurement of Long-Term Economic Growth in the
United Kingdom', Economic Development and Cultural Change, iv (1955), 3-38.
1
Young, Travels during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789 (2 vols.; Dublin, 1793), 1,
87 f-, 93-
3
Cf. Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1926),
p. 268.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 48 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
during much of the eighteenth century.1 As a result, he had more to
spare for other things, including manufactures. The Englishman was
reputed for wearing leather shoes where the Fleming or Frenchman
wore clogs. He was dressed in wool where the French or German
peasant often shivered in linen, a noble fabric for table or bed, but a
poor shield against the European winter. Defoe vividly and proudly
described the importance of this demand for British manufactures in his
Plan of the English Commerce in 1728:2

.. .for the rest, we see their Houses and Lodgings tolerably furnished, at least
stuff'd well with useful and necessary household Goods: Even those we call
poor People, Journey-men, working and Pains-taking People do thus; they
lye warm, live in Plenty, work hard, and [need] know no Want.
These are the People that carry off the Gross of your Consumption; 'tis for
these your Markets are kept open late on Saturday nights; because they usually
receive their Week's Wages late... in a Word, these are die Life of our whole
Commerce, and all by their Multitude: Their Numbers are not Hundreds or
Thousands, or Hundreds of Thousands,but Millions; 'tis by their Multitude,
I say, that all die Wheels of Trade are set on Foot, the Manufacture and
Produce of the Land and Sea, finished, cur'd, and fitted for the Markets
Abroad; 'tis by die Largeness of their Gettings, that they are supported, and by
the Largeness of their Number the whole Country is supported; by dieir
Wages they are able to live plentifully, and it is by their expensive, generous,
free way of living, that the Home Consumption is rais'd to such a Bulk, as
well of our own, as of foreign Production....

Defoe's reference to the Englishman's 'expensive, generous, free way

of living' calls to mind a final aspect of the British domestic market: a
consumption pattern favourable to the growth of manufactures. More
than any other in Europe, probably, British society was open. Not
only was income more evenly distributed than across the Channel, but
the barriers to mobility were lower, the definitions of status looser.
Nothing is more revealing in this regard than a comparison of contem-
porary images of society in the different countries of western Europe.
For Britain, we have schemes like those of Gregory King or Joseph
Massie—congeries of occupational groups ranked according to wealth
and so intermingled as to preclude the drawing of horizontal status
lines across the whole of the social pyramid. For France, we have a
neater tripartite structure: aristocracy, bourgeoisie, peuple; within these,
to be sure, there are fine distinctions, and it is not always easy to rank
1
This is the position of C. E. Labrousse, Origines et aspects iconomiques et sociaux de la
Revolutionfratifaise(1774-1791) ['Les Cours de Sorbonne'] (Paris, n.d.), pp. 54-8.
1
[Daniel Defoe], A Plan of the English Commerce (Oxford: Blackwell, 1928),
pp. 76-7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 49
people of different occupations or to place borderline groups like
artisans and retail shopkeepers; nevertheless, the arrangement is
orderly, traditionally logical. For most of west Germany, we have
the French system, but more rigid and carefully defined, to the point
where status, even of sub-groups, is often written into law. And east
of the Elbe, society was simpler yet: a small landholding aristocracy;
the large mass of personally dependent peasants; in between, a thin
layer of commercial bourgeois, spiritually and often ethnically alien to
the body social within which they lived and moved encapsulated.
So far as the rate of consumption is concerned, the implications of
greater equality of income are a matter of some debate.1 Similarly,
mobility is ambiguous in its effects: some people will save to climb;
others will consume to announce their arrival. The net result will
depend on circumstances.
Quality and direction of consumption, however, are something else
again. In non-primitive societies, where skills are fairly advanced and
there has been some accumulation of wealth, inequality fosters a taste
for extravagant luxuries and services among the few, whereas equality
encourages a demand for more sober, solid comforts among the many.
Great riches amid a sea of poverty are generally the product of a low
capital-labour ratio (or of misinvestment of capital). They give rise to
a prodigal expenditure of labour on pleasure and elegance: an over-
abundance of domestics—to the point where the mistress of the house
spends more time supervising her staff than more modest wives spend
doing their own chores; ornamental garments of great price; lavish
decoration of residences; the production of exquisitely difficult works
of art.
A more even diffusion of wealth, however, is the result of costly
labour. This was indeed the case in Britain, where wages—allowing for
the uncertainty and partial incomparability of the estimates—ran about
twice as high as in France and higher yet than east of the Rhine. In
such an economy, production functions are more capital-intensive,
while the rich consumer caters less to whim and satisfies himself with a
1
The traditional assumption is that inequality does increase the savings ratio. But
there is some question whether this is justified for a pre-industrial society, especially
one in which a small privileged group commands the levers of power and can draw a
kind of tributary income from the rest of the nation. It seems quite probable, for
example, that the court aristocracy of eighteenth-century France lived beyond its
income, consuming freely in the knowledge that there would always be ways of
obtaining more from the crown. Cf. Milton Friedman, A Theory of the Consumption
Function (Princeton, 1957), pp. 235 f., who argues that inequality of'permanent' (as
against measured) income per se does not affect the consumption-savings ratio; that it
is uncertainty about future income that promotes savings, against a rainy day as it

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 50 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
greater abundance of those goods that are available on a smaller
scale and in lower quality to his poorer fellows. On the other hand, the
relatively high purchasing power of the poorer elements of the popula-
tion implies a correspondingly greater demand for the things they need
and can afford—the cheaper, plainer articles most susceptible of mass
production.1
Mobility in such a society is a force for standardization. For mobility
implies emulation, and emulation promotes the diffusion of patterns of
expenditure throughout the population. Where there is no movement
between status groups, clear, inviolate distinctions of dress and way of
life mark the gradations of hierarchy. Where there begins to be move-
ment, as in the late Middle Ages, sumptuary laws are often needed to
keep people in their place. And where mobility has become so common-
place as to seem to many a virtue, discriminatory controls over expendi-
ture are unenforceable.
In England, sumptuary laws were dead letters by the end of the
sixteenth century; they were repealed by James I in 1604. Over the
next two centuries, the trend toward homogeneity of expenditure—
the effacement of vertical regional differences as well as horizontal social
distinctions—continued.! Contemporaries complained of the luxury of
the lower classes, who dressed so as to be indistinguishable from their
betters. This was an exaggeration; social lament as a literary genre is
invariably hyperbolic. Besides, much of the elegance of the populace
was meretricious, the result of an active trade in second-hand clothes.
Even so, the very demand for cast-ofls was evidence of the absence or
decay of customary distinctions: the poor man could and did wear the
same kind of coat as the rich. Similarly, contemporaries complained
of the farmer's imitation of city ways, his abandonment of the rustic
simplicity of yore. Again an exaggeration—yet the truth was that in no
economy was the countryside so closely integrated into the commercial
circuit; nowhere were the local pockets of self-sufficiency so broken down.
1
On the implication of inequality of income, or, more precisely, inequality of con-
sumption, for the nature and composition of industrial output, see the suggestive
article of W. Paul Strassman, 'Economic Growth and Income Distribution', Quarterly
J. of Economics, ixx (1956), 425-40; also S. Kuznets, 'Economic Growth and
Income Inequality', Amor. Earn. Rev. XLV (1955-), 1-28, which is more concerned with
the reverse relation.
The best single index to relative factor costs and the pattern of consumption is the
extent and character of domestic service: the twentieth century, sometimes called the
era of the common man, is also the age of the disappearing maid. And while the
British merchant of the eighteenth century had less cause for frustration than his
present-day descendants, he had his servant problem. Cf. Defoe, Everybody's Business Is
Nobody's Business, in The Novels and Miscellaneous Works of Daniel Defoe ('Bohm's
Standard Library'; 7 vols.; London, 1889), n, 499-500. See also J. Jean Hecht, The
Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1956), esp. chs. 1 and vi.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 51
All of this was part of a general process of urbanization, itself a
reflection of advanced commercialization and industrialization. London
alone was a monster: Defoe estimated in 1725 that it contained a
million and a half inhabitants, almost a quarter of the people in the
kingdom. This figure is testimony, not to Defoe's accuracy, but to the
impression the 'great wen' made on contemporaries; yet even con-
servative estimates put the population of the metropolitan area at about
half that number. In the provinces, the cities and towns developed
steadily after the Civil War; among the most rapidly expanding were
unincorporated 'villages' like Manchester, which had perhaps 12,500
inhabitants in 1717 and 20,000 by 1758. An estimate of 15 per cent of
the population in cities of 5000 and over by mid-century and 25 per
cent by 1800 is probably close to the truth.1 By contrast, the French
figure on the eve of the Revolution was something over 10 per cent;
and Germany was even more rural.
But it was not only that England had more people living in cities
than any other European country except perhaps Holland;* it was the
character of British urban life that made the pattern of settlement par-
ticularly significant. On the Continent, many of the cities were
essentially administrative, judicial, ecclesiastical in function. Their
populations consisted essentially of bureaucrats, professionals, soldiers,
and the shopkeepers, artisans, and domestics to serve them. The city
was not so much a node of economic activity, trading manufactures and
mercantile services for the products of the countryside, as a political and
cultural centre drawing tax revenues and rents from the rural population
in return for government and by traditional right. Madrid is the classic
example ofthis kind of agglomeration; but Paris was much like this, and
perhaps a majority of the larger French provincial cities—including
places like Arras, Douai, Caen, Versailles, Nancy, Tours, Poitiers,
Aix, and Toulouse—were little else. In Germany, of course, the very
fragmentation of political power was an incitement to the multiplica-
tion ofsemi-rural capitals, each with its court, bureaucracy, and garrison.
By contrast, the relatively smaller size of Britain's political apparatus
and its concentration in London left the older provincial centres to
somnolence and decay. Nothing is more striking about the map of
Britain in the eighteenth century than the modernity of the urban
pattern. The medieval county seats—Lancaster, York, Chester, Stafford
1
Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and
Structure (Cambridge, 1962), p. 7.
* And Holland's urban population was declining sharply, both relatively and
absolutely. Cf. William Petersen, Planned Migration: the Social Determinants of the
Dutch-Canadian Movement [University of California Publications in Sociology and
Social Institutions, vol. n] (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955), p. 20.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 52 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
—were overshadowed by younger places like Liverpool, Manchester,
Leeds, and Birmingham, and there was already a substantial shift of
population in favour of the North and Midlands. Much of the increase,
moreover, did not take place within the cities proper, but took the
form of a thickening of the countryside. Numerous overgrown indus-
trial villages sprang up—concentrations of hundreds of spinners and
weavers in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire,
similar in many ways to the earlier rural agglomerations of East Anglia.
The pattern throughout was one of close contact and frequent
exchange between city and land. Trade and shops went to the custo-
mers : the late A. P. Wadsworth noted the numerous advertisements of
cottages-to-let for tradesmen in the villages around Manchester, reflect-
ing on both sides the keen response to economic opportunity.1 In spite
of the sparseness of the data, it seems clear that British commerce of
the eighteenth century was, by comparison with that of the Continent,
impressively energetic, pushful, and open to innovation. Part of the
explanation is institutional: British shopkeepers were relatively free of
customary or legal restrictions on the objects or character of their
activity. They could sell what and where they would; and could and did
compete freely on the basis of price, advertising, and credit. If most
shopkeepers continued to haggle, many followed the lead of the Quakers
in selling at fixed, marked prices. In so far as such methods prevailed,
they conduced to a more efficient allocation of economic resources and
lower costs of distribution.
In sum, the home market for manufactures was growing, thanks to
improving communication, increase in population, high and rising
average income, a buying pattern favourable to solid, standardized,
moderately priced products, and unhampered commercial enterprise.
How much it grew, however, one cannot say precisely; we have no
statistics on domestic consumption.
We are better informed about foreign trade, if only because most of
the commodities that came in or went out of the country had to pass
under the eyes of the customs officers. Admittedly, the trade statistics
are incomplete, inaccurate, and biased by the use of fixed values in a
world of fluctuating prices. But they do furnish an order of compari-
son, showing for example a three- or fourfold gain in British exports
(including re-exports) in the century from 1660 to 1760.
We have seen that the growth of Britain's sales abroad, as at home,
reflected in large part her natural endowment; to this should be added
some institutional and historical advantages. She had a strong maritime
tradition, and, unlike most of her continental rivals, did not divert her
1
A. P. Wadsworth and Julia de L. Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lanca-
shire, 1600-1790 (Manchester, 1931), p. 276, n. 2.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 53
energies into the maintenance of costly armies and territorial aggrandize-
ment. Rather she concentrated her efforts on securing trading privi-
leges and a colonial empire, in large part at the expense of her leading
continental rivals, France and Holland. This kind of thing cost less than
European territory and in the long run paid better. No state was more
responsive to the desires of its mercantile classes; no country more alert
to the commercial implications of war. Mr Ramsey perceptively notes
the role of London in promoting this harmony of trade and diplomacy,
contrasting in this regard the isolation of Bordeaux, Marseilles, and
Nantes from Paris and Versailles.1
At the same time, Britain developed a large, aggressive merchant
marine and the financial institutions to sustain it. Of all the Continental
countries, only Holland again could rival her in this regard, and the com-
parative advantage of Holland lay in trade, not industry. Between
Dutch mercantile power and Britain's combination of mercantile and
industrial strength, the issue was never in doubt; the greatest asset of a
port is a productive hinterland.
In the long run, this was Britain's forte: the ability to manufacture
cheaply precisely those articles for which foreign demand was most
elastic. The most promising markets for Britain in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries lay not in Europe, whose own industries were
growing and whose mercantilist rulers were increasingly hostile to the
importation of manufactures, but rather overseas: in die New World,
Africa, the Orient. These areas were very different in needs and tastes.
The tribesmen of Africa and the plantation hand of the Antilles
wanted thin, cool fabrics, bright colours, flashy metal—light woollens,
the cotton-linen checks of Manchester, the cheap stampings of Birming-
ham. The requirements of the Indian or Chinese peasant were similar
(excluding most cotton goods) though more sober. The New England
farmer or Philadelphia merchant, confronted by a harsher, more
variable climate and more sophisticated technologically, bought
heavier cloth and sturdier hardware. For all, however, there was one
common denominator, and that a negative one: they were not especially
interested in costly, highly finished luxuries.
The effect of increased export, then, was to reinforce the pressures
toward standardization as against differentiation, quantity as against
quality. The sacrifice of quality to quantity was an old story in English
manufacture. By this I do not mean adulteration or the sale of inferior
goods as first quality—this was an international evil, as the iteration of
government and guild regulations on the Continent evidences. Rather
I mean the adoption of new methods of production that save costs at
1
G. D. Ramsay, English Overseas Trade during the Centuries of Emergence (London,
1957). PP- 247 f-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 54 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
the expense of solidity or appearance; the use of coal in place of wood
in glass-making or brewing is the best example.1
This readiness to abandon old ways for new, to place profit above
craft pride and even the appearances of pride, implies a certain separa-
tion of the producer from production, an orientation to the market
instead of to the shop. To some extent it reflected the early domination
of British manufacture by mercantile interests and the reduction of the
rural artisan to a mere employee of the putter-out. Clearly, however,
this is not enough to account for the phenomenon; in the wool industry,
for example, the most enterprising centre of manufacture was in
Yorkshire, a stronghold of the small independent clothier; and in
metallurgy, glass-making, brewing, and chemicals—the industries most
affected by the introduction of mineral fuel—the organization of
production had nothing to do with putting-out.
Instead, this cost-mindedness must be seen as part of a larger ration-
ality, itself in some measure the result of material circumstances—
above all, the greater cohesiveness of the British market and the effec-
tiveness of competitive pressures—but also as an ideological force of its
own, whose sources still remain to be explored. In no country in the
eighteenth century, with the possible exception of Holland, was
society so sophisticated commercially. Nowhere was the response to
profit and loss so rapid; nowhere did entrepreneurial decisions less
reflect non-rational considerations of prestige and habit. We shall have
occasion to consider this again when we speak of investment and the
supply of capital for industrialization. At the moment, my only con-
cern is to explain where market pressures were pushing the producers
and why the producers responded.
How much of the increase in demand and the trend toward mass pro-
duction of cheaper articles is to be attributed to the expansion of home as
against foreign markets is probably impossible to say. We have only
the grossest, global estimates of the proportion of domestic to over-
-seas sales, and these presumably comprise everything, including agri-
cultural products. What interests us here, however, is the demand for
manufactures, and only certain manufactures at that. One may perhaps
attempt this kind of comparison for the wool industry: at the end of
the seventeenth century English exports of wool cloth probably
1
J. U. Nef has argued in a number of works that the adoption of mineral fuel itself
gave strong impetus to the production of'quantity and utility rather than quality and
elegance'. See, inter alia, his Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge,
IO
58), pp. 52-3- Yet it is clear that the readiness to accept coal was itself indicative of a
deeper rationality; such nations as France, confronted with the same choice, obdurately
rejected coal—even where there were strong pecuniary incentives to switch over to the
cheaper fuel.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 55
accounted for upwards of 30 per cent of the output of the industry; by
1740, the proportion had apparently risen, possibly to over half, and in
1771-2, something under a half.1 In this important branch, then, the
major impetus seems to have come from the export trade, and the most
active exporting area in the industry, Yorkshire, was also the most
rapidly growing centre of manufacture. It has indeed been argued that
not only was the minimum critical market required to induce a techno-
logical breakthrough too big for any one country to provide, but that
only a large fraction of the growing world demand could supply the
necessary push; and that it was that peculiar combination of economic
and political circumstances that permitted Britain to win for herself in
the eighteenth century so large a share of the trade in manufactures that
accounts for the successful leap to the 'higher' mode of production.2

Yet the answer is not so simple. Such figures as we have on British

exports (overwhelmingly manufactures) show a distinct levelling off
in the third quarter of the century. The volume of woollen shipments
falls from the late fifties; cottons falter in the late sixties and seventies;
the break comes later in iron and steel—in the late sixties—but it is
sharp and the drop persists until the nineties.3 David Eversley argues
cogently against the easy acceptance of exports as the leading sector of
the economy in process of revolution: noting the weight and relative
stability of home demand, he reasons that only the existence of this
kind of dependable market justified and permitted the accumulation of
capital in manufacture.4 On the other hand (as in many historical
questions, one can fairly shuttle back and forth between pros and cons),
this very variability of exports was surely a stimulant to industrial
change and growth. It is not only that the marginal increment of sales
often spells the difference between profit and loss; the bursts of overseas
demand placed abrupt and severe burdens on the productive system,
pushed enterprise into a position of rapidly increasing costs, and en-
hanced the incentive for technological change. Certainly, from the late

1
Thesefiguresare based on Phyllis Deane, "The Output of the British Woollen
Industry in the Eighteenth Century', J. Earn. Hist, xvn (1957), 309-10, 211-13,
215-16, 220. The article itself makes clear the limitations of these figures, which are
essentially informed inferences from informed guesses.
2
Cf. Kenneth Berrill, 'International Trade and the Rate of Economic Growth',
Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xn (i960), 351-9; also P.A., 'The Origins of the Industrial
Revolution' [summary of a symposium], Past and Present, no. 17 (i960), pp. 71—81.
3
Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, pp. 46, 59.
t D. E. C. Eversley, 'The Home Market and Economic Growth in England,
1750-80', in Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1967),
pp. 206-59.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 56 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
eighteenth century on, the waves of investment seem to follow on
increases in sales abroad.1
In any event, this rising demand contained the seeds of difficulty.
Every mode of industrial organization has, built into it, opportunities
for conflict between employer and employed. These are particularly
serious in putting-out because the system furnishes the arms as well as
the causes of hostility: the worker has custody of the materials of the
employer and transforms them in his own good time, in his own home,
free of supervision. The only resource of the merchant is his limited
control over the income of his employees: if he pays them little enough,
they are compelled to work for fear of hunger; and if he abates their
pay for any departure from standards of quality, they are compelled to
maintain a minimum level of performance. To be sure, the exercise of
such constraints is contingent on the establishment of some kind of
monopsonistic bond between employer and worker; otherwise the
employer can do no more than accept the prevailing market price for
labour. That such a nexus did in fact often exist—because of actual
monopsony in some areas, or personal ties, or debt—and that it led to
abuses, seems incontrovertible.2 There is a substantial body of folklore
built around the figure of the grasping clothier and his even greedier
minion, Jimmy Squeezum.
On the other hand, it is equally clear that these controls were at best
spotty and limited in effect; that the worker early learned to eke out his
income by setting aside for his own use or for resale some of the raw
materials furnished by the merchant. Such embezzlement was usually
effected at the expense of the finished product: the yarn was sized to
give it false weight; the cloth was stretched up to and beyond the point
of transparency. Nor was there any feeling of moral compunction
about such abstraction; it was looked upon as a normal perquisite of the
trade, more than justified by the exploitation of the manufacturer.
The employer's control over labour was strongest in a declining
market. At such times, the menace of unemployment hung heavy over
the domestic workers, and indeed, from the manufacturer's point of
view, one of the greatest advantages of the putting-out system was the
ease of laying off labour; overhead costs were minimal. (Later on,
1
Cf. Francis Crouzet, 'La formation du capital en Grande-Bretagne pendant la
Revolution Industrielle', Deuxieme Conference Internationale d'Histoire Economique, Aix-
en-Provence 1962. [Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Sixieme Section:
Sciences Economiques et Sociales, 'Congres et colloques', vm] (Paris; 1965), pp. 589-
640.
i
For one example of the role of debt in holding a worker to his employer, cf.
T. S. Ashton, "The Domestic System in the Early Lancashire Tool Trade', Econ. Hist.
Rev. 1 (1926), 136.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN S7
when the alternative of concentrated factory production became
available, many an entrepreneur, in the continental countries especially,
delayed shifting over because of the flexibility of the older arrangements.)
In the eighteenth century, however, the British putter-out was con-
fronted with a secularly expanding market, which sapped industrial
discipline while aggravating the conflicts endemic in the system. Thus
the worker's predilection for embezzlement, sharpened in depression
by the desire to compensate for increased abatements and lack of work,
was nowise dulled in prosperity; on the contrary, the reward for theft
was greater.
What is more, though the system was flexible downwards, expansion
of output was difficult. Up to a point, rural manufacture expanded
easily by opening new areas—moving from the environs of the manu-
facturing towns into nearby valleys, invading less accessible mountain
regions, spreading like a liquid seeking its level, in this case the lowest
possible wage level. It was in this way that the woollen industry filled
the dales of Wiltshire and Somerset and came to thrive all along the
Welsh marches by the end of the sixteenth century; on the Continent,
the growing woollen fabriques of Venders and Monschau were seeking
their weavers in the Limburg by the mid-eighteenth century, while the
cotton manufacture of Normandy, after covering the Pays de Caux, was
spilling over into Picardy.
But in eighteenth-century Britain, the possibilities of geographical
expansion had been largely exhausted. The most accessible areas had
been explored and drawn into the system. The worsted weavers r»f the
West Riding were buying yarn in the northern dales and as far afield as
East Anglia. In Lancashire, by mid-century, weavers were walking miles
to collect the weft needed to keep their looms busy the rest of the day
and buying the spinsters with ribbotis and other vanities. Much of the
difficulty was due to the difference in labour requirements for spinning
and weaving: it took at least five wheels to supply one loom, a pro-
portion ordinarily at variance with the composition of the population.
So long as it was merely a question of finding rural spinsters—whose
husbands worked in the fields—to furnish yarn to urban weavers, there
was no problem. But once weaving spread to the countryside and the
men gave up cultivation for industry, the imbalance was bound to
become an obstacle to expansion. There is evidence that some spinners
had begun to specialize in particular types of yarn by the middle of the
eighteenth century, that a division of labour had come about, in parts
of Lancashire at least, in response to the pressure of demand. But this
was hardly enough, given the state of technology, and the price of
yarn rose sharply from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth
century.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 58 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS

Essentially the increase was due to the ever-wider dispersion of the

labour force, for nominal spinning wages changed little. The cost of
transport was high to begin with; even more serious, in a world of
poor communications, the price of moving goods is not a smooth
function of distance; costs jump sharply each time one has to cross a
natural barrier or bridge gaps in the network of roads and waterways.
Sooner or later, therefore, the expanding manufacturer was caught in
a cost cage and compelled to seek higher output from within his zone of
operations.1
In the long run, to be sure, he could expect immigration and natural
increase to augment his labour force. Thus there was considerable
movement of population in spite of restrictions due to the laws of
settlement; Lancashire in particular was a kind of internal frontier,
attracting thousands from the adjacent counties as well as from Ireland
and Scotland well before the coming of machinery and the factory. And
industrial activity, by providing new resources, made possible extensive
division of the land, encouraged early marriage, and gave rise to
densities of settlement that would otherwise have been inconceivable.
Professor Habakkuk and others have called attention to the attraction of
industry for overpopulated areas;1 but here, as so often in history, the
process is one of reciprocal reinforcement: rural industry frequently
laid the basis of what was eventually to become overpopulation.3
Yet migration and natural increase are slow-acting palliatives. In the
short run, the manufacturer who wanted to increase output had to get
more work out of the labour already engaged. Here, however, he
again ran into the internal contradictions of the system. He had no way
of compelling his workers to do a given number of hours of labour;
the domestic weaver or craftsman was master of his time, starting and
stopping when he desired. And while the employer could raise the
1
The above is not intended to imply that there was a profit squeeze (for which I
have no evidence); simply that the costs of distribution and collection set spatial limits
to the labour market, even under conditions of rising demand. But given the nature of
putting-out, in particular the worker's temporary custody of the raw materials, one
can conceive of the possibility that an increase in demand for and price of the finished
article would so encourage pilferage (on which, see below), that labour cost per unit
would rise sharply and profits diminish—at least until countermeasures could be taken.
2
Cf. H. J. Habakkuk, 'Family Structure and Economic Change in Nineteenth-
Century Europe', J. Earn. Hist, xv (1955), 1-12; Joan Thirsk, 'Industries in the
Countryside', in F. J. Fisher, ed., Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and
Stuart England in Honour ofR. H. Tawney (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 70-88.
3 Perhaps the best study of the social and psychological, as well as economic,
mechanisms by which the introduction of industry into the countryside promotes a
higher rate of population growth is provided by Rudolf Braun's pioneering study of
the Zurich highlands: Industrialisierung and Volksleben: Die Veranderungen in einem
la'ndlichen Industriegebiet vor 1800 (Erlenbach-Zurich and Stuttgart, i960).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 59
piece rates with a view to encouraging diligence, he usually found that
this actually reduced output. The worker, who had a fairly rigid con-
ception of what he felt to be a decent standard of living, preferred
leisure to income after a certain point; and the higher his wages, the less
he had to do to reach that point. In moments of affluence, the peasant
lived for the day; gave no thought to the morrow; spent much of his
meagre pittance in the local inn or alehouse; caroused the Saturday of
pay, the sabbath Sunday, and 'Holy Monday' as well; dragged himself
reluctantly back to work Tuesday, warmed to the task Wednesday,
and laboured furiously Thursday and Friday to finish in time for
another long weekend.1
Thus precisely at those times when profit opportunities were greatest,
the manufacturer found himself frustrated by this unreasonable inver-
sion of the laws of sensible economic behaviour: the supply of labour
decreased as the price rose. Nor was the other tack more effective.
Outright wage cuts were not feasible in the face of increasing demand,
for there was a limit to the employer's hold over his workers. More
common were surreptitious increases in the worker's task: he was
given longer warps or less credit for waste; or procedures of measuring
and weighing were altered in the employer s favour. This kind of
cleverness, however, brought with it its own penalties. The resentful
workers were incited thereby to embezzle the more, and frictions
built into the system were correspondingly aggravated. The eighteenth
century saw a persistent effort to halt the theft of materials by making
embezzlement a criminal offence, providing employers and law
officers with special rights of search and seizure, placing the burden of
proof on any person holding materials he could not account for, and
repeatedly increasing the penalties for violation. These last included
corporal punishment, for fines were of no effect on penniless spinners
and weavers. The very iteration of these acts is the best evidence of then-
ineffectiveness; by the last quarter of the century the black market in
wool and yarn had become an organized business and many a cotton
manufacturer was said to have begun his career by buying materials

1
Adam Smith {Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. vm) perceptively noted the con-
nection between intense application and prolonged relaxation, and argued that the
former gave rise to the latter. Cf. T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1955), p. 205. This interpretation seems to put the cart
before the horse. It was because the worker preferred^ this kind of leisure and could
achieve it by working at full speed for two or three days that he adopted this sporadic
pattern; not because he enjoyed working himself to the limit for a few days and
needed a long weekend to rest. The latter position is equivalent to arguing that
students rest the first three months of the term because of the heavy 'cramming' they
do for final examinations.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 60 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
1
from this source. Similarly the laws to compel workers to finish their
tasks promptly and to fulfil their obligations to one employer before
hiring out to another—a problem that apparently grew with the demand
for labour—were little more than admissions of difficulty and expres-
sions of intent. The discipline of the industrial system was breaking
down.
The shift in attitude toward the labouring poor in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries reflects in part the employer's frustration
and vexation. Where once poverty had been looked on as an unavoid-
able evil and the poor man as an object of pity and a responsibility to his
neighbour, now poverty was a sin and the poor man a victim of his own
iniquity. Defoe is only the clearest and most effective spokesman for
this viewpoint, which castigated the worker for the sloth that made
him waste his time in idleness and low diversion, and the vice that led
him to squander his scanty resources on alcohol and debauchery. This
virtuous indignation seems to have softened from the middle of the
century; at least writers on economic matters were beginning to
argue that labour was not incorrigibly lazy and would in fact respond
to higher wages. Mr Coats has suggested that this shift owed much to
the introduction of machinery and the promise of a definitive solution
to the problem.2 Perhaps; in the meantime, the businessman continued
sceptical, and in places like Manchester people were still told in 1769
that the 'best friend' of the manufacturer was high provisions.3 One
can understand why the thoughts of employers turned to workshops
where the men would be brought together to labour under watchful
overseers, and to machines that would solve the shortage of manpower
while curbing the insolence and dishonesty of the men.

Yet if the presence of this growing need for a change in the mode of
production clarities the demand side of technological innovation, it
will not suffice to explain the supply side: the conditions that made
possible the devising of new methods and their adoption by industry.
One thing seems clear: if Britain was the country that felt most keenly
the inadequacy of the prevailing system, she was not the only one. The
major continental centres were also disturbed by shortages of labour
and the abuses of domestic manufacture. As noted above, the weavers
1
Travis, Notes.. .o/Todmorden and District (1896), p. 56, cited by Wadsworth and
Mann, Cotton Trade, p. 399.
2
A. W . Coats, 'Changing Attitudes to Labour in the Mid-Eighteenth Century',
Earn. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xi (1958), 46-8.
3
Arthur Young's famous testimony, from his Six Months Tour Through the North of
England (4 vols.; London, 1770), in, 248-9. Cf. Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the
Laborer in a System of Nationalism (New Haven, 1920), pp. 98-105.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 6l
and merchant-manufacturers of Normandy and Venders, of the Rhine-
land and Saxony, were obliged to find their yarn over an ever wider
radius, often in the face of laws in the country of origin forbidding its
export to competitors. Nor was this the first time in history that
demand had pressed hard on the capacity of craft and domestic manu-
facture: in medieval Italy and Flanders analogous difficulties arose
without calling forth an industrial revolution.
The problem may be broken down into two aspects: the conditions
governing the invention of labour-saving devices; and those determin-
ing the adoption of these devices and their diffusion in industry.
On the first, it would seem clear, though by no means easy to demon-
strate, that there existed in Britain in the eighteenth century a higher
level of technical skill and a greater interest in machines and ' gym-
cracks' than in any of the other countries of Europe. This should not be
confused with scientific knowledge; in spite of some efforts to tie the
Industrial Revolution to the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the link would seem to have been an extremely
diffuse one: both reflected a heightened interest in natural and material
phenomena and a more systematic application of empirical searching.
Indeed, if anything, the growth of scientific knowledge owed much to
the concerns and achievements of technology; there was far less flow of
ideas or methods the other way; and this was to continue to be the
case well into the nineteenth century.1
All of which makes the question of British mechanical skill the more
mysterious. The testimony of contemporary observers on this point is
mixed: some found the British creative as well as highly gifted crafts-
men; others looked upon them as simply clever imitators; there is no
evidence before the great innovations of the eighteenth century of any
exceptional reservoir of talent in this sphere. To be sure, there were the
millwrights, clock-makers, joiners, and other craftsmen whose experi-
ence in construction and contriving trained them in effect to be the
mechanics of a new age. But England was not the only country with
such artisans, and nowhere else do we find this harvest of inventions.
Yet if there is no positive evidence of a superior level of technical
skill in Britain, there is a strong indirect argument for this assumption:
even after the introduction of the textile machines (and the new metal-
lurgical and chemical techniques, as well), the continental countries
were not prepared to imitate them. The most effective of the early
copies were almost all the work of British emigrant mechanics, and it
was a matter of decades before the rest of Europe freed itself from
dependence on British skills. Nor was this long apprenticeship drawn
1
This was true even of the steam-engine, which is often put forward as the prime
example of science-spawned innovation. See below, p. 104.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 62 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
out simply because of a desire to employ more productive workers.
The English artisans who came to the Continent were costly, homesick,
insubordinate. Their employers could hardly wait to be rid of them.
Why the British developed these skills earlier and faster than others is
another matter. Was it because corporate controls of production and
apprenticeship had largely broken down by the end of the seventeenth
century, whereas the continued influence of guild organization and the
active supervision of mercantilistic governments on the Continent
tended to fix techniques in a mould and stifle imagination?1 Is the
Encyclopidie, with its careful descriptions of the proper way to do
things, a symbol of this rigidity? Or was it because the avenues of
social advancement were different in Britain than in the aristocratic
monarchies of the Continent, that talent was readier to go into business,
projecting, and invention than in more traditionalistic societies? One is
struck by the middle-class origins of most of the creators of the first
textile machines. John Kay was the son of a 'substantial yeoman';
Lewis Paul, the son of a physician. John Wyatt's background is
vague, but he had attended grammar school and was presumably from
the kind of family that felt schooling was desirable. Samuel Crompton's
father was a farmer who produced cloth on the side and was apparently
comfortably situated. Edmund Cartwright was the son of a gentleman
and a graduate of Oxford. It was not discreditable in the eighteenth
century for children of good families to be apprenticed out to weavers or
joiners.2 Manual labour and dexterity were not stigmata of the peuple,
as opposed to the bourgeoisie.
1
See Gabriel Jars's comparison of Sheffield, where industry was still fettered by the
guild system in 1764-5 (though the growth ofcertain enterprises had burst these bonds),
and Birmingham, where any man could engage in any business and at most 20 per cent
of the workers had properly served their apprenticeships. "The multiplicity of trades
has given rise to emulation such that each manufacturer is ceaselessly occupied in
inventing new means of cutting down labour costs and thereby increasing his profits.
This has been pushed to such an extent that it seems unthinkable that ironmongery
can be produced anywhere so cheaply as in Birmingham.' Chevalier, 'La mission de
Gabriel Jars', Trans. Newcomen Soc. xxvi (1947/8 and 1948/9), 63.
2
Thus Peter Ewart, son of a Scots clergyman, one of whose brothers became minis-
ter to the Prussian court, another a physician, a third, partner to John Gladstone in the
Liverpool trade: because of his talent for mechanical matters, he was apprenticed as
a millwright to John Rennie. W. C. Henry, 'A Biographical Notice of the Late Peter
Ewart, Esq.', Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 2nd ser.
vn (1846). Or James Watt, father of the famous inventor: son of a mathematics
teacher who was an Elder of the presbytery and Kirk Treasurer at Cartsdyke (Scot-
land), he was apprenticed to a carpenter-shipwright. His brother was trained in
mathematics and surveying. S. Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt (London, 1865),
pp. 81-3. Or Charles Tennant, son of a farmer and 'factor to the Earl of Glencairn',
who was apprenticed to a weaver. E. W. D. Tennant, 'The Early History of the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 63
A further consideration suggests itself. Was it not only that the
English atmosphere was more favourable to change, but also that
special experience in certain areas provided unique facilities for training ?
What, for example, was the role of the Newcomen engine in shaping
English metallurgy and machine construction? Or does the explana-
tion lie simply in the greater need for innovation on the island (a matter
of degree, to be sure, but questions of degree can often be decisive):
need for labour-saving devices in a textile manufacture whose products
lent themselves to mass production; for effective pumping equipment
in mines; for ways to make use of mineral fuel in a country with the
largest appetite for iron in the world?
The fresh and important researches of A. E. Musson and Eric
Robinson offer an impressive picture of the energy with which Lanca-
shire mobilized and trained technological skill in the second half of the
eighteenth century—importing craftsmen from as far away as London
and Scotland and capitalizing on its own strong traditions of skilled
labour to turn joiners into millwrights and turners, smiths into foundry-
men, clock-makers into tool and die cutters.1 Even more striking is
the theoretical knowledge of these men. They were not, on the whole,
the unlettered tinkerers of historical mythology. Even the ordinary
millwright, as Fairbairn notes, was usually 'a fair arithmetician, knew
something of geometry, levelling, and mensuration, and in some
cases possessed a very competent knowledge of practical mathematics.
He could calculate the velocities, strength, and power of machines:
could draw in plan and section.. ..' 2 Much of these 'superior attain-
ments and intellectual power' reflected the abundant facilities for
technical education in 'villages' like Manchester during this period,
ranging from Dissenters' academies and learned societies to local and
visiting lecturers, 'mathematical and commercial' private schools with
evening classes, and a wide circulation of practical manuals, periodicals,
and encyclopaedias.
Whatever the reasons for British precocity in this domain, the results
are clear; and equally clear is the relative ease with which inventors
St Rollox Chemical Works', Chemistry and Industry, 1 November 1947, p. 667.
Similarly, there was no derogation in marrying a craftsman. See the pedigree of the
Pilkington family in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. T. C. Barker,
Pilkington Brothers and the Glass Industry (London, i960), pp. 20-30.
1
A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, "The Origins of Engineering in Lancashire',
J. Boon. Hist, xx (i960); 'Science and Industry in the Later Eighteenth Century',
Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xn (i960). Also G. H. Tupling, "The Early Metal Trades and
the Beginnings of Engineering in Lancashire', Trans. Lancashire and Cheshire Anti-
quarian Soc. LXI (1949), 25 £
* Wm. Fairbairn, Treatise on Mills and Millwork (2nd ed.; 2 vols.; London, 1864),
1, vi.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 64 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
found financing for their projects and the rapidity with which the pro-
ducts of their ingenuity found favour with the manufacturing com-
munity—if anything, too much favour, for many of the earlier
inventors spent more time enforcing their patent rights than earning
them. 1 Some have accounted for this swift diffusion of change by the
relatively greater accumulation of capital in Britain than anywhere else
in Europe except Holland (which was kind enough to send some of its
surplus funds to England, rather than invest them in its own industry).
They argue that the greater supply of capital was reflected in lower
interest rates, which tended to decline in the course of the eighteenth
century, and that this in turn made change that much less costly and,
part passu, that much more profitable and attractive.*
The argument is persuasive, but the historical facts tend to modify it
at a number of points, diminish its import at others. On the one hand, it
is most unlikely that differences in the rate of interest of the order of
two, three, even half-a-dozen points are a decisive consideration where
the mechanical advantage of innovation is as great as it was for the
early textile machines. One can understand that the timing of canal and
road construction, or similar costly projects of slow gestation, was
affected by shifts in the rate of interest, in part because the very possi-
bility of flotation was frequently dependent on an easy money market.
But for the prospective textile entrepreneur, the problem was not
'whether his profits would cover 6 per cent or 12 per cent on borrowed
capital, but whether he could raise the capital at all.
In this regard, the cotton manufacturer of the eighteenth century was
favoured by the very newness of the Industrial Revolution. The early
machines, complicated though they were to contemporaries, were
1
A number of writers have laid stress on the incentive effect of patent legislation.
I am inclined to doubt its significance. This kind of protection was not new; the basis
of the system was laid by the Statute of Monopolies of 1624. In our period, the cost
and difficulty of obtaining a patent was rising steadily. Cf. Witt Bowden, Industrial
Society in England Towards the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York), 1925, pp.
26-30. At the same time, there was good reason to doubt the efficacy of patents
against determined competitors, as numerous inventors learned to their sorrow, and
many an entrepreneur placed his reliance on secrecy, rather than the law.
2
This was die position of Prof. T. S. Ashton in his Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830
('Home University Library', London, New York, and Toronto, 1949), pp. 9-11,
90-1, but he has since modified it considerably, emphasizing, not cost of capital but its
availability. The rate of return on government securities was important, he argues,
because of the 5 per cent ceiling on the rate of interest: when the funds fell and the
return (including the prospect of capital gains) rose, capital would shift in that direc-
tion, diminishing the supply to industry and trade. An Economic History of England:
the Eighteenth Century, pp. 26-9. There is an excellent discussion in L. S. Pressnell,
"The Rate of Interest in the Eighteenth Century', in Pressnell (ed.), Studies in the
Industrial Revolution (London, i960), pp. 190-7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 65
nevertheless modest, rudimentary, wooden contrivances, which could
be built for surprisingly small sums. A forty-spindle jenny cost perhaps
.£6 in 1792; scribbling and carding machines cost £ i for each inch of
roller width; a slubbing billy with thirty spindles cost J^IO. ios.1 And
these were new. Similar equipment was frequently advertised in used
condition at much lower prices. The only really costly items of fixed
investment in this period were buildings and power, but here the
historian must remember that the large, many-storeyed mill that awed
contemporaries was the exception. Most so-called factories were no
more than glorified workshops: a dozen workers or less; one or two
jennies, perhaps, or mules; and a carding machine to prepare the
rovings. These early devices were powered by the men and women
who worked them.2 Attics and cottages were reconverted for the
purpose; later on a steam-engine might be added to this kind of impro-
vised structure. Moreover, there were premises to rent—here we have
another example of the responsiveness of English capital to economic
opportunity. Not only were complete buildings offered to prospective
tenants, but larger mills were subdivided and let in small units. So
that an industrialist could in fact start with a minimal outlay—renting his
plant, borrowing for equipment and raw materials, even raising funds
for payment of wages by contracting in advance for the finished product.
Some no doubt began with nothing more than the capital accumulated
by petty local trading in yarn and cloth; others, as noted above, ap-
parently built their fortunes in the black market for embezzled materials.
On the other hand, a good many of the early mill owners were men
of substance—merchants whose experience in selling finished com-
1
W. B. Crump (ed.), The Leeds Woollen Industry, 1780-1820 (Leeds: The Thoresby
Society, 1931), pp. 212-13, 293'. also Herbert Heaton, 'Benjamin Gott and the
Industrial Revolution in Yorkshire', Econ. Hist. Rev. ffl (1931), 52. For purposes of
comparison, a cotton weaver earned perhaps 75. 6d. a week in 1770, a hand spinner
between 2s. and 35. Thus the 40-spindle jenny cost about two weeks wages of the
forty women it replaced. Wage figures from Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade,
pp. 402-3. A traditional hand-loom cost more than ajenny; anywhere from ,£7 to ,£ 1 o.
z
The first application of water power to the mule was apparently in 1790 at the
New Lanark mills. The increased drive made possible 'double mules' of 400 spindles;
thus capital bred capital. George W. Daniels, The Early English Cotton Industry
(Manchester, 1920), p. 125. It is not clear when the steam-engine was first so used—
perhaps in the late 1780's, certainly in the early 1790's. A large proportion of these
early engines were employed, not to drive the machinery directly, but to raise water
upon a wheel; some of them, indeed, were Savery-type steam pumps (see below,
p. 101), which were preferred to more efficient machines because of their lower initial
cost. An engine delivering 2-4 h.p. could be had new for between ^150 and ,£200.
A larger Boulton and Watt rotative engine (15-20 h.p.) cost four or five times as much.
Steam came earlier to frame spinning: Arkwright's atmospheric engine at Shudehill
(Lanes.), to raise water for a wheel, was installed in 1783. A. E. Musson and E. Robin-
son, 'The Early Growth of Steam Power', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xi (1959), 418-39.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 66 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
modifies had alerted them to the possibilities of large-scale, mechanized
production; putters-out, who had had direct experience in manufacture;
even independent small producers with enough set by to change their
methods and expand. Thus of n o cotton spinning mills established in
the Midlands in the period 1769-1800,62 were the creations of hosiers,
drapers, mercers, and manufacturers from other districts or from other
branches of the textile industry.1 This previous accumulation of wealth
and experience was a major factor in the rapid adoption of techno-
logical innovation—as it was in industries like iron and chemicals. W e
are now come full circle: the inventions came in part because the
growth and prosperity of the industry made them imperative; and the
growth and prosperity of the industry helped make their early and
widespread utilization possible.
All of which serves to emphasize an important caution: it was not
capital by itself that made possible Britain's swift advance. Money
alone could have done nothing; indeed, in this regard, the entrepreneurs
of the Continent, who could often count on direct subsidies or mono-
poly privileges from the state, were better off than their British counter-
parts. What distinguished the British economy, as we have already had
several occasions to remark, was an excepttotul sensitivity and re-
sponsiveness to pecuniary opportunity. This was a people fascinated
by wealth and commerce, collectively and individually.
Why this was so is a question worthy of investigation. Certainly the
phenomenon was closely related, as both cause and effect, to the already
noted openness of society; and this was linked in turn to the peculiar
position and character of the aristocracy.
Britain had no nobility in the sense of the other European countries.
She had a peerage, composed of a small number of titled persons, whose
essential and almost unique perquisite was the possibility of sitting in
the House of Lords. Their children were commoners, who often
received, to be sure, courtesy titles in token of their high birth, but were
no different in civil status from other Britons. Even the peers had only
the most modest privileges: trial by their fellow noblemen in criminal
proceedings, for example, or the right of direct access to the sovereign.
They did not enjoy fiscal immunities.
Below the nobility stood the gentry or so-called squirearchy, an
amorphous group, without legal definition or status, that had no
equivalent on the Continent. Its edges were blurred, its ranks loosely
1
This figure of 62 actually understates the role of textile men in the new factory
cotton manufacture, for it does not include somefifteenmills established by Arkwright,
Strutt, and partners, most of whom were drawn from this milieu. Stanley D. Chap-
man, The Early Factory Masters: The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands
Textile Industry (Newton Abbot, 1967), p. 78.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 67
and heterogeneously constituted. Some gentry were of noble ante-
cedents; otters had made their fortunes in trade or the professions or
government service and had purchased estates as much for their social
prestige as for their income; others were scions of old country families;
still others were farmers or yeomen grown wealthy. They had two
things in common: land ownership and a way of life that was a vestige
of medieval seignorialism. These were the local notabilities—lords of
the manor, justices of the peace, county sheriffs. With the peers, they
were the true rulers of provincial Britain.
Both nobility and gentry generally practised primogeniture: the
oldest male child inherited both title (where pertinent) and land. This
had two large consequences: it increased the economic burden of the
head of the family; and it compelled most of the children to earn their
living, in whole or part.
Thus it was no easy task to preserve and if possible increase the family
estate for transmission to one's heir while finding places for younger
sons and dowries for daughters. Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, put
the point well in a letter of 1695 to his executors; he favoured primo-
genitary strict settlement, he wrote,
not so much out of a vain affectation of continuing a great estate in my
family, as because [my son] will thereby be under a necessity of observing
some good economy that he may be able to provide for his younger children,
and consequendy will not run into diat foolish or extravagant way of living
which debauches and corrupts die manners of many families, as well as ruins
dieir fortunes *
To be sure, British society had provided careers for cadets of good
family: remunerative offices in government; Church livings; commis-
sions in the armed forces; a growing number of potentially lucrative
situations in the colonies (not really important until the second half of
the eighteenth century). Yet excessive and otiose as many of these
places appeared to contemporary reformers, they were not enough to
satisfy the demand, as the competition for patronage testifies, and they
had to be shared with such other groups as the legal profession and the
mercantile interest. Sinecures and offices came high, and it was a rare
father who could place more than two or three sons well. To quote
Nottingham again: 'no estate can provide so fully for younger children,
but that they must in great degree help themselves'. The fourth and
fifth sons, of gentry and even noble families, would have to be appren-
ticed to trade—not the trade of the shop, to be sure, but the interna-
1
Quoted by H. J. Habakkuk, 'Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham: His House
and Estate', inJ.H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan
(London, New York, Toronto, 1955), p. 156.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 68 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
tional commerce that was at once the pride of the English economy and
the seed-bed of new houses.1
Admittedly, there were rarely as many as four or five sons that sur-
vived to manhood, and the flow of gentle talent into business was
presumably small.2 Certainly it was less important in the eighteenth
century than it had been in earlier periods, partly perhaps because the
royal house brought with it from Hanover strong German prejudices
against this kind of mobility, partly because the proliferation of office
and the extension of British dominion were opening up alternative
opportunities that were more attractive and preferentially accessible.3
Yet it was not so much the substantive contribution to enterprise that
counted, as the symbolism of the example, the sanction that this legiti-
mate participation, however small, conferred on trade as a respectable
activity and on pecuniary rationality as a way of life.
In the meantime, the head of the family had to build the patrimony
and make it work for him and his children. Not all landowners did
well in the contest for fortune or even tried, but at their best they
formed a class of 'spirited proprietors' that warmed the hearts of
improvers like Arthur Young. Noble or gentle, they lived on their
estates (and not at the court), rode their lands and noted their yield,
sought improvements to enhance traditional revenues, conceived new
ways to produce income. They rarely cultivated or operated directly—
though one can cite contrary instances like Thomas Fitzmaurice,
brother of the Earl of Shelburne, who, among other enterprises,
bleached and sold the linens woven by his Irish tenants.4 (Even if they
1
Much depended, however, on necessity and opportunity. In Scotland, the gentry
were poor and had few claims to preferment. The Established Church was closed to
them; the prospect of fighting the battles of England, unattractive; foreign commerce
and colonial enterprise offered few employments until the century was well advanced.
The more intellectual could prepare for the Bar, but these were necessarily few. Many
sought their livelihood, therefore, as shopkeepers, alias 'merchants'. As Henry G.
Graham puts it in his classic study, ' . . .in those days, a gentleman's son felt it as
natural to fall into trade as for a rich tradesman to rise out of it'. The Social Life of
Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (4th ed.; London, 1950), p. 33.
2
We really do not know how important, absolutely or relatively, was the partici-
pation of these younger sons of noble or gentry families in business. A systematic
survey of the entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution would be immensely valuable,
though difficulties of definition (what is active participation?) would confuse the
issue, especially as regards the aristocratic contribution. In the meantime, we are
reduced to discrete impressions. Cf. Walter E. Minchinton, 'The Merchants in
England in the Eighteenth Century', Explorations in Entrepreneurial History [henceforth
Explorations], x (1957), 62.
3
For the earlier period, see Lawrence Stone, 'The Nobility in Business', ibid.
pp. 54-61.
4
A. H. Dodd, The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (Cardiff, 1933),
pp. 32-3.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 69
had made their fortune in trade and continued in the firm, they inevi-
tably gave less time to mercantile concerns.) Rather they leased their
land to tenants—peasants, commercial farmers, or industrial contractors.
"When they financed business ventures, it was as creditors more than as
partners; or they bought shares in joint-stock companies and trusts.
Their interests were generally handled by stewards, agents, and
solicitors, and this exposed them to abuses of confidence. Yet that was
all the more reason to supervise their affairs closely, and many of them
made the decisions that are the hallmark of active entrepreneurship.
A significant few opened mines, built iron works and mills, dug canals,
developed ports, and leased their urban properties for building. What is
more, they anticipated demand, undertook investments on speculation,
advertised if necessary for tenants, and stood ready to operate then-
installations through agents or partners if no lessees were forth-
coming.
They also enclosed the land, concentrated their holdings, introduced
or found tenants who would introduce better crop rotations and
techniques of cultivation, helped spread new ideas about the country.
This is not the place to discuss the so-called 'agricultural revolution' of
the eighteenth century, or to assess the benefits or injustices that
accompanied it. My aim here is to underline the generality of this spirit
of innovation and its effects; and also to recall the well-known fact that
this was a society that interposed relatively few institutional barriers to
a fundamental change of this kind. The Tudor monarchy may have been
concerned about enclosures; the parliamentary regime of the eighteenth
century was less paternalistic. For good or evil, Britain's countryside
was being kneaded like dough; and the improving landlords were a
powerful leaven.
It is probable that such industrial ventures as people 'of name' under-
took were on the whole less remunerative than competitive efforts by
'professional' businessmen; or for that matter, that the great estates
could not bear comparison with the lands of the small proprietors in
their neighbourhood.1 It is also true that the nobility and gentry tended
over time to change from active entrepreneurs into rentiers; this was
the experience, for example, of areas like Wales and Northumberland,
where large coal and ore deposits had initially provided a favourable
base for industrial activity by landowners. Yet the significance of these
efforts lay in the efforts themselves, not in their return. Once again it
lay in the legitimacy conferred on innovation and the pursuit of wealth
as a way of life.
A comparison will illuminate the argument. Thus far I have treated
1
Cf. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book in, ch. n; Arthur Young, Travels
during the Years 1787,1788 and 1789,1,90,99,108, and especially 198.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 7O THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS

this permeation of country life by the spirit of enterprise and calculation

as a consequence of social structure and the system of inheritance. There
was undoubtedly more to it. In part, it reflected the quickening pace of
the economy: new men kept moving up and the older families had to
move faster to hold their own. Li part, it was probably a response to
new opportunities, in particular, to the increasing demand for resources
that lay in the hands of the landed proprietors. Yet this response was
neither necessary nor inevitable. It would have been just as easy for the
nobility and gentry to turn their backs on their new rivals and break off
competition by defining the means of their ascension as intrinsically
ignoble. This is what the aristocracy of Europe had done in the Renais-
sance, when it had developed the very idea of the gentleman as a
weapon against the pretensions of the bourgeoisie.1 And this was to be
the reaction of much of Europe's aristocracy in the nineteenth century
in the face of industrial revolution and a corresponding shift in the
balance of political power. The British nobility and gentry chose to
meet the newcomers on middle ground: they affirmed their distinction
of blood or breeding; but they buttressed it with an active and produc-
tive cultivation of gain.
This momentous decision was self-reinforcing. The concern of the
British gentleman for the accretion of his fortune made him a partici-
pant in society rather than a parasite upon it—whatever judgement one
may pass on the character of this participation. Business interests
promoted a degree of intercourse between people of different stations
and walks of life that had no parallel on the Continent. ' W e used to sit
down to dinner,' wrote Lord Hervey in 1731, 'a little snug party of
about thirty odd, up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc.;
and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch. We had
Lords Spiritual and Temporal, besides commoners, parsons and free-
holders innumerable.' 2 Compare Arthur Young's reflections on a visit
with the Due de la Rochefoucauld:3
At an English nobleman's, there would have been three or four farmers
asked to meet me, who would have dined with the family amongst the ladies
of the first rank. I do not exaggerate, when I say, that I have had this at least
an hundred times in thefirsthouses of our islands. It is however, a thing that
in the present state of manners in France, would not be met with from Calais
to Bayonne, except by chance in the house of some great lord that had been
much in England, and then not unless it was asked for.
1
See the article by Arthur Livingston on 'Gentleman, Theory of the' in the En-
cyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and the references given there.
1
A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (London,
I9S3). P- 4-
3
Young, Travels, I, 207.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 71
Or, to return to Britain, consider the friendship of Robert Hewer,
successful supercargo and trader turned landowner and lord of the
manor of Manadon (near Plymouth), with the Duke and Duchess of
Bedford: he spent weeks as their guest at Woburn Abbey, where he
was ' of all their parties of pleasure!'; and the visit was repeated several
times.1 Such a continuing relationship is more significant of true society
than a dozen marriages between noble blood and bourgeois gold pour
redorer le blason.2
Below the level of the gentry, there was no barrier between land and
trade—not even a permeable membrane. Given the rural character of
most industry and the intermittent claims of agriculture, many cultiva-
tors were at the same time manufacturers or middlemen or both. This
was true not only of textiles, but of branches like metallurgy where one
might think the nature of the manufacturing process would have im-
posed a more rigorous division of labour: witness Isaac Wilkinson,
Aaron Walker, Jedediah Strutt and others. Note that where similar
conditions prevailed on the Continent, one found the same combina-
tion of activities: the land brought forth industrial enterprise and
enterprisers. Yet again, what sets Britain apart is a question of degree.
Nowhere else, as we have seen, was the countryside so infused with
manufacture; nowhere else, the pressures and incentives to change
greater, the force of tradition weaker. It was all of a piece: improving
landlords, enclosures, commercial farming, village shops, putting-out,
mines and forges, the active mortgage market—all combined to break
the shackles of place and habit, assimilate country and city, and promote
a far wider recruitment of talent than would have otherwise occurred.
In a society of which four of five people lived on the land, this was a
powerful stimulus to overall development.
By the same token, the flow of entrepreneurship within business was
freer, the allocation of resources more responsive than in other econo-
mies. Where the traditional sacrosanctity of occupational exclusiveness
continued to prevail across the Channel, enforced sometimes by law but
in any case by habit and moral prohibitions, the British cobbler would
not stick to his last nor the merchant to his trade. It was not merely a
kind of negative phenomenon—that is, the absence of confining regula-
tions or opprobrious strictures; rather it was a positive drive, an
ambitious versatility that was always alive to the main chance. One
1
Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1961),
p. 138.
J
There was much of that too—on the Continent as well as Britain. But inter-class
alliances are to be found in all but rigid caste societies. The real test is not the union;
it is what follows: how many great families in such circumstances are willing to know
their new relations after the wedding?

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 72 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
cannot but be impressed by a man like this Thomas Griggs, grocer and
clothier of Essex in the mid-eighteenth century, who invested and
speculated in real estate, fattened cattle for market, malted barley, lent
money on pawn. 1 Or like Thomas Fox, Quaker clothier of Wellington,
who was moved by hard times in the wool trade to look into the
possibilities of lead, calamine, or copper mining—or all three.2
One could extend the list considerably, but one final example will
have to suffice: Samuel Garbett of Birmingham, originally brassworker,
then merchant and chemist, partner in spinning, chemical (Birmingham
and Prestonpans, near Edinburgh), iron-smelting (Carron works,
Scotland), and flour-milling (Albion Mills, London) enterprises, and
shareholder in the Cornish Metal Co. (copper mines). To appreciate
the force of this drive for wealth, one must remember that these men
were risking their fortunes at each throw of the entrepreneurial dice.
With rare exceptions, there was no haven of limited liability. Garbett
went bankrupt in 1772 because of the failure of one of his partners.
Similarly, the structure of the firm was more open and rational in
Britain than in the continental countries. Everywhere, the fundamental
business unit was the individual proprietorship or the family partner-
ship, but where, in a country like France, the family firm was almost
always closed to outsiders, British entrepreneurs were far more willing
to enter into association with friends or friends of friends. Indeed, this
seems to have been the preferred way of raising capital to expand or of
attracting and attaching special skills to the enterprise. In textiles, a
capitalist like George Philips would seek out and take as partner an
experienced manager like George Lee, late employee of Peter Drink-
water; or an already hardened flax spinner like John Marshall, faced
with a crisis in the trade, could throw out his partners ('As they could
neither of them be of any further use, I released them from the firm and
took the whole upon myself'); and when, shortly after, though
mortgaged to the hilt, he determined to expand, would bring in new
ones for much larger amounts.3 In brewing, where the need for
capital was so great and urgent 'that it could not be produced fast
enough from the profits of the firms', 'established concerns welcomed
into their partnerships bankers and merchants, who of necessity brought
in the social and political consequences of vast wealth made in other
fields'.4 In machine building, it was probably skill more than capital
1
K. H. Burley, 'An Essex Clothier of the Eighteenth Century', Earn. Hist. Rev.
2nd ser. xi ((1958),
9 5 ) 289-301.
93
11
b Fox, Quaker
Herbert k Homespun (London, 1938), pp. 46 f.
3
These were the Benyons,y , woollen merchants of Shrewsbury. W. Gordon
hll' off Leeds, Flax-Spinners
Rimmer, Marshall's l 1788-1886 (Cambridge, i960), pp. 40-4.
4
Peter Mathias, 'The Entrepreneur in Brewing, 1700-1830', Explorations, x (1957),
73-6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 73
that was the scarce factor, though it took thousands of pounds to turn
a repair shop into an engineering plant. Boulton and Watt are perhaps
the best model of this alliance of money and talent, but one could cite
many similar associations, with varying division of contributions and
responsibilities.1 The pattern was probably most widespread in metal-
lurgy; there the requirements of both capital and talent were heavy,
and the partnership was the normal business form.2 Even where a
firm was essentially a family affair—the Crawshay smelting mill at
Cyfarthfa or ironmongery in London, for example—outsiders were
brought in as needed; bought out later if advisable; and new partners
found. Professor Ashton has pointed out the importance in this con-
nection of interfarnilial associations of Dissenters: the bonds of a
common, persecuted religion proved almost as effective a business tie
as blood itself.3
The cohesiveness and mutual support of the nonconformist business
community was only one element in their commercial success. They
suffered numerous disabilities because of their religion, and business was
in many ways the most convenient outlet for their energy and ambition;
and their faith itself, with its stress on diligence, thrift, and rationality as
a way of life, was often a competitive advantage. They may also, as a
result of child-rearing practices that gave early scope for initiative and
freedom, have inculcated on their young a peculiarly intense need for
achievement. This at least is the contention of David McClelland, who
asserts that an independently established index of the need for achieve-
ment in England turns up sharply at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, just in time for the Industrial Revolution.4 In any event, it is
surely no coincidence that Dissenters were most numerous in the North
and Midlands, the centres of most rapid industrial development; or that
a disproportionately large number of the leading entrepreneurs of the
1
Thus Bateman and Sherratt of Salford: Fenton, Murray and Wood of Leeds;
Hazeldine, Rastrick and Co. of Bridgnorth (Salop); and somewhat later, Maudslay,
Son and Field of London; Nasmyth, Gaskell and Co. of Manchester; Sharp, Roberts
and Co. of the same city; et al.
1
To be sure, some of the facilities available in textiles were present in metallurgy as
well. Thus landowners, desirous of increasing their incomes, were often ready to let
mineral rights on favourable terms and otherwise promote enterprise on their estates;
sometimes, as at Cyfarthfa and Dowlais, leases fixed at absurdly low rates ran for a
century. Also, it was often possible to rent plants already built for a moderate sum.
Nevertheless, it took a thousand pounds or more to launch even a modest furnace or
forge; and a giant like Carron, capitalized at ,£12,000 at its founding in 1750-00, had
fixed plant valued at £47.4°° a decade later. R. H. Campbell, 'The Financing of
Carron Company', Business History, 1 (1958), 21-34.
3
Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution (2nd ed.; Manchester, 1951),
ch. rx: "The Ironmasters'.
4
David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, 1961). The argument

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 74 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
Industrial Revolution were from this group.1 On the other hand,
Britain was not alone in having Calvinists, who played the role of an
entrepreneurial leaven throughout Europe. What distinguished Bri-
tain was the extent to which her religious nonconformists conformed
to a wider social pattern; the entrepreneurial differences were differences
of degree, and not of kind.
The same observations are relevant to the oft-cited thesis that price
inflation brought bigger profits, and that bigger profits made possible
industrial change.2 Even if it could be shown that profits did increase
over the century and that it was higher prices that were responsible—
and the usual demonstration proves nothing of the sort—the fact
remains that Britain was not the only nation to have price inflation in
this period; that the best enterprises on the Continent made just as high
rates of profit and relied more, if anything, on self-financing.3 The
point again is not so much the rate of return as the manner of its use:
where British firms ploughed profits back into the business, then-
competitors abroad too often transferred them from trade to more
honorific callings, or held them as a reserve in the form of land,
mortgage loans, and similar non-industrial placements.
Finally, a word should be said about the role of banks and bank
credit. In no country in Europe in the eighteenth century was the
financial structure so advanced and the public so habituated to paper
has been subjected to careful scrutiny by M. W. Flinn,' Social Theory and the Indus-
trial Revolution', in Tom Burns and S. B. Saul, eds., Social Theory and Social Change
(London, 1967), pp. 9-32. Flinnfindssignificant differences in the child-rearing prac-
tices of Dissenter sects: by McClelland's criteria, some were far less conducive to the
inculcation of 'need-achievement' than others. Flinn gives low marks to the Metho-
dists, whom McClelland makes much of; and gives the highest marks to the early
Quakers and the Congregationah'sts. On balance, he is inclined to give some weight
to McClelland's thesis.
1
Cf. the survey of Everett Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change (Homewood, 111.,
1962), pp. 305-8, based on men mentioned in Ashton's little classic on the Industrial
Revolution.
2
The locus classicus is Earl J. Hamilton, 'Profit Inflation and the Industrial Revolu-
tion', Quart. J. Econ. LVI (1941-42), 257-70. See also his earlier article, 'American
Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism, 1500-1700', Econotnica, ix (1929), 338-57, and
his reply to the criticisms ofJohn U. Nef, 'Prices and Progress',/. Econ. Hist, xn (1952),
325-49-
3
See the excellent analysis of the problem in David Felix, 'Profit Inflation and
Industrial Growth: the Historic Record and Contemporary Analogies', Quart. J.
Econ. LXX (1956), 441-63. One should note that most of the price increase in the
second half of the eighteenth century occurred in the 1790's. Felix argues that such
expansion of profits as did take place was the result of greater productivity rather than
a combination of price inflation and wage lag. This is clearly so: the very industries
that were making the most rapid technological advances were the ones whose prices
were falling and die nominal wages of whose workers (or real wages, for that matter)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 75
1
instruments as in Britain. Nominally, the credit offered by the growing
multitude of private banks was for short periods—up to ninety days—
to cover commercial transactions; in fact, much of it was in die form
of revolving and open credits, or even of standing overdrafts, which
served as quasi-capital.2 What is more, the development of a national
network of discount and payment enabled the capital-hungry industrial
areas to draw for this purpose on the capital-rich agricultural districts.
The system was just developing in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century. By the i82o's and 1830's, however, when the problem of dis-
posing of the products of British factories had become more difficult
than that of financing technological change, bank credit was a pillar
of the industrial edifice.
The role of bank credit was the more important because, in the early
decades of the industrial revolution, working capital was still far more
important than fixed capital. This was true even of enterprises in heavy
industry—in mining, metallurgy, machine manufacture. Thus Sidney
Pollard offers a sample of business accounts of firms in copper mining,
copper refining, Unmaking, engineering, and light metals manufacture
for dates ranging from 1782 to 1832: the lowest proportion of fixed
capital to total inventory valuation of assets is 8-8 per cent; the highest,
3 3-2 per cent.3 Other measures of this relationship—for example, com-
parisons of fixed capital with accounts receivable or payable—for other
were rising through most of this period (1760-1830). The mule spinners were a
privileged group. What is more, there is considerable direct evidence that rates of
profit in these industries were not increasing over the long run, but rather reached a
peak with the introduction of the critical mechanical innovations (Schumpeter's
entrepreneurial profits) and then declined as new firms were attracted into the field.
1
Note, in this regard, the experience ofRobert Owen, who found in 1797 that the toll
collectors of the Glasgow-New Lanark turnpike preferred the notes of the local banks
to gold coin. The Life ofRobert Owen by Himself, ed. M. Beer (New York, 1920), p. 71.
1
Not to speak of accommodation paper, which was a means of obtaining credit, if
only for short periods, with or without the co-operation of the banks. With the con-
nivance of banks or discount houses, accommodation paper could be the basis for
generous medium- and long-term credit. On all this, see W. T. C. King, History of the
London Discount Market (London, 1936); L. S. Pressnell, Country Banking in the Indus-
trial Revolution (New York, 1956); D. S. Landes, Bankers and Pashas: International
Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (London, 1958).
3
S. Pollard, 'Fixed Capital in the Industrial Revolution in Britain', J. Econ. Hist.
xxiv (1964), 299-314. Actually Pollard's analysis requires one modification. The low
ratio of fixed to circulating capital does not hold for the start of an enterprise when
accounts receivable have not yet accumulated. See, for example, the year-by-year
accounts of Oldknowe, Cowpe & Co., cotton manufacturers, whose proportion of
fixed capital dropped from 90 per cent in the first year (1786), to 3 5 per cent a decade
later. Chapman, The Early Factory Masters, p. 126. Thus initialfixed-capitalrequire-
ments could be large and a bar to entry; and if the banks provided little long-term
capital, it was not necessarily because little was demanded.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 76 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
firms at other times show similar results. And Pollard argues that some
of the largest, most heavily capitalized enterprises of the Industrial
Revolution were actually in trouble because they found it hard to
raise circulating capital commensurate with the size of their fixed plant.
Paradoxically, they were too rich for their own good.
Although the development of an integrated national money market
clearly promoted an easier, more abundant flow of resources from land
to industry, the nature and direction of the balance ofpayments between
these two sectors are less obvious. It is a commonplace of economic
literature that one of the major aspects or criteria of development is the
shift of resources from agriculture to manufacturing; and that a condi-
tion of rapid development is an increase of productivity in husbandry
that will generate the savings to finance industrial expansion. The best
example of such a sequence is Japan, where output per head in agricul-
ture almost doubled in the space of a generation (1878/82-1903/7) at
little expense of capital; and where, especially in the early years, the land
tax drained a substantial fraction of farm income for investment in de-
velopment.1 The British case, however, differs sharply. For one thing,
gains in farm productivity were assuredly far lower. The statistics avail-
able are in no way comparable to the Japanese but such as they are, they
have led one authority to speculate that 'output per head in agriculture
increased by about 25 per cent in the eighteenth century, and that the
whole of this advance was achieved before 1750'.* The same source
suggests that the real output of the farm sectors rose about 43 per cent
in the course of the century, 24 per cent during the critical decades
from 1760 to i8oo;3 by contrast, Japanese agricultural product about
doubled from the late 1870's to the early 1900's.
Moreover, the increase in British farm output was due in large
measure to enclosures and the improvements they made possible: con-
centration of holdings, elimination of fallow, more productive choice
and rotation of crops, selective breeding of livestock, better drainage
and fertilization, more intensive cultivation. It is still a matter of
dispute how rapidly these new techniques spread or how quickly they
followed on enclosure itself. What is clear is that both the division of
the land and the subsequent improvements in its use cost money: for
legal expenses, roads, ditches, and fences, to begin with; and eventually
for buildings, equipment, drains, and materials. Unfortunately, we
1
Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky, "The Role of Agriculture in Modem
Japanese Economic Development', Econ. Devel. and Cult. Change, ix, no. 1, part n
(October i960), 43-67; also G. Ranis, 'The Financing ofjapanese Economic Develop-
ment', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xi (1959), 440-54.
2
Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 75.
3
Deane and Cole, op. cit. p. 78.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 77
have no figures of the area affected, but such partial statistics as are
available—enclosure of commons and waste, for example, by parlia-
mentary act—suggest that from 1760 to 1815 Britain enclosed millions
of acres at an initial cost of redistribution of upwards of £1 per acre,
and at an eventual cost of anywhere from £ 5 to ^25 per acre, de-
pending on the original condition of the soil and the nature of its use.1
Such investments paid, as the higher yields and rents on consolidated
land show. But it may well be that in the early decades of heavy en-
closure, that is, the very years that also saw the birth of modern
industry, British husbandry was taking as much capital as it was giving;
while in the period from 1790 to 1814, when food prices rose to record
levels, the net flow of resources was probably toward the land. The
great contribution of agriculture to industrialization came after 1815,
when both enclosure and the breaking of marginal soil slowed and
proprietors and tenants reaped the fruits of earlier efforts. Yet even then,
these returns depended on protection against foreign corn and were
therefore not a net addition to the savings generated by the economy.
Rather, they were bought at the price of a certain misallocation of
resources, and abundant and responsive though they may have been,
they were probably less than what the land would have provided under
more competitive conditions. Still, it was thanks to enclosures and
what is sometimes called the 'Agricultural Revolution' that Britain
fended off as well as she did Ricardo's 'stationary state'—that end of
growth and accumulation wherein the pressure of population on the
supply of food has so raised the cost of subsistence and hence wages,
that manufacturers can no longer make a profit and the wealth of the
nation flows as rent to the owners of the land.

To sum up: it was in large measure the pressure of demand on the

mode of production that called forth the new techniques in Britain,
and the abundant, responsive supply of the factors that made possible
their rapid exploitation and diffusion. The point will bear stressing, the
more so as economists, particularly theorists, are inclined to concen-
trate almost exclusively on the supply side. The student of economic
development, impressed on the one hand by the high cost of indus-
trialization, on the other by the low level of savings in underdeveloped
countries, has devoted most of his attention to the problem of capital
formation: on ways to raise the rate of net investment from, say, 5 per
cent to 12 or more; and on devices to prevent increased income from
1
On the cost of enclosure, cf. Great Britain, Board of Agriculture, General Report
on Enclosures (London, 1808), p. 97. On subsequent expenses of improvement,
Albert Pell, 'The Making of the Land in England: A Retrospect', Journal of the Royal
Agricultural Society of England, 2nd ser. xxra (1887), 355-74.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 78 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
dissipating itself on increased consumption.1 His approach is essentially
analogous to that of an economic historian like Hamilton, with his
thesis of industrial revolution born of and fed by profit inflation. And
indeed, many a planner has seriously contemplated the deliberate use
of inflation, which tends to shift resources from consumers to savers,
to promote industrialization.
Yet however justified this concern with saving and capital may be in
this age of costly equipment and faculties and abysmally poor would-be
industrial economies, it is less relevant to the British experience. To
begin with, eighteenth-century Britain enjoyed, as we have seen, more
wealth and income per head than the unindustrialized countries of
today; she started, in other words, from a higher base. Furthermore, the
capital requirements of these early innovations were small—usually
within reach of a single person or family; and the successful enterprise
could build the growth of each period on the profits of the one before.2
Finally, these critical innovations were concentrated at first in a small
sector of the economy, and their appetite for capital was correspondingly
limited; while on the larger scale of the economy as a whole, just as
within the smaller world of the enterprise, growth built on this narrow
base by a process of derived demand that fed on earlier success.3 It was
the flow of capital, in other words, more than the stock, that counted
in the last analysis. So much for the preoccupation with primitive
accumulation.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to learn that the aggre-
gate volume of investment was a relatively small proportion of national
1
One could cite numerous examples. For some idea of the wide spectrum of
thought along this one line, cf. W. A. Lewis, The Theory ofEconomic Growth (London,
1955). PP- 201 f.; W. W. Rostow, 'The Take-off into Self-Sustained Growth',
Boon. J. LXVI (1956), 25-48; and a review by O. Ehrlich of Gerald M. Meier and
Robert Baldwin, Economic Development: Theory, History, Policy (New York, 1957), in
J. Econ. Hist, xvm (1958), 74.
1
On the ability of British enterprises to grow by reinvestment of profits, see the
statistics assembled by Francois Crouzet,' La formation du capital en Grande-Bretagne',
Deuxieme Conference Internationale d'Histoire Economique, pp. 622-3. He offers a sample
of fifteen firms from the textile manufacture, metallurgy, and brewing. In the first
two branches, compound growth rates range from 3-5 to 29-8 per cent per year, and
some of the companies show for several decades semi-logarithmic curves of growth
that are almost straight lines. What is more, thesefiguresgive only an incomplete idea
of the ability of these enterprises to generate profits. In the years 1794-1828 the capital
of John Marshall & Co. (linen manufacture, Leeds) rose from £14,000 to £272,000;
but in the years 1804-1815, that is, in about a third of the time, Marshall and his
partners earned some £446,000. Admittedly these war years were especially favour-
able. Ibid., p. 619, n. 3; Gordon Rimmer, Marshatts of Leeds, Flax-Spinners 1788-1886
(Cambridge, i960), pp. 69, 71 ff.
3
So much for hypotheses of balanced growth; the historical experience, under
conditions of relatively unplanned development, followed other lines. See below,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 79
income in these early decades of the Industrial Revolution, and that it
was only later, when a more elaborate technology required large out-
lays and Britain had increased her product per capita to the point where
she could save more, that the proportion rose to the level that econo-
mists once looked upon as a characteristic of industrialization. Thus
according to Phyllis Deane, the ratio of net capital formation to income
did not go above 5 or 6 per cent through most of the eighteenth cen-
tury, rising to perhaps 7 or 8 per cent only in the last decade, when the
Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Not until the railway boom of
the 1840's did the proportion rise to 10 per cent.1
The same pattern seems to hold for other industrializing countries,
though it would be dangerous to make fine comparisons between the
rough estimates of capital formation currently available. For France,
we have the tentative findings of Jean Marczewski's research group at
the Institut de Science Economique Appliquee which propose an im-
plausibly low average net rate of 3 per cent of net domestic product for
France until the railway years of the 1840's, when it rises to 8 per cent;
not until the Second Empire, with even more railway construction and
extensive urban improvement, does the proportion go up to 12* 1 per
cent.2
For Germany, unfortunately, we have no figures for the period before
the i856"s. By that time mining, heavy industry, and the railway net-
work were all expanding rapidly; even so, the rate of-net capital
formation for the two decades 1850-70 averaged less than 10 per cent.3
In general, there is good reason to believe that until very recently
economists and economic historians were wont to exaggerate the
significance of capital formation as a motor of economic growth.
pp. 3Hff., 321, 338. Also John Hughes, 'Foreign Trade and Balanced Growth': the
Historical Framework', Amer. Econ. Rev. xnx, no. 2 (May 1959), 330-37; and Goran
Ohlin, 'Balanced Economic Growth in History', ibid. pp. 338-53.
1
Deane, 'Capital Formation in Britain before the Railway Age', Econ. Develop-
ment and Cultural Change, DC, no. 3 (April 1961), 352-68; Deane and Cole, British
Economic Growth, ch. viii.
2
Marczewski, "The Take-Off Hypothesis and French Experience', in W. W.
Rostow, ed., The Economics of Take-off into Sustained Growth (London, 1963), p. 121.
3
Simon Kuznets, 'Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations,
VI: Long-Term Trends in Capital Formation Proportions', Econ. Development and
Cultural Change, DC, no. 4, part n (July 1961), 14. For Japan, Henry Rosovsky suggests
rates averaging between 7 and 9 per cent for the decades from 1887 to 1917; rates of
gross capital formation ran about 5 per cent higher. Much of this, moreover, was
military expenditure, which contributed only in part to economic growth. If one
excludes military outlays, one arrives at decennial average net rates between 4-5 and <5-8
per cent. Capital Formation in Japan, 1868-1914 (Glencoe, 111., 1961), pp. 9,15. On all
the above, cf. Rondo Cameron, 'Some Lessons of History for Developing Nations',
American Econ. Review, Lvn, no. 2 (May 1967), 313-14.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 8O THE U N B O U N D PROMETHEUS

Newer research has made clear that increase of capital will account for
only a small fraction of gains in aggregate output; indeed that the com-
bined inputs of the traditional factors of production—land, labour, and
capital—play a minority role in the overall process.1 Whence these gains,
then? They seem to derive from the quality of the inputs—from the
higher productivity of new technology and the superior skills and
knowledge of both entrepreneurs and workers. And here again, as we
have seen, the Britain of the Industrial Revolution was especially
favoured.

Technological innovations are only part of the story. The question

remains why they had the effect they did. An institutional order is a
remarkably complex and elastic system; not everything can turn it
upside down. Only changes of a certain quality and scope could have
transformed the mode of production and initiated a self-sustaining
process of economic development.
The manufacture of almost any textile may be analysed into four
main steps: preparation, in which the raw material is sorted, cleaned,
and combed out so that the fibres lie alongside one another; spinning,
in which the loose fibres are drawn and twisted to form a yarn; weav-
ing, in which some yarn is laid lengthwise (the warp) and other yarn
(the weft) is run across over and under the longitudinal lines to form a
fabric; finally, finishing, which varies considerably with the nature of
the cloth, but may comprise fulling or sizing (to give the cloth body),
cleaning, shearing, dyeing, printing, or bleaching.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, only a handful of these
processes had as yet been mechanized. In the wool manufacture, the
fulling mill, its heavy hammers driven by water, was known on the
Continent as early as the eleventh century and by the thirteenth had
spread widely over the English countryside. The gig mill, which raised
the nap on the cloth preparatory to shearing, dated from the sixteenth
century; and though legal prohibition and die opposition of the shear-
men delayed its diffusion, the repeated clamour against the device is the
best evidence of its gains. There had also been two major improvements
on the immemorial loom: the knitting frame, a complex, hand-run
contrivance for weaving hosiery (invented by William Lee in 1598);
1
On this whole question of the residual—that part of growth which cannot be
explained by the conventional factor inputs—see S. Kuznets, Modem Economic Growth:
Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven and London, 1966), pp. 79-85. Kuznets offers
calculations of the value of the residual for the United States and Norway in the
twentieth century, and for Soviet Russia. They seem to indicate a rise in the signifi-
cance of quality as against quantity as industrialization proceeds. It may be, then, that
comparable calculations for the Britain of the Industrial Revolution would show a
much smaller residual than now.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 8l
and the Dutch or small-wares loom, invented at about the same time,
and designed to weave as many as twenty-four narrow tapes or ribbons
simultaneously.
Another precocious mechanical innovation was the silk-throwing
machine, which twisted the filaments to form a thread. It was invented
in the seventeenth century in Italy, where the secret was jealously
guarded. But the plans were smuggled out by an Englishman named
John Lombe in 1716-17, and within a few years John's brother Thomas
built a huge throwing mill at Derby, a 500-foot power-driven factory
of five or six stories and some 460 windows that was one of the wonders
of the age. By the middle of the century, similar plants had been
established in London and the provinces, some of them even larger than
Lombe's monster.
In addition to these complex devices, which anticipate in their
ingenuity and relative efficiency the better-known inventions of the
mid-eighteenth century, a number of less spectacular advances had
occurred, gradually and almost unnoticed. Over the centuries, the
spinning wheel, large or small, had replaced the distaff, and the wheel
itself had been altered to work faster and turn out a more even yarn.
At the same time, those processes that required the use of fuel—
dyeing, for example—had from the sixteenth century on learned to
use coal instead of the more expensive wood. Finally, a variety of
small improvements had been made in preparing the fibre for spinning,
weaving the yarn in more complex patterns, and finishing it with the
sheen and smoothness that betokened quality.
None of these advances, however, was sufficient in itself to trigger a
process of cumulative, self-sustaining change. For it took a marriage
to make the Industrial Revolution. On the one hand, it required
machines which not only replaced hand labour but compelled the con-
centration of production in factories—in other words, machines whose
appetite for energy was too large for domestic sources of power and
whose mechanical superiority was sufficient to break down the resis-
tance of the older forms of hand production. On the other hand, it
required a big industry producing a commodity of wide and elastic
demand, such that (1) the mechanization of any one of its processes of
manufacture would create serious strains in die others, and (2) the
impact of improvements in this industry would be felt throughout the
economy.
Neither the knitting frame nor the Dutch loom nor the throwing
mill could satisfy these conditions. The first two, hand driven, were
quite suited to domestic manufacture; and all three were employed in
the production of goods whose actual market was small and potential
demand limited. It was not until the techniques of spinning and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 82 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
weaving cheap textiles were transformed that the threshold of revolu-
tion was crossed.
It was crossed first in the cotton manufacture. Why in cotton? One
would have expected the passage to occur in wool, which was far and
away the most important industry of the day, whether in terms of
numbers employed, capital invested, or value of product. In England,
imports of raw cotton (net of re-exports) in the first decade of the
century averaged a little over a million pounds a year, worth perhaps
,£30,000 or £ 3 5,000; at that time, ifwe are to rely on available estimates,
thewoollen industry was consuming about 40 million pounds ofmaterial,
valued at some £2 million. Even some decades later, in 1741, when
both cotton consumption and prices were up and the price of wool had
fallen, the disparity was still enormous: something over r j million
pounds of raw cotton worth around ,£55,000, as against almost 60
million pounds of wool valued at perhaps .£1,500,000. * In the other
countries of Europe, the comparison was equally in favour of the older
industry.
It has long been customary to explain this apparent paradox by
denying it, that is, by asserting that it was just because the cotton
industry was new, hence free of traditional restrictions on the scale and
character of production, that it was able to adopt new techniques. The
argument will not stand scrutiny. In England—which is the country
that counts for our purposes—the extensive development of putting-
out in the West Country and East Anglia and the rise of independent
clothiers in Yorkshire had long freed the bulk of the wool manu-
facture from guild controls; indeed, in so far as legal restrictions
entered into account, they favoured the older industry, on which the
economic prosperity of the nation had been built.
On the other hand, the smallness of the cotton manufacture on the
eve of the Industrial Revolution should not deceive us. For so young a
creation, it was a spectacularly lusty child, and so rapid were its gains
that almost from the beginning the older wool and linen trades were
impelled to demand succour from the state. In England, a whole series
of laws and decrees were passed from the late seventeenth century on to
stimulate the consumption of domestic wool cloth: sumptuary laws
like the Act requiring that all dead be buried in wool shrouds; pro-
hibitions on the import of competitive fabrics; restrictions on the out-
put of calicoes at home (1721). To no avail. The closing of England to
East Indian cottons simply encouraged the domestic producers, whose
fustians and linen-cottons (they were not yet able to turn out pure
1
Cottonfiguresfrom Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade, pp. 520-2; wool from
P. Deane, 'The Output of the British Woollen Industry in the Eighteenth Century',
J. Econ. Hist, xvn (1957), 220.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 83
cottons) did not come under the interdiction. By the middle of the
century, gains at home and abroad had made the cotton manufacturers a
vested interest too powerful for even the still pre-eminent wool trade
to overcome.
Still more important, cotton lent itself technologically to mechaniza-
tion far more readily than wool. It is a plant fibre, tough and relatively
homogeneous in its characteristics, where wool is organic, fickle, and
subtly varied in its behaviour. In the early years of rudimentary
machines, awkward and jerky in their movements, the resistance of
cotton was a decisive advantage. Well into the nineteenth century,
long after the techniques of mechanical engineering had much im-
proved, there continued to be a substantial lag between the introduction
of innovations into the cotton industry and their adaptation to wool.
And even so, there has remained an element of art—of touch—in wool
manufacture that the cleverest and most automatic contrivances have
not been able to eliminate.
Once mechanization did come to cotton, of course, it was successful
far beyond what it could have hoped to be in wool. On the one hand,
the elasticity of supply of the raw material was substantially greater:
one can increase acreage sown far more rapidly than the number of
sheep. Thus cotton prices rose by about half in the 1770's and 1780's
under the pressure of demand from the new spinning machines, while
imports increased more than sixfold. Once the North American plan-
tations entered the market, moreover, and the cotton gin made slave
labour profitable, imports kept rising spectacularly while prices fell.
In the peak year of i860, Britain purchased over 1*4 milliard pounds
of cotton at about the same 7^ pence it cost at the start of the eighteenth
century.
On the other hand, the market for cotton goods was more elastic
than for wool. Not only was the trend of taste in favour of the new
fibre—for centuries, there had been an irregular but almost uninter-
rupted shift in the direction of lighter fabrics—but the availability of a
cheap, washable textile gave rise to new patterns of dress of unforeseen
potential. No longer was it the wealthy alone who could enjoy the
comfort and hygiene of body linen; cotton made it possible for millions
to wear drawers and chemises where before there had been nothing
but the coarse, dirty outer-garments. A new kind of work-clothing
was born—tough, yet comfortable to the skin and easy to clean and
maintain. Even the rich, impressed with the colour and elegance of
cotton prints, learned to distinguish more and more between the
seasons and dress for the summer in muslins and calicoes.
At the same time, the bulk of the untapped markets in the pre-
industrial areas of the world lay in the warmer climes or in temperate

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 84 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
areas with hot summers. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, a good part of Britain's gains as an exporter of wool cloth
had been in the countries bordering the Mediterranean, the western
plantations, and India; similarly, the spurt in re-exports of Indian
calicoes that marked the late seventeenth century was due to the new
demand of semi-tropical lands enriched by sugar, tobacco, and other
'colonial wares'. The story was no different in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: the commercial frontier of Britain lay overseas—
in America, Africa, south and east Asia. The first was by far the most
important: the West Indies and mainland colonies together bought
10 per cent of English domestic exports in 1700-1,37 per cent in 1772-3,
about 57 per cent in 1797-8.1 Wool had played a big part in these gains:
the sale of cloth in the new Atlantic market (America and Africa) grew
sixfold from the beginning of the century to the eve of the American
Revolution.2 Now it was cotton's turn.
And so, although the first of the famous series of inventions that
transformed the textile industry—both the fly-shuttle of Kay (1733)
and the spinning frame of Wyatt and Paul (1738)—were designed for
the manufacture of wool, the requirements of technology and the
logic of the economic situation willed otherwise.

There is neither time nor space to review at this point the history of
these inventions, which will be familiar to most readers. A number of
summary observations, however, are indispensable.
(i) They came in a sequence of challenge and response, in which the
speed-up of one stage of the manufacturing process placed a heavy
strain on the factors of production of one or more other stages and
called forth innovations to correct the imbalance. We have already noted
the difficulty of supplying weavers with yarn. Kay's fly-shuttle, which
did not really catch on until the 1750's and I7<5o's, only aggravated an
already serious disequilibrium. The problem was solved by a family of
spinning devices: carding machines by Paul and others (in use from the
1
Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 34. Thesefiguresshow a somewhat
more rapid increase to the 1770's than those of Ralph Davis, 'English Foreign Trade,
1700-1774', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xv (1962), 292.
1
Ibid. p. 291. The sale of'other manufactures'—nails, tools, metal wares, leather
goods, cordage, other textiles, and the like—grew even faster, to almost nine times its
volume at the beginning of the period. As a consequence, the share of wool manu-
factures in total exports shrank from more than two-thirds to perhaps 27 per cent over
the course of the century. Even at the end, however, they were still worth twice as
much as cotton exports. Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, pp. 30-1. Cottons
followed a deviant geographical pattern: major expansion in overseas areas to about
1770, that is, the eve of technological revolution; then the most rapid gains, in Europe.
Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade, p. 146.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 85
1750's); Hargreaves's jenny (c. 1765; patent 1770); Arkwright's water
frame (1769); Crompton's mule (1779)—so called because it com-
bined some of the features of the frame and the jenny. 1
The mechanical advantage of even the earliest jennies and water
frames over hand spinning was enormous: anywhere from six up to
twenty-four to one for the jenny; several hundred to one for the
frame. The spinning wheel, which had taken some centuries to dis-
place the rock, became an antique in the space of a decade. Moreover,
the victorious jenny scarcely outlived its victim; even the later models,
with eighty and more spindles, could not compete in productivity—to
say nothing of quality—with power-driven mules of two and three
hundred. By the end of the century, the jenny was obsolete.
What is more, the quality of the machine-spun yarn was better than
anything the distaff or wheel had been able to produce. A thread spun
by hand is necessarily uneven in thickness and strength; and no two
hanks are ever the same. One of the most difficult tasks of the manu-
facturer of the eighteenth century was to assemble suitable assortments
of yarn. On occasion, he paid a premium for the work of an especially
gifted spinster. The machine changed all this. Not only was its work
more regular and stronger in proportion to weight, but the mule,
which drew and twisted the roving simultaneously and continued to
draw even after the twisting stopped, could spin higher counts than
man had ever known: where the most skilful Indian spinner working
with the wheel, or Swiss spinster using a distaff, could barely surpass
1
Technically the family was composed of two branches. On one side were the
throstles (beginning with the water frame and continuing through various avatars
down to the cap and ring machines of the present day), which drew the roving out
first and then imparted twist. On the other were the jenny and mule, which imitated
the action of the human spinner by drawing and twisting simultaneously. Because
the weakness of the untwisted thread limited the length of the draw, the throstle could
not produce fine counts and was used primarily for the production of warps. In the
early period, this was extremely important since the jenny—and later the mule—spun
too loose a thread for this purpose. On the other hand, because the long draw gave
more play to the twist, which concentrated in the thinner spots and built them up, the
mule made a more regular thread than the frame; moreover, later improvements
enabled the mule to produce a harder twist, and from 1800 the throstle tended to fade
from use. There was a renewal of favour in the 1820's and 1830's, however, with the
development of the ring principle and the growing use of power looms, which especi-
ally at first needed the strongest possible warps. Nevertheless, the British cotton
industry, with its steady shift to finer yarn and cloth, has never made so much use of
the throstle as the continental countries. Cf, Daniels, The Early English Cotton Industry,
p. 164; also Julia de L. Mann, 'The Textile Industry: Machinery for Cotton, Flax,
Wool, 1760-1850', in Ch. Singer et al., A History of Technology, vol. rv: The Industrial
Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), pp. 283-91 and the sources cited there; and
F. Nasmith, 'Fathers of the Machine Cotton Industry', Trans. Newcomen Soc. vr
(1925-6), 167-8 (letter of E.J. Welffens).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 86 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
150 hanks to the pound, the better mule operatives were able to
approach 300 by the start of the nineteenth century.
The tremendous increase ofthe supply of yarn that resulted from these
inventions—reflected in a more than twelve-fold increase in cotton
consumption from 1770 to 18001—made improvements in weaving
imperative. This was the golden age of the hand-weaver, whose
unprecedented prosperity was a shock to all, a scandal to some. The
answer was the power loom, invented by Cartwright in 1787. It
caught on with difficulty owing to mechanical shortcomings (the main
problem was how to achieve speed without excessive breakage of the
threads), and its diffusion can be linked directly to fluctuations in the
demand for cloth and hence the cost of hand labour. Thus its adoption
was slow during the first two decades of the century, when war and,
later on, tariff barriers cut Britain off from important markets. In the
meantime, performance was improved, and where, in the first decade
of the century, the machine worked hardly faster than the traditional
hand loom, the technical advantage had risen by the mid-1820's to as
much as q\ to 1, and one boy on two looms could do up to fifteen
times as much as the cottage artisan.1 At that point, the aim seems to
have been not so much to speed the machine as to simplify its opera-
tion so that one person could handle more units at the same time: in
183 3, a young man with a twelve-year old assistant could run four looms
and turn out as much as twenty times the output of a hand worker. 3
Such figures are clearly impressionistic and unstandardized. Yet they
convey a general picture of the growing gap between machine and
man, a gap reflected in the statistics, themselves approximate, of power
looms in operation in Great Britain: 2400 in 1813, 14,150 in 1820,
55,500 in 1829, 100,000 in 1833, 250,000 by mid-century. 4 By con-
trast, the number of hand-loom weavers declined, although at a rate
that testified to the obstinacy and tenacity of men who were unwilling
to trade their independence for the better-paid discipline of the sheds.
In the teens, their number actually rose to about a quarter of a million,
and hung steadily there for another decade, though wages had fallen
1
Average net imports, 1768-72; 3,703,0001b.; 1798-1802, 47,233,0001b.
2
Cf. Edward Baines, A History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London,
1835), P- 24°> citing R. Guest, A Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture
(Manchester, 1823).
3
It is not clear how common this practice was. The impression one gets from com-
parisons between British and Continental practice is that the usual work load in a
British cotton shed remained two looms until the i87o's, when conflicts arose over the
effort to double the assignment.
4
The figures up to 1833 aie&omBaines, History ofthe Cotton Manufacture, pp. 235-7.
The 1850 number is from the factory reports, cited by T. Ellison, The Cotton Trade of
Great Britain (London, 1886), pp. 76-7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 87
by over a half; by 1830 these reached an apparently irreducible mini-
mum of about 6s. a week. The next two decades saw attrition shrink the
weavers—in spite of recruitment of Irish immigrants whose subsistence
level was even lower than that of the English artisans—to a remnant of
40,000. It is likely that many, if not most of these, were employed only
part time—a reserve supply of labour in the event of unusual demand.
A dozen more years, and there were perhaps 3000 left.
One point remains to be made about the pattern of challenge and re-
sponse. The prominence of the inventions in spinning and weaving has
tended to obscure the importance of this principle for all stages of
textile manufacture. In particular, the mechanization of spinning
would have been unthinkable without a corresponding speed-up of the
preliminary processes of cleaning, carding, and preparation of the
roving. The eighteenth century saw, therefore, the development of an
entire complex of pre-spinning machines, linked in rationally calculated
combinations to the frame and the mule; the early machine builders
often sold their products in sets or 'assortments' covering the various
stages of manufacture from raw fibre to yarn. Similarly, the finishing
processes were transformed: it was no longer feasible to bleach cloth
in open meadows when more of it was being turned out than there
was ground available. The answer lay in the use of chemical agents:
often sulphuric acid at first; from the 1790's on, chlorine. In the same
way, cylinder printing was introduced in place of the block press in
London in 1783; it had been known for some time before; but by then
the need was ripe, and it spread quickly to the rest of the country.
(ii) The many small gains were just as important as the more
spectacular initial advances. None of the inventions came to industry
in full-blown perfection. Aside from the trial and error of creation,
there were innumerable adjustments and improvements—in articulation
of parts, transmission ofpower, and the materials employed—before these
primitive contrivances would work commercially. The first decades of
industrialization saw a ceaseless war against breakdowns. By the turn of
the century, however, not only the heavy motionless frame of the
machine could be built of iron, but also the moving parts; leather
belts had replaced pulley-ropes of cotton-mill waste, In subsequent
decades, improvements in the steam-engine produced a smoother
stroke; gearing and shafting were rationalized; and increasing auto-
maticity achieved its consummation in Roberts's self-acting mule (1825).
(iii.) Nothing illustrates better the continued importance of purely
technological considerations than the persistent lag of mechanization
in the woollen industry. It was not until the 1780's that the jenny came
into general use in the Leeds area, and the mule was not really a success
until the 1830's. In worsted, where the combed fibres will take more

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 88 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
strain, machines came in faster: in the 1780's and 1790's, Yorkshire
milk and shops were using jennies, hand- or animal-powered mules,
and modified water frames. The first use of the steam-engine dates
from before the turn of the century, and by 1820 there were perhaps
two dozen steam-powered factories in the West Riding. By then
hand spinning was almost a curiosity.1
Even when mechanized, the wool industry was compelled to work
more slowly than cotton. William Fairbairn, probably the greatest
authority of the period on factory design, has the mules of his sample
cotton plant running at 232 r.p.m., those of his hypothetical woollen
mill at 152.* Limitations of speed were still more serious in weaving,
where the power loom offered nothing like the gains in productivity
characteristic of the new spinning equipment. Thus Fairbairn's cotton
looms were working at from 140 to 160 picks per minute, while his
woollen equipment was doing 46. To be sure, it was harder to weave
woollen yarn than the tougher worsted, but even in worsted the power
loom came in slowly. The transition in the West Riding came in the late
1830's and 1840's: 2768 power looms in 1836,11,458 in 1841,19,121 in
1845, 35,298 in 1856.3 The woollen manufacture was about a decade
behind (6275 power looms in Yorkshire in 1856, 5733 in Lancashire,
14,391 in the whole of Great Britain); and even after the hand loom
had been driven from the sheds of larger enterprises, it survived in the
Yorkshire countryside—afortiori in the West Country, the home of the
old-fashioned broadcloth trade.

Because of its subsequent importance, the iron industry has some-

times received more attention than it deserves in histories of the
Industrial Revolution. Looking back from the vantage of one hundred
years and more, living in a world in which heavy industry is the basis
of the economy, writers have tended to overemphasize the immediate
1
The best source is Eric Sigsworth, Black Dyke Mills: A History (Liverpool, 1958),
chs. i-n; see also J.James, A History of the Wool Manufacture in Englandfrom the Earliest
Times (London, 1857).
Another reason for the slower mechanization of the woollen, as against the worsted,
manufacture was the relatively high cost of the raw material. Figures for 1772 show
the raw wool accounting for one third of the value of the finished product in die cloth
branch; for only one sixth, in the worsted branch. The share of labour was thus far
greater in the latter, and the potential economy offered by the use of machinery was
that much larger a proportion of total price. Cf. Deane, 'The Output of the British
Woollen Industry', p. 215.
* Treatise on Mills and Millu/ork (2nd ed.; 2 vols.; London, 1864-5), n, 187, 195.
3
H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (Oxford: Clarendon,
1920), p. 357; Part Papers, 1857 Sess. 1, xrv, 180. The last is for the county of York-
shire as a whole; the vast majority, however, were in the West Biding.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 89
significance for the eighteenth century of the technological advances
in smelting and refining. Not in number of men employed, nor
capital invested, nor value of output, nor rate of growth could iron
be compared with cotton in this period. If the unit of production,
larger at the start than in other industries, grew under the stimulus of
technical change, the social impact of this growth was nowise com-
parable to that of the transition from putting-out to factory in textiles.
On the other hand, the growing supply of ever-cheaper metal did
facilitate enormously the mechanization of other industries, the shift
from water to steam power and, eventually, the transformation of the
means of transportation. In the process, the units of manufacture in
metallurgy grew until they overshadowed in their vastness and
Vulcanian energy the largest cotton mills in the kingdom.
To understand the history of the iron and steel industry, a knowledge
of the purely technological determinants is indispensable. In this
regard, three points must be kept in mind:
(1) Metallurgy is a chemical process: the problem is to reduce the
ore, which is iron in compound form, to a suitably pure metal. The
reaction requires large quantities of carbon as well as heat, and the
fuel, which serves a double purpose, is necessarily placed in direct con-
tact with the ore. This in turn poses special difficulties. All fuel,
whether vegetable or mineral, contains substances other than carbon—
oils, as well as minerals like sulphur and phosphorus—that are harmful
to the final product. Charring will get rid of the volatile impurities;
already in ancient times, smelters and smiths were using charcoal rather
than wood, and the introduction of coal as a fuel in the late Middle
Ages was soon followed by the development of the analogous coked
form. But charring or coking will not get rid of mineral impurities,
which are far more serious in coal than in wood. So that although
techniques were developed by the seventeenth century for using coke
in glass-making, malting, dyeing, and other heavy energy-consuming
industries where fuel and raw material can be kept separate, efforts to
employ it in iron smelting failed.1 Not until a semi-adventitious mix of
fairly clean ore and coal was achieved by Darby at Coalbrookdale in
1709 did coke-blast iron become a commercial reality.* Even then, the
process did not spread until half a century later, after decades of empiri-
cism had achieved a knowledge of mix and finished product that made
1
A simple point, but generally overlooked. Thus J. W. Nef, 'Coal Mining and
Utilization', in C. Singer et al., A History of Technology, m, 79.
2
There is some question about the exact date. See M. W. Flinn, 'Abraham Darby
and the Coke-smelting Process', Economica, n.s. xxvi (1959), 54-9; and R. A. Mott,
'"Coles": Weights and Measures, with Special Reference to Abraham Darby and
the Coke-smelting Process', ibid. pp. 256-9.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 90 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
it possible to make use of less favourable materials and improvements
in the blast had yielded the higher temperatures required. Moreover,
another generation had to pass before innovations in refining made it
possible to convert coke-blast iron into competitive wrought iron,
comparable in tenacity and malleability to metal made with charcoal.1
Britain was only the first country to face the problem: the late adop-
tion of coke smelting on the Continent was in large measure due to
the same chemical difficulties. Similar considerations were to prove
decisive in the second half of the nineteenth century in the application
of new techniques for the mass production of steel.
(2) The charcoal or coke used in the blast furnace must be at once
porous enough to provide as large a surface as possible to combustion
and passage to heat and flames, yet at the same time strong and rigid
enough to withstand the weight of the charge. This is one reason why
there have always been limits—especially before the coming of the
railway—to the transport of either fuel; once crumbled by jolting
and handling, they are useless. This also explains why not all coal is
suitable for metallurgical coke: if it is very oily, the end product of
carbonization is too hollow, hence friable; and if it has little or no oil,
like anthracite, the result is too solid for combustion. To be sure, there
is a certain amount of leeway, and indeed modern metallurgy has
made major advances in mixing otherwise unsuitable qualities of coal
to produce a satisfactory coke. Nevertheless, differences in quality
impose differences in costs, and in the nineteenth century especially,
the distribution of coking coal—which was particularly favourable to
Britain and western Germany—was a critical factor in the location and
competitive position of metallurgical enterprise.
(3) Efficient combustion in the blast furnace requires a powerful,
forced draught; the larger the furnace, the more powerful the draught.
The substitution of coke for charcoal required and encouraged the use
of ever bigger furnaces. Efforts to increase the blast of traditional water-
powered leather bellows were on the whole unsatisfactory. Not until
the cast-iron blowing cylinder (c. 1760 at Carron) was combined with
the rotative steam-engine (1776 at John Wilkinson's furnace at Willey
in Shropshire) was the problem solved.2 Even then, furnace technique
fell far short of the chemical possibilities of the combustion process. To
exploit these, one had to alter the character of the blast itself. The first
and most rewarding step on this path was to preheat the air (Neilson in
1
In 176s Jars wrote: 'the production of good wrought iron from pit-coal pig iron
is considered impossible.' Gabriel Jars, Voyages me'tallurgiques (3 vols.; Lyons, 1774-
81), 1, 250.
'* H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry (London, 1957), pp.
332-3; cf. Gabriel Jars, Voyages, 1, 277.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 01
1829; see below, p. 92). The next, not taken until after the Second
World War, was to modify the wind by maintaining humidity constant
and/or by enriching it with oxygen.
(4) The product of the blast furnace is pig iron, a hard metal too
brittle to work. The only way to shape it is to cast it in moulds; even
then, the resulting pieces will not stand up to pressure, strain, or blows.
To change this form of iron into one that can be worked and will
support stress (what is called wrought or malleable iron), one must
refine it by removing most of the remaining carbon and such other
chemical impurities as diminish its malleability, tensile strength, duc-
tility, and other virtues. In the early eighteenth century, this was done
by heating and reheating the metal in charcoal fires and pounding out
the dross with hammers—a long, costly process that yielded a product
of high, though uneven, quality and irregular shape.
From the 1730's on, British forgemasters devoted great effort and
expense to finding a shorter, surer technique that would use mineral
rather than vegetable fuel. The search took half a century. The first
advance provided only a partial solution: by introducing a refinery
hearth and sometimes also a reverberatory fire (one in which the flames
did not play on the metal directly) between the furnace and the
forge, it was possible to use coal or coke rather than charcoal for
some and eventually all of the fining process. The operation was still
slow and the resulting product was not so good as charcoal bar, but it
was cheaper, and by 1788 according to one estimate, about half the
wrought iron in the kingdom was being made with mineral fuel.1 By
this time, however, the definitive triumph of coal was assured by the
invention of a quite different technique—Henry Cort's combination of
puddling and rolling (patents of 1784 and 1783). The former process
made use of a reverberatory furnace to decarburize the pig in one step,
alternately heating and cooling the metal until the wrought iron could be
separated out by reason of its higher melting-point. After some pre-
liminary hammering, the rolling mill—long used for such light work as
slitting rods—then squeezed rather than beat out the dross, shaping the
iron the while. This application of the rotative principle (see below,
p. 309, n. 1) offered two great advantages over the reciprocating action of
the tilt-hammer: it worked perhaps fifteen times as fast; and by grooving
or otherwise preforming the rolls, one could now turn out an almost
unlimited range of those standardized crude shapes—beams, bars, rails
and the like—that have come to constitute the framework of industry,
construction, and transport.
The course of technological change in metallurgy suggests the
following generalizations:
1
Ashton, Iron and Steel, p. 88. No source given.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 O2 THE U N B O U N D PROMETHEUS

(1) There is in iron-making, as in textile manufacture, a see-saw of

challenge and response. Thus the diffusion of coke-smelting put new
pressure on refining, in spite of the ingenuity of ironmasters in develop-
ing new applications for cast iron. Cort's combination of puddling and
rolling temporarily eased the difficulty, but the construction of new
and larger furnaces gave rise in the course of the nineteenth century to a
new imbalance. The fundamental difficulty was the physical hardship
of puddling, which called for exceptional strength and endurance.
There was simply a limit to what flesh could stand, and after a while
the only way to increase output was to train more men and build more
hearths. Much money and effort was expended on finding a way to
mechanize the process. In vain: the imbalance was not corrected until
Bessemer and his successors learned to make cheap steel.
(2) Again, in iron as in textiles, small anonymous gains were pro-
bably more important in the long run than the major inventions that
have been remembered in the history books. And again, as in textiles,
the reason is to be found in part in the empirical approximateness of
these early advances. Patents were a beginning as well as an end, and
ironmasters found that each combination of ore and fuel or metal and
fuel required its own recipe. The word is used advisedly. Iron manu-
facture was essentially a kind of cookery—requiring a feel for the
ingredients, an acute sense of proportion, an 'instinct about the time
the pot should be left on the stove. The ironmasters had no idea why
some things worked and others did not; nor did they care. It was not
until the middle of the nineteenth century that scientists learned
enough about the process of converting ore to metal to provide a
guide to rational technique and measures for testing performance. As
late as i860, Bessemer was baffled by the failure of his converter on
phosphoric ores.
Aside from the adaptation of the processes of smelting and refining
to ores and fuel of different characteristics, the lesser improvements in
iron technology were concentrated for the most part in three areas:
(a) Fuel economy. The gains are hard to measure because of statistical
incomparability. In South Wales, changes in the blast and in the shape
and size of the furnace cut coal consumption (including engines and
lime and ore kilns) per ton of pig from perhaps 8 tons in 1791 to 3^ in
1830. The most important single advance was Neilson's hot blast,
introduced in Scotland in 1829: with some materials, it yielded a fuel
saving of over a third if coke was employed, more than two-thirds if
coal, the while increasing output per furnace markedly. The hot blast
was the beginning of a surge of Scottish iron production: the make of
pig rose from 29,000 tons in 1829 to 825,000 in 1855. Results were
impressive but less spectacular south of the Tweed, and certain areas,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 93
like the Black Country and South Wales, were decades in switching to
the new technique. In general, British interest in fuel economy was
limited by the cheapness of coal; much of what improvement there was,
was simply a by-product of growth—larger, more efficient furnaces
tended to burn less coke per unit of output.
In refining, the traditional techniques had consumed 2^-3 tons of
charcoal per ton of crude iron produced. The use of mixed fuel (part
coke, part charcoal) reduced the ratio to about 2 to 1. Puddling then
brought it down to r j to 1, and with further improvement, to about
J to 1 by the middle of the nineteenth century.1 The gains were thus
substantial, though less important than in smelting. One should keep
in mind, however, that every technique that permitted the substitution
of mineral for vegetable fuel added that much to man's energy resources.
(b) Economy ofmetal. The problem was especially serious in refining:
in the early puddling furnaces, half the pig was drawn off in the slag.
A series of changes, culminating in the late 1830's in Joseph Hall's
furnace bed of roasted tap cinder (instead of iron-hungry sand), cut
waste to 8 per cent while speeding the conversion process. Hall's
innovation pushed iron economy almost to its limit; at the end of the
nineteenth century, waste still amounted to about 5 per cent. 2
(c) Adaptation to growth. The constant enlargement of the blast
furnace was aimed, not so much at saving raw materials as at raising
output and, if possible, the productivity of labour; it brought with
it a great increase in the number of puddling furnaces. At the same
time, greater familiarity with the uses of iron brought a demand for
ever-largerpiecesof metal. With this growth of both output and size of
product came difficulties in moving the raw materials and in handling
and shaping the work. These were solved by a variety of devices:
elevated platforms for loading the blast furnace, rails for transportation
within the plant and even within the forge sheds, overhead chain
pulleys and cranes to lift the blooms and finished pieces. The steam
hammer, conceived in 1839 by Nasmyth and first applied by Bourdon
of Le Creusot (the debate over priority has assumed the character of a
national quarrel), was in effect a way of placing in the hands of the
forge worker unprecedented power and strength, subject to precise
control; large boring machines were an analogous advance.
1
Over the same period, the producers of charcoal-wrought iron fought hard to
hold their market. Among other things, they succeeded in cutting their own fuel
consumption to less than i£ tons ofcharcoal per ton ofcrude bar. On this phenomenon
of the technological stimulus of obsolescence, see below, p. 260.
1
David Mushet, Papers on Iron and Steel (London, 1840), p. 32; W. K. V. Gale, 'A
Technological History of the Black Country—Iron Trade' (typewritten MS.), p. 58.
I am grateful to Mr Gale for allowing me to consult his extremely informative study.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 94 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
The development of the British iron industry was directly linked to
these technological considerations. Up to the middle of the eighteenth
century, the pecuniary and material limitations on the transport of
charcoal or wood restricted growth and often compelled the ironmaster
to halt work for as much as several months while sufficient fuel was
collected for another run; the effect was to raise overhead charges
enormously. The irregularity of the supply of water for power, due to
drought in the summer and, less often, frost in winter, imposed similar
interruptions. Both difficulties combined on occasion to push the
furnaces and forges into lonely rural areas, where abundance of fuel and
water was largely offset by isolation from the market.
It has long been customary to argue that the excessive appetite of the
British iron manufacture had by the eighteenth century so exhausted
its supply of wood that numerous furnaces and forges were forced to
shut down, that overall output fell or at least stood still from about 1660
to 1760, and that only the introduction of mineral fuel saved the
industry from slow starvation. Recent studies, however, have modified
the picture, noting that the wood employed by the furnacemaster was
coppice rather than construction timber; that much of this was system-
atically cultivated for the iron industry, so that in some areas, at least,
the supply increased; and that a substantial number of new furnaces
and forges were fired after 1660, more than compensating for those
that had to be abandoned.1 The fact remains that charcoal was getting
ever costlier in some of the traditional iron-making areas; far more of
the new furnaces were founded before 1700 than after; much of the
industry survived in the face of Swedish and Russian competition only
thanks to customs duties; and production, though rising, was rising
far more slowly than imports or the output of more prosperous
industries. Mr Flinn has suggested an increase of 'upwards of 10,000
tons' from 1660 to 1760; this would imply at most a gain of 75 per
cent. By comparison, purchases of iron from Sweden and Russia more
than doubled from 1711-15 to 1751-5.2
As early as 1740, Great Britain was using perhaps 10 or 11 pounds of
wrought iron per person a year. In the next fifty years, consumption
about doubled. By comparison, the French were using around 5 pounds
per head at the later date, and the average for the Continent as a whole
1
See especially M. W. Flinn, 'The Growth of the English Iron Industry, 1660-
1760', Earn. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xi (1958), 144-53; G. Hammersley, 'The Crown
Woods and Their Exploitation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries', Bull, of the
Institute of Historical Research, x x x (1957), 136-61.
* H. Scrivenor, History of the Iron Trade (London, 1854), p. 58; K. G. Hildebrand,
'Foreign Markets for Swedish Iron in the 18th Century', Scandinavian Econ. Hist. Rev.
vi (1958). 4-15-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 95
was far lower. These gross estimates are confirmed by the qualitative
impressions of observers: thus Arthur Young, who notes with surprise
that 'the wheels of these [French] waggons are all shod with wood
instead of iron'. 1 Whatever the sources of this ferruginous temper—
which Alfred Marshall attributed to 'that sturdy, resolute Norse
character' of his ancestors2—it is the more impressive for having
developed in the face of the growing scarcity of fuel; until well into the
eighteenth century, Britain used iron because she wanted to, not
because it was abundant or cheap. (To be sure, the most likely sub-
stitute, wood, was perhaps even dearer.) Even so, one can but wonder
what would have happened, had she had to go on depending on costly
and inelastic foreign sources for much, if not most, of the principal
structural material of modern technology.3
In any event, the problem was solved by the substitution of coal for
wood, which, thanks to Britain's exceptional resource endowment and
favourable transport conditions, changed a high-cost industry into the
most efficient in the world. The make of pig iron rose sharply (the
1780's seem to mark a definite break in the curve), and where, in 1750,
Britain imported twice as much iron as she made, by 1814 her exports
alone amounted to five times her purchases. Some of this rapid increase
in output reflected the special needs of the war years. But the coming
of peace simply brought other sources of demand to the fore: engin-
eering; the construction of factory plant and equipment; the manu-
facture of agricultural implements, hardware, piping for water and
gas, and, especially after 1830, rails. Most important, exports of iron
rose almost twentyfold by the middle of the century (57,000 tons in
1814; 1,036,000 in 1852). In the 1780's Britain's output of iron was
smaller than that of France; by 1848 she was smelting almost two
million tons, more than the rest of the world put together.
The development of mechanized industry concentrated in large units
of production would have been impossible without a source of power
greater than what human and animal strength could provide and inde-
pendent of the vagaries of nature. The answer was found in a new con-
verter of energy—the steam-engine; and in the exploitation on a
tremendous scale of an old fuel—coal.
Each of these called the other forth. The strongest source of demand
1
Young, Travels, 1, 46. * Industry and Trade (London, 1919), p. 60.
3
On the rigidity of the Swedish supply after 1750, cf. Eli F. Heckscner, An Eco-
nomic History of Sweden (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1954), p. 178. On
Russia, cf. M. Goldman, "The Relocation and Growth of the Pre-Revolutionary
Russian Ferrous Metal Industry', Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, rx (1956-7),
20; R. Portal, L'Oural au XVIIIesihU (Paris, 1950); R. Portal, 'Une route du fer au
XVIIIe siecle', Revue historique, c a a (1954), 19-29.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 96 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS

Table i . Pig-iron Output of Great Britain (in long tons)

1740 17.350 1830 678,417
1788 68,300 1835 940,000
1796 125,079 1839 1,248,781
1806 258,206 1848 1,998,568
1825 581,367 1852 2,701,000

S O U R C E S . For the years 1740-1830 and 1852, Scrivenor, History of the Iron Trade,
pp. 136, 302; for 1835, M. Meisner, Die Versorgung der Weltwirtschaft mit Bergwerks-
erzeugnissen, I, 1860-1926 [in Wekmontanstatistik, pub. by the Preussische Geologische
Landesanstalt] (Stuttgart, 1929), p. 84; for 1839, Mushet, Papers on Iron and Steel,
p. 421; for 1848, Ludwig Beck, Geschichte des Eisens in technischer und kulturgeschicht-
licher Beziehung (5 vols.; Braunschweig, 1894-1903), rv, 665. Note that all of these
are informed guesses. The first official returns of iron production do not come until
1854. Cf. R. Hunt,' The Present State ofthe Mining Industries of the United Kingdom',
J. Royal Statistical Soc. xrx (1856), 317; Howard G. Roepke, 'Movements of the
British Iron and Steel Industry—1720 to 1951' [Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences,
vol. xxxvi] (Urbana, 1956), p. 24.

for increased power was mining, especially coal mining. From the
sixteenth century on, as we have noted, the need for new sources of
thermal energy in a country almost denuded of its forests led Britons to
substitute mineral for vegetable fuel in a wide variety of heat-absorbing
industrial operations. At the same time, the consumption of coal for
domestic purposes rose steadily: there was perhaps a time, in the six-
teenth century, when the Englishman recoiled at the acrid, sulphurous
fumes of burning coal; but by the modern period, such scruples were
laid by familiarity and necessity.
The more coal man used, the deeper he dug; until, by the end of the
seventeenth century, the pits in many areas had penetrated beneath the
water table and flooding threatened to put an end to further extraction.
(The same difficulties were beginning to afflict the tin, lead, and copper
mines of Cornwall.) Ingenious systems were devised to lead off the
water, when possible, or to pump or raise it out of the pits by animal
power. But the task was fast getting out of hand: in one colliery in
Warwickshire, five hundred horses were employed to hoist the water,
bucket by bucket.
The use of five hundred horses is evidence of a simple but sometimes
neglected fact: there is in principle no limit but numbers to the amount
of work that can be accomplished or power that can be generated
by human or animal labour. One thinks, for example, of the construc-
tion of the pyramids or of such comparable tasks as the removal of a
327-ton obelisk in Rome in 1586 by die massed efforts of 800 men and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 97
140 horses working forty capstans in the presence of the official
executioner.1
Yet the use of gangs or of veritable herds of animals poses logistical
difficulties that increase sharply with the number of labour units: there
is the problem of co-ordination, first, and linked to it, the sheer limita-
tions of space and the high cost of a complex system for the transmission
of power. Moreover, man and beast are subject to fatigue; they must
be relieved, and the more there are, the more difficult the passage from
one team to the next. Mass labour of this kind is reasonably effective—
if certain precautions are observed and discipline is maintained—in the
performance of sporadic work demanding intense effort for short
periods. It is ill suited to providing the steady, concentrated power
required by industry.
Here lay the great advantage of the steam-engine. It was tireless, and
one could direct its tens of horsepower far more effectively than one
could combine the efforts of five hundred horses. Moreover—and in
the long run, this was the key to the steam-engine's revolutionary
effects on the pace of economic growth—it consumed mineral fuel and
thereby made available to industry, for the provision of motive power
as against pure heat, a new and apparently boundless source of energy.
The early steam-engines were grossly inefficient, delivering less than
1 per cent of the work represented by their thermal inputs. This was a
far cry from the performance of organic converters: both animals and
man can deliver from 10 to 20 per cent of inputs, depending on condi-
tions. But neither man nor beast can eat coal. And since the supply of
organic nourishment was and is limited—as the Malthusian checks of
famine and disease abundantly testify—it is this increment of fuel made
available by the steam-engine, however wastefully used, that counted.
To make the point dear, compare man's consumption of coal with
its hypothetical alimentary equivalent. By 1800 the United Kingdom
was using perhaps 11 million tons of coal a year; by 1830, the amount
had doubled; fifteen years later it had doubled again; and by 1870 it
was crossing the 100-million-ton mark. This last was equivalent to
800 million million Calories of energy, enough to feed a population of
850 million adult males for a year (actual population was then about
31 million); or to supply one-fourth as many people with the complete
energy requirements of a pre-industrial society.2
1
See the contemporary pictorial representation of this operation in T. K. Derry
and Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technologyfromthe Earliest Times to AD.
1900 (Oxford, i960), frontispiece; also pp. 180, 245.
* That is, the energy required for heat and manufacture, as well as for the internal
nourishment of the biological organism. C. Cipolla,' Sources d'energie et histoire de
l'humanW, Annales: E.S.C. xvi (1961), 528.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 98 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
Or—to approach the subject from a different angle—in 1870 the
capacity of Great Britain's steam-engines was about 4 million horse-
power, equivalent to the power that could be generated by 6 million
horses or 40 million men. 1 If we assume the same patterns of food
consumption as prevailed in the eighteenth century, this many men
would have eaten some 320 million bushels of wheat a year—more
than three times the annual output of the entire United Kingdom
in 1867-71. And this does not take into account the even larger number
of workers required for activities other than furnishing power, or the
young, old, and other unemployed members of our hypothetical
coal-innocent society.
It would be easy, by selecting a later date and a higher consumption
of energy, to conjure up more awful pictures. From 1870 to 1907, the
capacity of prime movers in British industry alone more than doubled,
and from 1907 to 1930, doubled again; to this would have to be added
the even greater increase of engines in land transport and shipping. Or,
to shift to a larger scene, world consumption of commercial sources of
energy multiplied six times in the fifty years from i860 to 1900 and
more than tripled in the next half-century. One can imagine an in-
dustrial world compelled to depend exclusively on animal engines for
work, a world swarming with so many men and beasts that every inch
of the earth's surface, including mountain, desert, and icy tundra, would
not suffice to feed them. But one need not persist in these fantasies.
The point is obvious: no such industrial world could come into being.
It is precisely the availability of inanimate sources of power that has
enabled man to transcend the limitations of biology and increase his
productivity a hundred times over. It is no accident that the world's
industry has tended to localize itself on and near the earth's coal
measures; or that the growth of capital has been proportional to the con-
sumption of mineral fuel. Coal, in short, has been the bread of industry.2
At this point, some words of caution are advisable. Like food, coal
has been a necessary but not a sufficient cause of industrial performance.
1
This is a conservative estimate, for the equivalency is between capacities over
brief periods of time, a working day, for example. And while many of these steam-
engines undoubtedly operated only part of the time and then often at less than full
load, it seems reasonable to assume that animal generators would deliver an even
smaller fraction of capacity. Thus men, and the beasts they use, rest most of each day
and a substantial portion of the days in each year; whereas many steam-engines worked
around the clock, day in and day out, year after year. On balance, double the number
of men or animals would seem a more accurate equivalent.
2
The above discussion owes much to conversations with Professor Carlo Cipolla.
See his Economic History of Population (London, 1962), ch. n. Also Fred Cottrell,
Energy and Society (New York, 1955); E. A. Wrigley, Industrial Growth and Population
Change (Cambridge, 1961); and idem, 'The Supply of Raw Materials in the Industrial
Revolution', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xv (1962), 1-16.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 99
One cannot work without eating; yet the availability of food will not
make one work. We shall have several occasions in the course of this
survey to consider feats of industrial accomplishment by localities or
countries poor in energy resources. Some of these have benefited from
compensating advantages; others have transcended their handicaps by
acts of creative entrepreneurship. Usually, however, these triumphs
have occurred in light industry, where energy requirements are a
relatively small portion of total cost. It is (or was) hard to make bricks
without straw; or iron and heavy chemicals without cheap fuel.
It should be remembered, moreover, that the coal-steam combina-
tion was not the only source of inanimate power available to the
European economies of the eighteenth century. The force of the wind
had been harnessed for millennia, first by means of sail for navigation,
then from the Middle Ages on, through mills for pumping and
grinding. Even more important was water power. Already known in
antiquity, the water mill first came into wide use in the Middle Ages,
perhaps as an answer to the growing scarcity of slave labour. Its intro-
duction into British wool manufacture to drive the fuller's hammers
gave rise to that rapid expansion of rural production that Professor
Carus-Wilson has described as' an industrial revolution of the thirteenth
century'. In the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nine-
teenth, the water wheel accounted for the greater, though a diminishing,
share of the power used by British industry; and there is no doubt that,
had Britain been better endowed by nature with hydraulic energy, or
had she been poorer in coal, the dominance of the wheel would have
continued much longer than it did. This was the case in the United
States, where the great coal deposits lay in what were at first the rela-
tively inaccessible lands west of the Appalachians and where the eastern
slopes of the same range offered superb sites for the erection of water-
driven mills. The same was true of comparable areas in Europe, the
whole Alpine region, for example—Dauphine, Switzerland, Baden,
Bavaria, northern Italy.
Coal and steam, therefore, did not make the Industrial Revolution;
but they permitted its extraordinary development and diffusion. Their
use, as against that of substitutable power sources, was a consideration
of costs and convenience. The advantage of wind and water power was
that the energy employed was free; their great disadvantage was that
it was often not abundant enough and in any event was subject to
variations beyond human control. The wind might not blow; the
stream might dry up or freeze. By contrast, the steam-engine could be
relied on in all seasons; but the initial outlay was higher and it was costly
to operate. As one writer of 1778 put it, 'the vast consumption of fuel
in these engines is an immense drawback on the profit of our mines, for

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 100 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
every fire-engine of magnitude consumes £3,000 worth of coals per
annum. This heavy tax amounts almost to a prohibition.' 1 This was
clearly an exaggeration, for the use of steam was growing. Still, it cost
only £900 a year to feed those five hundred horses in Warwickshire.
Small wonder that the early engines were generally employed only
where coal was extremely cheap—as in collieries; or in mines too deep
for other techniques, as in Cornwall; or in those occasional circum-
stances—the naval drydock at Saint Petersburg for example—where
cost was no object.
As a consequence, the leitmotif of steam technology was the effort
to increase efficiency, that is, the amount of work performed per input
of energy. By comparison, the goal of greater power, that is, work per-
formed per unit of time, took second place, although the two objectives
were linked and what made for the one, permitted or yielded the other.
This pursuit of fuel economy and power, like other movements of
technological advance, had its multitude of small and often anonymous
gains: better materials, closer tolerances, the introduction of safety
valves and gauges, the recognition and adoption of coal specially suited
to the production of steam, the collection of accurate information on
the performance of engines under different conditions. But it was also
punctuated by some great leaps forward, each marked by a critical inno-
vation that widened substantially the commercial applicability of steam.
The first practicable device for the conversion of thermal energy into
work was Thomas Savery's 'fire-engine' of 1698." It was in effect
steam-engine and pump combined. There was no piston, no transmis-
sion of power to other machinery. Steam was heated in a boiler, then
passed into a 'receiver', where it was condensed to create a partial
vacuum. This drew in water from below (more accurately, the water
was driven up into it by air pressure), which was then expelled upwards
by the next injection of steam, and the cycle began again. The waste of
energy was enormous, not only because of the alternate heating and
cooling of the receiver, but also because, in the absence of a piston, the
steam came into direct contact with the cold water. The system had
one other serious drawback: one could increase the power only by
raising the pressure, and some of the Savery engines were worked at as
much as three atmospheres. That was about the limit of safety. Given
the quality of the materials employed and of the metal work of the day,
anything higher was almost certain to result in an explosion, as a
number of operatives learned too late. The only alternative, in deep
mining, for example, was to use two or more engines in tandem, a
costly procedure and one especially vulnerable to breakdowns.
x
Price,in the Appendix toMineralogia Comubiensis, cited by Robert A.Thurston, A His-
toryoftheGrowthoftheSteamEngine (Centennial edition; Ithaca,NewYork,i939},p.7i.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 101
What Thurston calls the first true engine, that is, a device for
generating power and transmitting it to a machine performing the work
desired, was the contribution of Thomas Newcomen, ironmonger and
blacksmith of Dartmouth, England, in 1705. Here the pump was
separate from the cylinder that received the steam. The vacuum pro-
duced by condensation was used, not to draw in water, but to work a
piston connected to one end of a see-sawing cross-beam, the other end
of which rose and fell and thereby operated the rod of the water pump.
Note that the steam was not used to drive the piston, but only to
create a vacuum; ordinary air pressure provided the force that pushed
the piston downward against the weight of the pump at the other end
of the beam. Hence the name, 'atmospheric engine .
Newcomen's method offered two advantages over Savery's concep-
tion, first, it eliminated the loss of heat due to contact with the water
being pumped. The saving was not large and was almost dissipated in
the transmission of force from engine to pump. Years later, when con-
struction of both types had much improved, tests of the two engines
showed duties generally ranging betweenfiveand six million foot-pounds
per bushel of coal, a yield of less than 1 per cent. Still, every bit helped.
Far more important, the use of a piston made it possible to obtain
more force without increasing the steam pressure; all that was required
was a larger surface on which the atmosphere could push, that is, a
larger piston. As a result, the Newcomen engines were at once more
powerful, safer, and more dependable. Indeed, some of them were to
remain at work for five decades and more, well into the nineteenth
century.
Not that the Savery steam pump disappeared. Builders like John
Wrigley in Lancashire were manufacturing improved versions of it to
the very end of the eighteenth century, and so enterprising a cotton
spinner as John Kennedy used' Savary's' machine to drive his improved
mules in Manchester in 1793. One would like to know how many of
these there were, where they were used, and for what purposes. Those
we know of were small, generating a few horsepower, and were used
to raise water to drive the wheels of light industrial plants.
By contrast, the Newcomen engine dominated the market for large
prime movers. Thurston writes that within a few years of its invention,
it had been introduced into nearly all large mines in Great Britain';
and that many new mines were dug that could not have been exploited
before. The statement may be exaggerated; we do not have statistics on
this point. But we do know that the engineer Smeaton found 57 of
these machines, totalling 1200 horse-power, in the Newcastle basin
alone in 1767, and 18 large engines in the Cornish mines in 1780. In the
Midlands, the Coalbrookdale foundry, better known for its pioneering

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 102 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
of coke smelting, was the major supplier of Newcomen engines to the
collieries of the region; and even after the introduction of the Watt
engine, the older type continued in demand, for coal at pithead was
cheap or even a free good (many boilers burned unsaleable slack), and
the lower initial cost of the Newcomen engine, its simplicity of main-
tenance, and its remarkable durability gave it the preference.1
Yet the persistence of the Newcomen engine should not lead us to
underestimate the crucial significance of Watt's contribution. By
building a separate condenser (patent of 1769; first commercial applica-
tion, 1776), he saved the energy that had previously been dissipated in
reheating the cylinder at each stroke. This was the decisive break-
through to an 'age of steam', not only because of the immediate
economy of fuel (consumption per output was about a fourth that of
the Newcomen machine), but even more because this improvement
opened the way to continuing advances in efficiency that eventually
brought the steam-engine within reach of all branches of the economy
and made of it a universal prime mover. Watt himself effected some of
the most important of these further gains (patents of 1782 and 1784):
the double-acting engine, with the steam working alternately on each
side of the piston; the use of steam to drive the piston as well as to
create a vacuum; the cut-off stroke, which took advantage of the
expansive force of the steam to obtain a substantial saving of energy;
above all, the sun-and-planet gear, which converted the reciprocating
stroke of the piston into rotary motion and made it possible to drive
the wheels of industry.
Watt believed firmly in the low-pressure engine; and, indeed, most
of the power of his machine derived, not from the force of the steam,
which rarely went above i j atmospheres, but from the vacuum on the
other side of the piston. Other men were less dogmatic. Around the
turn of the century, William Bull, Richard Trevithick, the American
Oliver Evans, and others evolved the high-pressure engine (two or
more atmospheres), which eventually yielded fuel economies of 1:1%
and better. In the beginning, however, its main advantage lay in its
simplicity and its ability to deliver the same work with a smaller piston;
it was thus lighter and cheaper than the low-pressure engine and used
far less water. This saving of space and materials was of primary im-
portance in the construction of movable engines. The locomotive and
steamboat would have been sharply restricted commercially had only
low pressure been available.

1
On the continued use of the Savery and Newcomen engines, see A. E. Musson
and E. Robinson, 'The Early Growth of Steam Power', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xi
(i959). 418-39; Thurston, History of the Growth, pp. 68 fF.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 103
Moreover it was high pressure that made possible the effective
application of compounding, which made use of the energy that
remained in the steam after it had driven the piston, by leading it into a
second cylinder (eventually a third and even a fourth) of larger
dimensions. The principle was the same as that which made possible the
cut-off stroke: theoretically there is no difference between the expansion
of the steam in one cylinder or more than one. Practically, there is a
significant gain in efficiency: the sum of the forces exerted by more than
one piston varies less throughout the action than that of a single piston;
more important, the temperature of each cylinder varies less if the
range of expansion of the steam is divided than if it is confined to one
vessel. The result was a major saving of fuel: by the middle of the
nineteenth century, an average compound engine used slightly over
2^ pounds of coal per horsepower-hour; Watt's machine needed about
7i, and the Newcomen engine of 1769 used 30.1 Jonathan Hornblower
built a two-cylinder engine on these lines as early as 1781, but he used
steam of low pressure, and his machine was found to be no more
efficient than that of Watt; moreover the latter sued him for infringe-
ment of patent, and when Hornblower was unable to pay royalties and
fine, he was clapped into prison. It was Arthur Woolf who, in 1804,
produced the first commercially successful compound engine. He used
high pressure and a separate condenser—by this time Watt's patent had
expired. In the long run, compounding found its widest application in
shipping, where the saving on fuel was multiplied by the space released
thereby for cargo and passengers.
Unlike the wooden machines for spinning and weaving cotton or
wool, the steam-engine required from the start a corresponding revolu-
tion in the relevant fields of metallurgy and construction. Smeaton
predicted that Watt would not be able to build his engine because it
required more accuracy than the techniques of the day permitted; and
indeed some seven years elapsed between the patent and the first com-
mercial realization. The difficulty was solved in part through the
ingenious efforts ofjohn Wilkinson, who learned to bore cylinders with
some precision; as Watt put it, he could 'promise upon a seventy-two
inch cylinder being not farther distant from absolute truth than the
thickness of a thin sixpence [say 0-05 in.] at the worst part'. Even this
was hardly close enough for an effective vacuum, and Watt and
engineers after him continued to use packed rope or hemp and tallow
to plug the gaps between piston and cylinder. Not until well into the
nineteenth century had materials and machine construction advanced
1
For figures on coal consumption and a discussion of the statistical difficulties
involved, see W . Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (London, 1906), pp. 145-9; also
Conrad Matschoss, Die Entwicklung der Dampfinaschine (2 vols.; Berlin, 1908), 1, 506-7.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 104 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
to the point where full advantage could be taken of the intelligence of
Watt's conception.
This raises the related but larger issue of the connection between
science and technology. It is often stated that the Newcomen machine
and its forerunners would have been unthinkable without the theoretical
ideas of Boyle, Torricelli, and others; and that Watt derived much of
his technical competence and imagination from his work with scien-
tists and scientific instruments at Glasgow. There is no doubt some
truth in this, though how much is impossible to say. One thing is
clear, however: once the principle of the separate condenser was
established, subsequent advances owed little or nothing to theory.
On the contrary, an entire branch of physics, thermodynamics,
developed in part as a result of empirical observations of engineering
methods and performance.1 Nor is it an accident that this theoretical
work was begun in France, where a school like the Polytechnique
devoted its efforts explicitly to the reduction of technique to mathe-
matical generalization. All of which did not prevent England from
continuing to lead the world in engineering practice and invention.
Because of the steam-engine's early shortcomings, it was less suited
than the gently turning water wheel for work requiring a certain
smoothness and regularity of motion. This, together with purely
economic considerations like relative size of firm, goes far to explain
the slower adoption of steam in wool than in cotton. As late as 1850,
more than a third of the power available to the wool manufacture of
England and Wales came from water (12,600 h.p. steam; 6800 water);
for the cotton industry of all of Great Britain, the corresponding figure
was about one-eighth (71,000 steam; 11,000 water). The biggest users
of steam power among the other industries were mining and metal-
lurgy; unfortunately, overall figures are not available. We are thus
reduced to crude estimates for the kingdom as a whole. Thus it has been
suggested that there were no more than one thousand engines in use in
1800; guessing at an average size of 10 h.p. (it would not matter to the
argument if one chose a multiplier twice as large), one arrives at an
aggregate capacity of perhaps 10,000 h.p. Fifteen years later, according
to the French observer Baron Dupin, this total had risen, for Great
Britain alone, to 210,000 h.p.; and by the middle of the century it had
further increased more than sixfold. For the United Kingdom in 1850,
Mulhall estimates 500,000 h.p. of stationary engines, 790,000 h.p. of
mobile engines, mostly in the form of railway locomotives. The latter
had constituted an insignificant category a generation earlier.

1
T. S. Kuhn,' Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery', in
M. Clagett, ed., Critical Problems in the History of Science (Madison, Wise., 1959).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 105
One of the cherished myths of economic history is the image of a
swift and drastic shift from rudimentary hand tools to machines.
According to this, we begin with carpenters and millwrights with
chisels and files, cutting and scraping by eye and feel; and then, within
two generations, we have machinists and engineers operating precision
power tools and working to specifications and blueprints. In fact, as is
so often the case with revolutions, the old and new were not that far
apart, and the change was slower than usually pictured.
The craftsman of the mid-eighteenth century, particularly in fields
like clock-making, was familiar with an impressive variety of machines,
including lathes, punches, drills, and screw- and wheel-cutting engines.
These were slow and only moderately accurate; yet they were adequate
to the industry of the day—both pre- and post-innovations—and indeed
have survived in some out-of-the-way places to the present.1 Of the
great mechanical inventions of this period, only the Watt steam-engine
required, as noted above, an immediate advance in metal-working
technique.
In the long run, however, the diffusion of mechanized manufacture
called forth major improvements in tool design. For one thing, the
productivity of the new machines for making consumers' goods was
directly related to speed of operation and efficient utilization of power;
both of these in turn demanded precise, smoothly working parts. For
another, the scarcity of skilled wood and metal workers created a
need for the kind of equipment that would enable a mechanic to do
more in less time and with as little training as possible. And both these
considerations were reinforced by the growth of an autonomous,
specialized machine-construction industry in which imaginative arti-
sans had an opportunity to modify old tools and devise new ones; the
same process of gradual, cumulative technological advance by anony-
mous increments that characterized the consumers'-goods industries
was equally important in the manufacture of capital goods.
Because of the anonymity of many of these improvements and the
great diversity of practice, it is impossible to convey more than
an approximate notion of the overall pace of advance. In the cotton
industry we can at least count spindles and categorize them under
rubrics Eke 'mules' or 'water frames', which, though embracing
equipment of different efficiencies, are homogeneous enough to be
meaningful. In machine construction, we have no counts, and even
1
On the technical competence of wood and metalworkers before the Industrial
Revolution, see especially Musson and Robinson, 'The Origins of Engineering in
Lancashire',/. Econ. Hist.xx (i960), 209-33. AlsoM. Daumas, 'PrecisionMechanics',
and K. R. Gilbert, 'Machine Tools', in C. Singer et ah, A History of Technology, iv:
The Industrial Revolution, c. 1750-c. i8$o (Oxford, 1958), 379-441.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 106 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
if we had, the range of variation between tools of the same name is so
great as to render classification illusory and even the timing of innova-
tion uncertain. Two examples will suffice. We know that gauges were
being employed by machine builders as early as the 1770's and 1780's;
indeed, the use of the word to designate an instrument for measuring
dimensions dates to the late seventeenth century. Yet it hardly seems
likely that men were 'working to gauge' in this early period, that is,
using these devices, not only to measure size or scribe lines, but to
assure standardization. Where and when the latter technique was intro-
duced, and how fast it spread, is impossible to say. Similarly, we know
that the slide rest was in wide use in the eighteenth century. Yet the
invention of this basic instrument of precision work, which took the
cutting tool out of the fallible hands of the artisan and made possible
control of the direction and depth of its action, was attributed by
Nasmyth and others to Maudslay. A myth? Perhaps. More likely,
however, contemporaries who credited him with it had in mind some
change in its character or innovation in its use, perhaps simply insistence
on its use where others were content to work by hand.
But if we cannot measure the state of technique at a given point in
time we can speak of the trend. In the space of two generations, in
large part owing to a handful of gifted figures who learned from each
other and formed as it were a family of toolmakers, wood- and metal-
working techniques were transformed, at least at the margin. 1 Tools
became heavier and more rigid (Maudslay's all-metal lathe), more
automatic and precise (Clement's self-regulating lathe and double-
driving centre chuck, Nasmyth's self-acting nut-milling machine and
shaper, a whole succession of improvements in planing), more versa-
tile and easier to operate (the turret-lathe and milling machines). By
the middle of the nineteenth century 'the majority of the machine
tools now in use.. .had been brought into existence',2 and men like
Nasmyth were toolmakers to machine builders, stocking standard
models and selling from catalogue descriptions.3
The means of performance came first; the standards of accuracy
after. The invention of power tools did not change the personal
1
For the family tree of innovations and innovators in machine-tool manufacture,
see Joseph W. Roe, English and American Tool Builders (New Haven, 1916), p. 7;
Gilbert, 'Machine Tools', p. 418. This pattern of direct employer-employee contact
as a source of technical training and seed-bed for entrepreneurship characterized the
continental industry as well. On Germany, see F. Redlich, 'The Leaders of the
German Steam-engine Industry during the First Hundred Years', J. Econ. Hist, iv
(1944), 146.
2
Gilbert, 'Machine Tools', p. 441.
3
See A. E. Musson, 'James Nasmyth and the Early Growth of Mechanical
Engineering', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. x (1957). Nasmyth expressed his intention of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 107
character of the work. Each craftsman remained judge of his own per-
formance, working to approximate specifications that were not always
uniform even within the shop. The assembling ofany piece of machinery
required a costly and time-consuming adjustment of all the parts, which
were individually filed down to fit the whole. Reproduction or
replacement was similarly approximate. Every screw had its individual
thread.
Maudslay and Clement made an effort to correct some of these short-
comings by insisting on the use of true plane surfaces and standardizing
the screws produced in their shops. But the major work in this area was
done by one of their pupils, Joseph Whitworth, who, building on the
work of his masters, worked out standard threads for bolts and screws
of all sizes and developed the gauges that bear his name. Diffusion of
these principles and techniques was another matter. Whitworth's con-
tributions go back to the 1830's and his methods were made public
in 1840, yet in 1856 he was still pleading for accuracy.
Generally speaking, standardized precision work, which made
possible interchangeable parts, preceded the adoption of common,
industry-wide norms. Thus if working to gauge was still the exception
before 1850, it was spreading rapidly, and a number of machine makers,
like Roberts of the self-acting mule, had long made use of templets and
jigs to facilitate the performance of repetitious operations. Uniformity
of standards of screw and bolt manufacture, on the other hand, came
only in the second half of the century (common within the enterprise
by i860) and for a long time stood alone; all the weaknesses of human
vanity combined with habit and the cost of change to deter acceptance
of general patterns by particular producers.
One field in which standardization of product was achieved early
was stampings. The principle went back to antiquity, when dies were
used to mint coins of uniform design. In the early modern period, the
punch was introduced, and made possible regularity of shape and size.
In industry proper, the technique was obviously appropriate to the
manufacture of buttons, gewgaws, buckles, and similar small objects.
Birmingham, if not the first to use it, was the city that made the most of
it while limitations of power restricted its application to the light metal
trades; in the nineteenth century, a number of minor industries—pen
nib manufacture, for example—were revolutionized by adaptations of
this process.
Such products are clearly not to be compared to interchangeable
parts, which must be exact enough to fit and interact with others in a
operating on this principle as early as 1836 in letters to his future partner Gaskell.
Cited in R. Dickinson, 'James Nasmyth and the Liverpool Iron Trade', Trans, of the
Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cvm (1956), 99.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 108 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
larger mechanism. Nor are they—and the less so in this early period—
so strong as pieces wrought, forged, and milled in the traditional
sequence. (Even today a drop-forged blade commands a premium over
a stamped one.) Nevertheless, the principle was as promising as that of
precision machining, which would always be more expensive, and the
application was enormously broadened by the introduction of power
presses and similar big equipment. By the middle of the century, the
steam hammer was beginning to be used in the manufacture of railway
wheels. This was only a beginning, but it was the herald of a new kind
of machine construction mat was eventually to make possible the
streamlined, inexpensive hard goods of the twentieth century—auto-
mobiles, refrigerators, bicycles, television sets.

Like the machine-building and engineering trades, the chemical

industry has tended to be neglected in textbook histories of the Indus-
trial Revolution, in part for the same reasons: the complexity and many-
sidedness of its development, and the need for technical knowledge that
the historian rarely possesses. Probably even more important, however,
in promoting this oversight have been (i) the unrevolutionary character
of this development—the organization of labour remained essentially
unaltered while gains in productivity were usually smaller in chemicals
than in those areas where mechanization was feasible; and (2) the
secondary position of the industry in this early period—its growth was
largely a response to the needs of other branches of manufacture, in
particular, textiles, soap, and glass. We are accustomed today to look
on the chemical manufacture as a giant, partly because of its success in
creating wondrous new materials like nylon or plastics, partly because
of the 'miracle' drugs that pour out of its laboratories in an endless
stream; we are less aware of the enormous output of what is generally
known as the heavy chemical industry, which is concerned with those
inorganic agents, acid and alkali, used in the production of other
commodities.
Yet the derivative character of this growth in our period in no way
diminishes its importance. The transformation of the textile manufac-
ture, whose requirements of detergents, bleaches, and mordants were
growing at the same pace as output, would have been impossible with-
out a corresponding transformation of chemical technology. There was
not enough cheap meadowland or sour milk in all the British Isles to
whiten the cloth of Lancashire once the water frame and mule replaced
the spinning wheel; and it would have taken undreamed-of quantities
of human urine to cut the grease of the raw wool consumed by the mills
of the West Riding.
The solution was found in a simultaneous advance along several lines:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 109
(i) by substituting where possible vegetable for animal sources of raw
material; (2) by substituting inorganic for organic raw materials; (3) by
making use of the by-products of each reaction to produce other
reactions yielding useful compounds; and (4) by improving the tools
and equipment of the industry—furnaces, vats, mixers, piping, and the
like—so as to permit the more rapid processing of larger quantities with
greater safety. The first two were analogous in significance to the sub-
stitution of coal for wood in metallurgy: they freed the industry from
the bondage of inelastic supplies. The third is particularly characteristic
of the chemical manufacture and largely accounts for the conditions of
increasing return that prevailed in the heroic age of early innovation.
The fourth yielded perhaps the smallest gains in our period, but was to
grow increasingly important as innovations in the other areas were
absorbed and the increasing scale of production shifted attention to the
physical plant and the logistical problems of work flow.
The course and character of tins advance are best conveyed by exam-
ining the changes in the production of those key compounds that are
the basis of the heavy chemical manufacture and the industrial commod-
ities derived from them. The most important of these, even then,
was sulphuric acid, a substance of such versatility (oxidizing agent, de-
hydrating agent, acid, electrolyte) that its use has come to serve as a
rough index ofindustrial development. In the first half of the eighteenth
century, sulphuric acid was employed chiefly as a nostrum, occasionally
as a bleach. The method ofpreparation was slow, constrained, inefficient;
the price, 15. 6d. to 2s. 6d. an ounce, prohibitive for most industrial use.
Within the space of a few decades, however, the introduction from the
Continent of the bell process (first successful application by Joshua
Ward and John White at Twickenham in 1736) and then the substitu-
tion of large lead-lined vats for the much smaller glass 'bells' (John
Roebuck and Samuel Garbett at Birmingham in 1746) increased the
scale of operation a thousand-fold and pushed the cost down to l\i. a
pound. By the end of the century Britain, which had once eked out the
home supply with purchases from Holland, was exporting up to two
thousand tons a year.1
In industrial chemistry, one compound leads to another. Sulphuric
acid, in combination with salt, yielded as one product hydrochloric
acid, from which chlorine could be freed for use as a bleaching agent.
The method of accomplishing this was wasteful, and chlorine in its
pure form was dangerous and so corrosive that it tended to rot the
1
A. and N . Clow, The Chemical Revolution: a Contribution to Social Technology
(London, 1952), pp. 132-9; Pub. Record Office, T. 64/241: 'An Account of the
Exports of British Manufacturers from Scotland to Holland ' I am indebted to
Dr T. C. Barker for this material.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 110 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
fabric being treated. Yet it offered important advantages over such
older bleaches as sunshine, buttermilk, and even dilute sulphuric acid,
and the search began for chlorine compounds or mixtures that would
handle more easily. The first of these were liquors, the most important
of which, potassium hypochlorite or Javel water, was invented in
France in 1796 and has remained a household cleaning agent ever since.
For the textile manufacture, however, the major advance was Charles
Tennant's invention of bleaching powder (patents of 1797 and 1799),
made by absorbing chlorine in slaked lime. Tennant's output of the
powder rose from 57 tons the first year, to 239 tons in 1810,910 tons in
1825, 5719 tons in 1850; in 1852, production for Great Britain as a
whole was 13,100 tons. In the meantime, the price fell to one-tenth its
original level—from £140 to £14 per ton. 1
Alkalis too were indispensable to the manufacture of textiles; and of
a wide variety of other commodities as well. Two types were employed:
potassium carbonate (commonly in the form of potash or the purer
pearl ash) and sodium carbonate (generally called soda), along with
compounds related to one or the other. Potassium alkalis were com-
bined with tallow or other animal fat to make soft soap, used especially
by the woollen industry for scouring and fulling; were mixed with
sand to produce one of the silicates that we call glass; went into the
manufacture of gunpowder and alum; and were employed in bleaching
and cleaning cloth and in the softening of leather. For all their ver-
satility, however, they had the disadvantage of deriving from raw
materials in scarce and inelastic supply. Potassium carbonate was
obtained from prepared wood ash in a ratio of perhaps 1 part of pure
compound to 600 parts of wood, necessitating a rate of consumption
that was out of the question in timber-starved Britain. Europe and
America were combed for supplies, and from the middle to the end of
the century imports grew from about 1500 to 9000 tons. Moreover
England was not the only country in the market; as demand outstripped
supply, the price went up substantially, doubling in the period from
1780 to 1815. Not until the 1860's, when the Germans began to exploit
the rich deposits of mineral potash in the Stassfurt area, did this bottle-
neck ease. By that time, a revolution in the manufacture of sodium
carbonate had altered drastically the relative importance of the two
alkalis.
Sodium alkali is as versatile as the potassium variety; indeed, the two
are substdtutable for each other in many of their applications. The main
difference industrially is that soda is used in the manufacture of hard
soaps and curd soaps—hence, of a household staple as well as of a
1
These and other details of this discussion are takenfromL. F. Haber, The Chemical
Industry during the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1958), ch. n.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN III
production good. In the eighteenth century, sodium alkali also was
obtained from the ashes of plants: thc-saltwort, which grew chiefly in
Spain and the Canary Islands and yielded barilla, containing 20-35 per
cent by weight of soda; and dried seaweed from western Scotland and
Ireland, from which was derived kelp, with a soda content of from 5 to
10 per cent. The latter was able to compete because barilla, though
richer, paid duty; moreover imports were just about cut off during the
Napoleonic wars.
The supply of sodium alkali was more elastic than that of potash but
could not possibly keep pace with increasing demand. Once again, the
answer was found in the substitution of mineral for vegetable raw
materials—in this instance, an especially abundant mineral, common
salt. The actual technique was worked out in France in the 1780's by
Nicolas Leblanc: conversion of salt to saltcake (sodium sulphate) by
means of sulphuric acid (whose usefulness was multiplied thereby many
times); and burning the saltcake in mixture with coal and calcium car-
bonate (usually in the form of limestone) to yield sodium carbonate
and wastes.
British producers, who were certainly aware of the Leblanc process
by the end of the eighteenth century, were slow to adopt it; large-
scale manufacture began only in 1823. Scholars have usually attributed
this delay to the effects of the tax on salt; more important, probably,
was Britain's continued access to the traditional vegetable sources,
combined with the conservatism of alkali users, who were reluctant to
change over to the synthetic product even after James Muspratt made
it available at a favourable price.1 By contrast, France, which was cut
off from Spanish barilla during the Napoleonic wars, had begun
commercial manufacture in 1808 and within a decade was producing
between ten and fifteen thousand tons of Leblanc soda a year.2 Once
the initial resistance was overcome, however, British output of syn-
thetic alkali increased spectacularly, from the few hundred tons of 1820
to almost 140,000 tons in 1852. (French output at the latter date was
perhaps 45,000 tons.) This rise was accompanied by a sharp fall in
the price of soda; crystals, for example, went from a wartime peak of
jC,59 a ton, to £36. 105. on the eve of Leblanc, to £5. 10s. by mid-
century.
Owing to the importance of bulky raw materials in chemical manu-
facture^—it took ten to twelve tons of ingredients to make one ton of
soda—the industry was sharply localized almost from the start. The
1
Cf. T. C. Barker, R. Dickinson and D. W. F. Hardie, 'The Origins of the Synthe-
tic Alkali Industry in Britain', Economica, n.s. xxni (1956), 158-71.
* Based on J. A. Chaptal, De I'industriefranfoise (2 vok; Paris, 1819), n, 70, 173,
which gives the price as 10 frs. per quintal and output as 2-3 million francs.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 112 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
three main centres were the Glasgow area, Merseyside and Tyneside.
The first was oriented originally to the local textile industry. Its
resource position was not so strong as that of the other two, and its
continued importance was a tribute to the technical creativeness and
commercial energy of the Tennant firm. This enterprise built its fortune
on bleaching powder and branched out from there into the manufac-
ture of acids, alkalis, fertilizer and related commodities. Overall, it was
the biggest chemical producer in the world in the thirties and forties,
and its giant works at St Rollox, with its skyscraper chimney of 455 J feet
to dissipate the noxious fumes high above the countryside, was the
world's largest chemical factory.
Merseyside was favoured by the availability of coal on one side and
salt on the other, a network of excellent waterways, and proximity to
the biggest textile market in the world. Its major product was soda ash,
whose availability promoted the related soap manufacture: by 1835,
the output of hard soap along the Mersey was 47,750,000 lb., as against
32,650,000 in London; output had tripled since 1820, as against a 75 per
cent increase for the nation as a whole. Cheap soda and saltcake (sodium
sulphate) were also factors in the rapid growth of glass-making in Lanca-
shire—though less important than in soap; where in 1832 the factories
in the Liverpool area paid less than an eighth of the excise on glass, by
1870, this region was probably making half the glass manufactured in
England.1
The greatest centre of chemical manufacture was the Tyne basin,
again an area with easy access to water transport and an abundant
supply of cheap coal. Salt, on the other hand, had to come across the
island from Cheshire; and the local market for chemical products was
small, for there was no textile industry in the area and little manufacture
of soap and glass. Yet the Tyneside firms found ample compensation in
London and abroad, especially in northern Europe. From a late start—
output of alkalis and acids was negligible in 1820—the north-east came
by mid-century to account for half of the chemical plant, labour force
and output of the entire kingdom.2
The encouragement given by the mass production of heavy chemicals
to other branches of manufacture was only in part a function of the
supply and price of the chemicals themselves. On the one hand, the
availability of relatively pure compounds made possible the adoption of
new raw materials that would otherwise not have been susceptible of
treatment. Thus the development of purer soda ash made it feasible to
1
T. C. Barker and J. R. Harriss, A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution,
St Helens, 1750-1900 (Liverpool, 1954), pp. 202, 363. Unfortunately for our statistical
evidence, the excise duty on glass was removed in 1845.
* For a partial census in 1852, see Haber, The Chemical Industry, p. 18.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 113
use palm oil instead of animal fat in soap manufacture. The importance
of this is apparent: the demand for fats was growing even faster than
population and the traditional sources of supply were relatively
inelastic; by mid-century, vegetable oils were being used in food,
candles, and lubricants as well as soap.
On the other hand, the manufacture of synthetic compounds gave
rise to enormous quantities of waste, which, by a kind of paradox not
uncommon in technology, were a powerful stimulus to innovation.
There was the positive lure of profit: waste turned to use had value;
and the negative goad of expense: unexploited waste had to be dis-
posed of. There were two tons of'galligu' for every ton of soda made,
and land for dumping cost a small fortune. Moreover, much of the
waste was noxious and brought down on the chemical manufactures a
hail of lawsuits, the attention of Parliament, and eventually official
inspection and controls.
It would be impossible here to follow in detail the various solutions
to this problem, or the interaction of these new techniques with one
another and with outside processes to open new possibilities for growth.
The story of chemicals in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century
is in large part this effort to use up all the materials, an effort which
stemmed largely from soda manufacture but in specific instances
originated elsewhere, in the production of chlorine for bleaching, for
example. Every operation undertaken led to others, and the size of the
productive unit grew with the proliferation of commodities. Yet this
was not an industry that employed large numbers of men; as in
metallurgy, plant and materials were the most important factors of
production. In 1851 the industrial census gave 9172 adult workers in
chemical manufacture, as against 292,340 in cotton, 152,205 in woollen
and worsted, some 390,000 in the building trades.1 The importance of
chemicals, however, was clearly out of proportion to its numbers, or
even its capital investment.
One aspect of the industry is worthy of special note. More than in
any other, development derived from scientific research. This is not to
say that the research itself was always conducted along correct theo-
retical lines—there was much empirical trial and error in the laboratories
of this period—or that the industry made as much use of scientific
knowledge or scientists as it might have. On the contrary, many of the
advances were the work of self-taught 'chemists' and the more
successful enterprises were characterized not so much by innovations in
chemical process as by the effective organization of the factors of pro-
duction within the prevailing scientific and technological framework.
1
Parliamentary Papers, 1852-3, ixxxvm, Part 1, Table xxvm, pp. ccxl-ccbrii (males
and females, twenty years of age and over).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 114 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
The fact remains, however, that the laboratory was indispensable, at
least to the invention of new procedures, whereas it was to all intents
and purposes unknown in other fields. In this regard, the really
important research in theoretical and applied chemistry was being done
abroad, where the education of chemists was already more systematic
and thorough than in Britain. For the moment, however, the abund-
ance of cheap raw materials and economies of scale gave Britain a
tremendous competitive advantage: soda exports, for example, went
from 75,704 cwt. valued at ,£44,575 in 1840 to 2,049,582 cwt. worth
nearly £ 1 million in i860.1 Not until the last quarter of the century
did new techniques in both light and heavy chemicals threaten
this hegemony.

Machines and new techniques alone are not the Industrial Revolution.
They meant gains in productivity, a shift in the relative importance of
the factors of production from labour to capital. But by revolution we
mean a transformation of the organization as well as the means of
production. In particular, we mean the assemblage of large bodies of
workers in one place, there to accomplish their tasks under supervision
and discipline; we mean, in short, what has come to be known as the
factory system.
In this regard, two important questions call for consideration. The
first is the relationship between the supply of labour and the extension
of the new mode of production; the second, the place of the factory
system in the overall pattern of economic change.
The first—the recruitment of a factory labour force—has been the
subject of much debate. The facts are reasonably clear. By 1830 there
were hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children employed
in factory industry.2 They had entered the mills in spite of a strong fear
of the unknown, an aversion to supervision and discipline, and resent-
ment of the unremitting demands of the machine. The rules of the
early factories are our best indication of the importance of these issues:
the heaviest fines were reserved for absence (the cardinal sin, often
worth several days' pay), lateness, and distraction from the job.
The interpretation of these facts is something else again. For a long
time, the most accepted view has been that propounded by Marx and
repeated and embellished by generations of socialist and even non-
1
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. CLXVI, col. 1455.
2
Even after passage of the Act of 1833 and the institution of regular inspection, we
have no full count of the factory labour force at a given point of time. For one thing,
the official definition of factory limited the term to power-driven textile mills; for
another, employment varied constantly, and the different inspectors collected their
statistics over a period of some months. See the data for 1835 in A. Ure, Philosophy
of Manufactures (London, 1835), Appendix.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 115
socialist historians. This position explains the accomplishment of so
enormous a social change—the creation of an industrial proletariat in
the face of tenacious resistance—by postulating an act of forcible
expropriation: the enclosures uprooted the cottager and small peasant
and drove them into the mills. Recent empirical research has invali-
dated this hypothesis; the data indicate that the agricultural revolution
associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labour,
that indeed those rural areas that saw the most enclosure saw the largest
increase in resident population.1 From 1750 to 1830, Britain's agricul-
tural counties doubled their inhabitants. Whether objective evidence of
this kind will suffice, however, to do away with what has become
something of an article of faith is doubtful.
A more recent interpretation takes the opposite tack and argues that,
since the factories were manned in the long run, there was never any
problem of recruitment; that in the deceptive language of common
sense, there was no labour shortage.
The proposition is non-refutable, hence meaningless. From the
hindsight of any given level of resource utilization, the resource in
question has proved adequate to that level. Besides, the economist
knows no shortage; he knows only relative prices. The meaningful
question is the influence of labour supply on the choice of techniques
and rate of investment.2
Here, unfortunately, we are confronted by the apparent contradic-
toriness of the relationship. On the one hand, as we have seen, the high
and rising cost of English labour was an encouragement to mechaniza-
tion, hence growth, in the eighteenth century. Even after the initial
period of industrialization, the rate of substitution of machines for men
reflected fluctuations in wages or wage demands; thus the textile manu-
facturers introduced automatic spinning equipment and the power
loom spasmodically, responding in large part to strikes, threats of
strikes, and other threats to managerial authority. That famous apologist
for the factory system, Andrew Ure, wrote a happy chapter on the
1
See the important article ofJ. D. Chambers, 'Enclosure and the Labour Supply in
the Industrial Revolution', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. v (1953), 318-43.
1
Cf. Morris Morris, 'Some Comments on the Supply of Labour to the Bombay
Cotton Textile Industry, 1854-1951', Indian Economic Journal, 1 (1953), 138-52; and
his 'Recruitment of an Industrial Labor Force in India, with British and American
Comparisons', Comparative Studies in Society and History, n (i960), 305-28. This
position derives in part from the experience of industrialization in India, where the
pressure of an almost unlimited labour reserve and the development of a kind of
symbiotic relationship between factory employment and village subsistence facilitated
recruitment. Similar forces eased the transition in Japan as well. Characteristic of both
economies has been the extreme paternalism of the industrial employer: 'A job with
Tata's is like a piece of land.' It would be most dangerous, however, to infer from
the Asian to the British experience.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 Il6 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
capacity of the machine for taming labour.1 In sum, high wages were a
stimulus to innovation and technological advance.
On the other hand, one can have too much of a good thing. British
industry could not have grown much if factory labour had been so
much more costly than, say, agricultural labour, or so much more
costly than labour in other countries that it no longer paid to invest in
manufacturing. Something of the kind was happening in the late
eighteenth century when, with the power loom not yet practicable
and English weavers enjoying the unprecedented demand consequent
on the introduction of machine spinning, it began to pay to ship British
yarn to central Europe, there to be woven by peasants accustomed to a
far lower standard of living than Englishmen.* The difficulty that
certain isolated country mills found in obtaining workers at commercially
feasible wages, to the point of being compelled on occasion to leave
new equipment idle, is another example.3
Fortunately, the supply of labour increased substantially in Britain
from the mid-eighteenth century on, almost as much, indeed, as the
demand. In the first place, the rapid growth of population created a
surplus of labour in the countryside, much of which found its way into
the new urban centres of the North and Midlands. Secondly, while
eighteenth-century England does not fit the economists' model of the
pre-industrial society with unlimited supplies of labour,4—there were
two societies nearby which do fit it and were in a position to send
some of their surplus humanity to England—Scotland and, even more,
Ireland. And finally, though least important, the same highly developed
rural textile industry that had absorbed the free labour of the English
countryside released an increasing number of workers as mechaniza-
tion of weaving advanced and immigrant Irish labour began to compete
for employment. The hand-loom weavers went into the mills reluc-
tantly, but they went.
Even so, the task would have been immeasurably more difficult had
the technological requirements of manufacture, especially in the early
years of the jenny and water-frame, not allowed the employment of
marginal elements—children, women, vagrants when necessary; and
had social and political institutions not permitted a certain amount of
explicit and concealed conscription, especially of parish apprentices.
1
Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, pp. 364.-70.
* It was this yarn trade that brought Nathan Rothschild to Manchester in 1797, to
lay the foundations of the British dynasty. It was this also that inspired Wm. Raddiffe
to write his Origins of Power Loom Weaving (London, 1828).
3 Cf. A. Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800-1850 (Manchester, 1926), p. 88.
4
The excellent analysis of W. Arthur Lewis, 'Economic Development with
Unlimited Supplies of Labour', The Manchester School, xxi (1953), 139-91. is applic-
able to Britain only with major modifications.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 117
With the coming of the power mule, however, grown men were
required in increasing numbers and the employer was compelled to
turn to the free labour market. This time it was the familial organiza-
tion of factory labour that eased the change: the employer could hire
parents and children together, which not only increased the financial
incentive but also, by preserving the parents in their tutorial role,
reconciled them the more easily to the undesirable features of factory
work. By the time further technological advances—the introduction of
long mules and the self-actor in the twenties and thirties—and limita-
tions on child employment once again changed the composition of the
labour force, a new generation had grown up, inured to the discipline
and precision of the mill.1
How, now, does one reconcile the advantages of scarce labour and
abundant labour in explaining Britain's economic development? It is
not possible yet to give a definitive answer; we need to know a lot more
of the facts before generalizingfromthem. At the moment, one can only
advance the tentative hypothesis that the factor cost pattern required
for a technological breakthrough is different from that needed for
exploiting the possibilities of that breakthrough. Scarce labour seems
to have encouraged a deepening of capital in eighteenth-century
Britain; while a more abundant supply facilitated widening in the
following decades.
Our second question is the place of the factory in the economy as a
whole. There was a time when the coming of the factory system was
pictured as a cataclysm, overwhelming the old order and transforming
British industry within a generation. This was certainly the impression
of contemporaries who, engaged in a fierce polemic over the social
consequences of technological change, inevitably starkened the issues
and saw everything in black and white. Some of the early economic
historians accepted this view, though largely for different reasons.
Among other things, the tendency to see the factory system as the last
1
On the recruitment of the factory labour force in cotton, see, in addition to
Redford's classic study of Labour Migration, George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the
Arkwrights (Manchester, 1924); R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the
Arkwrights, 1758-1830 (Manchester, 1958); F. Collier,' An Early Factory Community',
Econ. Hist. 11 (1930), 117-24; Frances Collier, The Family Economy of the Working Classes
in the Cotton Industry, 1784-1833 (Manchester, 1964); Neil Smelser, Social Change
in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the Lancashire Cotton Industry,
1770-1840 (London, 1959). For comparable problems in other industries, see D. C.
Coleman, The British Paper Industry 1495-1860: a Study in Industrial Growth (Oxford,
195**), ch. x i ; A. H.John, The Industrial Development of South Wales, 1750-1850
(Cardiff, 1950), ch. in. Also D. F. Macdonald, Scotland's Shifting Population, 1770-
1850 (Glasgow, 1937), chs. m and iv; and J. E. Handley, The Irish in Scotland, 1798-
1854 (Cork, 1945), ch. iv.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 Il8 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
of a sequence of ascending stages of industrial organization, beginning
with the craft shop and passing through putting-out, implied the mutual
exclusiveness of these forms and obscured those peculiar competitive
advantages of each that have made possible their co-existence to the
present day. Only in this century have scholars reversed the interpreta-
tion by stressing continuity rather than change. Clapham's classic
Economic History of Modern Britain is a monument to this new point of
view; it is, in Herbert Heaton's words, 'a study in slow motion'. 1
The economic basis for the survival of the older modes of production
is to be found partly within them, partly in the demands of the factory
system and the general growth attending its development. Thus both
craft shop and factory make possible the control of the work process
from above (in the shop, the employer is usually worker as well); and
while the factory is able to turn out more goods cheaper, the shop can
work far more economically to special order. So that although factory
production meant the end of many shops, it meant the beginning of
many more. Machine building and maintenance, in particular, called
forth a swarm of small artisanal enterprises; but large-scale industry in
general found it desirable, for rational pecuniary reasons, to subcontract
for much of its work.
The putting-out system is weak on both scores: the domestic artisan
is rarely skilled enough to make individual finished products of the
highest quality; nor can he compete with the factory in mass produc-
tion of standardized items. Yet the weakness of putting-out is in many
ways deceptive. For one thing, the capacity of dispersed manufacture
for improvements in productivity should not be underestimated. Thus
the division of labour made possible remarkable levels of output in
certain trades—the metal-working ones in particular—well before the
coming of machinery. Moreover, while the simplification of the work
process implicit in such specialization is an invitation to mechanization,
the devices that result often reinforce at first the position of the home
worker; the early punching, cutting, and stamping machines were
eminently suited to the cottage or the cellar. It is only when a higher
stage of machine construction is reached, with the building of large,
power-driven devices, that factory manufacture wins out.
Even where specialization and simplification cannot be pushed very
far, in textiles for example, the home worker has one great advantage:
he is cheap. He is usually able to draw some of his sustenance from the
soil, if only from a garden plot; and his affection for the freedom of
home work is such as to reconcile him to wages that a mill hand would
not tolerate. For the manufacturer, moreover, he is dispensable; the
immobilization of capital in plant and equipment is minimal, and in
1
Heaton, 'Industrial Revolution', Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN IIO
time of difficulty work may be halted without fear of heavy, uncom-
pensated fixed costs.1
For these reasons, the putting-out system proved hardier than might
have been expected. It dragged on unconscionably in those trades
where the technological advantage of power machinery was still small
(as in weaving) or where the home artisan could build himself a rudi-
mentary power device (as in nail-making and other light metalwork).
And it often survived in symbiosis with the factory; many manufac-
turers found it profitable to install only so much machinery as would
supply a conservatively estimated normal demand, relying on a
reserve pool of dispersed labour for additional output in time of
prosperity.
At the same time, much of the ground that the craft shop and putting-
out lost in the newly mechanized industries was made up in other fields.
On the one hand, the gains in productivity in certain stages of manu-
facture, with resultant reduction in price and rise in demand for the
finished product, increased the labour requirements of the other,
traditionally organized stages. Thus the clothing trades profited from
the transformation of spinning and weaving, and lace-making and
embroidery from the availability of cheap yarn. On the other hand,
certain kinds of technological advance created craft and domestic
industry where they had not existed before or extended them far
beyond their traditional boundaries. The sewing-machine is an
excellent example: it made ordinary women seamstresses and seam-
stresses tailors, and so doing hastened the transformation of what had
once been the task of every woman into a professional activity.
In general, the whole tendency of industrialization and urbanization
was to specialize labour ever farther and break down the versatility of
the household. A whole range of occupations—baking, butchering,
the manufacture of things as diverse as candles, soap, and polish—
expanded or appeared in response. Along with this, the growth of
population and per capita real income—as a result of productivity
gains in agriculture as well as industry—augmented consumption and
increased the portion devoted to manufactures and services, with con-
sequent stimulation of the traditionally organized trades as well as the
newly mechanized ones. Housing alone required an army of carpenters,
masons, plumbers, plasterers, glaziers, tilers, and plain labourers.
All of this is clearly brought out by the occupational statistics. The
British census of 1851—for all its inaccuracies—shows a country in
which agriculture and domestic service were far and away the most
1
For a theoretical analysis of some of the competitive advantages of putting-out,
see A. Hirschman, 'Investment Policies in Underdeveloped Countries', Amer. Econ.
Rev. sxvn (1957), 557-60.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 120 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
important occupations; in which most of the labour force was engaged
in industries of the old type: building trades, tailoring, shoemaking,
unskilled work of all sorts. Even in the cotton manufacture, with over
three-fifths of its working force of over half a million (of a total of
almost sixteen millions) in mills,1 almost two-thirds of the units making
returns employed less than fifty men; 2 the average mill in England
employed less than 200; and tens of thousands of hand looms were
still at work in rural cottages.
Yet just as it would be wrong to picture the factory system as a tidal
wave, so we would be deceiving ourselves to see it as a gentle erosion
of the traditional order. For one thing, there was the trend: in the
period from 1834, when the factory inspectors sent in their first returns,
to mid-century, the number of cotton mill operatives in Britain
increased from 220,825 to 330,924—and this in spite of substantial
gains in productivity. In other industries—leather, paper, the metal
trades—factory employment was growing even more rapidly; they
were where cotton had been two generations earlier. Moreover the
speed of the shift from old to new was increasing pan passu with the
rate of technological change. In particular, the improvements in the
technique of machine construction meant the rapid translation of con-
cepts and devices developed in one industry to analogous operations in
others; it is a short jump from cutting cloth to cutting leather or
metal. They also meant larger and faster equipment that demanded
power and was incompatible with domestic manufacture.
In a class by themselves, but following a similar path to factory
organization, were those industries in which work had always been
separated from the home and dispersion of labour was impossible.
Iron, chemicals, machine work, shipbuilding all fall into this category.
Long before the coming of the cotton mill, these branches of manu-
facture had been characterized by large units of production. A charcoal
iron furnace of the early eighteenth century might employ eight or
ten men, plus as many as a hundred digging ore, cutting and charking
wood, transporting materials, and generally servicing the smelters.
In the same period, the naval arsenal at Chatham employed upwards of a
thousand men, all of them carefully assigned and supervised, so that
'tho' you see the whole Place as it were in the utmost Hurry, yet you
see no Confusion, every Man knows his own Business.. .'.3
1
Thefiguresare of population and working force ten years of age and older.
2
This is a guess based on the assumption that most of those employers who did not
give the number of their men employed less than fifty. J. H. Clapham, An Economic
History of Modem Britain (3 vols.; Cambridge, 1932-9), n, 35.
3 Daniel Defoe, Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. G. D. H. Cole;
2 vols. (London, 1927), p. 108.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 121
Should such units be designated as factories? From the standpoint
of the two critical criteria—concentration of production and main-
tenance of discipline—the term certainly fits. At the same time, they
differed in one important regard from the textile mills that were in fact
the prototype of toe factory as we know it: however thoroughly the
work in these forges and yards was supervised, the pace was set by men
and not machines. It was spasmodic rather than regular. There were
moments that required a burst of concentration and effort: when the
furnace was tapped or the vat poured; the mast hoisted or keel launched;
the hot blooms moved or turned. And there were quiet moments,
while the mix boiled or the men waited for the next piece to be ready.
At their loosest (disregarding the question of mobility), these pro-
duction units were very much like the assemblage of craftsmen and
assistants on a building job; or the construction gang on a canal or
railway project.
Such enterprises multiplied and grew considerably in average size as
a result of industrial expansion. In 1849 Dowlais, probably the largest
iron plant in the kingdom, employed 7000 men to work its eighteen
blast furnaces, its puddling ovens, rolling mills, mines, and the rest.1 Yet
the difference from the foundries and forges of the eighteenth century
was more one of degree than of kind, and the social impact of this
development was not so great as that of the rise of a disciplined prole-
tariat in the textile mills.
On the other hand, the effect of improved technology was to push
the man-paced industries toward the precision and regularity of
spinning and weaving. In iron and steel, the rolling mill, steam
hammer, and more effective handling equipment all led in this direc-
tion; and throughout the metal trades, the development of special-
purpose machine tools and more precise parts was a portent of the
assembly lines of the twentieth century.
Secondly, the contribution of factory industry to the economy was
out of proportion to its share of total production. Thus the factory
promoted a higher rate of investment, hence of growth, than other
forms of manufacture. Partly this was simply a consequence of capital
intensity: the man who lived by the machine was more likely to be
interested in and save for mechanical improvements than the merchant
who relied on cheap cottage labour.2 Even more, it reflected the
1
Beck, Geschichte des Eisens, IV, 663.
z
Cf. A. O. Hirschman and G. Serkin, 'Investment Criteria and Capital Intensity
Once Again', Quarterly Journal of Economics, Lxxn (1958), 470, who cite the contrast
in this regard between the owner of the land-intensive hacienda and the operator of
the capital-intensive plantation. On this point, see also E. R. Wolf and S. W . Mintz,
'Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America and the Antilles', Social and Economic
Studies, vi (1957). 380-412

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 122 THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS
technological orientation implicit in concentrated production. In
contrast to putting-out, where the entrepreneur was primarily a seller,
a merchandiser of goods turned out by others by methods inattentive
to market needs and opportunities, the factory placed the emphasis on
making: the mill owner was first and foremost a production man, able
within fairly wide limits to alter the techniques and conditions of work
at will. As a result, technique was responsive to economic opportunity
as never before. The pressures for change already inherent in the new
technology—with its calculus of efficiency, its systematization of
empirical investigation, its implicit and growing ties to a growing body
of scientific theory—were thereby enormously reinforced. The factory
was a new bridge between invention and innovation.
In sum, one must not mistake the appearance for the reality. The
census returns and other numbers to be found between the covers of
dusty parliamentary papers are the economic historian's butterfly
under glass or frog in formaldehyde—without the virtue of wholeness
to compensate for their lifelessness. As described by occupational data,
the British economy of 1851 may not seem very different from that of
1800. But these numbers merely describe the surface of the society—
and even then in terms that define away change by using categories of
unchanging nomenclature. Beneath this surface, the vital organs were
transformed; and though they weighed but a fraction of the total—
whether measured by people or wealth—it was they that determined
the metabolism of the entire system. We have seen that, in so far as
small-scale enterprise continued to flourish, it did so largely because of
demand derived from the growth of concentrated manufacture: the
demand of the large producers themselves; of their employees; and of
the urban agglomerations that grew up around them. But not only
small industry was tied in this way to the modern sector. Agriculture,
trade, banking—all came increasingly to depend on the needs, the
products, the bills of exchange, the investments of Lancashire, the
Midlands, and the other nodes of British factory industry. The people
of the day were not deceived by the pristine air of much of Britain's
landscape. They knew they had passed through a revolution.
It was, moreover, a revolution like nothing ever experienced.
Previous transformations, political or economic, had always finished by
stabilizing at a new position of equilibrium. This one was clearly con-
tinuing and bid fair to go on indefinitely. Many Britons would have
stopped it in its course, or even turned it back. For good reasons or bad,
they were distressed, inconvenienced, or outraged by its consequences.
They mourned a merrie England that never was; deplored the soot and
ugliness of the new factory towns; bemoaned the growing political
power of crass parvenus; cried out against the precarious poverty of a

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004
 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN 123
rootless proletariat. This is not the place to assess these judgements,
which have remained a matter of controversy to the present day.
But it is worth noting that these pessimists, vociferous though they
were, were a small minority of that part of British society that expressed
an opinion on the subject. The middle and upper classes were convinced
by the marvellous inventions of science and technology, the increasing
mass and variety of material goods, the growing speed of movement
and convenience of everyday activities, that they were living in the
best of all possible worlds and what is more, a world getting better all
the time. For these Britons, science was the new revelation; and the
Industrial Revolution was the proof and justification of the religion of
progress.
The 'labouring poor', especially those groups by-passed or squeezed
by machine industry, said little but were undoubtedly of another mind.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 14 Nov 2019 at 10:33:46, subject to
the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819957.004