Summary_The Rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe.docx

The Rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe

Introduction

Perceptions of that interest were strongly influenced, if not dictated, by what

continued to be the most common form of organization for manufacturers–the craft

guild. Its longevity was due not least to the plurality of tasks it performed: quality

control, social disciplining, social welfare, status maintenance, religious devotion

and collective recreation

being just a few. At its heart, of course, stood its monopoly of production of a given

commodity in a particular community. In most European towns for most of the

eighteenth century, aspiring manufacturers had to join a guild.

Typically, the trainee craftsman first had to serve an apprenticeship of three years.

As a journeyman, he then left the city to travel from one town to

another, collecting en route testimonials from his various employers. This

peregrination usually lasted at least two years. On his return to his home- town he

was not allowed to apply immediately for admission to the ranks of the masters.

First he had to work for another two years or so as a simple journeyman. He was

then permitted to submit his masterpiece to the guild

and, if it were approved, to pay the substantial fees and become a master. This is a

very generalized account; the process was often very much longer or, especially if

the candidate concerned were a close relation of an existing master, shorter.

Needless to say, this long and complicated procedure gave the guilds ample

opportunity to keep their numbers down, the regulations governing the presentation

of masterpieces being an especially potent

weapon.

Like so many other organizations enjoying a monopoly of their chosen activity, the

craft guilds had a built-in tendency towards ossification. By the eighteenth century

many were showing all the negative conservatism of a vested interest overtaken by

events: dogged devotion to old techniques,

suspicion of innovation, resentment of competition and xenophobia. They were

particularly determined to confine guild membership to ‘their kind of people’. The

early modern value-system prioritized honour and the guild- masters were just as

determined to defend their place in the social hierarchy as was any magnate or

prelate. So no applicant for admission to a guild need bother unless male, of

legitimate birth and of the right religious denomination. Contamination by contact

with a ‘dishonourable profession’ offered a rich range of reasons for the exclusion,

for example, of sons of public executioners, knackermen, tanners, barber-surgeons,

shepherds, musicians, actors, pedlars or beggars. More bizarrely, in Germany at

least, the offspring of civil servants were ruled out. Significantly, so were factory-

workers. The pedantry displayed when enforcing these regulations may well

have concealed a more personal vindictive agenda. In 1725 in Brandenburg, for

example, a cloth-maker was ejected from his guild when it came to light that his

wife’s grandmother was allegedly descended from a shepherd. A

cobbler spotted drinking with the local hangman suffered the same fate.

More serious than these occasional acts of discrimination was the dead weight

constantly applied to enterprise and innovation, as the master

craftsmen protected their monopoly by reducing competition to a minimum. In

France it was the requirement of a masterpiece that was exploited most.

The journeyman was often required to produce a fiendishly complicated piece of

work, to give presents to the jury members appointed to assess its merits, and then,

if successful, to pay an entrance fee to the guild. In Paris, the distillers required 800

livres and the apothecaries 1,000 livres. Yet the sons and grandsons of existing

masters were often exempted from some or even all these requirements. Minutely

detailed regulations on size and quality choked innovation and adaptation to

changing market conditions. The new code introduced in the Dauphiné in 1782, for

example, contained

265 paragraphs. New commodities were seen not as an opportunity but as a threat,

as in the case of printed calicoes, banned by a series of ordinances passed between

1686 and 1759. Typical was the attitude expressed by the town council of

Strasbourg in 1770 when obstructing an attempt by a cotton manufacturer to get

established: ‘it would upset all order in trade if the manufacturer were to become

merchant at the same time, and infringe the most sensible rules laying down who

are allowed to trade in the city’. These and many other abuses were recounted with

relish by the enlightened reformer Turgot, when he proposed to Louis XVI in 1776

that the guilds be abolished outright. The excessive demands for useless and

expensive masterpieces, he argued, were forcing gifted craftsmen to leave France

work abroad. The guilds’ arguments that they ensured quality control he dismissed

as spurious: ‘liberty of trades has never caused ill effects in those places where it

has been established for a long while. The workers in the

suburbs and in other fortunate places do not work less well than those living in

Paris. All the world knows that that the inspection system of the guilds is entirely

illusory.’ He concluded: ‘I regard the destruction of the guilds, Sire, as one of the

greatest benefits that you can bestow on your people.’ Turgot fell from power,

following a court intrigue, before the necessary legislation could be enforced. It was

left to the Revolution to complete his work.

Other governments took frequent action against guild abuses. In the Holy Roman

Empire the Imperial Trades Edict of 1731 offered both a

comprehensive indictment and a programme for reform. Some idea of the pre-

modern world in which the guilds operated can be gained from paragraph number

one of article thirteen:

That the tanners and the tawers [Rothgerber and Weissgerber, two tanning trades

using different materials and techniques] in some places brawl with one another

over the processing of dog skins, and over other useless disagreements among

themselves, and those who will not process them call the others dishonourable, and

also will have it that apprentices who have

worked in places like that should be punished by the others. Similarly if an artisan

stones a dog or cat to death, or beats it, or drowns it, or even just touches a

carcass, an impropriety is wrung out of that, to the point that the skinners take it

upon themselves to pester such hand workers by sticking them with their knives

and in other ways, and in such fashion as to oblige them to buy their way out of it

with a sum of money.

Significantly, this edict was renewing previous measures dating from 1530, 1548,

1577, etc. and conceded that ‘these very salutary provisions have not altogether

been lived up to and even other abuses have gradually crept in’. As implementation

was conditional on action by the individual principalities of the Empire, very little

was actually achieved. The guilds

were so deeply entrenched in most places that any attempt to wrench them out by

the roots caused social and political disorder. Especially during the difficult years of

the mid-seventeenth century, rulers found themselves obliged to do deals with all

manner of corporate bodies, including the guilds. Moreover, the latter showed

surprising tenacity and even vitality in some trades. Far from being ‘decadent’,

‘moribund’ or ‘superannuated’–just three of the adjectives often applied to their

condition in the eighteenth

century–guilds were still being created. Wherever governments valued social

harmony and control above productivity, the guilds could find friends. So the

troubled times after 1789, and even after 1848, saw the guilds taking on a new

lease of life.

As the tanners and tawers knew, there was more than one way of killing a cat, and

there was more than one way of dealing with the guilds.

Especially popular in continental monarchies was the granting of permission to

favoured entrepreneurs to operate outside the guild system, producing certain

specified–usually luxury–goods. Setting the pace here was Jean-Baptiste Colbert,

who took control of economic policy in France

in the 1660s. In 1662 he paid 40,000 livres for ‘a large house situated on the

Faubourg Saint-Marcel les Paris, commonly known as the Gobelins’. He filled it with

a number of tapestry workshops under the general direction of the painter Charles

Le Brun. Before long there were working there ‘over 800 tapestry workers,

sculptors, artists, goldsmiths, embroiderers and, in general, workers in all that made

for splendour and magnificence’. Their first task was appropriately representational,

namely creating a series of huge tapestries to designs of Le Brun illustrating Louis

XIV’s exploits. To

consummate the union between royal economic enterprise and royal display, one of

the tapestries depicted ‘King Louis XIV visiting the

Gobelins Manufactory’. Other similar enterprises followed, the largest for the

production of mirrors and soap.

As we shall see in a later chapter, such was the success of the ‘Versailles project’

that most other European sovereigns felt obliged to follow the French example.

Although this emulation was partly a matter of fashion, it was also driven by a

mercantilist concern to improve the balance of trade by reducing expensive

imports. Right across continental Europe, non-guild manufacturing establishments

were founded with government support,

encouraged by all kinds of fiscal and financial privileges. In the Electorate of Mainz,

for example, they were set up to produce ribbon and braid,

cotton, pencils, chocolate, gold and silver chain, hats, silk, surgical instruments,

playing cards, sewing needles, Spanish noodles, soap, parchment, cosmetics,

taffeta and chintz (and even this is not a complete list). It is next to impossible to

assess the overall effect of these and similar enterprises elsewhere. Did they

promote the economy by providing capital and enterprise which otherwise would

have been absent? Or did they impede development by stifling competition?

Certainly many of them were short-lived, bobbing from crisis to crisis, kept afloat

only by further injections of capital before sinking when the bottom of the royal

purse was reached. Success stories such as Meissen or Nymphenburg porcelain

were

rare. On the other hand, apologists for royal subsidies have pointed out that the

level of subsidy was relatively low. Even Louis XIV advanced only 284,725 livres to

mirror manufacturing between 1667 and 1683, and about 400,000 livres to soap

manufacturing between 1665 and 1685. His total

subsidy to privileged manufacturing during a twenty-year period was about

16,000,000 livres, which sounds a good deal until one recalls that the gross annual

domestic product during the same period was around a billion-and- a-half livres. It

also appears that many of those regions which progressed to full-blown

industrialization in the nineteenth century had received privileged treatment during

the eighteenth.

Although the products of these luxury industries now line the walls of palaces or fill

the display cabinets of museums, at the time their impact on the larger economy

was marginal. Much more subversive of guild domination of manufacturing was the

expansion of rural industries,

especially in the manufacturing of textiles but also of goods such as gloves, ribbons,

stockings, shoes and hats, not just on a small scale for local

consumption but on a mass basis for export markets. The key figure here was the

merchant-capitalist, who co-ordinated the various processes on a ‘putting-out’

basis. It was he who bought the raw material and had it delivered to the homes of

the labourers, first to the spinners, then to the

weavers and then to the fullers and dyers who turned it into finished cloth. It was he

who paid them on a ‘piecework’ basis. It was also he who found a cloth factor to

take it to market. The advantages of this system were manifold: it exploited cheap

rural labour, increasingly available as the population expanded; it minimized the

need for fixed capital; it gave peasants the opportunity to supplement the returns

from theirplotsbyworkingafterdarkorduringslackperiodsoftheagricultural year; it

allowed the unskilled labour of women, children and the elderly to make a

contribution to the household’s income; it promoted the division of labour; and it

evaded all the rules and regulations of the guilds, especially quality

controls and limits on the size of enterprises.

That ‘putting-out’ to rural labourers suited the needs of the age was demonstrated

most eloquently by the large and rapidly rising number of those involved. In

Prussian Silesia, production of linen rose from 85,000 to 125,000 pieces between

1755 and 1775 and the number of looms from

19,810 in 1748 to 28,704 in 1790, by which time there were in excess of 50,000

people employed in the industry. Table 6 shows a comparable increase in the

number of flax, cotton and wool spinners in Bohemia in the space of just eleven

years between 1768 and 1779.

Table 6. Increases in Bohemian textile-spinner numbers during the 1760s and 1770s

Melton also estimates that in the province of Lower Austria the number employed in

manufacturing rose from 19,733 in 1762 to 94,094 in 1783.

Similar figures were recorded from the many other ‘industrial landscapes’ which

developed during the course of the eighteenth century, in Italy: a broad band of

Lombardy in the hills north of Milan from Val d’Aosta to Lake Garda, the riviera

around Genoa and Tuscany north of the Arno; in the Iberian peninsula: Catalonia,

which in 1770 was described by one visitor as ‘a little England in the heart of Spain’

and by the 1790s boasted the biggest concentration of dyers and weavers outside

Lancashire; in France: Brittany, Maine, Picardy and Languedoc; in the southern

Netherlands: Flanders and Twente; in the Holy Roman Empire: the lower Rhine,

Westphalia, Baden, Württemberg, Westphalia, Silesia and southern Saxony; in the

Habsburg

Monarchy: Bohemia, Moravia and Lower and Upper Austria; in England: Lancashire,

the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Cotswolds and East Anglia. The number of people

employed was considerable, as every weaver’s loom required around twenty-five

ancillary personnel to keep it supplied, including six spinners. A good example of

how putting-out could erode the position of the guilds was provided by the

expansion of the bleaching industry in Elberfeld and Barmen, two adjacent towns in

the Duchy of Berg on the Lower Rhine. Originally a guild monopoly, the process

moved into the surrounding countryside, making best use of the river Wupper, and

expanded from 15 enterprises in 1690 to 100 in 1774 and 150 in 1792.

Following the inevitable tussle with the guilds, the government lifted all restrictions

on production in 1762.

This summary of the development of rural manufacturing has deliberately avoided

use of the contentious concept ‘proto- industrialization’. First coined in 1972, it was

advanced by its supporters as an explanation for the breakthrough from traditional

forms of manufacturing to the industrial revolution, being held responsible for

population growth, the commercialization of agriculture, capital

accumulation, the generation of surplus labour, proletarianization and the creation

of large markets. Subsequent criticism has left little of all this intact. It has been

argued in return that the region from which the

phenomenon was first derived–Flanders–was exceptional, matched only by England

and one or two other small enclaves on the continent. Sheilagh

Ogilvie, the most effective critic of proto-industrialization, concludes:

In the rest of eighteenth-century Europe, proto-industry (like agriculture) was

regulated by traditional institutions: guilds, merchant organisations, privileged

towns, village communities, feudal landlords. The spate of research on proto-

industrialisation has shown that industrial development was affected much more

strongly by institutional variations than by the presence (or absence) of proto-

industry.

From the point of view of the entrepreneur, the least attractive feature of putting-

out was the lack of control over the workforce. The labourer worked unsupervised,

at his own pace and when he felt like it. When the household’s income reached a

certain point, there was a tendency to prefer leisure to labour, even if the market–

and the merchant–were crying out for more goods. One answer was to concentrate

production in a single centre

and to move from paying piecerates to paying wages. That required higher fixed

capital in the form of buildings, and consequently greater vulnerability to market

fluctuations, but it did allow the workers to be

supervised and kept up to their work. These ‘manufactories’ proved to be an

effective way of responding to market opportunities in the eighteenth

century. It has been estimated that there were about 1,000 of them in

German-speaking Europe in 1800, of which 280 were in the Habsburg

Monarchy (140 in Lower Austria and 90 in Bohemia), 220 in Prussia, 170 in Saxony

and 150 in the Wittelsbach territories (Jülich-Berg, the Palatinate and Bavaria).

Some of the individual units employed large numbers of

workers on a central site: to select a few examples from the 1780s, the state- run

woollen manufactory at Linz employed 102 dyers and finishers, a calico printing firm

at Augsburg employed 350, the royal textile manufactory in

Berlin employed c. 400. Even luxury goods could record large numbers of factory

workers, with around 400 at both Meissen and Berlin in 1750.

Significantly, the further east one went, the more of these large enterprises were

owned and run by great aristocratic magnates, exploiting both the raw materials

and the cheap serf labour to be found on their estates. The greatest single

entrepreneur in the Habsburg Monarchy was Count Heinrich Franz von Rottenhan,

who established two large cotton factories and an ironworks on his Bohemian

estates. Although the state was directly responsible for

some of the largest concerns–the Lagerhaus in Berlin, for example, which made

uniforms for the Prussian army–its numerical share was only about 6 per cent. On

the other hand, there were numerous private individuals who amassed great

fortunes from manufacturing–Schüle the ‘calico king’ of

Augsburg, the Bolongaro brothers of Frankfurt am Main (tobacco), and the von der

Leyen dynasty of Krefeld (silk), for example. Nor was the

centralized manufactory a phenomenon confined to north-western Europe: in 1779

in Barcelona there were nine woollen factories employing 3,000, and there were

many units in Russia with workforces numbered in thousands.

AN ‘INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION’?

Page upon page of evidence relating to the growing size of manufacturing units in

Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century could be paraded, but without

adding much, apart from tedium. A more interesting question is whether the

quantitative change was accompanied by a corresponding qualitative shift. To put

the same question another way: was it just the old

system producing more or had a structural change occurred? Until relatively

recently, the answer would have been an unequivocal yes to the latter proposition.

‘The industrial revolution’, beginning in England in the second half of the eighteenth

century, was for most of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries as fixed a point of reference as was the French Revolution of 1789.

Indeed, they have been often coupled together to mark the start of the modern

world, as they were by Eric Hobsbawm in his still-popular The Age of Revolution.

Hobsbawm also provided a good traditional definition of the economic wing of his

‘dual revolution’:

What does the phrase ‘the Industrial Revolution broke out’ mean? It means that

some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the

shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth

became capable of constant, rapid, and–up to the present– limitless multiplication of

men, goods and services…The economy became, as it were, airborne.

However, whereas the ‘French Revolution’ was in use by

contemporaries from the start, the ‘Industrial Revolution’ took much longer to get

established. It was first used in the French form ‘révolution industrielle’ in the 1820s

and it was also a French pundit–the economist

Jérôme Adolphe Blanqui–who first pronounced on the world-historical nature of the

phenomenon when he wrote in 1831, ‘industrial conditions

were more profoundly transformed than at any time since the beginnings of social

life’. It was yet another Frenchman, the historian Paul Mantoux, who provided the

classic historiographical statement of its centrality to the modern world:

The modern factory system originated in England in the last third of the

eighteenth century. From the beginning, its effects were so quickly felt and gave

rise to such important results, that it has been aptly compared to a revolution,

though it may be confidently asserted that few political revolutions ever had such

far-reaching consequences.

These cross-Channel observers were perhaps more perspicacious than those

directly affected, for in England the phrase did not catch on until much later. In the

catalogue of the British Library, there are hundreds of titles published in the

twentieth century containing the phrase ‘industrial

revolution’, but only a handful from the nineteenth and none at all from the

eighteenth. Although Friedrich Engels made frequent use of the term in The

Condition of the Working Classes in England, first published in 1845, the work was

not translated from German into English until 1886. Two years previously, Arnold

Toynbee’s posthumous Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England had begun

the term’s long and busy career as a

central organizing concept in British historiography.

Once established, the idea of an industrial revolution which reshaped first England,

then continental Europe, and then much of the rest of the

world, took a strong hold. Oceans of ink have been spilt debating whether it was a

bad thing that reduced the working classes to a ‘state of downright bestiality’

(Richard Altick) or a good thing that trickled increased wealth down to the meanest

mill-operative, but its actual existence was generally

accepted. Indeed, the idea of a revolution occurring in the economic history of the

world, which then affected every other aspect of human activity (a

combination of Prometheus and Proteus, as it were) was given a new lease of life in

the middle of the twentieth century. In The Stages of Economic

Growth, first given as a series of lectures in Cambridge in 1959 and then published

as a best-selling book, W. W. Rostow adopted an aeronautical metaphor to

summarize what happened when the Industrial Revolution occurred: ‘take-off’.

The take-off is the interval when the old blocks and resistances to steady growth are

finally overcome. The forces making for economic progress, which yielded limited

bursts and enclaves of modern activity, expand and come to dominate the society.

Growth becomes its normal condition.

Compound interest becomes built, as it were, into its habits and institutional

structure.

Few, if any, terms originating in economics have achieved such general currency.

Its acceptance was facilitated by the almost simultaneous publication (in 1962) of

another hugely influential model of industrialization, namely Alexander

Gerschenkron’s Economic

Backwardness in Historical Perspective, although he preferred a more fluid

metaphor–‘great spurt’. The belief that such watersheds had occurred in the past

and could happen again in the future was very much in the air in the boom years of

the 1950s and 1960s, encouraging politicians to coin slogans such as ‘the white

heat of the technological revolution’ (Harold Wilson) or ‘the great leap forward’

(Chairman Mao). Nor did the checks of the 1970s

and 1980s, following the Yom Kippur War of 1973 kill the concept. On the contrary,

the rapid developments in information technology in the late 1980s gave birth to

the notion of a ‘third Industrial Revolution’, the first having been based on coal and

iron and the second on chemicals and

electricals. As such, it remains as vital as ever.

Yet there have always been dissenting voices. Just as political scientists such as de

Tocqueville stressed the continuity between the old regime and post-Revolutionary

France, so have there always been historians undertaking the same sort of exercise

for economic development. While

Rostow claimed that the British economy took off between 1783 and 1802, although

conceding that it had taken a long time to taxi out from departure- gate to runway,

others have suggested that it never got air-borne, indeed that it was not an

aeroplane at all. They see industrialization not as a revolution but as an

evolutionary process, unsuited to mechanical metaphors. Rather it should be

likened to an organism growing at moderate speed–something between an oak and

a leylandii cypress. In particular they have drawn

attention to the protean nature of the concept ‘Industrial Revolution’, lending itself

to exploitation by both Marxists and apologists for western- style capitalism (Rostow

subtitled his Stages of Economic Growth ‘a non-

communist manifesto’). Michael Fores, for example, has complained that it ‘is a sort

of turn-coat Vicar of Bray figure of scholarship, infinitely

accommodating to the special interests of individual writers’. No one has stated this

point of view more trenchantly than the late Rondo Cameron, who in an article

provocatively entitled ‘The industrial revolution–a misnomer’, asserted: ‘probably no

term from the economic historians’ lexicon has been more widely accepted by the

public at large than

“industrial revolution”. That is unfortunate, because the term itself has no scientific

standing and conveys a grossly misleading impression of the nature of economic

change.’

This controversy has generated a huge amount of scholarly literature.

As it involves such fundamental questions as the nature of historical

change, indeed the nature of historical explanation per se, it can never be resolved,

and certainly not here. However, it is necessary to examine, however briefly, some

of the key economic areas involved in the period before 1815. A particularly strong

argument in favour of the ‘gradualists’

can be found in the all-important field of communications. As we have seen in

Chapter 1, many improvements were made during our period, none of them

revolutionary but together having a cumulative effect sufficient to persuade

contemporaries that a really major change had occurred. Looking back in 1784, the

sixty-one-year-old German writer Friedrich Carl von

Moser identified speed as the great development of his life. He recalled

with nostalgia the good old days when the leisurely pace of travel accorded

perfectly with the national character of the Germans, slow of thought and

slow of motion. It was their neighbours, the French, who thought, acted, marched,

shot, hunted, ate, walked and travelled quickly. But all that had changed, he noted,

and now the Germans too were rushing hither and thither, as demonstrated by a

recent journey he had undertaken on a new

highway (Chaussee), which had been so fast ‘that I ceased to be able to hear or see

properly’.

One must wonder how Moser, who died in 1798, would have responded to a railway

journey. He might well have joined those who speculated that the human body

could not tolerate speeds in excess of 30 miles (48 km) per hour. Although the

railway age is usually dated to the opening of the first regular passenger service in

1825, when a train pulled by a steam locomotive began to ply between Stockport

and Darlington, even here it did not arrive like a clap of thunder in a blue sky. A

clear distinction needs to be drawn between railways and steam locomotives. The

great advantage of a railway, defined as parallel tracks along which wheeled

vehicles can be drawn, is that it greatly reduces friction, and hence increases

proportionally the load that can be pulled by a given motive force. The latter can be

human, animal or mechanical. Wooden railways had been in use in German mines

since around 1500 and can be found in England about a hundred years later. Their

load-bearing capability was greatly increased when iron began to replace wood.

Between 1768 and 1771 Richard Reynolds introduced cast-iron rails at the great

Coalbrookdale ironworks near Telford

in Shropshire, adding an inner flange to the rail to improve stability. Later rails were

constructed from malleable iron and the flange was transferred to the wheel.

Eventually there were more than 20 miles (32 km) of rails within the Coalbrookdale

works.

These early railways were usually purely private enterprises, built, financed and run

by mining companies, but there were a few horse-drawn public railways in existence

before the end of the eighteenth century, such as the line from Croydon to

Wandsworth for freight and from Swansea to

Mumbles for passengers. Steam-power was first applied on an experimental basis

by Richard Trevithick in the late 1790s. By 1804 he was able to demonstrate a

locomotive on the line at the Pen-y-Darran ironworks in

Glamorganshire, which pulled ten tons of ore and seventy passengers at 5 miles (8

km) per hour. As is often the way with technology, once the trail had been blazed,

others quickly followed, notably John Blenkinsop, whose five-ton locomotive

Salamanca pulled ninety tons of coal on a level surface at 4 miles (6.5 km) per hour

in 1812; William Hedley, another locomotive builder but better known for patenting

a smooth wheel and rail system in 1813; and of course George Stephenson, whose

locomotive Blücher of 1814 was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion

locomotive and could pull thirty tons of coal up a hill at 4 miles (6.5 km) per hour. In

short, the ‘railway age’ was well and truly underway before 1815 and had taken so

long to come to fruition that ‘revolution’ does indeed seem something of a

misnomer.

That applies to both aspects of what became known collectively as the ‘railway’,

namely iron rails and steam-power. Indeed, the manufacture of iron had come into

common use in Britain as early as the eighth century BC. It was discovered that

heating iron-bearing ore to a high temperature with the use of charcoal, fanned by a

draught of air, creates a solid lump of metal (a ‘bloom’). When re-heated, the metal

can be hammered into a shape. This is ‘wrought iron’. If additional carbon is added

to the ore, the melting temperature is reduced, which allows liquid iron ore to be

poured into a mould. This is ‘cast iron’. In the course of the fifteenth century, a

furnace

was developed which used blasts of heated and compressed air to drive up the

temperature. This is a ‘blast furnace’. The molten iron is run off into moulds

consisting of a main channel connected to a number of shorter

channels at right angles. As this resembles a sow suckling her pigs, the cast iron

which results is known as ‘pig iron’. A further innovation known as ‘fining’ allowed

the impurities to be drawn off by oxidation, leaving semi- solid, malleable wrought

iron in its place.

Two major innovations were made during our period. By the early eighteenth

century, iron production in England was on the decline, not through want of demand

but due to the shortage of timber from which charcoal is made. In 1709, after much

experimentation, the Quaker

Abraham Darby succeeded in making iron using coke rather than charcoal. Coke is

the residue left after mineral coal has been heated to a high temperature out of

contact with air. As it is rich in carbon, it can substitute for charcoal both as a

heating agent and as a necessary additive to the iron ore. On the other hand,

because it is a much firmer, more robust substance, it can bear a much larger

weight of iron ore in the furnace, thus allowing much larger furnaces to be built,

with corresponding economies of scale.

Darby’s blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale were each soon producing up to ten tons of

pig iron a week. As there were virtually limitless resources of coal, much of it close

to the surface, the inhibition placed on iron production by timber shortage was

removed.

The second major innovation was a response to the imbalance between improved

pig-iron production and slow and inadequate ‘fining’. In 1784

Henry Cort patented his ‘puddling’ process, which used a reverberatory furnace to

turn pig iron into malleable iron. A reverberatory furnace uses hot air and gases to

heat the metal, without allowing the latter to be polluted by coming into direct

contact with the fuel used for heating. Puddling

consists of stirring the molten pig iron on the bed of the furnace, thus

allowing the circulating air to remove carbon and other impurities from the iron.

Together with his development of a more efficient way of creating bar iron,

patented the previous year, Cort’s invention helped to encourage a rapid increase in

iron production, which quadrupled during the next twenty years. Pig-iron output in

Great Britain went from 17,350 long tons (a long ton is 2,240 pounds or 1,016 kg) in

1740 to 68,300 in 1788 to 125,079 in 1796 to 258,206 in 1806. Lord Sheffield, a

prolific author on economic matters, predicted in 1786: ‘it is not asserting too much

to say that the result [of Cort’s inventions] will be more advantageous to Great

Britain than the

possession of the thirteen colonies of America, for it will give the complete

command of the iron trade to this country, with its vast advantages to navigation’.

In 1750 Britain imported twice as much as iron as was manufactured at home, but

by 1815 that relationship had been reversed to the extent that exports now

outnumbered imports by a factor of five. It

should be noted, however, that although iron production increased very rapidly,

steel remained very much a minority metal. A technique for making steel in a

crucible was discovered in the 1740s but it remained very

expensive and confined to cutlery manufacture. Cheap steel did not become

available until the middle of the following century.

A similarly gradual story unfolded in the second component of the railways–steam-

power. Once again, innovation was driven by need. In this case, it was the need to

pump water out of coalmines that had to go deeper as the surface seams were

exhausted. In 1702 one mine in Warwickshire was using more than 500 horses to

work the pumps. The first mechanical pump was invented by Thomas Savery in

1698. This ingenious device

consisted essentially of a large metal container filled with steam. Cool water was

then poured on to the metal casing, causing the steam inside to

condense, thus creating a vacuum, which in turn drew up water from the mine. This

was patented as the ‘Miner’s Friend’, but it was barely practical, since the alternate

cooling and heating was hugely wasteful and the tin-

soldered joins proved to be positively lethal in their failure to handle the

steam pressure consistently. Much more efficient was Thomas Newcomen’s

‘atmospheric engine’ of 1705, which used the partial vacuum created by

condensing steam to move a piston inside a cylinder. This machine also had distinct

limitations: it was slow and voracious in its appetite for coal. Indeed its thermal

efficiency was only about 1 per cent, or in other words of every hundred units of

coal consumed, only one was actually used to pump water. However, the cost of

coal was of little concern at the pit-head and

Newcomen engines were introduced into almost all the large mines in Great Britain

within a few years. By the middle of the eighteenth century there

were more than fifty in use in the Newcastle coalfields alone.

The real breakthrough came when James Watt, a Glasgow instrument- maker, found

a way of dispensing with the hot-cold routine that had made previous steam-

engines so inefficient. While repairing the University of

Glasgow’s model Newcomen engine, he saw a way of employing all the

steam generated: ‘the idea came into my mind that, as steam was an elastic body,

it would rush into a vacuum, and, if a communication were made between the

cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might be there

condensed without cooling the cylinder’. In 1769 he patented his ‘new method for

lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire engines’, formed a partnership

with the great Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton and began producing

steam-engines for use, not just in coalmines but in all forms of industry. Further

developments by Watt, notably the double-action engine invented in the early

1780s, improved efficiency still further. It has been suggested, not without reason,

that this was a truly epochal moment, because for the first time in its history,

humankind had at its disposal a source of power wholly independent of location.

Karl Marx made the point well in Das Kapital:

Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam- engine,

was a prime mover found, that begot its own force by the

consumption of coal and water, whose power was entirely under man’s control, that

was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and

not, like the waterwheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in

towns instead of, like the waterwheels, being scattered up and down the country,

that was of universal technical application, and, relatively

speaking, little affected in its choice of residence by local circumstances. The

greatness of Watt’s genius showed itself in the specification of the patent that he

took out in April, 1784. In that specification his steam-engine is described, not as an

invention for a specific purpose, but as an agent universally applicable in

Mechanical Industry.

Marx was writing in the middle of the following century, by which time the full

implications of Watt’s inventions were there for all to see. At the time, there was

less excitement. By 1800 there were only about a thousand steam-engines of

various kinds in operation across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. In

terms of horse-power generated, they were still heavily outpointed by traditional

energy sources, especially water-power,

still very important in the woollen industry. Peter Mathias has estimated

that even wind-power may have made a larger contribution than steam- power in

1800 and, moreover, that about 50 per cent of the latter was still being produced by

Newcomen-type engines.

If neither metallurgy nor steam-power can sustain the concept of an industrial

revolution, the sole remaining candidate is textiles, more

specifically cotton. If less ancient than iron, cotton had nevertheless been

around for a long time, first reaching Europe from Egypt around ad 900. In the

eighteenth century it was mainly imported from Brazil, the Caribbean islands, the

Middle East and India. Small amounts were grown around the Mediterranean and on

the Portuguese and Spanish islands of the eastern

Atlantic. The first cotton from the USA did not arrive until 1784. In understanding

the significance of the innovations of the late eighteenth century, it is important to

understand why cotton was an attractive but problematic fibre. Its great advantages

are that it is flat, hollow, with a natural twist and a long ‘staple’ (the natural length

of the fibre).

Consequently, it combines comfort with strength and durability. Its great

disadvantage is that it very labour-intensive. The cotton ‘bolls’ which grow on the

plant have to be harvested, ginned (separating the seed from the fibres), cleaned,

roved (drawing out, lengthening and twisting) and carded (combing out,

straightening and making the fibres naturally parallel) before it can be spun into

yarn and then woven into cloth. The process has been described very well by Henry

Hobhouse in his classic study Seeds of

Change:

It was comparatively easy to grow a good crop of cotton, but picking a hundred

pounds of bolls would take two man-days; ginning would take fifty man-days at

best; and bailing by hand, cleaning and carding another twenty man-days. All this

effort resulted in only about eight pounds of spinnable

cotton, which would then require twenty-five to forty man-days to spin. An ethnic

cotton thread, therefore, cost twelve to fourteen man-days of labour per pound.

Even if some of this was cheaper child labour, or adolescent labour, the cost of this

boring work was still high and inescapable.

Compared to one pound of cotton, one pound of wool at the same date took at most

one to two man-days from raw material to thread, linen two to five and silk about

six.

As Hobhouse adds loconically, ‘No wonder cotton was the luxury cloth in 1784.’ Only

mechanization could turn it into a cloth for mass consumption. The process came in

fits and starts, with a number of inventions designed primarily for other fabrics. John

Kay’s ‘flying shuttle’ of 1733, for example, which doubled a weaver’s productivity,

was intended for woollens.

However, it called for a corresponding increase in the spinning of yarn, which

encouraged the invention of mechanical spinning devices. Lewis Paul and John

Wyatt’s roller spinning machine, patented in 1738, James

Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny, invented in 1764 and patented in 1769, Richard

Arkwright’s water frame of 1769 and Samuel Crompton’s ‘mule’ of 1779 (so-called

because it combined the functions of both the jenny and the frame) combined to

bring a massive increase in productivity, economies of scale, improvements in

quality and a precipitous fall in the cost of yarn.

Such was the degree of change that it caught the eye of poets–of John Dyer, for

example, who in The Happy Workhouse and the Good Effects of Industry of 1747

recorded:

We next are shown A circular machine’ of new design,

In conic shape: it draws and spins a thread Without the tedious toil of needless

hands. A wheel, invisible beneath the floor,

To ev’ry member of th’ harmonious frame Gives necessary motion. One, intent,

O’erlooks the work: the carded wool, he says, Is smoothly lapped around those

cylinders, Which, gently turning, yield it to yon cirque Of upright spindles which,

with rapid whirl,

Spin out in long extent an even twine.

By 1800 the cost of very fine yarn was one quarter of what it had been twenty years

earlier. Cotton benefited most from these and other inventions, because its tough

composition suited the crude technology of the early machines, because of a long-

term shift in fashion towards lighter fabrics, because export markets in warmer

climates were opened up and because the wearing of underwear became habitual

for all classes. Sidney Pollard has

estimated that a labourer spinning by hand needed more than 50,000 hours to work

100 pounds (45 kg) of cotton; Crompton’s mule of 1780 needed 2,000 hours; and

the power-assisted mule introduced in the mid 1790s needed just 300. In other

words, the productivity of labour rose 150 times in the course of the eighteenth

century. The amount of cotton imported into

Britain increased from 2,500,000 pounds (1,135 kg) in 1750 to 22,000,000 (nearly

10,000,000) in 1787, by which time most of it was being cleaned, carded and spun

by machines. As measured by the consumption of raw

cotton, production increased ten times between 1760 and 1785 and then more than

ten times between 1785 and 1827.

There was a clear appreciation among contemporaries that something momentous

had happened. John Aikin wrote in 1795 that ‘the rapid and prodigious increase of

cotton manufacture is, perhaps, absolutely unparalleled in the annals of trading

nations’. Yet numerous qualifications have to be made to what might be looking like

a revolutionary scenario.

After the promising spurt of productivity represented by the flying shuttle, weaving

failed to keep pace with spinning. Edmund Cartwright patented a ‘power loom’ in

1785 but, despite subsequent improvements, the problem of combining speed with

continuity was defeated by repeated breakages of the yarn. By 1815 there were

only about 2,400 power looms in operation in the United Kingdom. Mechanical

weaving was to be a nineteenth-century phenomenon. It has also been pointed out,

by Samuel Lilley for example, that the jennies, frames and mules did not represent

a technological breakthrough comparable with, say, the discovery of synthetic dyes

wireless telegraphy. He adds that ‘the early stages of the Industrial

Revolution–roughly up to 1800–were based very largely on using medieval

techniques and on extending these to their limits’. What Hargreaves,

Arkwright and the rest did was to take different parts of the traditional

spinning-wheel and put them together in new combinations. It has also been

pointed out that in purely quantitative terms, the contribution made by

cotton to the national economy was modest. Peter Mathias’s figures suggest that in

the 1760s it amounted to less than half a per cent and was still less than 1 per cent

in the 1780s. In 1770 cotton added £600,000 to the Gross

Domestic Product, but wool added £7,000,000 and leather £5,000,000.

Of all the products associated with the British industrial revolution, cotton was also

the one that spread furthest fastest and earliest to the

continent. However tedious, the following information gleaned from a number of

regional studies gives some idea of the ubiquity of cotton manufacturing by 1815:

at Rouen the number of manufactories increased by 1,800 per cent between 1763

and 1785 and by 800 per cent at Bolbec; at

Mulhouse in Alsace, the number of printed cotton pieces increased from 30,000 to

120,000 between the 1750s and the 1790s; in 1786 the French imported

11,000,000 pounds (5,000,000 kg) of raw cotton (the British were importing about

18,000,000 pounds (over 8,000,000 kg) at the same time); during the last quarter

of the eighteenth century, cotton began to be worked to the north-west of Milan in

Gallarate, Busto Arizio and Vercelli; a cotton mill using the mule jenny was

established at Monza in 1795; cotton manufacturing in Russia began with the firm of

Chamberlain and Cousins in 1755 and spread quickly; between 1782 and 1786 ten

cotton factories

were set up in Prague; the Catalonian cotton industry was employing 80,000 by

1792; in the Austrian Netherlands, cotton factories were

established at Antwerp, Brussels, Mechlin and Tournai; in Alsace in 1806 there were

25,026 people working in various branches of the cotton industry, or nearly half of

all industrial workers in the province; in the département of the Roër (the

northernmost of the four new départements

created when the west bank of the Rhine was annexed to France) there were

65,000 people–c. 10 per cent of the total population–working in 2,500 factories in

1811; in Europe as a whole in 1815 there were 1,500,000

spindles in the cotton industry, of which 1,000,000 were in France, 250,000 in

Saxony and 150,000 in Switzerland. This kind of information could be replicated at

will, but that will do.

Many of these enterprises were organized on a putting-out basis and many of them

were manufactories rather than mechanized factories.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that British technology found its way to

the continent. Some entrepreneurs moved there to seek their fortunes, as did none

other than John Kay when he failed to maintain his

patent rights to his flying shuttle. The French authorities gave him a grant of 3,000

livres and paid him an annual salary of 2,500 livres to tour Normandy to teach

workers how to use his invention, while three of Kay’s sons made

shuttles in a Paris workshop. It spread through industrial espionage, with machinery

being copied and operatives being bribed to divulge secrets. In 1785, for example, a

German spy called Baden, arrested in Lancashire, was fined the very substantial

sum of £500 for trying to recruit machine operatives. By 1815 local versions of

jennies, frames and mules were in operation right across Europe, from Belgium to

Russia.

Why were the British first in the field? No one explanation will work, for it is next to

impossible to find a single characteristic peculiar to the

British economy. Was it perhaps the excellent communications, both natural and

man-made? The Dutch Republic was equal if not superior in this regard. Was it the

accumulation of commercial and financial expertise, the integrated money-market,

the advanced commercial agriculture, the flexible social structure, the religious

toleration, the relative immunity from war- damage? Here too the Dutch were at

least equal and several other European countries boasted at least some of these

factors. Was it the availability of raw materials, especially coal and iron ore (which

the Dutch lacked)? Yet

Belgium and several parts of western and central Germany were equally favoured.

And so on. Perhaps a combination of all these advantages was needed to achieve

the critical mass.

It is also possible that to look exclusively at the supply side of the

economy is to invite certain disappointment. It was on the demand side that the

British were so special. As Neil McKendrick has stated firmly in a

seminal study, ‘There was a consumer revolution in eighteenth century England.

More men and women than ever before in human history enjoyed the experience of

acquiring material possessions…The consumer revolution was the necessary

analogue to the industrial revolution, the necessary

convulsion on the demand side of the equation to match the convulsion on the

supply side.’ What in the past had been seen as luxuries now became ‘decencies’

and what had been decencies now became necessities. The work

of McKendrick, Sir John Plumb, Roy Porter and John Brewer has shown how

eighteenth-century Britain, and especially eighteenth-century England, was

increasingly gripped by a rage for spending which transformed the

economy. As Plumb observed, ‘to spend has been the rising chord of Western

capitalism’ and ‘aggressive consumption lies at the heart of

successful bourgeois society’. The concept of the classless customer who was

always right took hold, as Adam Smith recognized in The Wealth of Nations in 1776:

‘consumption is the sole end and purpose of all

production; and the interests of the producer ought to be attended to, only in so far

as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. This maxim is…

perfectly self-evident.’ Ultimately, what encouraged the Darbys and the Arkwrights

to come up with ways of satisfying the market’s appetite was the knowledge that

these eager consumers were out there looking for products to purchase. As David

Landes has observed, ‘what distinguished the British economy…was an exceptional

sensitivity and responsiveness to pecuniary opportunity. This was a people

fascinated by wealth and

commerce, collectively and individually.’ Of course, there were consumers on the

continent, notably in the Low Countries and in urban centres, but nowhere were

they so numerous and so confident.

The British viewed continental developments with a complacency born of the

knowledge that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They could afford to be

patronizing in 1815, because they knew that the twenty-two years of warfare which

had just ended had turned what was already a gap between the British and

continental economies into a chasm. The reasons for this development must await

consideration in a later chapter; here we

can conclude with the question of whether the political revolution in France was

accompanied, or perhaps even preceded, by an industrial revolution in Great

Britain. A Marxist historian such as Eric Hobsbawm is in no doubt that it was:

If the sudden, qualitative and fundamental transformation, which happened in or

about the 1780s, was not a revolution then the word has no

commonsense meaning…The Revolution itself, the ‘take-off period’, can probably

be dated with as much precision as is possible in such matters, to some time within

the twenty years from 1780 to 1800: contemporary with,

but slightly prior to, the French Revolution. By any reckoning this was probably the

most important event in world history, at any rate since the invention of agriculture

and cities. And it was initiated by Britain.

There is nothing ideological about such a view, although Hobsbawm likes to think

that conservative (i.e. non-Marxist) historians are naturally uneasy with anything to

do with revolution. The American economic historian

David Landes is equally convinced of the revolutionary nature of what happened in

Britain in the late eighteenth century, and almost repeated Hobsbawm’s words

when he wrote ‘The technological changes that we

denote as the “Industrial Revolution” implied a far more drastic break with the past

than anything since the invention of the wheel.’ On the other hand it is undeniable

that scholars who see Great Britain as an ‘old regime’ see not revolutionary change

but continuity. Jonathan Clark has written, with

characteristic trenchancy, ‘The “Industrial Revolution” is…not a thing, still less an

event, but a term of historical art adopted long afterwards to

celebrate an alleged watershed between premodernity and modernity: where the

French Revolution brought to an end the Ancien Régime in France, the Industrial

Revolution was supposed to have done the same in England.’

The economic historians have provided plenty of statistical evidence to support

Clark’s view. They have pushed the origins of industrialization further and further

back in time, while simultaneously post-dating the

effects. As David Cannadine has put it, the industrial revolution has been ‘almost

written out of modern British history’. In 1989, the bicentenary of the French

Revolution, Donald Coleman summed up the current state of play:

If the evidence, largely in the form of contemporary statistics or ingenious modern

reconstructions is approximately correct…then it would seem that before 1830

economic growth was slow, with neither output nor incomes per head showing

much increase; and notable change, economic and technical, was severely limited.

Only after the mid-century did the economy show much significant difference and

even then it was more a matter of

structural change, from agriculture towards industry, than the attainment of

higher productivity. In short, continuity has been stressed and the discontinuity

implied by the idea of a revolution downgraded or even dismissed.

How are we to resolve this dispute? Paradoxically, a clue to a possible solution is

provided by Clark in a piece of evidence which he presents in support of his

argument against the notion of an industrial revolution but

may perhaps point in more than one direction. It is an extract from a treatise

published in 1815 by the manufacturer and social reformer Robert Owen:

Those who were engaged in the trade, manufactures, and commerce of this country

thirty or forty years ago, formed but a very insignificant portion of the knowledge,

wealth, influence, or population of the Empire.

Prior to that period, Britain was essentially agricultural. But, from that time to the

present, the home and foreign trade have increased in a manner so rapid and

extraordinary as to have raised commerce to an importance, which it never

previously attained in any country possessing so much political power and

influence. This change has been owing chiefly to the mechanical inventions which

introduced the cotton trade into this country.

The immediate effects of this manufacturing phenomenon were a rapid increase of

wealth, industry, population and political influence of the British empire; and by the

aid of which it has been enabled to contend for five-and- twenty years against the

most formidable military and immoral power [France] that the world perhaps ever

contained.

Clark believes that this shows Owen looking primarily to Britain’s

commercial prosperity as the key to its survival. It does indeed do that, but it also

links the commercial transformation of the country ‘chiefly to the mechanical

inventions which introduced the cotton trade into this country’. Like most

contemporaries, Owen did not make the econometrician’s fine distinctions between

various forms of wealth creation. What he saw was an expansion of the British

economy proceeding so fast and so far as to justify revolutionary status, even if he

did not use the phrase ‘industrial

revolution’. He looked around him and saw paupers going from rags to riches in just

a few years. In Lancashire in 1780 it was recorded that within a single decade ‘a

poor man not worth £5, now keeps his carriage and

servants, is become Lord of a Manor, and has purchased an estate of

£20,000’. Significantly, Owen also linked this material prosperity to political stability

and military success. The ‘Second Hundred Years War’, which had begun with the

Glorious Revolution of 1688 had finally been resolved in Britain’s favour on the field

of Waterloo in the year that Owen published his pamphlet. As we shall discover in a

later chapter, the latest phase of that conflict, between 1793 and 1815, greatly

increased Britain’s economic lead over her old enemy. To the triumphalist British,

this seemed to be a victory not just of one country but of a whole culture, based on

liberty, Protestantism and prosperity, the three foundations of their country’s

greatness. In other words, what contemporaries experienced as a fundamental

change in their economy was part of a wider complex of developments, which in

just a century had turned an off-shore island of marginal economic and political

significance into the mistress of the world. Viewed in this way, the changes in

commerce and manufacturing do deserve their revolutionary status. The world was

transformed by industrialization, it did begin in Great Britain and it did begin in this

period.

Agriculture and the Rural World

THE PROBLEM OF PRODUCTIVITY

Nothing separates the modern world more from the old regime than the relative

importance of agriculture and the countryside. At the beginning of the twenty-first

century, just under 400,000 people are engaged in

agriculture in England, or 1.7 per cent of the working population. Moreover, the

overwhelming majority of those who live in rural areas commute each day to towns

and are urban in outlook. Almost none of the food they

consume is grown locally, indeed most of it is imported from abroad. In England in

1700 about 80 per cent of the population lived in the

countryside, more than two-thirds of them working directly on the land and most of

the remainder deriving their income from agriculture indirectly. In addition to

supplying almost all the food they ate, English agriculture also produced raw

materials for the country’s industries (wool, leather, tallow, madder, hops, etc.),

provided seasonal employment for many town- dwellers, and generated the capital

and credit to sustain the country’s manufacturing sector. Moreover, apart from a

few metropolises such as London and Bristol, most ‘towns’ looked more like villages

and existed to service the local agricultural economy. If that was true of one of the

most

commercialized economies in Europe, it applied with correspondingly greater force

to the wholly rural regions of the centre and the east. Despite sporadic signs that

the economic balance of power was beginning to shift, in 1815, as in 1660, the

country was king.

It had been so since the beginning of human history. The predominance of

agriculture, in the sense of organized cultivation of the earth, however,

was of much more recent origin. It is worth recalling that Homo sapiens has existed

ten times longer than civilization (and twenty times longer if

Neanderthal man is accorded human status). It was only around 10,000 BC

that the hand-to-mouth existence of hunting and gathering began to be

supplemented by the cultivation of crops and the domestication of animals. The

momentous nature of this change can hardly be exaggerated. For the first time,

humankind was able to produce and store a surplus, thus making civilization

possible. A first but giant step had been taken towards the domination, control and

exploitation of the planet.

The early agriculturalists were confronted by a problem which was still acute ten

millennia later, namely that although orderly cultivation greatly

enhanced production, the soil was soon exhausted. If worthwhile yields were to be

achieved, either new land had to be sown or the old plot had to be rested

periodically. It was the manner of addressing this fundamental

problem that determined patterns of European agriculture between 1660 and 1815.

Much depended on the density of population and the availability of land. Where the

former was thin and the latter was large, the cultivators

could afford to be prodigal. In Finland, the enormous, virtually empty forests

allowed swidden farming on a four-year cycle. In the first year, the trees were

stripped of their bark and allowed to dry out. In the second year, the desiccated

trunks were burnt down and the ash was left to be absorbed into the ground, a

process which continued through the third year. Finally, in the fourth year, seed was

sown in soil which was now so fertile that yields of between ten and twenty to one

could be achieved, or, in other

words, for every seed sown, between ten and twenty were produced.

Unimpressive by modern standards (yields of eighty to one are achieved for wheat

on East Anglian farms) this was an impressive score for the

eighteenth century, as we shall see. However, the drawback of this ‘slash and burn’

approach, which was also employed in Sweden and northern

Russia, was that not only did it lead to massive deforestation, but the land was very

soon exhausted and had to be abandoned, often for decades. A

similar approach was adopted on the steppes of southern Russia, where

crops were planted on natural grassland, which was then allowed to revert to

steppe when yields fell, as they very soon did.

In more settled and densely populated regions, this kind of agriculture could not be

practised. In most parts of Europe a pattern had developed

which divided the community’s arable land into two alternating parts, one of which

was cultivated and one of which was allowed to lie ‘fallow’.

Depending on the natural fertility of the soil, the land was left fallow every other

year in a ‘two-field’ system or every third year in a ‘three-field’

system. In other words, at any one time, half or a third of the arable land was not

being cultivated. In France, for example, a three-field system became established in

the fertile grain-growing regions north of the Loire, with wheat or rye being grown

during the first year, spring cereals such as barley or oats during the second, and

fallow for the third. In the less- favoured south, a two-field system had to be

employed; indeed, where the

soil was thin and the climate harsh, as in the mountains or on the Auvergne plateau,

much longer periods of fallow had to be allowed. Throughout the Iberian peninsula,

despite periodic attempts to move to a three-field system, soil conditions dictated

the dominance of the two-field system, as they also did at the other end of Europe,

in Scandinavia.

With at least a third of the land out of cultivation at any one time, productivity was

correspondingly low and the proportion of the population required to till the soil was

correspondingly high. Progress was impeded in part by sheer ignorance. Until it was

known that plants synthesize their proteins from inorganic nitrogen compounds in

the soil, the need to replace the all-important nitrogen could not be appreciated.

Indeed, nitrogen itself was not discovered until c. 1770. What eighteenth-century

cultivators could observe, however, was that the use of manure increased the

fertility of the

soil and reduced the need for fallow. That is because animals pass through their

system most of the nitrogen present in the food they eat (as well as other fertilizing

ingredients, notably phosphorus and potash). However, a great deal of their waste

is needed, as a ton (2,240 pounds or 1,016 kg) of animal manure contains only 10

pounds (4.5 kg) of nitrogen. Once these natural ingredients had been synthesized,

cheap and plentiful fertilizers became universally available, but that was to be very

much a development of the nineteenth century. When Sir Humphry Davy gave a

course of lectures to the British Board of Agriculture in 1813, later published as

Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, his subject was very much in its infancy. As he

complained to his audience: ‘agricultural chemistry has not

yet received a regular and systematic form. It has been pursued by

competent experimenters for a short time only; the doctrines have not as yet been

collected into any elementary treatise.’

Denied the factories of ICI or BASF to produce nitrates in industrial quantities, early

modern cultivators had to rely on their animals, or–if they were more enterprising

and less squeamish–on the ‘night soil’ produced by the human population. But they

found themselves trapped by the ‘infernal circle of the fallow’. The need for fallow

resulted in low productivity. But as the great majority of Europeans relied on cereals

for their subsistence, they were obliged to devote a high percentage of their land to

arable farming. That necessarily meant that only a low percentage could be

devoted to pasture and the maintenance of livestock, which in turn limited the

amount of manure available. And that necessitated leaving the land fallow every

second or third year, which brings us back to low productivity and square one.

BREAKING THE ‘INFERNAL CIRCLE OF THE FALLOW’

This circle could be broken, indeed it had been broken in many places in north-west

Europe before 1700. It could be broken, first by planting crops on the fallow land

which not only did not exhaust the soil but actually rejuvenated it by putting back

precious nitrogen. This was a technique known to the Germans as ‘Besömmerung’

(‘summering’). Several plant varieties were tried, depending on soil and climate,

including peas, vetch (a bean-like fruit of various species of the leguminous plant

vicia), potatoes,

esparsette or sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia) and buckwheat, but the most effective

were various kinds of roots (turnips, swedes, mangelwurzels, etc.) and artificial

pasture, especially clover. The last-named were the most

effective because they could be stored and used as forage for additional livestock

during the winter months. In particular, roots and hay could be used to promote

stall-feeding, which in turn facilitated the collection of manure, the maximization of

its benefits and the reduction of the need for fallow. In other words, the infernal

circle could not only be arrested, it

could be put into reverse.

From ‘summering’ it was a short step to devising rotations of crops which

eliminated fallow altogether. In Flanders elaborate sequences had

been developed as early as the fourteenth century, although that degree of

precocity was exceptional. It was not until the late seventeenth century that

significant shifts away from the old open-field system could be registered.

In England by 1700 the ‘Norfolk’ four-course system had spread from its eponymous

origin to several other counties. This called for a winter-sown crop, usually wheat, in

the first year, turnips in the second, a spring-sown crop, barley for example, in the

third, but undersown with clover and rye-

grass, which was then grazed and/or cut in the fourth. To maintain nitrogen levels

and thus productivity, an optimum balance had to be struck between the production

of cereals and the maintenance of livestock in an alternating pattern of ‘convertible

husbandry’. As in so many other forms of economic progress, it was the Low

Countries that were the pioneers, although the English liked to think that they

formed the vanguard. Richard Bradley proudly claimed in his General treatise of

husbandry and gardening;

containing a new system of vegetation: illustrated with many observations and

experiments of 1726 that ‘The Improvement of Land and the Study of Agriculture,

have greatly contributed to render our Nation famous above all other Countries’.

Although it was certainly in the north-west corner of Europe that agricultural change

had proceeded most generally,

contemporary reports show that the elimination of fallow had been achieved in

many parts of the Holy Roman Empire too: in Brandenburg, for example, where an

enterprising major, Joachim Friedrich von Kleist, introduced new rotations in the

second half of the eighteenth century and more than doubled the value of his

estate. From Erfurt, whose hinterland had the reputation of being ‘the market

garden of Germany’, Christian Reichardt recorded that he had developed an

eighteen-year rotation of cereals and vegetables which

eliminated the need for fallow and did not require frequent manuring. Travelling

through the Electorate of Mainz in 1765, Thomas Pennant recorded ‘in my road to

Hanau passed thro’ a flat rich country abounding with Indian Corn [maize], Beets,

Kidney Beans, Cabbages and Potatoes’. Even south of the Alps pockets of

productivity could be found, in the Po Valley, for example, or around Vicenza, where

the use of artificial pastures from the mid-eighteenth century soon doubled grain

yields, or around

Valencia in southern Spain, where Joseph Townsend found sophisticated rotations in

operation in 1787.

Agricultural reformers who had witnessed what the rotation of crops could achieve

by way of increased productivity could become most indignant when confronted by

traditional patterns. Perhaps the most knowledgeable, certainly the most emphatic,

was Arthur Young, who travelled extensively in England, France and Italy. He found

plenty to

admire in French agriculture, although perhaps significantly it was the peripheral

regions such as Flanders, Artois and Alsace that caught his

approving eye. Again and again he marvelled at the abundance and variety of the

country’s natural produce. Yet he just as often lamented that what Providence had

bestowed with such a generous hand, man spoiled through ignorance, ‘for fallows

disgrace in some rich districts the finest soils imaginable’. In Picardy, Normandy, the

Pays de Beauce or the Pays de

Caux, the ‘noble soil is full of beggary and weeds’. Warming to his work, he went on:

To detail all the barbarous rotations which ignorance has spread through Bretagne,

Maine and Anjou would be tedious. The general feature of their management is to

pare and burn the fields exhausted, abandoned, and by time recovered, that a

succession of crops may bring it once more into the

same situation. A change of the rotation of crops is the only thing wanted to alter

the face of these provinces.

In Lorraine and Franche-Comté, the ‘miserable routine’ of the three-field system

was ‘a disgrace to the cultivators’. Although he found ‘the worst

husbandry in Great-Britain’ immediately outside Cambridge on the road to St Neots,

Young’s benchmark had been provided by the agriculture he found in East Anglia

and described in considerable detail in his four-volume The Farmer’s Tour Through

the East of England. Being The Register of a

Journey through various Counties of this Kingdom, to enquire into the State of

Agriculture of 1771. Although he did not use the word ‘revolution’, that in effect was

what he was describing. During the previous two generations, he observed, the

agriculture of Norfolk in particular had been transformed. This he ascribed to seven

reasons:

enclosures

the use of marl (a kind of soil consisting principally of clay mixed with carbonate of

lime, forming a loose unconsolidated mass, valuable as a fertilizer)

new rotations turnips

clover and rye-grass long leases

‘By the country being divided chiefly into large farms’

Was Arthur Young right to be so indignant? If eliminating the fallow was such a

simple matter, was it just lethargy and ignorance that kept so

much land out of cultivation? As we shall see, it was a complicated nexus of

cultural, geographical, political, social and economic forces that kept most of

Europe’s agriculture locked in a cycle of low productivity. Ignorance

certainly did play a part. It is no accident that the most innovative regions were also

among the most productive. Literate cultivators found it easier to gain access to the

rapidly growing body of literature and to give the lie to Voltaire’s quip that ‘Many

useful publications are written about agriculture and everyone reads them, with the

exception of the peasants.’ There were

certainly plenty of well-meaning agronomists spreading the productivity gospel with

missionary zeal. In Italy, an agricultural academy, the

Accademia dei Georgofili, was founded in Tuscany in 1753, the first of many such

initiatives, often followed by the publication of periodicals and pamphlets. The first

Italian chair in agricultural science was founded at Padua in 1765. Travelling

through Italy in 1789, Arthur Young was presented by his fellow agronomist Tartini

with a copy of his Giornale d’Agricultura di Firenze, although the gift was

accompanied by the depressing comment that the venture had folded due to lack of

interest.

However, he did add complacently, ‘a professor of agriculture, in Sicily, being sent

by his sovereign, and wisely sent, to England for instruction in

agriculture, appears to me to be an epoch in the history of the human mind’. The

German-speaking world was also prolific: in 1803 an agronomist teaching at the

Prussian University of Frankfurt an der Oder compiled an

agricultural bibliography with more than 6,000 titles.

OBSTACLES TO AGRICULTURAL GROWTH

However, knowledge of what to do and how to do it was only the first, and by no

means the most difficult, step. Let us imagine that a French peasant working in a

traditional three-field system found out about the advantages of ‘summering’ and

decided to grow turnips on his share of the fallow field.

Just as soon as the first shoot appeared above the surface, he would be confronted

by what was arguably the greatest obstacle to agricultural

progress, namely the communal structure of cultivation. Every member of the

community, both noble and commoner, had the right to graze cattle on the land

that was fallow, on the cultivated fields after the harvest had been gathered in and

on the meadows after the first hay crop. This right was known as ‘vaine pâture’ in

France, but its equivalent could be found

wherever there were open fields. Together with ‘parcours’, the reciprocal right of

vaine pâture enjoyed by two or more neighbouring communities, it was one part of

a community-based approach to economic life which required all decisions to be

taken collectively–what to sow, when to sow, where to sow, when to harvest, how to

harvest, and so on. No great stretch

of the imagination is required to appreciate the inertia built into this system. If a

convoy can move only at the pace of its slowest member, communally organized

agriculture lay permanently becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of tradition.

Returning to our imaginary enterprising French peasant, his attempt to breathe new

life into the motionless sails of his village’s agriculture would soon be punished by

walking the plank. To prevent his neighbours’ cattle

consuming his turnips, his obvious course of action was to erect a fence and thus

enclose his plot. The most likely response would be direct action to demolish the

barrier, but legal action would certainly have been justified. In other words, any

cultivator seeking to break with tradition needed not just knowledge, enterprise and

courage, he also needed the support of the

authorities. There was no excuse for the latter not appreciating the check on

productivity imposed by vaine pâture, denounced by agronomists as ‘barbarous’,

‘savage’ and–that most pejorative of mid-eighteenth-century

epithets–‘gothic’. From the rich variety of denunciations, the following, from the

leading French agronomist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, is particularly

authoritative:

One would scarcely imagine that customs so barbarous, and so opposite to the

progress of agriculture, should be in some sort authorized by prescription, and even

encouraged, or at least winked at, by the magistrates: the fact is however certain;

and the partisans of this custom [vaine pâture] have the confidence to assert, that

it is absolutely necessary for the

encouragement of the increase of cattle. What a strange error is this! Can we

possibly think that the means of increasing the number of our cattle can consist in

what deprives us of the opportunity of providing for them a

sufficiency of food? Experience has often convinced us that two acres of good

lucerne will maintain four oxen, or as many cows, for six months in the year, with a

very small addition of ordinary fodder: how many acres of stubble would the same

number of cattle require to maintain them? Cows

and oxen would be in bad case had they no other food but what the stubbles afford.

This custom, far from favouring the increase of cattle, is a real obstacle to it: this is

so evident, that I think it quite unnecessary to prove it.

For aspiring reformers like Duhamel du Monceau, the English example seemed to

point the way to the future. A magistrate of the Parlement of

Metz observed ‘we might perhaps not have realized that this practice was a bad one

if the English had not taught us what the land is capable of.

Without the shadow cast by the picture of their agriculture on ours, we might still

believe like our fathers that rights of vaine pâture were a bondage.’

So why was Prometheus not unbound? When the first reliable

agricultural census in France was conducted in 1840, it showed that 27 per cent of

the soil was still fallow and only 6 per cent devoted to artificial pastures. During the

previous hundred years or so, certainly some initiatives had been taken, both at a

local and a national level. The most promising was the drive launched by the

luxuriously named Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin, comte de Bourdeilles, who

was controller-general of finances between 1759 and 1763. He planned to allow

every member of a

community to withdraw up to a fifth of his land from the vaine pâture on condition

that it was then used for the cultivation of artificial pasture and was enclosed with a

ditch or hedge. The scheme was sent to the senior provincial officials (intendants)

and agricultural societies for comment, a

procedure which took a great amount of time and yielded inconclusive results. No

national legislation ever was introduced. It was left to individual Parlements, Estates

and intendants to do what they could–and although that turned out to be not

negligible, neither was it adequate. They were inhibited by a belief that communal

rights such as vaine pâture represented a legitimate form of property. As

Guillaume-François Joly de Fleury,

controller-general of finances in the early 1780s, put it: ‘The rights of vaine pâture,

having been established for the greater part by customary

arrangements, it does not seem possible to interfere with them since they

constitute a sort of property belonging to the community of inhabitants.’ Another

powerful consideration was the knowledge that the abolition of a communal

structure and the introduction of individual initiative would discriminate against

those who eked out a living on the margins of rural

society. As is so often the case, greater productivity for the whole could be

purchased only at the expense of countless vulnerable individuals. As Bertin himself

put it, ‘it is between the protection that is due to the suffering part of humanity and

the greater benefit to agriculture as a whole, that is difficult to decide’. Given the

potential for social violence displayed by the suffering part of humanity and the

limited police powers at the disposal of the state, no wonder that more often than

not it was decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

Despite his indignation at abuses such as vaine pâture, Duhamel du

Monceau did not believe that the kind of legislative coercion employed in England

could be applied to France–there it would have to be left to voluntary action.

This reluctance and/or inability of the French state to press ahead with the abolition

of communal rights, and thus to permit enterprising cultivators to enclose their

land, provide an excellent illustration of the narrow limits within which the absolutist

state in practice operated. It was in

constitutional, parliamentary Britain that real action that made a real difference was

taken. This was because the British Parliament represented the landed interest of

the country. A decision taken at Westminster and

embodied in an Act of Parliament was then enforced by those same landowners,

acting in their capacity as Justices of the Peace. Many

enclosures in Great Britain took place as a result of agreement among all those

affected, indeed Parliament usually declined to act unless four-fifths of property-

owners had signalled their consent, but the availability of

enforceable legislation certainly accelerated the process. Although the first

enclosure act was passed as early as 1604, unfavourable economic

conditions confined the total to fewer than fifty between then and the accession of

George II in 1727. By this time, however, money was

beginning to raise its voice more insistently. In 1722, Robert Vyner was told that

enclosure had allowed the rents of land at Withern in Lincolnshire to be raised from

2s 6d(121/2 pence) to 13s 4d(67 pence) per acre. That was

almost certainly exceptional but even the more common rise of 40 per cent plus

was very attractive. As the ‘price scissors’ between agricultural produce and

manufactured commodities began to open more widely during the second half of

the eighteenth century, a torrent of acts flowed from Parliament, washing away the

traditional agricultural landscape. According to Paul Langford, nearly four thousand

enclosure acts were passed between 1750 and 1810, affecting roughly 20 per cent

of the total acreage of England and Wales. It allowed rich landowners to become

richer still: between 1776 and 1816, Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, doubled his

rent roll.

In other words, to cut through the dense thicket of traditional communal agriculture,

a sharp and heavy legislative instrument was required. An

alternative approach was found in Prussia, where the king was the fortunate owner

of between a quarter and a third of all farmland. This gave the royal administration

a degree of control over the rural economy which Frederick the Great (1740–86) in

particular was not slow to exploit. Among many other schemes for maximizing

productivity, he issued a general decree in 1769 to encourage enclosures.

Elsewhere in northern Europe, rationalization proceeded by example–often

emanating from the Low

Countries–from the consolidation of strips on the open fields to full

enclosure. This process spread along the Baltic littoral during the second half of the

eighteenth century, the Swedish Field Consolidation Act of 1749 being an important

landmark. In Denmark the main initiative came from

above in the shape of a series of agricultural commissions, which after 1757

established regional enclosure laws, superseded in 1768 by the General Land Use

Department which promoted both enclosures and rationalization within the old

system. From there it spread south into Schleswig-Holstein, where the initiative

appears to have come mainly from free peasants with an eye on the market. In the

Austrian Netherlands, the government issued

orders encouraging the division of common land and the consolidation of holdings in

Hainaut in 1757, Brabant in 1772 and in Namur in 1774.

Where the reversal of the ‘infernal circle of the fallow’ could be

achieved, greatly increased production of cereals followed. This was every

cultivator’s dream, for the grain could be milled into flour, and the flour

could be baked into the bread which was the staple of preference for most

Europeans. In many parts of Europe, however, neither soil nor climate was suitable

for cereal-growing, so the inhabitants had to make do with other forms of food. As

Arthur Young observed, ‘many of the people in France

eat but very little rye and no wheat’, concluding ‘to suppose, therefore, that the

quantity of land here noted is all under wheat and rye, would be a gross error’.

Among the alternative crops he described was a throwback to hunting-gathering

days–the chestnut (Castanea sativa, not to be confused with the horse-chestnut,

Aesculus hippocastanum, whose fruit is as

attractive as it is inedible). Again and again on his travels through France he

commented on the beauty and ubiquity of chestnut trees (known as ‘the bread-

tree’), especially in the Limousin, La Marche and parts of Languedoc, where ‘they

eat chestnuts abundantly’. On the road to Limoges in June 1787 he noted ‘chestnuts

are spread over all the fields and yield the food of the poor’, adding on another

occasion that chestnuts were ‘the exact transcript of the potato in Ireland’. Its

importance for substantial parts of the south was considerable, indeed a historian of

Languedoc writing in the 1770s stated that only chestnuts made the Cevennes and

the Vivarais habitable at all, because supplies of cereals were so limited that they

could not sustain a quarter of the existing population.

NEW CROPS

Less haphazard in their distribution were some crops of more recent origin. Top of

the list chronologically was maize, also known as ‘Indian corn’, brought back from

the Americas by Columbus and his successors. As a foodstuff, it has numerous

advantages, notably its high yield (up to forty to one), its suitability for reducing

fallow or converting a two-field to a three- field system and the length of its roots,

which penetrate deeper and take less from the topsoil. By the end of the

seventeenth century, maize was well

established in northern Italy and south-west France, by the middle of the

eighteenth century it was common in Spain and Portugal, and by 1800 it had

reached the littoral regions of the Black Sea. By this time it was much more than a

fringe curiosity. In France 15 per cent of all grain harvested in the diocese of

Toulouse in 1774 was maize, as was 20 per cent in the diocese of Albi in 1786. In

Lombardy at about the same time, it has been estimated that 10 per cent of the

cultivable area was down to maize. Yet it

could not serve as a general panacea for Europe’s agricultural problems. As the

regions just noted indicate, maize flourishes best in a sunny climate.

Moreover, it is labour-intensive, is inferior to other cereals in nutritional value, its

protein (and especially its gluten) is of poor quality and it is deficient in niacin,

making those who rely too heavily on corn prone to pellagra and other niacin-

deficiency diseases. Eighteenth-century

cultivators would not have known about its nutritional limitations or niacin

deficiency, but they could see the other drawbacks without difficulty.

According to Maurice Garden, maize made no discernible progress in France in the

eighteenth century and there may even have been a retreat after 1750. Even more

restricted by its special requirements was rice,

confined almost exclusively to northern Italy, where it sustained a prosperous

export trade, albeit at the cost of making malaria endemic.

Most important of all, at least in terms of potential, was the potato. First introduced

from its native south America to Spain and Italy in 1565, it had reached the Low

Countries by 1587, when the papal legate included it in his diet, the German-

speaking world a year later, England at some point during the 1580s, and France

just before the turn of the century. It did not reach Scandinavia and eastern Europe

until the middle of the eighteenth century.

Despite this early introduction, the potato took a long time to get

established, not surprisingly in view of the unattractive appearance and texture of

the early varieties. The compensating advantages, however, were so great that

eventually it began to gain acceptance, first in horticulture and then in agriculture.

As every gardener knows, the potato is special, for it is easy to plant, requires

minimal attention, reaches maturity rapidly, and– most important–produces

spectacular yields. In the kitchen it is equally

welcome, for it requires very little preparation (it does not have to be threshed or

milled like cereals), can be easily cooked in several different ways and is both tasty

and filling. According to the Dutch economic historian Slicher van Bath, in the

eighteenth century the yield of the potato

per acre was 10.5 times higher than wheat and 9.6 times higher than rye, which

more than compensated for its lower calorific value. To put that

statistic another way, the net calorific value of the potato is 3.6 times that of grain.

Writing in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith stated firmly: ‘The food

produced by a field of potatoes is not inferior in quantity to that produced by a field

of rice, and much superior to what is produced by a field of wheat. Twelve thousand

weight of potatoes from an acre of land is not a greater produce than two thousand

weight of wheat.’ He also

commented that during the previous thirty or forty years the price of potatoes had

halved, as their cultivation had moved from the garden to the field. More

controversially, he ventured the opinion that the benefit of a diet of potatoes could

be witnessed in the impressive physiques of the labourers and prostitutes of London

(‘the strongest men and the most beautiful

women perhaps in the British dominions’), especially when compared with his

stunted fellow Scots, subsisting on a diet of oatmeal.

The potato was also less vulnerable to adverse weather than most other staple

foodstuffs. As we have seen in Chapter 2, for the early modern European, it was not

so much a question of whether a cereal harvest would fail as of when. A community

that could fall back on potatoes when this happened was a community that had

freed itself from the threat of famine. As the Englishman John Forster claimed in a

pamphlet of 1664, the potato was ‘a sure and easy remedy’ for food shortages. Of

course, over-reliance on the potato could also lead to catastrophe if disease struck,

as it did in Ireland in the 1840s, but in the eighteenth century the potato was a life-

saver. For that reason alone, governments were keen to promote its

cultivation. For reasons that are still not clear, their efforts bore least fruit in France,

with the exception of isolated regions on the periphery in the

Dauphiné and the Pyrenees. Not even the news that potatoes were served to the

royal family at Versailles or prints of Queen Marie Antoinette wearing a corsage of

potato-flowers were sufficient to overcome a prejudice so deep- seated that

pommes frites did not appear on French menus until the following century. In

Toulouse, for example, Robert Forster found that peasants would not even feed

potatoes to their pigs, for fear that their meat would be contaminated. The

Burgundians invented the French appellation pomme de terre–but they also banned

it on the grounds that it caused leprosy. While intendant of Limoges in 1761, the

enlightened physiocrat

Turgot tried to dispel the popular belief that the purple flower of the potato was a

version of deadly nightshade by eating it in public and making peasants sit next to

him to observe that he was not poisoned. The French were not, of course, alone in

their prejudices. In 1770 famine-afflicted

Neapolitans refused to touch a boatload of potatoes sent as a gift; burghers of

Kolberg in Prussia told Frederick the Great, ‘the things have neither

smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what are they to us?’;

and Russian peasants distrusted the potato because it was not mentioned in the

Bible, believed that it caused cholera and rioted when attempts were made to force

them to grow it.

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