How and why did industrialisation occur in Britain between 1780 and 1850?

In the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain underwent what historians have called an ‘industrial revolution’ with factories pouring out goods, chimneys polluting the air, escalating exports and productivity spiralling upwards. This was an epic drama, of Telford, the Stephensons and the Darbys, Macadam, Brunel and Wedgwood, a revolution not simply of inventions and economic growth but of the spirit of enterprise within an unbridled market economy. This is, however, misleading. Industrial change was not something that occurred simply after 1780 but took place throughout the eighteenth century. There was substantial growth in a whole range of traditional industries as well as in the obviously ‘revolutionary’ cases of textiles, iron and coal. Technical change was not necessarily mechanisation but the wider use of hand working and the division of labour. Changes were the result of the conjunction of old and new processes. Steam power did not replace waterpower at a stroke. Work organisation varied: the ‘dark satanic mills’ were not all conquering. In 1850, factories coexisted with domestic production, artisan workshops, large-scale mining, and metal production. Change also varied across industries and regions.

Why did economic change occur in Britain between 1780 and 1850? Answering this question usually focuses on why industries like cotton, iron and coal expanded and what influence the spread of steam power had. These areas were important but undue emphasis on them neglects the broader economic experiences of Britain. Similarly, the question ‘Why did the industrial revolution take place in Britain rather than France or Germany?’ misses the crucial point that economic change did not occur in Britain as a whole. Growth was regional and industrialisation took place in particular locations like Lancashire, the Central Lowlands of Scotland and South Wales and around Belfast. Explaining the industrial revolution is a very difficult undertaking since economic change had an effect, however small, on all aspects of society. Some circumstances that were present in Britain made change possible and, in that sense, can be said to be causal. Others held back progress but change occurred despite them. This section will look at the importance of certain ‘key’ factors in explaining growth in the economy.

Population

If it is possible to identify a single cause for the industrial revolution, then a strong case can be made for population increase. Between 1780 and 1850, the population of England and Wales increased from over seven million to nearly eighteen million. This led to mounting demand for goods like food and housing. Nevertheless, the increase in demand for other goods – more manufactured goods or more efficient means of communication – did not necessarily follow from population expansion. The problem is one of timing. When did population growth occur? When did economic growth occur? Did they correspond? Although historians broadly accept population growth from the mid-eighteenth century, they do not agree when the economy began to grow.

• If population growth stimulated demand, you would expect economic and population growth to coincide. However, they did not. Accelerated economic growth was concentrated in the last quarter of the eighteenth century while the maximum rate of population growth on mainland Britain was not achieved until after 1810.
• Population began to expand after 1750 and some historians argue that this provided the final ingredient necessary to trigger off industrialisation. Berg and Craft have shown that the origins of higher growth rates went back to the early decades of the century. In this scenario, population growth came after the beginnings of economic growth.

The impact of population growth causes problems for historians who argue for economic growth from the 1780s and those who see growth as something that began earlier in the century. It had favourable effects on economic growth in three important respects:

1. Population growth provided Britain with an abundant and cheap supply of labour.

2. Population growth stimulated investment in industry and agriculture by its effects on demand for goods and services.

3. Urbanisation made it profitable to create or improve services. For example, the building of the canal from the Bridgewater coalmines at Worsley to Manchester took advantage of the growing demand for domestic coal.

The role of population growth in the origins of Britain’s industrial revolution was far from straightforward. 

Investment

Britain was a relatively wealthy country in the mid-eighteenth century with a well-established system of banking. This enabled people to build up savings and provided them with capital to invest. Between 1750 and 1770, there was growing investment in roads, canals, and buildings and in enclosing land. This process continued after 1780 through to the 1850s with continued investment in transport and enclosure and in the expansion of the textile and iron industries, and after 1830 in the development of railways.

• The annual rate of domestic investment rose from about £13 million in the 1780s to over £40 million by the 1830s.
• The ratio of gross investment to the gross national product rose from 6 per cent in the 1770s to 12 per cent by the 1790s at which level, it remained until 1850.
• Widespread capital investment was largely confined to a small, though important part of the economy. Capital investment rose in farming, communications and textiles, especially cotton and in iron and steel. Other areas of the economy were often undercapitalised relative to these industries.

Capital investment in farming was largely on enclosures, drainage and buildings. Landowners ploughed back about 6 per cent of their total income into the land. This rose to about 16 per cent during the French wars when high wheat prices encouraged investment in enclosure. Investment fell back after 1815 with the onset of depression and did not revive until the 1840s. In the 1780s, a third of all investment was in farming. By 1850, this had fallen to an eighth. By contrast, there was a rapid growth of investment in industry and communications. Annual investment in industry and trade rose from £2 million in the 1780s to £17 million by 1850. Between 1780 and 1830, there was an annual investment of £1.5 million on canals and roads and for the improvement of docks and harbours. These figures were dwarfed by investment in railways that peaked at £15 million per year in the 1840s, some 28 per cent of all investment. The increase in the availability of capital to invest allowed economic growth to occur.

Trade

Britain was already a well-established trading nation. Colonies were important sources of raw materials as well as markets for manufactured goods. London was a major centre for the re-export trade. The slave trade played a major role in the development of Liverpool and Bristol and its profits provided an important source of capital for early industrialisation. By the 1780s, the export trade was expanding annually by 2.6 per cent. Cotton production depended on international trade and was responsible for half the increase in the value of exports between 1780 and 1830. Cotton accounted for just over half Britain’s exports by 1830 and three-quarters of all exports were associated with textiles. This represented a narrow trading base and helps to explain why the British economy underwent depression in the 1830s and early 1840s. British factories were over-producing for European and global markets already saturated with textile goods. The result was some changes in the goods exported with iron exports growing from 6 per cent in the 1810s to 20 per cent by 1850 and the growing importance of coal exports. In the 1780s, Europe was a major market for British goods and this remained the case in 1850. However, there were important changes in the destination of British goods.

• The United States increasingly became a focus for exports of manufactured goods and for raw cotton. This process was helped by the opening up of the Latin American markets in the early nineteenth century.
• India was a huge market for cotton goods. Similar possibilities exited in the Middle East and South America. Britain increasingly shifted trade towards less developed economies that provided growing imports of tropical products to Britain and other industrialised countries like Germany and France.
• Overseas trade has been highlighted by some historians as a primary cause of economic growth. The growth of export industries at a faster rate than other industries was closely linked to foreign trade.

To what extent was the growth in trade between 1780 and 1850 central to Britain’s economic development?

• It stimulated a domestic demand for the products of British industry.
• International trade gave access to raw materials that both widened the range and cheapened the products of British industries.
• It provided purchasing power for countries to buy British goods since trade is a two-way process.
• Profits from trade were used to finance industrial expansion and agricultural improvement.It was a major cause of the growth of large towns and industrial centres.

The role of British trade must, however, be put into perspective. Changes in the pattern of British trade between 1780 and 1850 – the export or re-export of manufactured goods in return for imports of foodstuffs and raw materials – were relatively small and the industrial developments from the 1780s consolidated already existing trends. Exports may have helped textiles and iron to expand but they made little impact on the unmodernised, traditional manufacturing sectors.

Transport

By 1750, Britain was already a highly mobile society. Travel may have been slow and, on occasions dangerous but it was not uncommon. Within a hundred years, the British landscape was scarred by canals and railways and traversed by improved roads and the movement of goods and people quickened dramatically. Turnpike roads and the emergence of a sophisticated coaching industry, canals with their barges carrying the raw materials and manufactured goods of the industrial revolution, new harbours and the railways were symbolic of ‘progress’ as much as factories and enclosed fields.There were 800 market towns in England and Wales in the 1780s. This reflected the intensity of production and the ability of particular areas to specialise in particular products. These products were then moved to markets across the country often using the turnpike roads. In 1767, 16,000 sheep and 14,000 cattle passed through the Birdlip Hill Turnpike in Gloucester en route from south Wales to London. Imports of coal into London from the north-east rose from one million to three million tons per year between 1720 and 1790.

Britain’s road system in the mid-eighteenth century was extensive but under-funded. Just over £1 million was spent annually. This was, however, insufficient to maintain the road system necessary to growing trade and manufactures. Turnpike roads, the first was established in 1663, grew slowly in the first half of the eighteenth century. An average of eight were established each year. From the 1750s, this went up to about forty a year and from the 1790s, to nearly sixty. By the mid-1830s, there were 1,116 turnpike trusts in England and Wales managing slightly more than a sixth of all roads, some 22,000 miles. Parallel to this organisational development, there were improvements in the quality of road building associated particularly with Thomas Telford and John Loudon Macadam. What contribution did turnpike and parish roads make to improved communication in Britain between 1780 and 1850? Spending on parish roads did not increase markedly though there was a significant growth in spending by turnpike trusts. This reached a peak of £1.5 million per year in the 1820s. The problem was that improvements to the road system were patchy and dependent on private initiatives. Despite this, there were significant reductions in journey times between the main centres of population. In the 1780s, it took ten days to travel from London to Edinburgh; by the 1830s, 45 hours. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of passengers carried by a rapidly expanding coaching industry. The road system transported all kinds of industrial material and manufactured goods. There was a significant growth of carrier firms after 1780. In London, for example, there were 353 firms in 1790 but 735 in the mid-1820s and a five-fold increase in the number of carriers in Birmingham between 1790 and 1830. These firms were, however, unable to compete with the canals or the railways and concentrated on providing short distance carriage of goods from canals and railway stations to local communities.

The major problem facing early industrialists was the cost of carrying heavy, bulky goods like coal or iron ore. The solution was to use water, rivers, coastal transport and from the 1760s, canals. The first phase of canal development took place in the 1760s and early 1770s beginning with the construction of the Bridgewater canal. The second phase, in the 1790s, has rightly been called ‘canal mania’ with the completion of several important canals and the setting-up of fifty-one new schemes. By 1820, the canal network was largely completed linking all the major centres of industrial production and population.

• Canals dramatically enhanced the efficiency of the whole economy by making a cheap system of transport available for goods and passengers. The price of raw materials like coal, timber, iron, wood and cotton tumbled. The needs of farming, whether for manure or for access to markets for grain, cheese and butter, were easily satisfied where farmers had access to canals.
• Canals were a means of overcoming the fuel crisis that threatened to limit industrial growth by making cheap, abundant coal supplies available.
• The building of canals created massive employment and spending power at a time when growing industries were looking for mass markets.

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of canals to Britain’s industrial development between 1780 and 1830.

From 1830, railways were the epoch-making transport innovation. Between 1830 and 1850, 7,000 miles of track was laid with railway ‘manias’ in the 1830s and between 1844 and 1847 when investment was at its peak. Their economic importance lay in their ability to handle both major types of traffic – people and goods – that no other single mode of transport had previously been able. They offered lower costs and greater speed attracting passengers, mail and high-value goods. Mail went to new railways in six months and coaches running in direct competition lost out. However, canals were able, by cutting their rates and improving their services, to continue to carry goods for several years. In 1840, the volume of traffic carried by canal from Liverpool to Manchester was more than twice that carried by railway. The Victorians had no hesitation in assuming a direct link between railways and economic growth though historians are today far less convinced. There was increased demand for coal and iron. In the 1840s, 30 per cent of brick production went into railways and between 1830 and 1845, some 740 million bricks were used in railway construction. Towns grew up round established engineering centres at Swindon, Crewe, Rugby and Doncaster. Food could be transported more cheaply and arrived fresher. There is, however, no doubting their social and cultural impact of railways. This is clearly supported by the statistics. 64,000 passengers were in 1843 but 174,000 in 1848 with an increase in the third-class element from 19,000 to 86,000 in the same period. The Great Exhibition of 1851 reinforced this increased mobility of population.

Between 1780 and 1850, great output was achieved by the transport industry, as in manufacturing industry, by applying a rapidly increasing labour force to existing modes of production as well as using new techniques and applying steam-driven machinery. Historians have emphasised the importance of canals and railways that respectively in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in reducing transport costs. However, coastal and river traffic and carriage of goods and people by road remained important and the horse was the main means of transport well beyond 1850.

Social factors

British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was profoundly conservative. How was a society with highly traditional structures able to generate changes in so many areas of economic life? First, by 1780, British society was capitalist in character and organisation. Its aristocracy was remarkably ‘open’, allowing the newly rich and talented to ‘climb’. The most successful merchants, professional and businessmen in each generation were funnelled off into landed society. Success brought wealth and the ultimate proof of success in business was the ability to leave it. In France, where social climbing was discouraged there was political and social discontent and ultimately political revolution. In Britain, where social climbing was not obstructed, there was an industrial revolution.

Secondly, Britain was already a highly market-oriented society. Imports, whether smuggled or not, were quickly moved to market. Domestic goods, both agricultural and manufactured, were bought and sold directly at the network of markets or through middlemen, who acted as a channel between producer and consumer. Until 1830, the key to economic growth was the growing home demand for consumer goods. Growing consumption influenced trade and economic growth. Possessing and using domestic goods enhanced social status or displayed social rank. Lower food prices after 1780 may well have stimulated a consumer boom: people had more disposable income. There was a dramatic increase in the number of permanent shops in major urban centres and many of the characteristics of modern advertising emerged with circulars, showrooms and elaborate window displays. Changing patterns of consumption created an environment in which manufacturers could exploit known and growing demand.

Finally, entrepreneurial skill and ‘enterprise’ played a major role in the development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century economy. Entrepreneurs did three things:

• They organised production.
• They brought together capital (their own or others’) and labour.
• They selected the geographical site for operations, the technologies to be used, bargained for raw materials and found markets for their products.

They often combined the roles of financiers, capitalists, work managers, merchants and salesmen. Three main explanations for the place of entrepreneurs in leading economic change have been identified by historians:

• There was a change in the ways people viewed social status from one where it was the result of birth to one where it related to what individuals achieved. Status was based on what you did, not who you were. This was a reflection of the openness and mobility of British society.
• Nonconformity seems to have been a crucial experience for many of the first-generation entrepreneurs encouraging a set of values outwardly favourable to economic enterprise.
• Entrepreneurs were able effectively to exploit advances in technology and industrial organisation. Most entrepreneurs were not pioneers of major innovations or inventions but realised how best to utilise them. James Watt would not have been successful but for the entrepreneurial skills of Matthew Boulton. This allowed them to manufacture and market goods effectively within a highly competitive consumer society.

British society did not prevent entrepreneurs from using their talents and motivation.

Conclusions

 

There was no blueprint for the ‘industrial revolution’. Population growth stimulated demand that entrepreneurs were able to satisfy. Developments in transport led to reductions in the cost of production making manufactured good cheaper. Investment in industry often brought good returns. The state made little attempt to control growth. Foreign trade brought raw materials and profits that could be invested in enterprise. The social structure was adaptable and relatively flexible. Each of these factors helped create an environment in which change could occur.

Politics and Religion

How did Britain’s political system work?

The United Kingdom, based on a single Parliament at Westminster, was quite new in the 1780s. Wales was united with England by legislation in 1536 and 1542. The Act of Union with Scotland was in 1707. However, Ireland did not lose its independence in 1801. The British Constitution of monarchy, House of Commons and House of Lords was held up, particularly by continental writers, as a model of how a country should be run. The American War of Independence (1775-1783) and the outbreak of revolution in France in 1789 led to increasing radical demands for reform of the system.

The electorate.

In the 1780s about 435,000 people in England and Wales could vote out of a population of nine millions, or just over five per cent. In Scotland and Ireland it was less than one per cent of the total population of ten millions. The Septennial Act 1715 established seven-year parliaments though general elections were also held on the death of the monarch, a practice finally ended in 1867.

The House of Commons was made up of MPs from the boroughs or towns and the counties. Both counties and boroughs sent two MPs each to Parliament. In the counties, all forty-shilling freeholders were entitled to vote and some of the counties had a considerable number of voters. Yorkshire, for example, had about 20,000 in the 1780s. Bedfordshire had nearly 4,000 just before the Reform Act, which was average for English counties. In the boroughs, the situation was much more confused. In some towns, the vote was given to the corporation or town council. In others, it was restricted to 'freemen' or to all who owned or occupied certain types of property, who paid local taxes ['scot and lot'] or who were not getting alms or charity ['potwallopers'].

Counties were more democratic than boroughs because the size of the electorate was important in determining the level of corruption. There were 'rotten boroughs', like Dunwich in Suffolk where thirty-two electors chose the two MPs. Where there were a small number of voters, elections allowed them to sell their votes. When William Cobbett stood, unsuccessfully, for parliament in 1806 on a non-corruption ticket he was accused of talking the bread from the mouths of voters. The price varied. Some electors accepted straightforward bribes. Others preferred to negotiate benefits for the town or corporation. Successful candidates were expected to show their gratitude and 'treating' was widespread. An elector had two votes, but could give both their votes or ‘plump’ for one candidate. When it is recalled that more than 40 per cent of the English boroughs had electorates of less than 100 and that two-thirds had electorates below 500, the importance of influence through corruption or 'management' is more understandable. Some boroughs were under the control of a particular family or patron: they were known as 'pocket boroughs' or 'nomination boroughs'. Although control by patrons was accepted, it could not be taken for granted and once achieved it had to be cultivated carefully. Since elections were expensive great efforts were made to avoid a contest whenever possible. Local Whigs and Tories might agree to share the representation rather than incur the cost of disputing it. When the ambitions of two families clashed, it was cheaper for them to take with one seat each rather than embark on the costly and uncertain procedures necessary to win both.

Elections.

 

Eighteenth and early nineteenth century elections were noisy, rough and held in public. Drunkenness and rioting were normal events and through the days on which polling took place, the mob revelled in the exhilarating diversions that accompanied the poll. Voting took place over several days on an open husting and unpopular preferences were greeted with catcalls, whistles or over-ripe fruit. Opponents were lured into taverns where they were got drunk and locked up until voting was completed. A memorial tablet in Leeds Parish Church reads "Roger Holt Leigh severely injured by an excited populace when engaged in the exercise of his franchise as Burgess of Wigan that he subsequently died." Since there was no voting register documents were often forged to give people the vote that did not have it. Dead men were impersonated, votes were cast twice and the returning officer often embarrassed his opponents by transferring the hustings to some inaccessible and unadvertised spot. Known enemies were disqualified on trumped up charges. Once all the votes had been cast, there could still be disputes over whether individuals had the right to vote.

 

 



Parties.

 

Before 1832, working out election results was complicated by the vagueness of party lines, the number of uncontested elections and the presence of 'independent' candidates. National political parties, like those we have today, offering distinctive political programmes and with an organised national and local party machine, did not begin to emerge until after the 1832 Reform Act. However, from the 1780s the number of MPs consistently supporting Tory or Whig positions in divisions in the House of Commons did increase. To talk about the 'Whig' and 'Tory' parties is deceptive. In neither case did the term mean a tightly knit political group, although they both came from the aristocratic landed elite, and it is necessary to give both words a very loose meaning. Lord Liverpool led a broadly Tory government between 1812 and 1827 but his cabinet was not united on fundamental issues. Liverpool remained in office not because he had a united and disciplined party behind him but because he could manage a majority in the Commons and Lords, on most occasions, and because he had the support of George, as Regent before 1820 and then as king. His long period in office demonstrated two particular things. First, as Prime Minister, he had at his disposal large amounts of political patronage, which he used to maintain his authority and 'manage' Parliament. Secondly, the pursuit of planned policies was difficult and through the period successive Prime Ministers tended to react to situations rather than determine them. Changes in direction were only possible when they had widespread support across the political establishment or if the policies were uncontroversial.

 

 

Religion

Organised religion in the 1780s played a dominant role in people’s lives. Christian principles formed the bedrock of society and its system of morality. Baptism, marriage and burial were key events for individuals. The pulpit was an important means of communication. The churches provided education, especially for the poor, in the form of day and Sunday schools. People often learned to read from the Bible. The language, images and messages of religious belief permeated throughout society.

The fundamental religious division was between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, the religion of the state throughout Great Britain. The Church of England or Anglican Church was the Established Church except in Scotland where the Presbyterian Church had the same role. It was created by Parliament in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its archbishops and bishops, a conservative body largely unwilling to contemplate reform, sat in the House of Lords. The strength of the Church of England lay in rural England and was based on the bond between the squire and the parson. By the 1780s, this cosy relationship was threatened by a weakening of social ties and widespread criticisms of clerical abuses. It was, however, weak in the growing towns. It failed to accommodate growing congregations leaving a religious vacuum among the working population that Nonconformity or Dissent filled from the 1760s and 1770s. Anti-Popery ran deep in British society and Roman Catholics were, until 1829, denied the same civil rights as Protestants. Catholicism in Ireland, the religion of the majority, was seen as a means of expressing nationalist aspirations and consequently as subversive. In Wales Calvinist Methodism increasingly took a similar stance. Chapel and Church were at the heart of many communities providing a focus for spiritual and practical support.







 

 

 

How was British society structured?

All societies are, to some degree, stratified or divided into different social groups. These groups may be in competition with each other for social control or wealth. They may be functional, defined by their contribution to society as a whole. They may share common 'values', have a common 'national identity' or they may form part of a society in which different 'values' coexist with varying degrees of success or conflict. What was British society like in 1780?

 

The working population

 

The labouring population made up the bulk of society consisting of those who earned their wages largely through manual work. There were, however, important differences within the working population. People worked in rural or urban environments. Their employment was agricultural, manufacturing or in the growing service sector. Some were skilled, others semi-skilled or unskilled. They were male or female. Agricultural labourers formed a major part of the workforce in rural Britain. There was, however, a distinction between the low waged southern English counties where little alternative employment was available and the higher waged northern counties where farmers had to compete for labour with expanding urban manufacturing industries. Within rural communities there was an important hierarchy based upon levels of skills that paralleled levels of income. Bird-scarers, generally children, were at the base of the hierarchy while ploughmen were at the top. Only the better-educated shepherds had greater status.

 

The same hierarchy of skill existed in industrial Britain and the distinction between skilled and unskilled or general labourers was one of enduring importance. Artisans formed the 'aristocracy of labour', highly paid and relatively secure in traditional trades largely unchanged by the industrial revolution. They guarded their skills, developed through the process of apprenticeship, against 'dilution' by semi-skilled workers who were paid less. Skilled factory workers, like the fine-cotton spinners and weavers of Lancashire, benefited from new technology. Others like handloom weavers and framework knitters became redundant. The creation of new skills during the industrial revolution led to the gradual creation of new skilled elites: foremen, overseers, mechanics and technicians as well as managers. Semi-skilled and unskilled manual labour was more vulnerable to economic fluctuations and to unemployment or under-employment. Men were generally able to push women to the lower-paid margins of manufacturing. In the textile industries, for example, men dominated new technology like the self-acting spinning 'mule' perfected in the early 1820s. The 'sweated trades' or the growing demands for domestic servants, low skill, low pay, long hours, was the destination for many women.

 

The diversity of experience is at its starkest in the debate over whether working class standards of living rose or fell between the 1780s and 1840s. Some workers, like navvies, experienced rising wages while others, for example handloom weavers, saw their income decline. This should not be surprising. There were always winners and losers of economic change especially when new technology made particular skills redundant. Even within the same occupation wages varied. In the 1810s printers earned 12-19 shillings in Scotland, 18-22 shillings in northern England, 18-24 shillings in the south east and as much as 25 shillings in London. The difference between the skilled London artisan and a Scottish crofter was, in many respects, as great as that between a member of the aristocracy and a prosperous shopkeeper. Yet, both often shared a common sense of resentment and disillusion at the inequalities in society.

 

The middle classes

 

The middle classes were increasingly defined as a 'class' in the late eighteenth century. They were distinguished from the aristocratic elite by the need to earn a living and from the labouring population by their property, however small, represented by stock in trade, tools or by educational investment in skills or expertise. As a class, they benefited from the changes in the economy and, though not exclusively urban, were increasingly found in the growing towns of the provinces. Their homogeneity as a class came from their growing acceptance of a common social and political ideology. This had three strands. First, evangelicalism, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, provided a firm religious foundation grounded in a 'call to seriousness'. This contrasted with the immoral behaviour of the aristocracy. It emphasised the virtues of hard work, plain and moral living, respectable family life and above all conscience. This converted middle class occupations like the law, medicine, the Church and the armed forces into 'callings' or vocations. Secondly, the ideas of Jeremy Bentham allowed attacks on the inefficiency of the aristocratic conception of society. Tradition, restriction and 'influence', the values particular to landed society, were compared, generally unfavourably, with middle class virtues of order, discipline, merit and application. Finally, Political Economy provided an economic justification for their growing power with its focus on the freedom of the market and the virtue of enterprise. The middle classes promoted their ideology with missionary zeal.

 

In the 1780s the middle classes embraced at one end city bankers and large industrialists with incomes from investment and profits of over £500 per year and at the other extreme small shopkeepers and clerks with annual earnings of only £50. The provincial elites were a small group of men and families who controlled growing industrial complexes. In London, there were the merchant bankers. This elite, on familiar and sometimes marrying terms with the aristocracy, was not representative of the middle class as a whole. The lower middle class was composed of smaller manufacturers, shopkeepers, milliners, tailors, local brewers as well as the rapidly growing number of clerks in both business and government, schoolteachers, an emerging managerial class, accountants, pharmacists and engineers. Aware of their status they maintained an important distinction between themselves as salaried or fee-earning employees and wage-earning manual workers.

 

The landed classes

 

In the 1780s, power, economic and political, still lay in the possession and exploitation of land. Landowners did not simply farm their own land or rent it out to tenant farmers. They exploited mineral deposits on their estates providing stone, slate, sand, brick-clay, timber and coal for growing industries. They rented their urban properties in response to a growing housing shortage. They invested in government stocks, the Bank of England, in industry and transport. The Duke of Bridgewater funded the first canal in the 1760s. Landowners benefited from the profits of political office since they monopolised the offices of state, their patronage and revenues. They were adaptable, if conservative, in outlook. A peerage of three hundred wealthy families dominated the landed classes. The estate and the country house were at the heart of their power providing authority and status. They controlled patronage rewarding the loyalty of friends, family and clients openly and without moral scruple to maintain their political power. Beneath of great landowners were the gentry who dominated the counties as squires, Justices of the Peace, poor law officials, churchwardens and backbench MPs. Below the gentry, landed society forked. There was a hierarchy of owner-occupiers or freeholders with incomes ranging from £700 down to as little as £30 per year; and tenant farmers who found their profits threatened by falling food prices and were the most vocal proponents of the Corn Laws.

 

The basis of landed society was mutual obligations within a hierarchical framework. Deferential attitudes were due to those above and paternalistic attitudes to those below. This was acceptable to most people in rural England and Scotland where the landlord was normally of the same nationality and culture. This was less the case in Wales and Ireland where landlords were often both from an alien culture and religion. However, the 'bond of dependency' between landlord, tenant farmer and labourer was beginning to break down by the 1780s. There had always be popular disturbances like food riots when people reminded those with power of their responsibilities and of the need for 'just wages' and 'just prices'. Food riots in the 1790s, the rural slump after 1815, the riots in the Fens in 1816, in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1822, and particularly the 'Captain Swing' riots across southern England in 1830 challenged established values. Each was largely unsuccessful and harshly repressed. This indicated of a breakdown in the dependency system, what Carlyle called "the abdication on the part of the governors". The market, not appeals to custom and established practice, increasingly determined the social behaviour of the landed classes.

 

A diverse society

 

Society in the 1780s was multifaceted. Attitudes were a result of particular circumstances, opportunities and fears created by an economy in which there were elements of continuity as well as change. Social attitudes, behaviour and work patterns were closely linked to support for the social hierarchy. Power was converted into moral authority and ensured the stability of a social hierarchy threatened by change. Deference, whether in urban or rural settings, remained strong because family, work patterns and communities did much to promote it. No one criterion, whether class or paternalism or dependency, can explain the complexities of society in the 1780s.

 

An ‘Industrial Revolution’

Between 1750 and 1850 the British economy experienced a very rapid and, by international standards, pronounced growth in manufacturing. The proportion of the labour force employed in industry, whether in the manufacturing or service sectors increased, and the proportion employed in farming fell. The textile, iron and coal industries underwent dramatic change as new technologies and new markets stimulated growth on an unprecedented scale. This traditional view of an 'industrial revolution' provides only part of the picture. The experience of cotton textiles was not typical of manufacturing industries. There was no general triumph of steam power or the factory system by 1850. Growth was modest. There was no great leap forward for the economy as a whole, despite the experience of cotton production. Change took place on a far broader canvas. There was growth of a far less dynamic nature in a whole range of traditional industries. Most employment in manufacturing industries remained small-scale, handicraft activities producing for local and regional markets. These trades were hardly affected by new technology. It was the wider use and division of labour that allowed output to grow. Economic transition was the result of the combination of old and new processes. Steam power did not replace waterpower at a stroke. Work organisation was varied and factories coexisted with domestic production, artisan workshops and large-scale mining and metal producing industries. Change varied across industries and regions. Lancashire may have seen vigorous industrial development but in Norfolk and Suffolk, the woollen textile industry declined in the face of competition from the more advanced and mechanised production of Yorkshire.

 

 

The industrial landscape changed under the impact of the 'industrial revolution'. Industrialisation in the eighteenth century occurred largely in the countryside and rural industry was domestic often in conjunction with farming. This industry was capable of mass production and of supplying regional, national and international markets. The move of some industries to factories did not lead to the emergence of the modern industrial landscape. Waterpower did not create smoke or dirt. Only when coal and steam were used directly did towns become blackened and their air and water polluted. Steam power led to larger concentrations of industries, often near canals or navigable rivers, and of the labourers needed to work in them. The move from the rural cottage industry to the urban factory is over-exaggerated. As late as 1851, the majority of people employed in Britain worked in the unmechanised sectors of the economy.

 

The market, local, regional, national or international, was at the heart of the economy in the 1780s. The transport of bulky good, and a reduction in the cost of carriage, was made easier by the development of the canal network in the second half of the eighteenth century and by railways after 1830. Coastal and river transport became increasingly important but Britain remained predominantly a horse-drawn society until the late nineteenth century. The last half of the eighteenth century saw growing demands for consumer goods. London, for example, used over three million tons of coal each year and thousands of cattle, sheep and fowl were driven to the London food markets from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The experience of London was paralleled in the growing cities of the Midlands and the North. Population growth stimulated home demand for cloth, leather for shoes, bricks, pottery, iron pots and pans. Growing consumption influenced, and was in turn influenced by, trade and economic growth.

In what ways was Britain a country of economic diversity?

Population had been growing since the first half of the eighteenth century. By the first national census in 1801 it had reached 15.7 million and by 1831 some 24.1 millions. The reasons for this were straightforward. The birth rate increased and the death rate fell after the 1750s. Women married younger at just below twenty-five years so increasing childbearing years. Historians disagree about the reasons behind these trends. Decline in 'killer' diseases like smallpox, improving living conditions, economic prosperity encouraging early marriage, higher life expectancy are suggested causes of growth. Whether there was a single cause or whether as is more likely there were several, growth was far from even. In England and Wales between 1750 and 1800, the annual average population increase was 0.7 per cent compared to 1.8 per cent for the following fifty years. For Scotland and Ireland the figure respectively were 0.5 and 1.6 per cent and 1.1 and 0.6 per cent.

 

 

Population growth stimulated demand for raw materials, manufactured goods, food and services that could be produced by the growing reservoir of available labour. Manufacturing industries, whether in the areas of dynamic growth like cotton textiles or in traditional artisan-based trades, expanded. The service sector saw particular growth with increased demand for domestic, medical and legal services and the creation of new professions to support expanding industries, towns and agriculture. Population growth stimulated urban growth with internal migration especially to the newer urban centres of production and to London. Urban growth too was far from even. Urban growth had its costs as well as benefits. It heightened squalor with many migrants finding they had exchanged rural for urban slums. There were higher levels of mortality especially among the labouring population, increasing exploitation in the workplace and a growing gulf between rich and poor.

 

The sweeping changes that took place in British agriculture—its agricultural revolution--over the period 1750-1850 in response to the increased demand for food from a rapidly expanding population. Recent research has shown these changes to be only part of a much larger, ongoing process of development. Changes of the latter half of the 18th century included the enclosure of open fields, the introduction of four-course rotation together with new fodder crops such as turnip, and the development of improved breeds of livestock. Many of the changes were in fact underway before 1750 and other breakthroughs, such as farm mechanisation, did not occur until after 1850. Farming dominated the British economy in the 1780s. The previous century had seen major changes particularly in the use of arable land. Turnips and crops like clover ended the need for fallow land. Cheaper iron making led to major developments in ploughs though it was not until after 1850 that machines were widely used. Selective breeding increased the quality and quantity of meat and dairy produce. Enclosure of the lighter arable land led to better use of land. This transformed the rural landscape. A pattern of field, stonewall and hedgerow already existed in northern and western England and in Wales and in much of eastern England which had already been enclosed. For central England, the open fields remained. Here the modern chequer-board pattern of small fields replaced the open landscape in a generation. Enclosure may have led to the dominance of large farms in southern England but most farming was on a much smaller scale. In Yorkshire, for example, seventy per cent of farms were less than one hundred acres and across the Pennines in Lancashire and Cheshire the figure was ninety per cent.

 

 

The growing needs of population, as well as the increased profitability of farming during the French Wars, pushed back the margins of arable land as never before. By 1820, twenty-five million quarters of corn were produced annually compared to fifteen million in 1760. This was not enough. From the 1760s, Britain relied on foreign imports of wheat to feed its growing population. Urban growth could not have been sustained without this. The French Wars marked a high point in British farming. Farmers invested heavily in improving their land, borrowing funded from high grain prices. Falling prices, a collapse from 127 shillings a quarter in 1812 to 74 shillings within two years, and cheaper continental imports after 1815 brought problems for arable farmers. It led to successful demands for protection. The Corn Laws were passed in 1815. Urban and industrial Britain saw the Corn Laws as a means of keeping food prices artificially high and of supporting farming at the expense of manufacturing industry. The advantage farmers thought they would gain was far outweighed by the propaganda advantage gained by its opponents. High costs certainly made wheat farming difficult when prices were low. Many farmers complained of 'depression' after 1815 through to the mid-1830s. Those who survived did so by reducing labour costs significantly. This was paid for through the 'distress' of agricultural labourers especially in southern England where little alternative employment was available.

 

The role of agriculture in the English economy was showing signs of declining national importance by the 1820s. This was less so in Wales, Scotland and Ireland where farming remained important. In Wales in the 1780s around seventy per cent of the working population worked in self-contained farming communities. Demand for farm tenancies remained high but land hunger and the ignorance of new techniques limited improvement. Similar problems existed in Ireland where sub-division of land meant that almost two-thirds of all holdings were below fifteen acres. Ireland was also an important exporter of grain and livestock to England. There was, however, a trend away from arable to pasture and livestock prices fell less dramatically than grain. Perceptive landlords soon recognised that urban growth meant markets for Irish meat. In 1825 47,000 Irish cattle were exported rising to 98,000 ten years later. In Scotland there was a clear difference between the improving farming of the Lowlands and the more traditional methods used in the Highlands. Scottish pioneers developed the threshing machine in 1786 and the horse-drawn reaper in 1826 and, more importantly, new methods of field drainage that allowed a revolution on Britain's heavy clay soils after 1840.

 

 

Between 1750 and 1850 the British economy experienced a very rapid and, by international standards, pronounced growth in manufacturing, an ‘industrial revolution’. The proportion of the labour force employed in industry, whether in the manufacturing or service sectors increased, and the proportion employed in farming fell. The textile, iron and coal industries underwent dramatic change as new technologies and new markets stimulated growth on an unprecedented scale. This traditional view of an 'industrial revolution' provides only part of the picture. The experience of cotton textiles was not typical of manufacturing industries. There was no general triumph of steam power or the factory system by 1850. Growth was modest. There was no great leap forward for the economy as a whole, despite the experience of cotton production. Change took place on a far broader canvas. There was growth of a far less dynamic nature in a whole range of traditional industries. Most employment in manufacturing industries remained small-scale, handicraft activities producing for local and regional markets. These trades were hardly affected by new technology. It was the wider use and division of labour that allowed output to grow. Economic transition was the result of the combination of old and new processes. Steam power did not replace waterpower at a stroke. Work organisation was varied and factories coexisted with domestic production, artisan workshops and large-scale mining and metal producing industries. Change varied across industries and regions. Lancashire may have seen vigorous industrial development but in Norfolk and Suffolk, the woollen textile industry declined in the face of competition from the more advanced and mechanised production of Yorkshire.

 

The industrial landscape changed under the impact of the 'industrial revolution'. Industrialisation in the eighteenth century occurred largely in the countryside and rural industry was domestic often in conjunction with farming. This industry was capable of mass production and of supplying regional, national and international markets. The move of some industries to factories did not lead to the emergence of the modern industrial landscape. Waterpower did not create smoke or dirt. Only when coal and steam were used directly did towns become blackened and their air and water polluted. Steam power led to larger concentrations of industries, often near canals or navigable rivers, and of the labourers needed to work in them. The move from the rural cottage industry to the urban factory is over-exaggerated. As late as 1851, the majority of people employed in Britain worked in the unmechanised sectors of the economy.

 

The market, local, regional, national or international, was at the heart of the economy in the 1780s. The transport of bulky good, and a reduction in the cost of carriage, was made easier by the development of the canal network in the second half of the eighteenth century and by railways after 1830. Coastal and river transport became increasingly important but Britain remained predominantly a horse-drawn society until the late nineteenth century. The last half of the eighteenth century saw growing demands for consumer goods. London, for example, used over three million tons of coal each year and thousands of cattle, sheep and fowl were driven to the London food markets from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The experience of London was paralleled in the growing cities of the Midlands and the North. Population growth stimulated home demand for cloth, leather for shoes, bricks, pottery, iron pots and pans. Growing consumption influenced, and was in turn influenced by, trade and economic growth.

 

England in 1780

Few writers can live solely from their writings. Thomas Love Peacock [1785-1866] was no exception. He began work as a clerk in a City office and in late 1818 took up a well-paid and responsible job at the India House where he worked for almost forty years. In taking his post with the East India Company, Peacock became a high-ranking civil servant and chose amateur status as a novelist. His writings, particularly Nightmare Abbey [1818] and Crotchet Castle [1831] ridiculed the poets of the Romantic Movement and political economists in their quest for scientific progress and 'the march of the mind'. Mr Crotchet lists certain great controversies he would like to see settled in his lifetime: "the sentimental against the rationale, the intuitive against the inductive, the ornamental against the useful, the intense against the tranquil, the romantic against the classical". Peacock, like other contemporary social critics, was trying to make sense of a Britain of increasing contrasts. Thomas Carlyle stated in Signs of the Times in 1829 that: "Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age, which with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand.... Our old modes of exertion are all discredited and thrown aside...."

In his Autobiographical Fragments, probably written in the early 1820s, the poet John Clare expressed an alternative view:

My hopes of bettering my station with the world was agen and I started for Wisbeach [in Cambridgeshire] with a timid sort of pleasure and when I got to Glinton turnpike I turnd back to look on the old church as if I was going in to another contry. Wisbeach was a foreign land to me for I had never been above 8 miles from home in my life and I coud not fancy england much larger then the part I knew. At Peterboro Brig I got into a boat that carrys passengers to Wisbeach once a week and returns the third day a distance of 21 miles for eighteenpence.... one of my worst labours was a journey to a distant village name Maxey in winter afternoons to fetch flour once or sometimes twice a week. In these journeys I had haunted spots to pass as the often heard tales of ghosts and hobgoblins had made me very fearful to pass such places at night it being often dark ere I got there....

William Cobbett wrote of Sheffield in his northern tour of 1830:

The ragged hills all round this town are bespangled with groups of houses inhabited by the working cutlers. They have not suffered like the working weavers; for to make knives there must be the hand of man. Therefore, machinery cannot come to destroy the wages of the labourer. The home demand has been very much diminished: but still the depression has here not been what it has been, and what it is where the machinery can be brought into play....

 

The England of the 1780s was in some respects 'modern', an 'age of machinery' as Carlyle maintained. It was an England of rapid industrial change where a growing population was being drawn to the expanding towns and cities of the north and midlands. It was a land of canals and newly surfaced roads feeding economic growth. But it was also an 'old' country in which going to a different part of the country was viewed as going to a foreign land and where a belief in the supernatural remained. In the 1780s, the tensions between change and continuity were unresolved and in some ways they remained unresolved in 1846. These pressures were more obvious outside England. In Scotland, Wales and Ireland the distinction between innovation and tradition was starker and resistance to change often took on a strongly nationalist character. Attitudes to particular crops grown in Ireland illustrate this distinction. The cultivation of turnips was seen as innovative by many rural labourers and, perhaps more importantly, as an English innovation. Turnips were destroyed in the fields just as some believed they were destroying their lives. By contrast, the potato, introduced by the English in the seventeenth century, had become an accepted indeed essential part of Irish cultural, as well as dietary, life. It is not surprising that some nationalists of the Young Ireland movement were able to represent the potato famines of the 1840s as part of a deliberate policy of genocide by English government. For many contemporaries Britain was a country of opposing poles: improvement and resistance, modernity and tradition, change and continuity, Englishness and cultural and linguistic nationalism, north and south, rich and poor. As is always the case, reality was far less clear-cut and far more complex than the rhetoric suggested.

Reform

On 27 March 1855, the Royal Commission released its report largely written by William Westgarth and John O’Shanassy. [1] In its three months of work, it had asked over 6,000 questions of elected representatives, diggers and camp officials. Though it had insisted on including events at Eureka in its brief, much to Hotham’s annoyance, its approach was discrete. It did not press Rede on his correspondence with Hotham, none of the Catholic priests were called and the contentious question of American involvement was largely ignored. It decided that the problems that caused the Eureka rebellion included a lack of political rights especially denying diggers the vote, their inability to buy land and the way the mining license was collected. Although the license was the trigger that led to the unrest, the Commission concluded that it was not the main cause.

 

The Commission recommended that the license be abolished and replaced with an export duty on gold of 2s 6p per ounce. [2] Bankers had assured Hotham in September 1854 that this would cause no major problems and he was prepared to agree to a low duty. The Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, though it disliked export duties in principle as taxes on exports, thought it expedient to accept it. [3] The next recommendation was the abolition of the Gold Commission and the appointment of wardens. With the abolition of the license, it suggested that two-thirds of the goldfield administration and half the police would not be needed. This reduction in the cost of managing the goldfields would lead to their net revenue being greater than before. It also recommended, largely at O’Shanassy’s insistence, that the diggers should pay an annual £1 miners’ right that would give them legal rights to their claims and entitle them, as annual leaseholders of Crown land, to the franchise. [4]

 

This charge would comprehend the registration of the miner, and the issue of a paper conveying his rights. The document may be taken out for the term of a year. The Commission agree in recommending a charge of £1. It is not intended that any active search be instituted by the authorities as to whether a miner has or has not taken out this qualification; but without it he has no right to the gold he may acquire, or to claims or digging ground he may take up and labor upon, and cannot be maintained in the possession of either. The Miner’s Right, as it is proposed to term this annual document, would be a means of distinguishing the well-disposed on the gold-fields…The miner’s right, as well as the licenses leviable on other classes of residents upon the gold-fields—a subject to be treated under its proper head—should qualify for the franchise. [5]

 

The report had considerable authority. Its members were sufficiently liberal to understand the diggers’ grievances and yet were closely associated with the government. This enabled its conclusions to be acceptable to both parties. Although he still believed that the gold license was right in principle, Hotham accepted the report and the government immediately introduced legislation in the Council. A Gold Export Bill was quickly passed not without opposition from squatters and radicals, who still maintained that diggers were too heavily taxed. [6] The Argus was highly critical of the legislation especially its right of search:

 

Before the new clauses were passed in the Customs Act on Thursday, the Gold Export Duty proposition was absurd, and now—it is monstrous as well. [7]

 

In practice, however, the new duty worked smoothly and simply and was helped by the rise in the price of gold. A second piece of legislation enlarged the Council by 12 members, 8 for the goldfields and 4 nominees, despite doubts whether the new members would take up their seats before the arrival of the new constitution. [8] A new Gold Fields Management Act was passed on 12 June 1855 legalising the miner’s right. [9] The Commission had recommended that diggers be selected to form Local Courts, but the government went further providing for a nominated chairman and elections every six months of members of a court by those with the miner’s right. The Local Courts were subject to the nominal supervision of the Council but in reality, were given complete control of the industry and regulated conditions on the goldfields.[10] ‘The nature of these courts was highly unusual and a remarkable democratic experiment’. [11]

 

The rapid legislative response pacified radical activity in the goldfields though suspicions of the government’s intentions remained until legislation was fully implemented. The Reform League remained active but a ‘national’ conference suggested in April 1855 appears not to have occurred. In Melbourne, the Age acted as a focus for political opposition to the government but no new party or organisation was formed. In the three months from April to June 1855, fewer than 1,000 diggers took out licenses but when the miner’s rights were issued from late June nearly 30,000 were issued by the end of July and over 50,000 by the end of the year.

 

The Local Courts were elected in July and at Bendigo, Denovan and Benson were among the leaders elected. [12] On the 14 July 1855, just eight months after the Eureka rebellion, 9 members of the mining community, including Raffaelo Carboni and H. R. Nichols, were elected unanimously at Bakery Hill to the Local Courts. The diggers’ control of the Local Courts was seen by the mining community as the ‘blood bought rights’ of the rebellion. The Legislative Council did not meet again until late in the year when 8 new mining members were elected. Peter Lalor and John Humffray were elected unopposed for Ballarat, Grant and Benson for Bendigo and in March 1856, the mining members were instrumental in obtaining compensation for those whose property was damaged or destroyed in Ballarat during the rebellion. The Commission of Enquiry also recommended that the squatters’ control of the land be broken and that diggers had the right to buy land. The resultant subdivision of land around mining sites led to the development of some of Victoria’s most important regional towns and cities. The ‘final curtain’ on the events of Eureka came on 31 December 1855, when Sir Charles Hotham, who had tendered his resignation in November, died of pneumonia, after catching a chill. [13] His successor, Sir Henry Barkly had the highest salary in the empire because the Colonial Office considered the post particularly difficult.[14]

---

[1] Anderson, Hugh, (ed.), Report from the Commission appointed to inquire into the Condition of the Goldfields, 1855, (Red Rooster Press), 1978. The Report was printed in Argus, 30 March 1855, pp. 4-5, 31 March 1855, p. 5, 2 April 1855, p. 6. 3 April 1855, p. 6. ‘The Gold-Fields Report’, Argus, 30 March 1855, p. 4, provides a critique of the document.

[2] ‘Council Paper: A Bill for Granting Duties of Customs upon Gold Exported from Victoria’, Argus, 5 April 1855, p. 6.

[3] ‘Chamber of Commerce’, Argus, 3 April 1855, p. 4.

[4] Connelly, C. N. ‘Miners’ Rights’, ibid, Curthoys, A., and Markus, A., (eds.), Who are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working-class, pp. 35-47, and Fabey, Charles, Holst Heather, Martin, Sara, and Mayne, Alan, ‘A miner’s right: making homes and communities on the Victorian goldfields’, in ibid, Mayne, Alan, (ed.) Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, pp. 201-219, especially pp. 200-207.

[5] Section 23 of the Report from the Commission appointed to inquire into the Condition of the Goldfields, printed Argus, 30 March, 1855, p. 6.

[6] ‘The Gold Export Duty Bill’, Argus, 5 April 1885, p. 4, pointed to complaints from Councillors of the haste displaying in jurying the second reading through the Legislative Council. The Bill received the Royal Assent on 20 April, ‘Legislative Council’, Argus, 21 April 1855, p. 4.

[7] ‘Gold Export Duty’, Argus, 21 April 1855, p. 4.

[8] ‘Enfranchisement of the Diggers’, Argus, 9 April 1855, p. 4,‘Legislative Council’, Argus, 12 April 1855, p. 5, 26 April 1855, p. 5, 1 May 1855, p. 4, 5 May 1855, p. 5, 9 May 1855, p. 4, 23 May 1855, p. 4. Royal Assent to the legislation was given on 22 May 1855. See also, ‘Nominee Representatives’, Argus, 9 May 1855, p. 4.

[9] ‘Legislative Council’, Argus, 13 June 1855, p. 4.

[10] Birrell, Ralph, ‘Eureka and the redefinition of company mining in Australia’, in ibid, Mayne, Alan, (ed.), Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, pp. 184-188, considers the creation of the local courts and their subsequent development.

[11] Serle, p. 178.

[12] ‘Bendigo’, Argus, 13 June 1855, p. 6.

[13] ‘Death of His Excellency Sir Charles Hotham’, Argus, 1 January 1856, p. 4, details his illness and unexpected death. Although the Argus report suggests pneumonia, it had earlier reported on 26 December that he had ‘English cholera’.

[14] Knox, B. A., ‘Sir Henry Barkly, (1815-1898)’, ADB, Vol. 3, pp. 95-96.

New Review

Richard Brown, Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882, Authoring History, second edition, 2017, £20.37, paperback, ISBN 978-1540352231; Richard Brown, Three Rebellions: Canada, South Wales and Australia, Authoring History, second edition, 2016, £19.72, paperback, ISBN 978-1539455707

 

The opportunity to revise and update the original texts as both these publications move into their second editions testifies to the success of previous print and electronic editions in helping to create markets for some of the less well trodden pathways of modern British and world history which have rarely featured so prominently in texts aimed at students in tertiary and higher education. In both instances the significance of the selected themes is succinctly explained in new prefaces. The new edition of Famine Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882 takes its overall length from 582 to 602 pages and is now offered as the second volume of a quartet on resistance and rebellion in the British Empire. It examines the Irish dimension in Britain’s Empire through attempts especially by Young Ireland and the Fenians to achieve Irish independence through rebellion and by the populist and parliamentarian constitutionalist Repeal association and campaign for Home Rule to the achievement of devolved government. The book looks at the nature and impact of the Great Hunger in its global context in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia and explains why, how and whither the Irish emigrated and how they settled into their new communities. The cover features Fenians at the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866, a victory, which the accompanying text argues ‘occurred too late to have any significant effect on the Confederation process’ though ‘it did play a major role in emotionally connecting the Canadian public to the idea of Canada’. However, the reader is warned in a cryptic caption that the book’s cover illustration amounts to a far from accurate depiction, though it might have helped some readers had this intriguing caption been elaborated and more of its provenance been revealed.

 

 

By contrast, the riveting cover illustration of the companion volume, focusing upon three rebellions in Canada, South Wales and Australia is extensively contextualised. Unusually, we discover, that it was painted by Katherine Jane Ellice, the daughter-in-law of the local seigneur, a prosperous fur trader, who was taken prisoner by the Patriotes at Beauharnois, near Montreal, in November 1838. Ellice described her captors as ‘the most Robespierre-looking ruffians, all armed with guns, long knives and pikes’. Their expressions and weapons are vividly captured in the watercolour. Moreover, Brown’s gripping account of the action and its significance is characteristically engaging and stimulating. He concludes that the rebellions in the Canadas, South Wales and Victoria were each a failure of popular constitutionalism to deliver political change and the unwillingness of the authorities to concede that change was necessary.

 

As the relationship of the United Kingdom with Europe and the wider world is re-defined post-Brexit, some of the global themes hitherto neglected but explored here with such insight, rigour and enthusiasm may perhaps again appeal to a widening readership.

John A. Hargreaves

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882

First book for 2017

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882 is the second book in the Rebellion Quartet, a series looking at resistance and rebellion in the British Empire.  It examines the Irish dimension in Britain’s Empire, evident in Three Rebellions: Canada, South Wales and Australia, through attempts especially by the Young Ireland and Fenian movements to achieve Ireland’s independence through rebellion between 1830 and 1882 and by the populist and parliamentarian constitutionalist Repeal Association and campaign for Home Rule to achieved devolved government. 

Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1830-1882 focuses on the nature and impact of the Famine in its global Irish context in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. Why, how and where Irish emigrated and how they settled into their new communities. How different approaches to Irish nationalism evolved in Ireland, British colonies in Canada and Australia and in the United States and why it failed to achieve its objectives between 1830 and 1882 and the political character of the Irish diaspora. It also explores the nature and differences in the character of Irish rebellion in Ireland, mainland Britain, Canada and Australia in 1848 and during the 1860s looking especially at its military character and failure. The role played by individuals such as Daniel O’Connell, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, John O’Mahony, James Stephens, John O’Neill, John Devoy, Michael Davitt, Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell.

The first edition was well received by reviewers and this edition has given me the opportunity to revisit material originally researched and written between 2005 and 2009 taking account of the most recent research and publications. I have delved further into newspapers from Britain, Ireland and Australia and have added further references to them. I have also extended the starting point for the book back by a decade to 1830.

Reviewing 2016: A second stab

After Brexit came the election of Donald Trump as the US President.  If Brexit was a shock, Trump’s election was an earthquake…no one thought he would get the Republican nomination let alone win the election against the experienced if not popular Hilary Clinton.  The election campaign, especially its last weeks, was one of the most visceral I’ve ever seen with making promises that he will need to honour—though in some cases this is unlikely—with the FBI saying it was reopening investigations into Hilary’s private email server ten days or so before election day and then withdrawing from investigation a few days later when the damage to Hilary’s already fragile reputation was done.  With Hilary wining the popular vote but Donald gaining the electoral college votes and the presidency, the result was hardly a ringing endorsement of the processes through which American democracy functions.

 

 

One of the major criticisms of Trump in the election campaign is that he has little experience of Washington but this misses the point that it is precisely because he has no experience that he was elected.  His brand of authoritarian populism, his notion of ‘American First’ appealed to those Americans for whom globalism has paid no dividends and whose lives have been blighted by the impact of untrammelled global free trade and who see no real benefit from the United States acting as the arbiter of global affairs.  What Trump is is an extremely successful if ruthless businessman who tweets what he thinks and who had vast experience in running and particularly managing things and increasingly people believed that he had the skills necessary to bring an expanding federal state to heel by not being prepared to do things the way they’ve always been done.  For the electorate this is his greatest strength but it is also his greatest weakness as the whole panoply of the Washington establishment will be against him and will obstruct his changes.  For a US President to get his policies accepted by Congress, there needs to be a degree of consensus; without this he becomes a ‘lame duck’ with the Washington political elite—and it has inexhaustible patience and ability to ‘dig the dirt’--simply waiting for his term of office to expire. 

 

 

Reviewing 2016

2016, the year that the ‘commentariat’ got just about everything wrong!  It was supposed to be a victory for ‘remain’ and Hilary Clinton preparing for her inauguration as US President half way through next month…well, no.  Britain was supposed to make a further…if perhaps reluctant…commitment to the European Union with an economic meltdown if this did not occur as companies abandoned what would become the Titanic of economies; that voting leave would result inevitably according to David Cameron and other ‘remainers’ in leaving the single market and the customs union, something now denied by the ‘remoaners’ and especially the Liberal Democrats who respect the referendum result—remember it was advisory not binding--but want to have another just to make sure and perhaps a third one for two out of three!!  The irony is that, although three out of four people eligible to vote did so, the percentage was lower amongst younger votes, some of whom are now complaining that the ‘baby boomers’ have stolen yet another part of their inheritance.  Brexit was not expected to happen and neither side in the debate had made any real provision for this eventuality…any sensible government would have taken steps to plan for Brexit even if they didn’t expect it to happen.  And when it did, instead of staying on to help with the transition to a new Prime Minister and to sort out the mess of his own choosing, David Cameron simply quit within hours of the result…it was a bit like, ‘well you didn’t take my advice, so I’m off!!’  Almost a hissy fit!!!!!

 

 

So why did England and Wales vote for Brexit?  Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain, though in NI’s case by a small majority.  This in itself caused problems as Scotland then demanded some sort of accommodation with the EU to recognise that it did not vote to leave.  This raised significant constitutional issues that have yet to be resolved…how do you accommodate a devolved, but not federal, structure within a unitary constitution?  The result is that Scotland demands that it has a special status under devolution in relation to the referendum despite the fact that the UK as a whole voted for Brexit by a significant if not enormous majority.  We may still be a ‘United’ Kingdom in theory but in practice that is clearly no longer the case.  This explains why the current mantra is ‘Yes, we accept the result of the referendum and the will of the people….but!!!!!’  The metropolitan elite cannot understand it and, if some of the recent comments in the press are a good indicator, some are still in denial about it all…they’ll wake up from a bad dream and the referendum won’t have taken place.  It’s the Peasants Revolt all over again but this time the peasants have got what they want…or have they?  Just as Richard II and his ministers betrayed the peasants in 1381 so constitutional niceties, legal arguments, practical politics and the realities of negotiation from March 2017 may well see yet another betrayal…this is what we’ve negotiated and Parliament’s agreed so that’s it whether or not there’s control over free movement of people or complete severance from the EU…it’s economics silly!! 

The reality is that because there was little planning for Brexit, the whole thing is a mess.  Whoever allowed a referendum bill to go through Parliament that did not specifically make the result binding was really incompetent…I cannot believe that nobody noticed that.  A conspiracy theorist might well argue that this was deliberate so that government could twist its way out of taking account of the result if it was leave…though I tend to the cock-up theory of politics.  And of course it’s also a mess for the EU…it has as little an idea of what Brexit will mean in practice as the government.  Yes it’s all…well don’t expect an easy negotiation from us but it then has to get through all 27 countries and how do you do that successfully? No one knows.  It’s almost a back of the cigarette packet situation. Yes it would have been easier to stay within the EU…certainly my own view…but that’s not how the people voted.

The West’s blame and the West’s shame

Watching Newsnight yesterday evening was one of the worst examples of a political post-mortem I think I’ve ever experienced.  The subject was the imminent fall of Aleppo to the Russian supported government of President Bashar al-Assad that commentators think represents perhaps not the end of the civil war but the beginning of the end of the civil war.  Aleppo itself may not matter much on Moscow's strategic chess-board. But the defeat of the rebel opposition there underscores the extraordinary turn-around in President Assad's fortunes. Before Russia intervened President Assad was on the ropes, his military power crumbling; now it looks as if he’ll win.  The West’s response…a fiery exchange at the UN, with US Ambassador Samantha Power accusing Syria and its allies of contributing to ‘a noose around civilians’ asking  ‘Are you truly incapable of shame?’

She is, of course, right. The civil war has been characterised by a total indifference to the fate of civilians who have been subjected to unspeakable atrocities, a new barbarism.  But the West is also culpable.  Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003—either an unprovoked assault on an independent country that may have breached international law or something authorised by United Nation sanction—the West has completely failed to stabilise the region and arguably has made the situation worse.  By removing despicable dictators in Iraq and then in Libya, initiating regime change and then failing to provide the mechanism to create a stable future, the West has been guilty of gross stupidity.  The scenario seems to have been…remove dictator, establishing a western style democratic government, let the liberated people get on with this and then act surprised when it all falls apart.  What this shows…apart from the hubris of the West…is that you can’t simply transplant democracy to countries with no real tradition of liberal democratic institutions.  The same applies to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’---I remember commenting on my blog at the time that the 1848 European revolutions came to mind…things that shone brightly and briefly and were then snuffed out by the forces of reaction…and so it was.  The West encouraged political aspirations and then expressed surprise when things did not turn out as they believed they ought.  The West’s interference in the region has largely been disastrous.

As the bombs continue to fall on Aleppo and its people, we sit well fed in our warm, comfortable houses and wring our hands at the inhumanity of man.  We moralise.  We call for the war to end, for the evacuation of civilians, for the feeding of the people starved for weeks.  We give words…words…words.  But we do nothing.  In fact, words are all we can give as the West has effectively abdicated any responsibility it may have felt for Syria.  I am reminded of Sir Humphrey’s words on the principles of foreign policy…’perhaps there was something we could have done…but it’s too late now!’