Industrial Revolution: Nature of Change

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.[1]

What was the nature and extent of change?

The view that the industrial revolution represented a dramatic watershed between an old and a new world has increasingly been questioned by historians. Growth was considerably slower and longer than previously believed though few historians would go as far as Jonathan Clark,

England was not revolutionized; and it was not revolutionized by industry.[2]

Change in the economy was multi-dimensional. There were dynamic industries like cotton and iron where change occurred relatively quickly and that may be called ‘revolutionary’. In other industries, change took place far more slowly. Between 1750 and 1850, the British economy experienced rapid, and by international standards, pronounced structural change. The proportion of the labour force employed in industry (extractive, manufacturing and service sectors) increased while the proportion working in farming fell. [3]

Much employment in industry continued to be small-scale, handicraft activities producing for local and regional markets. These trades were largely unaffected by mechanisation and experienced little or no increase in output per worker. Increased productivity was achieved by employing more labour.

The experience of cotton textiles, though dynamic and of high profile was not typical and there was no general triumph of steam power or the factory system in the early nineteenth century. Nor was economic growth raised spectacularly by a few inventions. The overall pace of economic growth was modest. There was no great leap forward for the economy as a whole, despite the experiences of specific industries. Productivity in a few industries did enable Britain to sell around half of all world trade in manufacture and by 1850 Britain was ‘the workshop of the world’. This, however, needs to be seen in the context of the characteristics of industrialisation. The ‘industrial revolution’ involved getting more workers into the industrial and manufacturing sectors rather than achieving higher output once they were there. The cotton and iron industries existed with other industries characterised by low productivity, low pay and lower levels of exports.

Between 1760 and 1800, there was a significant increase in the number of patents giving exclusive rights to inventors, what T.S. Ashton called ‘a wave of gadgets swept over Britain’.[4] Between 1700 and 1760, 379 patents were awarded. In the 1760s, there were 205, the 1770s, 294, the 1780s, 477 and the 1790s, 647. Certain key technical developments pre-dated 1760. Coke smelting was developed by Abraham Darby in Shropshire in 1709 but it was not until the 1750s that it was widely used. James Kay developed the ‘flying shuttle’ in 1733 increasing the productivity of weavers but it was thirty years before advances were made in spinning. Registering patents was expensive and as a result some inventions were not patented. Samuel Crompton, for example, did not register his spinning mule.[5] From the 1760s, there was a growing awareness of the importance of obtaining patents and the danger of failing to do so. This may account for some of the increase. Many of the patents covered processes and products that were of little economic importance, including medical and consumer goods as well as industrial technologies. Some patents represented technological breakthroughs while others improved existing technologies. Despite these reservations, there were important groupings of technological advances after 1760.

In the textile industries, there were advances in spinning thread with James Hargreaves’ ‘jenny’ in 1764,[6] Richard Arkwright’s water frame in 1769 and Samuel Crompton’s ‘mule’ in 1779, weaving with Edmund Cartwright’s power loom in 1785 and finishing with mechanised printing by Thomas Bell in 1783.[7] James Kay’s ‘flying shuttle’ had speeded up the process of weaving producing a bottleneck caused by the shortage of hand-spun thread. The mechanisation of spinning after 1764 reversed this situation. The new jennies allowed one worker to spin at least eight and eventually eighty times the amount of thread previously produced by a single spinner. Improvements by Arkwright and especially Crompton further increased productivity. The problem was now weaving. The power loom did not initially resolve the problem and the decades between 1780 and 1810 were ones of considerable prosperity for handloom weavers.[8]

Although the introduction of new machines for textile production, especially cotton occurred over a short timescale, their widespread use was delayed until the 1820s.[9] There were three main reasons for this. First, the new technologies were costly and often unreliable. Modifications were necessary before their full economic benefits were realised and it was not until the early 1820s that the power loom was improved and the self-acting mule was introduced.[10] Secondly, there was worker resistance to the introduction of the new technologies and some employers continued to use handworkers because they were cheaper than new machines.[11] This was particularly evident in the Yorkshire woollen industry that lagged behind cotton in applying new technology.[12] Finally, the original spinning jennies were small enough to be used in the home but Arkwright’s water frame was too large for domestic use and needed purpose-built spinning mills.

These early factories used waterpower though increasingly steam engines were used. By 1800, a quarter of all cotton yarn was spun by steam but factories did not combine powered spinning and weaving until after 1815. By 1850, some factories employed large numbers of workers, but most remained small. In Lancashire in the 1840s, the average firm employed 260 people and a quarter employed less than 100.[13] The mechanisation of the textile industry was a process in technological innovation and modification rather than an immediate revolutionary process.[14]

This was even more the case in the iron industry.[15] In 1700, charcoal was used to smelt iron and was increasingly expensive leading to Britain relying on European imports. Although Abraham Darby[16] perfected coke smelting in 1709 to produce ‘pig’ or cast iron it was not until demand for iron rose rapidly after 1750 that coke replaced charcoal as the fuel for smelting. The stimulus for expansion in iron making came from the wars with France and the American colonies in the 1750s and 1770s and especially between 1793 and 1815. This led technological change. Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling process of 1783-1784 that accelerated wrought iron production was of comparable importance to Darby’s earlier discovery.[17] The new technologies led to a four-fold growth of pig iron between 1788 and 1806, a significant reduction in costs and virtually put an end to expensive foreign imports. The ‘hot-blast’ of 1828 further reduced costs. Rising demand for iron stimulated developments in the coal industry. Here the major technological developments were led by the need to mine coal from deeper pits.[18] Pumping engines, first Newcomen’s and then Watt’s helped in this process. Sir Humphrey Davy’s safety lamp improved safety underground from inflammable methane gas or ‘firedamp’. Increases in productivity were, however, largely achieved by employing more miners.

Contemporaries and later historians emphasised the importance of the steam engine to the industrial revolution but wind and water remained important as sources of mechanical energy. Windmills were used for grinding corn, land-drainage and some industrial processes. Waterpower was far more important and remained so until the mid-nineteenth century.

Before 1800, most textile mills were water-powered and in 1830, 2,230 mills still used waterpower as against 3,000 using steam.[19] Metalwork, mining, papermaking and pottery continued to use waterpower. The development of steam power in the eighteenth century was gradual. Thomas Newcomen developed his steam-atmospheric engine in 1712 that was largely used for pumping water out of mines and though costly and inefficient was in widespread use by 1760.[20] Watt trebled the efficiency of the Newcomen engine by adding a separate condenser in the mid 1760s.[21] This made steam engine more cost-effective but they could still only be used for tasks involving vertical motion. The breakthrough came in 1782 with the development of ‘sun and planet’ gearing that enabled steam engines to generate rotary motion and power the new technologies in textiles. By 1800, about a fifth of all mechanical energy in Britain was produced by steam engines. Steam power was a highly versatile form of energy and its impact on British industry was profound.[22] It allowed industry to move into towns often on or near to coalfields where it could be supplied by canals. Though older means of generating energy remained important, the application of steam power to mining, iron-making, the railways and especially the booming cotton industry meant that by 1850 it was increasingly the dominant form of energy.

The technologies of the Industrial Revolution were adopted in Britain rather than elsewhere because they were profitable in Britain but generated losses elsewhere.[23] This explains Britain’s precociousness in invention: The famous inventions of the Industrial Revolution were invented in Britain because they generated enough profit to make the cost of developing and perfecting them worthwhile. This can be seen especially in relation to the spinning jenny. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that in 1764, James Hargreaves was inspired to develop the machine by seeing how a spinning wheel that had toppled over on its side, continued to rotate and spin automatically. Improvements in the jenny were rapid in the 1770s. The wheel was changed from a horizontal to a vertical orientation and the treadle that turned it was replaced by a simpler hand operated device. A roller was introduced that allowed the number of spindles to be increased to as many as the operator could turn. The first jennies had 12 spindles, but quickly 24 spindles became a standard design. These jennies were used in people’s houses. By 1780, a 120 spindle jenny was built, although 80 spindles became a standard. These jennies were located in workshops. This mode of production was cheaper than small jennies in cottages, and large workshop jennies had displaced smaller cottage jennies by 1790. Despite its revolutionary effects, the jenny was a simple machine that did little more than run a lot of spindles off a single spinning wheel and was hardly a conceptual breakthrough. The jenny was taken up very rapidly in England. The spread of jennies, especially larger ones in workshops, was punctuated by riots and arson as spinners protested against their use but by 1788, it was reported that 20,070 jennies were spinning cotton in Britain.

How important was technical advance to the industrial revolution? In 1776, Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations seemed unaware that he was living in a period of technical change and mechanisation. For him, economic growth was achieved through the organisational principle of division of labour rather than the application of new technologies. Others followed Smith in assigning less importance to technical change than historians subsequently did. The effect of technological change was neither immediate nor widespread until after 1800. Cotton and iron set the pace of change but other industries, like glass and paper-making, shipbuilding and food-processing were also undergoing organisational and technological change. Change varied across industries and regions. Steam power did not replace waterpower at a stroke. Work organisation and the uses of newer technologies varied and in 1850 factories coexisted with domestic production, artisan workshops and large-scale mining and metal-producing organisations. Both revolutionary technologies and traditional techniques remained important to Britain’s economic development

The pace of economic change and its geographical distribution after 1780 was uneven. Dynamic growth took place in specialised economic regions.[24] Cotton was largely based in south Lancashire and parts of Derbyshire and Cheshire. Wool was dominant in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Iron dominated the economies of Shropshire and South Wales. Staffordshire was internationally renowned for its potteries. Birmingham and Warwickshire specialised in metal-working. Tyneside was more diverse with interests in coal, glass, iron and salt. London with its huge population, sophisticated manufacturing and service sectors and its docks, warehouses, engineering, shipbuilding, silk weaving, luxury trades, the machinery of government and the law, publishing and printing, financial centre and entertainment was an economic region in its own right. De-industrialisation was also regional in character. After 1780, the West Country and East Anglia textile industries declined. The iron industry disappeared from the Weald in Kent and the Cumberland coalfield waned.

Regional growth or decline depended on a range of factors. Growth depended largely on access to waterpower as an energy source or as a means of processing, easy access to coal and other raw materials, and an ample labour force. In 1780, regions and their industries retained their rural character in varying degrees. Increasingly, however, industrial growth took on an urban character and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rapid expansion of towns that specialised in various industries. Around each of these urban centres clustered smaller towns and industrial villages whose artisan outworkers specialised in particular tasks. Walsall in the Black Country, for example, specialised in buckle-making; Coventry in ribbon production and tobacco boxes at Willenhall. The concentration of specialised commercial and manufacturing industries, especially skilled labour, in and around towns was a major advantage for entrepreneurs and businessmen. They were helped by the expanding communication network of roads and canal and after 1830 railways providing cheap supplies of raw materials and fuel as well as helping distribute finished products.

Economic change and population growth led to the rapid expansion of urban centres.[25] Towns, especially those in the forefront of manufacturing innovation, attracted rural workers hoping for better wages. They saw towns as places free from the paternalism of the rural environment and flocked there in their thousands. For some migration brought wealth and security. For the majority life in towns was little different, and in environmental terms probably worse than life in the country.

They had exchanged rural slums for urban ones and exploitation by the landowner for exploitation by the factory master. Between 1780 and 1811, England’s urban population rose from a quarter to a third, a process that continued throughout the century and by 1850, the rural-urban split was about even. The number of towns in England and Wales with 2,500 inhabitants increased from 104 in 1750 to 188 by 1800 and to over 220 by 1851. England was the most urbanised area in the world and the rate of urban growth had not peaked. London, with its one million inhabitants in 1801, was the largest city in Europe. The dramatic growth of the northern and Midland industrial towns after 1770 was caused largely by migration because of industry’s voracious demand for labour. Regions where population growth was not accompanied by industrialisation or where deindustrialisation took place found their local economies under considerable pressure. Surplus labour led to falling wages and growing problems of poverty.

Population growth, economic and social change, technological advances, changes in the organisation of work, the dynamism of cotton and iron as well as urbanisation were bunched in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth. This was revolutionary change. However, change was itself a process that extended across the eighteenth century. The revolution in the economy did not begin in 1780 nor was it completed by 1830.

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[1] Ashton, T.S., The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830, (Oxford University Press), 1948 is a straightforward introduction, though his conclusions are rather dated. It should be supplemented with Chambers, J.D., The Workshop of the World, (Oxford University Press), 1968, Checkland, S.G., The Rise of Industrial Society 1815-1885, (Longman), 1964, Deane, P., The First Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge University Press), 2^nd ed., 1983, Landes, D.S., The Unbound Prometheus, (Cambridge University Press), 1969, Hobsbawm, E.J., Industry and Empire, (Penguin), 1968, Mathias, P., The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1914, (Methuen), 2^nd ed., 1983 and More, C., The Industrial Age: Economy and Society 1750-1995, (Longman), 2^nd ed., 1997. Hudson, Pat, The Industrial Revolution, (Edward Arnold), 1992 is a valuable summary of research on both economic and social history. Daunton, M.J., Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700-1850, (Oxford University Press), 1995 and Wealth and welfare: an economic and social history of Britain, 1851-1951, (Oxford University Press), 2007, Mokyr, Joel, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850, (Yale University Press), 2009 and Floud, Roderick and Johnson, Paul A. (eds.), The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain. Volume 1: industrialisation, 1700-1860, (Cambridge University Press), 2004 and The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain. Volume 2: economic maturity, 1860-1939, (Cambridge University Press), 2004 are the most up-to-date studies. Floud, R., The People and the British Economy 1830-1914, (Oxford University Press), 1997 is the best short overview. Dodgshon, R.A. and Butlin, R.A., (eds.), An Historical Geography of England and Wales, 2^nd ed., (Academic Press), 1991 and Lawton R. and Pooley J., (eds.), Britain 1740-1950, (Edward Arnold), 1992 are excellent collections of papers. The best approach to the notion of a ‘slow growth’ industrial revolution remains Crafts, N.F.R., British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution, (Oxford University Press), 1985. Alternative approaches can be found in Lee, C.H., The British economy since 1700, (Cambridge University Press), 1987, 2^nd ed., 1994. Mokyr, J., (ed.), The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, (Westview Press), 1993 and Snooks, G.D., (ed.), Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary?, (Routledge), 1994. Digby, A. and Feinstein, C., (eds.), New Directions in Economic and Social History, 2 Vols. (Macmillan), 1989 and 1992 summarise developments in historical thinking. Ibid, Brown, Richard, Economic Revolutions 1750-1850: Prometheus Unbound? combines text with sources.

[2] Clark, J.C.D., Revolution and Rebellion: State and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (Cambridge University Press), 1986, p. 39.

[3] The   nature   of   industrial   organisation and the persistence of a ‘domestic’ system is examined in Thomis, M., The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution, (Batsford), 1974 and Responses to Industrialisation, (David   &   Charles), 1976   Clarkson, L.A., Proto-Industrialisation: The First Phase of Industrialisation, (Macmillan), 1985 examines the literature critically.

[4] Ibid, Ashton, T.S., The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830, p. 48. See also, MacLeod, Christine, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914, (Cambridge University Press), 2007 and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800, (Cambridge University Press), 1988. Allen, Robert C., The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, (Cambridge University Press), 2009 and ibid, Mokyr, Joel, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 place technological ideas and change at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

[5] See Calling, H., ‘The development of the Spinning Mule’, Textile History, Vol. 9, (1978), pp. 35-57.

[6] Aspin, Christopher, James Hargreaves and the spinning jenny, (Helmshore Local History Society), 1964.

[7] Hills, R.L., ‘Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton: why three inventors?’ Textile History, Vol. 10, (1979), pp. 114-126. See also, Aspin, Christopher, The water spinners, (Helmshore Local History Society), 2003, Fisk, Karen., ‘Arkwright: cotton king or spin doctor?’, History Today, Vol. 48, (3), (1998), pp. 25-30 and Merrill, J.N., Arkwright of Cromford, Matlock, 1986.

[8] Chapman, Stanley D. and Butt, John, ‘The Cotton Industry 1775-1856’ and Jenkins, D.T., ‘The Wool Textile Industry 1780-1850’, in Feinstein, C. H. and Pollard, Sidney, (eds.), Studies in capital formation in the United Kingdom, 1750-1920, (Oxford University Press), 1988, pp. 105-125, 126-140.

[9] Chapman, Stanley D., The cotton industry in the Industrial Revolution, (Macmillan), 1972 remains a good bibliographical essay. Rose, Mary B., (ed.), The Lancashire cotton industry: a history since 1700, (Lancashire County Books), 1996; Thompson, James, ‘Invention in the Industrial Revolution: the case of cotton textiles’, in Prados de la Escosura, Leandro, (ed.), Exceptionalism and industrialisation: Britain and its European rivals, 1688-1815, (Cambridge University Press), 2004, pp. 127-144; Farnie, Douglas A., The English Cotton Industry and the World Market, 1815-1896, (Oxford University Press), 1976.

[10] Lazonick, W., ‘Industrial relations and technical change: the case of the self-acting mule’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 3, (1979), pp. 231-262.

[11] Randall, A., Before the Luddites: Custom, community and machinery in the English woollen industry 1776-1809, (Cambridge University Press), 1991 places Luddism in a longer context and is particularly valuable for its discussion of community and cultural opposition to new technology. Thomis, Malcolm, The Luddites: Machine-breaking in Regency England, (David & Charles), 1970, Binfield, Kevin, (ed.), Writings of the Luddites, (John Hopkins University Press), 2004, pp. 1-68 and Vincent, Julien, Bourdeau, Vincent and Jarrige, François, Les Luddites: Bris de machines, économie politique et histoire, (Maisons-Alfort), 2006, pp. 17-54 consider the Luddite outbreaks.

[12] Crump, W.B., The Leeds woollen industry, 1780-182, (Thoresby Society), 1931, Rees, Henry, ‘Leeds and the Yorkshire woollen industry’, Economic Geography, Vol. 24, (1), (1948), pp. 28-34; Caunce, Stephen, ‘Complexity, community structure and competitive advantage within the Yorkshire woollen industry, c.1700-1850’, Business History, Vol. 39, (4), (1997), pp. 26-43; Smail, John, ‘The sources of innovation in the woollen and worsted industry of eighteenth-century Yorkshire’, Business History, Vol. 41, (1), (1999), pp. 1-15.

[13] Gatrell, V.A.C., ‘Labour, power, and the size of firms in Lancashire cotton in the second quarter of the 19^th century’, Economic History Review, Vol. 30, (1977), pp. 95-139 considers the size of enterprises.

[14] Harley, C.K. and Crafts, N.F.R., ‘Cotton textiles and industrial output growth during the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol. 48, (1995), pp. 134-144 examines the sixty years between 1770 and 1830.

[15] Harris, J. R., The British iron industry, 1700-1850, (Macmillan), 1988 looks at the research while Davies, R. S. W. and Pollard, Sidney, ‘The Iron Industry, 1750-1850’, in ibid, Feinstein, C. H. and Pollard, Sidney, (eds.), Studies in capital formation in the United Kingdom, 1750-1920, pp. 73-104 considers investment.

[16] Raistrick, Arthur, Dynasty of iron founders: the Darbys and Coalbrookdale, (Longman, Green), 1953; Flinn, M. W., ‘Abraham Darby and the coke-smelting process’, Economica, ns, Vol. 26, (1959), pp. 54-59; Trinder, Barrie, The industrial revolution in Shropshire, 3^rd ed., (Phillimore), 2000.

[17] Mott, R. A., Henry Cort, the great finer: creator of puddled iron, ed. P. Singer, (Metals Society), 1983. Cort took out patents in 1783 for the grooved rolling process and 1784 for his balling or pudding furnace, allowing the manufacture of crude, standardised shapes. His work built on the existing ideas of the Cranege brothers and their reverberatory furnace (where the heat is applied from above, rather than forced air from below) and Peter Onions’ puddling process where the iron is stirred to separate out impurities and extract the higher quality wrought iron.

[18] Pollard, Sidney, ‘Coal Mining 1750-1850’, in ibid, Feinstein, C. H. and Pollard, Sidney, (eds.), Studies in capital formation in the United Kingdom, 1750-1920, pp. 35-72.

[19] Harris, J.R., ‘The employment of steam power in the 18^th century’, History, Vol. 52, (1967), pp. 133-148.

[20] Mott, R.A., ‘The Newcomen Engine in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 35, (1964 for 1962-63), pp. 69-86 and Harris, J.R., ‘Recent research on the Newcomen engine and historical studies’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 50, (1980 for 1978-1979), pp. 175-192.

[21] Hills, R.L., James Watt, 3 Vols. (Landmark), 2002-2006 is a major study. See also, Hills, R.L., ‘James Watt and his rotary engines’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 70, (1), (1999), pp. 89-108 and Kanefsky, J., Boulton and Watt and the development of the steam engine: a reassessment, (Exeter University Press), 1978.

[22] Tunzelmann, G.N. von, Steam power and British industrialisation to 1860, (Oxford University Press), 1978, Crafts, N.F.R. and Mills, Terence C., ‘Was 19^th century British growth steam-powered?: the climacteric revisited’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 41, (2004), pp. 156-171, Tann, Jennifer, ‘Fixed Capital Formation in Steam Power 1775-1825’, in ibid, Feinstein, C. H. and Pollard, Sidney, (eds.), Studies in capital formation in the United Kingdom, 1750-1920, pp. 164-181, Hills, R.L., ‘The Importance of Steam Power during the Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Newcomen Society, Vol. 76, (2006), pp. 175-192 and Samuel, R., ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain,’ History Workshop, Vol. 3, (1977), pp. 6-72.

[23] See, Allen, Robert C., ‘The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France and India’, (Oxford University, Department of Economics), Working Paper 375, 2007.

[24] Hudson, Pat, (ed.), Regions and industries: a perspective on the industrial revolution in Britain, (Cambridge University Press), 1989.

[25] Clark, Peter, (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 2: 1540-1840, (Cambridge University Press), 2000 and Daunton, Martin J., (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, Vol. 3: 1840-1950, (Cambridge University Press), 2000 are essential.

Seigneurial system and settlement

The seigneurial system was a form of land settlement modelled on the French feudal system. It began in New France in 1627 with the formation of the Compagnie des Cent-Associés that was initially responsible for handing out land grants and seigneurial rights. The land was divided into 5 by 15 kilometre plots, usually along major rivers like the St. Lawrence. They were then further subdivided into narrow, but long lots for settlement. These lots were usually long enough to be suitable for faming, and they provided everyone who lived on them with equal access to neighbouring farms and the river.

Around 1637, to encourage French immigrants to settle in the St. Lawrence Valley, then known as ‘Canada’, the king implemented the seigneurial system, by distributing large tracts of land to settlement agents called ‘seigneurs’. These agents had to subdivide the tracts of land into lots or censives each measuring approximately three arpents[1] of frontage by 30 arpents in depth (180 by 1,800 metres). These lots were granted at no cost to new arrivals. In return for this ‘free’ land, a habitant was required to pay certain annual fees that constituted a form of the income and consumption taxes. These included not only the cens[2], which ranged from two to six sols[3] per arpent, and the rente,[4] usually 20 sols per arpent of frontage, but also, goods in kind, such as a pig or bag of wheat. In addition, a habitant wanting to graze farm animals on the common had to pay a few sols. To have wheat ground at the mill, a habitant paid the seigneur banalités, every fourteenth bushel of grain to pay off the cost of the building and pay the miller’s wages.[5] Similarly, a habitant was required to give every fourteenth fish to the seigneur in exchange for permission to fish the waters bordering the habitant’s land grant.

Beginning in 1670, tenants under the seigneurial system were required to remit a tithe to the Church. The tithe, equal to a twenty-sixth of the wheat crop, was used to maintain the religious buildings and property that the tenants used, such as the chapel, the rectory and the cemetery. Finally, the obligation to provide days of unpaid labour or corvée, dating back to the medieval period, remained in effect. A habitant was required to provide three to five days of unpaid labour each year for the maintenance of bridges and roads and for the construction of various buildings or structures, such as the manor house, the mill, barns, stables and fences.[6] In return, the habitant had access to the seigneury’s services and benefited from the security it provided.[7] The seigneurial system was central to France’s colonisation policy and came to play a major role in traditional Québec society. Despite the attractions of city life and the fur trade, 75-80% of the population lived on seigneurial land until the mid-nineteenth century. The roughly 200 seigneuries granted during the French regime covered virtually all the inhabited areas on both banks of the St Lawrence River between Montréal and Québec and the Chaudière and Richelieu valleys and extended to the Gaspé. Seigneuries were granted to the nobility, to religious institutions in return for education and hospital services, to military officers and to civil administrators.

By the end of the seventeenth century, much of the land adjacent to the river was occupied and this led to the building of a road behind the first concessions parallel to the river: this was the ‘rang’. Further land was then granted in long strips from this first ‘rang’ and this continued until the limits of arable land were reached. This structure formed the basic unit of the rural community and established a network of community solidarity. More generally, people were identified with their parish or canton (township), but it was the village or market town where people met to discuss politics, farm prices or offers of employment.[8]

Initially, the village was little more than a collection of houses spread at regular intervals along a road. At crossroads, or where a waterfall allowed the building of a mill, settlement was more densely concentrated giving rise to hamlets and markets. This also led to the development of commercial, administrative and industrial activities. The number of large villages was small until after the Conquest of 1760, but, between 1815 and 1850, the number of villages in Lower Canada grew from 50 to 300 containing 86,000 people. This rapid growth can be explained by the parallel growth of the Lower Canadian population that rose from 355,000 in 1815 to a million inhabitants by 1855. The birth rate was exceptionally high: in 1865, women had an average of seven children. Population growth led to increasing demands for goods and services that were provided by villages and this led to an intensification of the domestic trade in Lower Canada.

Largely because of the initiative of more entrepreneurial seigneurs, landless labourers were employed to develop rural industries especially in the communities round Montreal. There had always been artisans in villages and towns but by 1800 commodities were produced in smaller centres; for example, in the village of Saint-Charles in the Richelieu Valley, hat-making and pottery became important occupations and Saint-Jean became a centre for earthenware production. The appearance of coopers, tailors and carriage makers in other small centres emphasised the growing diversification of the rural economy.[9] Despite diversification of the rural economy, more than 80% of French Canadians were employed in farming in 1850. Soon prosperous market towns appeared such as Sainte-Rose, Terrebonne, Saint-Jérôme and Joliette on the north bank of the Richelieu, Saint-Charles, Napierville and Saint-Hyacinthe on the south bank and Saint-Romuald to the south of Quebec. This expansion of villages represented an essential transitory stage between the countryside and the cities by giving people their first experience of urban life.[10]

Most villages were organised on similar lines. The various buildings of the village were generally made of superimposed beams of squared timber. In the centre there was the church and presbytery generally built or rebuilt in stone. These buildings were extremely expensive to build and the community devoted much time and resources to them as the cost of building and running a church and the maintenance of the priest was met by the village. Parochial structures dated back to the seventeenth century and the territory was already squared into parishes by 1760. However, the increase in the number of villages and the growing power of the Church after 1840 led to the creation of new parishes and the sub-division of some that already existed. Although parishes often included several villages, they tended to take their name from the most important village community. When villages were established as municipalities after Confederation in 1867, their boundaries tended to follow existing parishes. This explains why there are so many small municipalities in Quebec today and why they often named after a saint.

Opposite the village church and the school that was generally attached to it, was the main street of the village occupied by the professional middle-class: lawyers, notaries, doctors, land-surveyors and principal businessman and merchants, the post master and blacksmiths. Because of the slowness of transport, there was also at least one inn that provided shelter for travellers. Buildings were less concentrated as one moved away from the centre of the village. The commercial activities tended to be located at the edges of villages: quays, warehouses, grain markets and industrial activities, such as sawmill, shipyards, potash factories, distilleries, etc. These enterprises were directly responsible for the growth of villages in the first half of the nineteenth century. They only employed a few workers but were found in significant numbers along the main transport routes.

There was considerable similarity in the social structure of villages across Lower Canada. Villages were generally founded by a seigneur though by the early-nineteenth century their economic and social role was declining. The priest was an important figure providing for the spiritual needs of the parish. The major problem in the early nineteenth century was that their numbers were limited: in 1837, there were only 273 priests for Lower Canada. While the number of priests remained small, there was a significant increase in the number of professionals. Between 1791 and 1836, the number of notaries increased from 55 to 373, lawyers from 17 to 208 and doctors from 50 to 260. They occupied the newer houses close to the centre of the village and were regarded as its natural leaders leading to many being elected to the Legislative Assembly. Closely linked to the professionals were artisans and merchants. They had many different roles and often travelled in search of work.

Farmers and share-croppers played an important role in the community providing much of the work for day labourers. Their wealth depended on their access to the market and they were, as was the case just before the Rebellions, particularly vulnerable to economic depression. They tended to be conservative in their economic and political attitudes. Farmers and their families tended to live outside the village. Their prosperity depended on access to the major road and river communication routes but there were wide variations of wealth across Lower Canada. Seigneurial tenure prevented the concentration of land but, as one writer commented in 1832, had the immense merit of obtaining land cheaply since habitants did not have to pay cash to benefit from it. Most work was carried out by the family especially the sons who hoped to obtain the paternal land in the future and who were prepared to work for nothing in the present. Habitants were not well regarded by the British or townspeople in general. In the eighteenth century, Frances Brooke found them ignorant, lazy, dirty and stupid to an incredible degree.[11] However, others saw them as honest, hard working, hospitable but also docile and submissive. In 1836, Romuald Trudeau criticised their lack of education and their idleness and their liking for spending time in inns. Observers were critical of habitant farming methods though this often reflected a failure to understand the peculiarities of colonial agriculture.[12] Levels of illiteracy among the French-speaking people were about 73% in 1838 but reached 88% in the countryside. This reflected not only inconsistencies in the provision of schooling in Lower Canada and a lack of interest by government but also habitant resistance to education.

Habitants frequently earned their living as day labourers. This sort of work was manual labour and labourers needed to be mobile to benefit from it. This appealed especially to unmarried men who could find themselves within a few months working in the city, then on logging sites or working for farmers during the labour-intensive harvest. Often casualties of the crisis in farming in the first decades of the nineteenth century and the resultant surplus of labour, their number is difficult to assess. Constantly on the move, they tramped the province in search of often transitory work. French Canadians moved as lumbermen into new forest frontiers, under employers largely from Britain or the United States and Quebec City, the centre of the lumber trade, grew in economic importance, offsetting Montreal’s hold on the fur trade.[13] It was not until after 1850 that the expansion of the industrial economy that day labourers gravitated towards working in factories and on public projects such as railway construction.

Finally, at the edge of the rural world there were squatters who farmed less fertile land. They often lived in intense poverty and a great isolation. The missionary priest provided some comfort to these thinly spread people who often lived in the immense and undeveloped forests. Diversification was also present among this marginal farming population that became increasingly dependent on cash income from forest work, a feature of the agro-forest economy of the Ottawa, Saint-Maurice and Saguenay valleys. [14] Family survival depended on men supplementing farm production with winter work in the forests.

The nature of rural economy and society is exemplified by the community that developed at Saint-Eustache.[15] In 1683, Michel-Sidrac Du Gué, seigneur de Boisbriand and captain of the regiment de Carignan-Salières was granted the Seigneurie-des-Mille-Isles. Because he did not attempt to settle it, the Crown withdrew his grant and in 1714 gave it to Jean Petit, treasurer of the Navy and Charles Gaspard Piot de Langloiserie. In 1733, Charlotte-Louise Petit, daughter of Jean Petit married Eustache Lambert-Dumont and Langloiserie’s daughter married Jean-Baptiste Céloron de Blainville. The Seigneurie-des-Mille-Isles was divided into the Seigneurie de Blainville and the Seigneurie Dumont also called the Seigneurie de la Rivière-du-Chêne. From 1755 to 1762, Dumont granted land to settlers along the Rivière-du-Chêne and also during this period he had the seigneurie’s first flour mill built. The construction of the church from 1780 to 1783 combined with the mill favoured the development of the market town of Saint-Eustache. Between 1784 and 1790, population increased from 1,958 to 2,385 habitants and the number of grants reached 336 by 1800 by which time the land along the Rivière-du-Chêne was completely settled.[16] The population of the region of Saint-Eustache continued to rise reaching 4,830 habitants in 1831 though, probably as a result of the Rebellion, this fell back to 3,195 in 1840.[17]

Before 1800, wheat farming made up eighty% of agricultural production in the Seigneurie de la Rivière-du-Chêne. Competition from Upper Canada from the mid-1800s led to a dramatic fall in demand for Lower Canadian wheat that led to depression in agriculture in the Seigneurie de la Rivière-du-Chêne that lasted until the 1830s. In the seigneury, the major causes of depression were obsolete farming techniques and severe shortages of land caused by the dramatic increase in the population. Following bad harvests in 1826-1827, the growing of corn was replaced with potatoes and oats.[18] By the early 1830s, Saint-Eustache was the third most important town in the province in terms of population and an important political and cultural centre. Its population was largely made up of farmers and members of the professions. It was one of the first centres to mobilise against the government during the 1837 Rebellion, a consequence of the strength of the local Patriote organisation led by Doctor Jean-Olivier Chénier[19] and W. H. Scott[20] since 1834. [21] The parish of Saint-Eustache was founded in 1825 with a population of 4,343 habitants of whom 393 lived in the village and the remainder in the surrounding area. There were 61 houses in the village and 777 in the countryside. Saint- Eustache was a large agricultural parish with 26,000 arpents of land. From 1 July 1855, legislation gave the village of Saint-Eustache ‘municipal’ status but it was not until 1948 that the village obtained the status of ‘town’ and it was three years later that its population exceeded that of its surrounding countryside.

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[1] An arpent is a unit of land measurement that equals 192 feet or 58.5 metres.

[2] The ‘cens’ was a nominal tax or land tax that replaced the ‘taille’, a direct tax levied on individuals in France. In New France settlers were also called ‘censitaires’, derived from this word that also relates to the word ‘census.’ The register in which the seigneur wrote the date and the amount paid each year by the censitaires was known as the ‘censier.’

[3] The ‘sol’ was the French money in the colony.

[4] The ‘rente’ was duty, royalty or tax paid in cash and, in many cases, with goods in kind.

[5] Under seigneurial tenure, grist mills (and, in many cases all mills), were seigneurial monopolies. This prevented a form of peasant rural accumulation common in freehold areas. It did not guarantee the existence of ‘service close to the producer’ since seigneurs commonly waited until there was a large enough pool of habitants before they would build a mill.

[6] The roads ‘provided’ by the seigneurs in Quebec were built by habitants on their own land or through communal labour, the ‘corvee’. The road system was actually governed by a colonial official, the ‘grand voyer’, not by the seigneurs.

[7] See, Desbarats, C., ‘Agriculture within the Seigneurial Régime of Eighteenth-Century Canada’, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 73, (1992), pp. 1-29; Harris. R. C., The Seigneurial System in Early Canada: A Geographical Study, (McGill-Queen’s University Press), 1984.

[8] Courville, Serge, Entre ville et campagne: L’essor du village dans les seigneuries du Bas-Canada, (Éditions PUL), 1990 remains an important study. Laurin, Serge, Les régions du Québec: Les Laurentides, (Éditions de l’IQRC), 2000 provides greater geographical and historical breadth.

[9] Courville, S., Robert, J-C and Séguin, N., ‘The Spread of Rural Industry in Lower Canada, 1831-1851’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, n.s., Vol. 2, (1991), pp. 43-70.

[10] Hardy, Jean-Pierre, La Vie Quotidienne dans la Vallée du Saint-Laurent 1790-1835, (Septentrion), 2001 provides an excellent synposis of life in the early-nineteenth century.

[11] Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague by the Author of Lady Julia Mandeville, (J. Dodsley), 1769, pp. 146-147. Frances Brooke (1724-1789) lived in Canada between 1763 and 1768 when her husband was military chaplain at Quebec and History of Emily Montague was one of the first novels written in the new World and certainly the first in Canada. See, Hammill, Faye, Canadian Literature, (Edinburgh University Press), 2007, pp. 33-38.

[12] Lambert, John, Travels Through Lower Canada and the United States of North America in the Years 1806, 1807 and 1808, 3 Vols. (Richard Phillips), 1810, Vol. 1, pp. 133-145 and Laterrière, Pierre de Sales, and Taunton, Henry Labouchere, A Political and Historical Account of Lower Canada, (W. Marsh & A. Miller), 1830, pp. 123-125, gave a negative view of farming.

[13] Innis, Harold A., The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, (Yale University Press), 1930, pp. 263-282 and Lower, Arthur R.M., Great Britain’s woodyard: Nritish America and the timber trade 1763-1876, (McGill-Queen’s University Press), 1973.

[14] Hardy, R., and Séguin, N., Forêt et societé en Mauricie, (Boréal Express), 1984.

[15] Grignon, Claude-Henri and Giroux, André, Le vécu à Saint-Eustache de 1683 à 1972: en hommage à nos patriotes, (Éditions Corporation des fêtes de Saint-Eustache), 1987.

[16] Giroux, André and Chapdelaine, Claude, Histoire du territoire de la municipalité régionale de comté de Deux-Montagnes, nd, pp. 15-17.

[17] Ouellet, Fernand, Le Bas-Canada de 1791 à 1840: Changements structuraux et crise, (Éditions de l’Université d’Ottawa), 1976, p. 243.

[18] Ibid, Giroux, André and Chapdelaine, Claude, Histoire du territoire de la municipalité régionale de comté de Deux-Montagnes, p. 19.

[19] Prévost, Robert, Chénier, l’opiniâtre, (Institut de la Nouvelle-France), 1940 is a short biography but see also Globensky, Maximilien, La Rébellion de 1837 à Saint-Eustache, pp. 220-224, passim. Messier, p. 109; Bernard, Jean-Paul, ‘Jean-Olivier Chénier’, DCB, Vol. 7, 1836-1850, pp. 171-174, is more recent. See also Laurin, Clément, ‘Bibliographie de Jean-Olivier Chénier’, Cahiers d’histoire de Deux-Montagnes, Vol. 5, (2), (1982), pp. 58-66.

[20] Globensky, Maximilien, La Rébellion de 1837 à Saint-Eustache, 1883, extended edition, 1889, reprinted (Éditions Du Jour), 1974, pp. 224-225, provided a brief, slanted biography. Messier, p. 441; Gouin, Jacques, ‘William Henry Scott’, DCB, Vol. 8, 1851-1860, pp. 791-792, is more balanced.

[21] Dubois, Abbé Émile, Le feu de la Rivière-du-Chêne, Étude historique sur le mouvement insurrectionnel de 1837 au nord de Montréal, (E.A. Deschamps), 1937; Paquin, Jacques, ‘La bataille de Saint-Eustache et le triste sort de Saint-Benoît’ in Boileau Gilles and Paquin, Jacques, Les Patriotes de Saint-Eustache, Cahier d’histoire de Deux-Montagnes, (Saint-Eustache: Société d’histoire de Deux-Montagnes), 1989.