The Rise of Modern Industry

J.L. Hammond, Barbara Hammond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136597145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First Published in 2005. This book is written for the general reader and not for the specialist. It is an attempt to put the Industrial Revolution in its place in history, and to give an idea both of its significance and of the causes that determined the age and the society in which it began. The book is divided into three parts: in part one authors discuss the development of commerce before the Industrial Revolution; part two describes the changes in transport which preceded the railways, the dissolution of the peasant village, the destruction of custom in industry, and the free play that capital found in consequence. Part three examines the first social effects of the change from a peasant to an industrial civilization.

PART I
COMMERCE BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

CHAPTER I
FROM THE LEVANT TO THE ATLANTIC

THE Industrial Revolution has created societies in which the plainest lives are ruled by forces that are as wide as the world. In the Middle Ages a man’s neighbours were those who lived near him; his outlook was bounded by his village; he could watch the growing of his food, and the spinning and weaving of his clothes. This life, with the charm and the danger of its simplicity, was extinguished by a series of changes, of which the most dramatic were the great mechanical inventions that began in the eighteenth century and have succeeded one another with extraordinary rapidity from that time to this. The new industrial system has been associated throughout the world with the name of England, because the English people played the leading part in making and using the first discoveries. It was from England that the new processes, the new machinery and the new discipline passed to the continent of Europe.

This volume does not follow the fortunes of the revolution beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. This is not an arbitrary limit. England, unlike Germany and the United States, passed through a revolution of great importance before the introduction of the railway. That revolution was marked by the dissolution of the old village, by the transformation of the textile industries, by changes of a different kind in the Pottery industries, and by a great concentration of capital and power in the industries connected with iron, steel and coal. Its effects were important enough, and decisive enough, to alter the character of English life. It is this revolution that is the subject of this study.

There is another reason for taking this period as a unity. By the middle of the century it is possible to discern the contributions that England was to make to the solution of the problems created by these new conditions. The immediate confusion has passed; society makes its first efforts to adapt its arrangements to its new life; the distinctive features of a new civilization are emerging from the shadows. Decisions have been taken, institutions have been created, a temper has been formed, beliefs have assumed solid shape that are to influence, for good and for evil, throughout the nineteenth century, first the life of the English people, and later the life of all the most active of the races of mankind.

Moreover, by the middle of the nineteenth century, records have been drawn up that enable the historian to review the social consequences of this revolution. The tradition of the eighteenth century gave a very definite and limited purpose to government. The politicians of that age did not cherish or pursue great constructive aims, for they held that a nation, which had a governing class distributed over the countryside, needed little in the way of leadership or initiative from the centre. The business of Parliament was to redress grievances, rather than guide development. With this view of their duty Ministers were ready to inquire into allegations, and statesmen, who contributed singularly little to the reform or readjustment of their institutions, introduced a custom of signal importance, the custom of Parliamentary investigation. When the reform of Parliament brought to the House of Commons men who took a less modest and leisurely view of the scope of government, inquiry on behalf of Parliament became a regular stage in constructive reform. Thus in the first twenty years of the life of the reformed Parliament, Commissions and Committees examined one industry after another, one aspect of social life after another, and the reports they published throw a powerful light on the society that was leading the way in the Industrial Revolution. For these reasons it is possible to take the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, the phase that was peculiarly and predominantly English, and to attempt to construct a picture of its effects.

The Industrial Revolution was in one sense catastrophic, since it had effects that were immediate, and spectacular; in another it was gradual, for it was the climax or the sum of a series of developments, none of them peculiar to England, some of them later in time in England than elsewhere. Any definition of this new society would make it clear that it could not have been called into being by any single set of forces. Its men and women, in Mr. Hardy’s phrase, serve smoke and fire rather than frost and sun; they produce for commerce and not merely for subsistence; they use in their daily lives the products of different countries for which they make payment by an elaborate system of exchanges; they live by an economy in which occupations and processes are sharply specialized; they rely for most of their production on the help of machines; the mass of persons taking part in this production have no property in the land, the capital, or the instruments on which it depends. It could not be said of a society so complex as this, that it was created by Watt, by Arkwright, by Crompton or by Stephenson. All that can be said is that the inventions by which those names are known throughout the world were decisive events in its history: decisive, because mass production depends on those inventions, and mass production is an integral part of the new system. Those inventions were essential, but among the causes that made the English people what they became, other events were not less significant.

In one sense the French Revolution created modern France, but modern France is the creation also of Louis XI, of Henry IV, of Richelieu, of the men and the forces that made France a great State before that Revolution made her a new type of society. So with England. Watt invented in an England that had accepted and adapted the Reformation, established an oligarchy in power, achieved a unity of law and government, created a constitution more flexible and liberal than those of its contemporaries, acquired an empire in distant seas. If the French Revolution had come in a different France, or the Industrial Revolution had come in a different England, each would have followed a different path, obeyed different forces, and created a different society. Any attempt then to describe the Revolution, however brief, will demand a sketch, however slight, of the general conditions that determined its time and place, its fortunes and its character. It is the object of these introductory pages not to attempt a summary or an interpretation of history, but to glance at certain salient passages that help to explain why eighteenth-century England was the agent, or the victim, of this revolution: the hero or the villain of this sensational piece.

A society whose habits depend so intimately on foreign exchange as those of modern England, cannot come to life in a world in which overseas commerce is mainly an exchange of luxuries. Before the discovery of the Atlantic routes Europe was such a world. The importance of the industrial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will become clearer, if we glance at the economy of that world as illustrated in two epochs of its history: first the epoch in which Rome, and then that in which Venice held the chief door between Europe and the East. In both of those epochs there was a well-organized and highly developed commerce, and industrial production assumed many of its modern features. It is worth while to survey, however briefly, the character of that commerce and that production, in order to see what was old and what was new in the system round which the life of mankind began to revolve in the eighteenth century.

Roman history presents of course a number of obvious resemblances to our modern economy. Capitalist organization is used to develop agriculture, mines, and forests, and overseas commerce. The story of Italian agriculture in the days of the Roman republic has pointed many a moral in modern controversies, and people who have never read a line that Pliny wrote, know his famous judgment, latifundia perdidere Italiam. Large scale production superseded the old peasant economy, and where this production was directed to the most profitable forms, such as growing vines and olives, the purchase of salt fish and clothing for the slaves was organized, as it might be organized in a modern compound; when this slave system broke down with the gradual failure in the supply of slave labour, it was followed by a system of serf farming, with mean whites attached to the soil; the loss of the old peasant farmer was lamented by poets and critics like Seneca and Virgil; statesmen like the Gracchi, Augustus, Tiberius, Trajan, Hadrian, Nerva and Alexander Severus, tried in vain to resettle him on the soil of Italy. There is a familiar ring about this story.

Large capital found even greater openings in commerce. Dr. Johnson thought the English merchant was a new type of gentleman, but eighteen centuries earlier Cicero, discussing the careers that might be held suitable to a gentleman, liberales habendi, included trading, if it was wholesale and on a large scale.¹ Successful commerce took a Roman as it takes an Englishman into the ranks of a proud and powerful aristocracy.

Another feature of our modern industrial society is specialization: the distribution of functions and services in production and exchange among classes, districts, peoples, climates. But specialization begins early. Damascus or Babylon were as celebrated for a special product thirty centuries ago, as Bolton, or Sheffield, or Kidderminster are to-day. And as first Greece and then Rome brought to Europe the arts of the East, the growing of flax, olives, vines, artificial grasses, and the culture of this or that product, different places in Europe came to be associated with different industries. Under the rule of Rome, Italian and Gallic towns made their mark in one trade or another: Arezzo became famous for pottery, Aquileia for bricks: there were districts in Gaul that could vie with Asia in producing dyes: Varro says that the curing of bacon for the Roman market was a Gallic industry, and that merchants in the valley of the Po sent their wines across the Adriatic to the barbarians on the Danube.

The overseas commerce of this world has been the subject of two famous descriptions, one by Juvenal, the other by Gibbon.¹ Ostia was crowded with merchant fleets. Ships brought corn from Africa or Sicily; but they brought also luxuries from all parts of the known world: furs from Scythia, amber from the Baltic, carpets from Babylon, silks, precious stones and spices from Arabia and India. Every year a fleet sailed from Myos Hormos, a port in Egypt, to the coast of Malabar, or the island of Ceylon, where merchants awaited them from all parts of Asia. The fleet returned in the winter, and its cargo, unloaded on the Red Sea, was carried on the backs of camels to the Nile, to be taken to Alexandria and Rome. A holidaymaker, indulging his fancy, as he loitered beside the ships at Ostia, might feel, no less than the man who loitered along the docks of Bristol in the seventeenth or of Liverpool in the eighteenth century, that he was in touch with the fables and riches of the East.

How were these luxuries paid for? In the modern world a country that received from its neighbours all that Rome was receiving would be developing its resources to pay for the luxuries it consumed. Rome was not in this position. In the Mediterranean world there was exchange of products over a wide area, but the States most active in that trade, Egypt, Carthage, Syracuse, were conquered by a power that based its economic prosperity on the plunder of its neighbours. In this sense almost all that was brought up the Tiber was tribute rather than commerce. The great economy on which Rome depended for her lavish life and her power in Europe was not an economy of production,¹ but an economy of pillage. She had at her mercy a number of Sovereigns and States that were rich and weak, and she swept all the treasure they had accumulated, largely, of course, by extortion from their own subjects, into her capital. In the second century b.c. Paulus, who conquered Macedon, brought nearly two millions into the Treasury, and enabled Rome to dispense with a property tax. In the last century of the Republic, the East and the Mediterranean were rifled more systematically: every general or politician in difficulties turned to Asia or Egypt; Julius Cæsar was meditating an expedition to Parthia at the moment of his death. A modern historian has thus summed up the dealings of Rome with the East: Rome seized the treasures of the East; then with outward peace and order commerce and industry began to recover, so that the East could buy back its precious metals. Rome would then seize these treasures again. This process was repeated till the East was exhausted.² It was with this treasure that Rome paid for her imports.¹ Peace was not less profitable than war in this relationship, for the system of farming the taxes gave to a needy nobleman or a contractor with nimble fingers endless opportunities of extortion. The sharp business man from Rome could make money in Syria or Africa in the closin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Prefaces
• Preface to Fifth Edition
• Contents
• Introduction
• Note on Further Reading
• Part I Commerce Before the Industrial Revolution
• Part II The English Industrial Revolution
• Part III The Social Consequences
• Index