Economic History | Jane Takes On History

July 7, 2020February 23, 2024

Child Labor—in the Congo and in the Industrial Revolution

According to the United Nations, 40,000 children work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, mining for the mineral cobalt. They work for up to 12 hours a day under dangerous conditions that can be deadly when they have to go underground.

Americans may be partly responsible for their work.

Cobalt is an essential ingredient of most electric vehicle batteries, and demand for electric vehicles is growing. The U. S government is promoting and subsidizing EVs. Recently, in a House-passed infrastructure bill, a Republican congressman tried to ban the purchase of battery ingredients that depend on child labor. His amendment was struck down.

Around 1780, thousands of children as young as 5 or 6 years old began to work 12 hours or more daily in British textile mills.[1] Can we learn something from that experience?

Children had always been expected to work in England, often for long hours, but the mechanized factories brought them out of homes and workshops. The textile mills didn’t need brawn; owners wanted women and children to monitor the moving machines and piece together broken threads. Their work cost less than men’s and they were more docile. Continue reading “Child Labor—in the Congo and in the Industrial Revolution”

June 30, 2020August 8, 2023

Remember the Ladies, Mr. Cannadine*

In studying British history, I’ve come across female British historians of the early twentieth century who helped develop economic history as a discipline. They were intellectuals; we’d call them “blue-stockings” in the United States (a few were also elegant), and they tended to delve deeply into regional archives.

Julia Mann, for example, was the expert on Britain’s pre-industrial textile industry; Ivy Pinchbeck wrote a pioneering volume about how women’s lives were changed by the Industrial Revolution; and Pat Hudson practically owned the history of woolen textiles, Britain’s largest industry before the Industrial Revolution.

I recently read a 1992 essay by Maxine Berg indicating that these historians, while well-regarded, were not taken as seriously as they should have been. [1] Berg suggests that such inattention may distort our understanding of the historiography of Britain.

I realize that historiography—the study of what historians write—may not appeal much to my readers, but that is what my master’s thesis is about. Specifically, I’m looking at what historians have said about labor conditions in the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850) and how their views changed over the years. Thus I need to know which historians helped paint the picture accurately.

And I see that some may have been left out. Continue reading “Remember the Ladies, Mr. Cannadine*”

May 28, 2020May 30, 2020

What Free Trade?

Was the Industrial Revolution the period of great free-trade thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume? Yes.

Was it a period of free trade? No.

One of the things that has struck me in my study of the Industrial Revolution (1750 to 1850) is how much protection the British government gave to various industries through tariffs or bans on imports.

Let’s start with wool, once Great Britain’s largest industry. From the mid-1600s, the woolen-cloth industry had kept its raw material prices low through a ban on the export of raw wool. Then at the end of the century calicoes (printed cottons from India) became quite popular. The wool industry responded by getting Parliament to ban imports of calicoes in 1700.

The law kept out Indian cotton but it opened the door to homemade British cottons! First, British companies began printing imported cloth to create calicoes; then they started producing the cloth itself.

Continue reading “What Free Trade?”

May 18, 2020March 17, 2024

Why Work If You Can’t Buy Anything?

In the 1600s and 1700s in England, prominent writers such as Daniel Defoe argued that the wages of laborers should be kept low. If wages were too high, laborers would only work a few days a week and be idle the rest of the time.

“There is a general taint of slothfulness upon our poor,” wrote Defoe in 1704; “there’s nothing more frequent than for an Englishman to work until he has got his pocket full of money, and then to go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till ‘t is all gone.”[1] And in 1771 Arthur Young wrote: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.”[2]

This was part of the mercantilist mindset, said Edgar S. Furniss in 1920 in a book that I discussed earlier in a different context.

The prevailing view was that labor had what economists call a “backward-bending supply curve.” As wages went up—which normally would draw in more supply—a good portion of the work force worked less, not more. Apparently, they didn’t need more.

Why Early Industrial Workers Didn’t Work Much

But there was actually a good reason they might not need more. There wasn’t much to buy. They couldn’t go down to the local Best Buy for gadgets or go over to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. It wasn’t until coffee, tea, and gadgets became options that workers began voluntarily to work more. Continue reading “Why Work If You Can’t Buy Anything?”

May 18, 2020May 27, 2020

Jared Diamond writes about “The Germs that Transformed History.” In the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall).

“[The Black Death’s] immediate effect on Western Europe’s economy and trade was disastrous. Paradoxically, though, its long-term impact was positive.”