Category: European History

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Middle-class at Heart (Part I)

“The baby is sick. He has been sick a long time. He cries a lot and Pa sometimes spanks him to make him be good. When he sits in his high-chair he can’t hold up his head  . . . Ma says she doesn’t have time to take care of him and anyway she is too busy to eat herself so she has no milk for the baby.”

So wrote Gertrude Willson in her diary in upper New York State during the mid-1880s. That starving baby grew up to be a school principal in New York City, although he died at age 56 because of his early malnutrition. Gertrude went to normal school and became a teacher. Her cousin became a school principal, then turned Methodist and became a circuit-riding preacher in Nebraska, and later was an Episcopal priest.

However poor her family was, Gertrude Willson’s family had pluck and determination and overcame odds.

A couple of months ago I asked readers to send me stories about their family history. I published one of them, by David Brook, and plan to publish the story of Gertrude Willson, a cousin of John Willson, in a future post.

The people who sent me stories are well-educated professionals. If there is one thing that has struck me about their family stories, it is how “middle class” they are, even going way back. That’s true of my family, too. By middle-class I mean that they worked hard, out of duty as much as necessity; they expected their children to do so, too; and they valued education. Continue reading “Middle-class at Heart (Part I)”

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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?”

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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?”

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History News in May

Mary Grabar critiques Howard Zinn and the New York Times’  1619 project.

Matt Ridley explains how innovation happened. On HumanProgress.org.

They even sent children by mail. National Geographic tells the history of the U. S. Post Office.

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.”

Historian George Nash puts the pandemic in perspective. On National Review.

Michael J. Douma reviews William Caferro’s book Teaching History.

Irish pandemic gifts to Choctaw Indians echo Choctaw’s 1847 gift to famine-ridden Ireland. In the Washington Post‘s “Retropolis.”

Continue reading “History News in May”

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A Tocqueville Insight, Largely Ignored

I have been studying the poor laws of England. From 1601 to 1834 England was unique among European nations in that people in need could receive financial aid, paid for by taxes. Other countries relied almost entirely on charity.

But the cost of relief kept going up. As early as 1662, an act was passed limiting relief to the poor who were born or  in the local parish or had lived there long enough to be “settled.”  Those from elsewhere had to go home if they wanted relief—or even if the parish overseers suspected they might want relief in the future. The immobility of the poor made it hard to find jobs.

The poor (who became known as paupers) were increasingly viewed as idle and vicious. Over the years, prominent people from John Locke to Jeremy Bentham came up with fanciful schemes for correcting the bad behavior of the poor—educating them, working them, punishing them. Little change occurred, however.

It turns out that Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French author of Democracy in America, probably understood England’s poor laws better than the English did. Continue reading “A Tocqueville Insight, Largely Ignored”