Tag: Industrial Revolution

Posted on

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*”

Posted on

Middle-class at Heart (Part II)

In 2012 President Obama outraged many people when he tried to argue for the value of government by saying, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” His statement was wrong because, of course, you did build that.

But that doesn’t mean that you had no help. For many of us, that help goes back perhaps hundreds of years.

In my last post I wrote about some of the family histories my readers have sent me. I was struck by how “middle-class” their families were, even 100 or 150 years ago.  I concluded that if you are a successful professional today, chances are good that you have a family history with a lot of solid middle-class people behind you, people who worked hard, sometimes back-breaking hard, who gave up leisure, and who sought education for themselves or their children.

That doesn’t mean your family history didn’t have some cads and misfits (mine did) but the general direction was toward discipline.

In other words, we have a cloud of witnesses who have predated us. Perhaps we received material goods from those ancestors, but far more important were the habits of mind—the mental strength that allows us to give up short-term rewards in the hope of longer-term gains. Continue reading “Middle-class at Heart (Part II)”

Posted on

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?”

Posted on

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?”

Posted on

Forget the Industrial Revolution

I have criticized economists for oversimplifying issues,[1] but I must say that sometimes they cut through the Gordian knot of difficult historical questions. That has just happened with an article by Joseph Connors, James D. Gwartney, and Hugo M. Montesinos.[2]

For decades, almost since Arnold Toynbee coined the term, there has been a debate over whether the Industrial Revolution increased or reduced the standard of living, especially for workers. Was the nineteenth century a period of “massive and continuous” progress, or were the Marxists right in saying that “capitalism both in its evolution and present form must be evil”?[3]

Connors et al. will have none of that debate because they have come up with a revolution that, by important measurements, has had even more impact than the Industrial Revolution. It is happening now around the world, affecting nearly everybody, not just those in England or Western Europe. Continue reading “Forget the Industrial Revolution”