ASPECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Any attempt to grasp the meanings of the Industrial Revolution in England is confronted instantly with a paradox: it is not one but two revolutions that are in question, and while they are inextricably linked, they are often studied as though one is autonomous of the other. The first, of course, was the economic transformation associated with the application of significantly new technology, changes in the dominant forms of industrial organization, accelerated urbanization, and ( a view recently brought into question ) massive rates of growth. The second revolution was broader and at times less tangible, but equally significant. It involved the human experiences produced by industrialization: the rise of new social relationships, new forms of suffering and ways of fighting this suffering, new possibilities, and new identities and ideologies. Historiographical approaches to these revolutions display a sharp cleavage, and the questions addressed to one often seem to be mutually exclusive, sometimes contradictory, of those addressed to the other.

To put it in very simplistic terms, this concerns the cleavage between social and economic history, perhaps exhibited more clearly here than in any other case. On the one hand, there is the concern with the triggers of what Rostow termed the `take-off into self-sustained growth’ in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the principal agents here are price and wage series, increases in national income per capita, rates of industrial output and growth, and indices of demand, consumption and investment. In this approach, therefore, the autonomy of economic history in a `pure’ state is asserted. On the other hand, there are the `human results’ of the Industrial Revolution, and we are shifted into the realm of social history. Since Thompson’s accent on `experience’ in The Making Of The English Working Class, the Industrial Revolution has become a focus for the study of class consciousness, the experience of industrial capitalism `from below’, the ideologies and movements of the exploited. In its most suggestive form, the social history of the Industrial Revolution has been dominated – or at least heavily influenced – by socialist historiography. The two approaches do meet at certain times: in the famous `standard-of-living’ controversy, for instance, and in some of the work of Eric Hobsbawm, and, more recently, Maxine Berg. However, this is countered by some of the more recent trends in British economic history, as indicated by the work of Donald McCloskey, Roderick Floud, and Nick Crafts, among others. While their analyses are perhaps more rigorous and sustained than those of, say, David Landes in the late 1960s, they also exhibit a readiness to reduce the `extra-economic’ currents of the later 18^th and early 19^th century to a convenient background, almost a wallpaper, against which the principal actors of the Industrial Revolution – prices, incomes, technology, rates of growth – could play out their parts.

The origins of the Industrial Revolution

Seen as economic history, the Industrial Revolution has provoked very sharp and animated historiographical debates. The initial British experience of industrialization, which can tentatively be dated between the 1780s and the 1830s or 1840s ( though this periodization is not unquestioned ), has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Phyllis Deane, one of the pioneer economic historians of the Industrial Revolution, sought in the 1950s to summarize the significant aspects of economic transformation. She listed a range of characteristics that constituted early industrial England, among these being the application of science and arithmetical knowledge to production for the market, the specialization of production in the context of international trade, the depersonalization and enlargement of the typical unit of production, the substitution of labour by the extensive and intensive application of capital, urbanization, population increase, and the rise of new social classes. These remain important keys to an understanding of the Industrial Revolution, although the element of an economic growth that can sustain and reproduce itself is also important. The overcoming of the Malthusian trap – always, it is to be remembered, in average, national terms, for there were people who starved even in periods of plenty – is important, since Britain witnessed a demographic revolution that was simultaneous with, and linked to, the rise of industry.

Certain qualifications need to be made when examining the history of the Industrial Revolution. First, recent research has demonstrated that the classic statistics for British economic growth in the Industrial Revolution – those presented by Deane and Cole – are exaggerated. Nick Crafts, while not rejecting the concept of an economic revolution as some have done, suggests a gentler, more gradual slope upwards. This evidently contrasts with the view put forward by David Landes, which Maxine Berg describes as `apocalyptic’. Crafts locates the origins of the Industrial Revolution in processes underway in the 18^th century – the increasing rate of industrialization of the labour force, a rise in the volume of resources devoted to investment, growing urbanization, the integration of markets, falling transport costs, and greater specialization. Many historians have pointed out the fairly slow rate of growth of GNP in Britain in the period of industrial revolution. However, on the whole, with a few exceptions, the concept of the Industrial Revolution remains acceptable to historians, justifiably, since the nature of changes brought about by industrial society is so palpably immense and significant.

Eric Hobsbawm, in keeping with what is essentially a Marxist understanding, has repeatedly stressed that the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood by means of a neutral concept of `industrialization’, but in terms of the web of social relations in and through which it developed. The key concept in this understanding, then, is industrial capitalism, the social relations of production, forms of accumulation and exploitation that determined the experience of industrialization. Whatever the ideological problems that this assertion might pose for some, it is nevertheless important if one is to avoid subscribing to an entirely autonomous, historically disembodied view of economic history.

Deane suggested that the Industrial Revolution is best understood in the context of four other economic revolutions happening in England at the time, which acted on and were simultaneously spurred on by industrialization. These were the demographic revolution, the transport revolution, the agricultural revolution, and the commercial revolution. While this presentation of complex processes is somewhat schematic, it does supply a useful key to the dominant processes in the age of industry.

First, after an extended period of stagnation, British population exploded between 1751 and 1830, rising from 6.5 to 14 million. There was a general rise in birth rates, and mortality rates declined sharply ( although, as Hobsbawm points out, they were to begin rising again in the early nineteenth century ). This sharp increase in population meant that there was no shortage of labour: indeed, one of the features of British industrialization was that it rested on a constant and massive pool of cheap surplus labour. It can also be argued that population increase created a large home market for industrial and agricultural produce. However, as Hobsbawm points out, domestic demand created through demographic rise cannot explain the industrial revolution, since England already possessed a flourishing market economy in the mid-eighteenth century, and there was ample demand for domestic small-scale production.

The revolution in transport was based on roads and waterways. Britain, being the pioneer industrial nation, was also the only one to industrialize before the introduction of the railway ( which was introduced in 1830 ). Engineers like Telford, Metcalf and MacAdam ( associated with `macadamized’ roads ) played an important role in improving road transport. Turnpikes ensured public investment in road maintenance. By 1751-72, 389 turnpike trusts had been set up, and by 1830 20,000 miles of roads were covered by these trusts. Water transport expanded its cope hugely, as in the last quarter of the 18^th century the area of dock land and harbour basins doubled ( the increase in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was more than tenfold ). This accelerated an already existing trend, since the use of a dispersed and casual labour force in dock construction and the maintenance of port towns had been a major feature of seventeenth-century social and economic relations. What was new was the scale of capital invested in dock and harbour construction, all the more significant since these involved huge social overhead capital costs, yielding no immediate returns. Between 1760 and 1830, British canal construction, too, witnessed a peak. This immensely reduced the costs of transport of raw materials, and thereby also reduced overall production costs. Canals cut the costs of transport per ton between Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham by 80%.

The revolution in agriculture had already been underway in the seventeenth century, and the practice of enclosing arable and common lands to carry out capitalist agriculture had been one of the focal points of the English Revolution of the 1640s. Between 1750 and 1800, there were over 2000 Acts and countless unofficial arrangements that intensified this process. As Hobsbawm points out, enclosures were a highly differentiated practice, and frequently involved peasant cooperation as well as coercion. There is also, in the eighteenth century, no clear link between enclosure and rural unemployment. However, the practice of encroachment upon commons and wastelands – often autonomous of enclosures, but not always – did involve trampling upon customary common rights that cottagers had enjoyed for generations, in the interests of private property. The varied practices of consolidation of land and the application of machinery ultimately led to a massive rise in productivity, and facilitated a supply of food sufficient to feed a rapidly rising – and industrializing – population. Other than this, as Robert Allen points out, the contribution of agriculture to industrialization is difficult to ascertain, although Nick Crafts has recently restated the case for the release of labour from agriculture on a substantial scale between 1700 and 1850.

The domestic economy and market thus provided a broad and steady base upon which industrialization could rest. However, as many historians – most forcefully Hobsbawm – have argued, in the short run it was overseas commerce that played the crucial role of ignition. Between 1750 and 1770, Hobsbawm points out, home industries increased their output by about 7%, and export industries by 80%. Foreign demand multiplied, and this expansion was founded on the capture of overseas markets and the destruction of domestic competition – in short, on colonialism, slavery and an aggressive re-export trade. For Hobsbawm, the readiness of the British government to subordinate all foreign policy to economic ends, its systematic support for merchants, and its aggressive maritime policies were crucial factors. British monopoly of `underdeveloped’ colonial markets and of the slave trade contributed to the Industrial Revolution in large measure. Within the context of a tight and expanding network of international trade, the ability of the British to control and manipulate the circulation of commodities, capital and labour created a potentially limitless horizon of profits and sales for merchants and manufacturers. Export trade was volatile, but it offered possibilities for accumulation on an unprecedented scale. David Landes qualifies Hobsbawm’s understanding a little by pointing out that export figures tend to level off in the third quarter of the 18^th century. However, he concedes that the possibilities of overseas demand, even if concentrated in short bursts, were a significant stimulant to industrialization. In general, it is clear that from the late eighteenth century the waves of investment in industry tended to follow the patterns of increase in overseas sales. The importance of overseas trade is manifested in the trajectory followed by the cotton industry, the centre-piece of the early industrial revolution. This would tend to strengthen Hobsbawm’s case.

Other factors favourable to industrialization in Britain have been adduced. One is the role of the State, hinted at above. From the standpoint of liberal economics, the `minimalism’ of State intervention provided a basis for the Industrial Revolution, leaving the field open for entrepreneurs. However, this argument is faulty on two grounds. First, there is no necessary link between laissez-faire and industrialization, as the German industrial experience demonstrates. Second, the State was non-interventionist insofar as it respected the rights of capital and capitalist property. There were significant import restrictions – in particular on Indian cotton textiles – in the early period of industrial growth. Equally significantly, capitalist trade operated through colonial monopolies and – for a long period – slave trade, backed to the hilt by the State. Within England, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw the accretion of power by the State vis-a-vis the rights of labour, culminating in Pitt’s Combination Act of 1800. Historians like Thompson, Linebaugh and Douglas Hay have pointed out the savagery of law in the eighteenth century, and the brutal punishment of even the smallest of offences against property through the multiplication of capital statutes. This was a process that started well before the Industrial Revolution, and continued into the nineteenth century.

Explorations of the origins of the British Industrial Revolution also point to the strange absence of technical education in England, which perhaps influenced the atomized and localized nature of early technological change. Weighed against this are arguments – put forward by Joel Mokyr and others – that there was considerable political and institutional support for technological progress, as demonstrated by the operation of the patent system. Further, more so than any other country, England could boast of highly skilled artisans who specialized in the mechanical trades. The machine-tool industry was largely founded on the efforts of these.

Finally, historians have pointed to the unique financing system of the Industrial Revolution, which was founded on a highly differentiated and flexible banking system. The Bank of England at the centre mobilized large amounts of capital for the government whenever necessary, 60-odd big London banks served an elite clientele, and below this there were about 800 country banks with the authority to issue notes more or less unrestrictedly themselves. Despite the potentially inflationary tension implied by this, capital was always readily available for small entrepreneurs. This, too, contributed to the fragmented nature of early technological change.

Technology And Industrial Growth

The pacemaker of early industrial change, as most historians agree, was cotton. Cotton provides a striking illustration of Hobsbawm’s assertion that the Industrial Revolution was substantially based on colonial commerce. The raw material for cotton manufacture was largely provided by the slave plantations of the West Indies, and competition from imports of finished Indian cotton textiles was banned in 1700. Local manufacturers emerged around Bristol, Glasgow, and Liverpool – major loci of slave and colonial trade – and eventually, with the tenfold expansion of cotton exports between 1750 and 1770, in Lancashire. The peculiarity of the explosion of the cotton industry lies in the fact that it had been a rather local and marginal industry even within the textile sector prior to its revolutionization, wool manufacture being the dominant form of textile production. Further, cotton was largely a domestic industry, concentrated in homes and small workshops, worked by spinning-wheels, handlooms, and manually operated printing presses. The bulk of labour in the spinning sector was carried out by women and children, and this continued into the period of industrialization, a point stressed by Maxine Berg.

The major problem faced by the cotton industry, as Hobsbawm points out, was the imbalance between the efficiency of spinning and weaving, which were effectively separate industries, with separate production processes. The spinning wheel could not supply weavers fast enough. This was transformed utterly by three major inventions: Hargreaves’ spinning jenny in 1764, Arkwright’s water-frame in 1768, and Crompton’s mule in 1779. These inventions made it possible to spin finer yarns than the Indian hand-spinner at much lower cost. The problem of the generation of power was solved by the application of the steam engine, applied to both textiles and mining. Newcomen had built the first steam engine in 1712, but Watt’s introduction of a separate condenser in 1765 increased fuel efficiency massively, to the extent that Watt is credited erroneously with the whole invention. In 1790, the spinning mule was attached to the steam engine. By the early 19^th century, cotton had witnessed a phenomenal, 200-fold rise in productivity.

Weaving was mechanized much slower, despite the invention of the power loom by Cartwright in 1785. Till 1820, though, power weaving was experimental and tentative, as Joel Mokyr points out. In part, the slowness of mechanization in the weaving sector had to do with the bitter resistance put up by hand-weavers to the disappearance of their trade and their means of subsistence. The period between 1780 and 1820, according to contemporary observers, represented a golden age for the hand-weaver, since the the rapid supply of cotton yarn necessitated a rapid multiplication of hand-looms and manual weavers. Improved power-looms began to replace weavers from the 1820s, but it was not until the 1850s that the handloom weaver disappeared entirely from the scene. As Berg has pointed out, `traditional’ forms of technology and production coexisted with the new, mechanized industry till the 1850s, and the relationship between the two was not always purely competitive. However, as Berg herself has frequently pointed out, this does not indicate a kind of `continuity thesis’. As experienced by spinners and weavers, the revolution in cotton manufacture was apocalyptic, and the sense of the almost overnight disappearance of old ways of life and rights was very strongly felt. And subsequent to the 1820s, the disappearance of the weaver did actually constitute a kind of economic genocide. Hobsbawm cites certain statistics that clarify this. The number of power-looms in weaving increased from 2400 in 1813 to 55,000 in 1829, 85,000 in 1833 and 224,000 by 1850. In the same period, the number of hand-loom weavers in Britain fell from 250,000 in the 1820s to 100,000 in the 1840s and 50,000 by the mid-1850s. These figures demonstrate an experience of mass redundancy and intense class conflict, which, as Thompson was to argue with eloquence, had referents other than the purely economic.

Carding was mechanized by Cartwright’s carding machine, and the invention of the cotton-gin in the United States in 1793 contributed greatly to the enhanced supply of raw material. Bleaching and the printing of coloured patterns – always much easier on cotton than linen, and one of the factors contributing to the popularity of cotton – also underwent mechanization. The planting and picking of cotton remained manual, but on the whole the cotton industry `modernized’ faster than any other in the period of industrialization. Between 1779 and 1812, according to Mokyr, the costs of labour and capital of cotton yarn fell by as much as 85%. Spinning mills began to dominate the landscape of cotton production from the early 19<sup>th</sup> century, and the years between 1815 and 1840 witnessed the spread of factory production throughout the industry. Hobsbawm argues that the `pace of cotton measured that of the economy’. Half of all British exports after the Napoleonic wars were cotton products, and in the 1830s raw cotton constituted nearly 20% of all imports. The cotton industry contributed most to the accumulation of capital, and to the successful diversion of incomes from labour to capital.

Other textile industries also underwent mechanization, though at slower paces or with less of an overall impact. Silk, for instance, was the first industry to experience wholesale mechanization. The first silk-throwing works were established at Derby in 1717. Wool, the leading textile manufacture prior to the revolution in cotton, lagged behind in its mechanization, though gig mills were employed and steam engines were in use by the early nineteenth century. In part the competitive disadvantage of wool stemmed from the fact that it was less versatile a fibre than cotton, more difficult to mechanize and print. Linen also lost out in the competition with cotton, and was reduced to specialization in a few niches – tablecloths, for instance, and embroidery.

The justified emphasis on cotton, however, should not lead one to equate the Industrial Revolution with cotton manufacture. This equation is justified if one is seeking the highest rates of growth, the quickest pace of industrial change, and so on. However, not being a capital goods industry, textile manufacture cannot stimulate growth in other sectors, as Hobsbawm has pointed out. Coal, iron and steel in a sense constituted the core of industrial development. Coal, developing with the impetus provided by the introduction of new techniques of energy utilization ( the application of high-pressure steam engines to coal mining, for instance ), thus provided a constant source of demand for energy. The methods of production were primitive but the output was massive. Coal mining pioneered, among other things, the revolution in transport through the railway ( invented in 1830 ).

Besides cotton, in relative terms the only other industry to be revolutionized in this phase was iron. Unlike cotton, iron production had been organized on a capitalist basis since the 16^th century. What was new was the revolution in technology. The bottlenecks faced by the iron industry in the late 18^th century were twofold: the source of fuel and the source of power. Charcoal had provided the major source of fuel for centuries, but this created two problems. First, forest reserves were not inexhaustible. Second, the iron furnace and forge, dependent on forest reserves, would have to migrate to new regions as these depleted. Power, the other major bottleneck, was substantially based on water: hence, the iron industry had to be located near both forest and water resources.

A severe fuel crisis in the mid-18^th century resulted in a galloping inflation in charcoal prices. This necessitated the exploration of alternative sources of fuel, and coal acquired prominence. The shift from charcoal to coke freed iron production from its traditional dependence on wood, and the industry moved into areas of coal deposits ( often found in close proximity to iron deposits ). The use of the steam engine in the blast furnace ( which had been invented in 1709 ) to melt down iron largely solved the problem of power. The process of refining pig iron was aided by the techniques of puddling and rolling ( devised by Henry Cort in 1783-84 ), and Nielsen’s hot-blast furnace, invented in 1828, made the process of iron production more efficient. Between 1760 and 1800, the production of iron in Britain increased from 30,000 tons to 250,000 tons annually, of which about 60,000 tons were exported. The real revolution in iron production was to occur later in the nineteenth century. This was natural, since iron, being a capital-goods industry, would naturally acquire a significant market only in a country that was fully industrialized. However, the importance of iron in the early Industrial Revolution was considerable. Mokyr argues that since the importance of an industry is to be judged by the substitutability of its products, and since iron has no ready substitutes, it had considerable significance in the economy. The invasive impact of iron production on the landscape of urban Britain is demonstrated by its increasing use in bridges, ships and buildings.

Mokyr points to certain other areas of industrial development: among these being gas-lighting ( a significant component in the human experience of industrialization / modernization, manifest in much of the literature of the times, notably Dickens ), pottery ( modernized and factorized by Josiah Wedgwood ), and machine tools. The machine-tool industry ( the Birmingham `toy trade’ in particular ) has been the focus of much recent attention, as has small-scale industry in general, notably in the pioneering work of Maxine Berg. This was one area where Britain enjoyed a great advantage, given the profusion and unusual sophistication of mechanical skills, especially in areas like London. Clock-making was an area of growth ( and clocks and clock-time, the subject of one of E.P Thompson’s most brilliant explorations, were of immense significance in the experience of industrial capitalism ), as was the production of planing, boring, sawing, and measuring machines. Without the sophistication and precision of machine-tool production, the cutting edge of British industrial development might have been lost.

Industrial Organization

Technology, then, provides one of the major strands in the narrative of the Industrial Revolution. The other strand that is weighted with equal importance is the organization of industrial production. Images of the blast-furnace, the spinning-jenny and the power-loom are conjured up by the mention of the Industrial Revolution, but not with the same power and clarity as the image of the modern factory, compressing human labour and experience under a single roof, and regulating time with almost inhuman precision.

This has been, among other things, central to the Marxist conceptualization of the Industrial Revolution. It encompasses much that was significant in Marx’s own philosophy: his critique of alienation, his positing of the simplification and polarization of class conflict between industrial bourgeoisie and factory proletariat, based on the `double freedom’ of the industrial wage-labourer from both extra-economic ties and the means of production, and the radical hopes he invested in the progressive socialization of human labour under capitalism, a dialectical process that he hoped would lead to the overthrow of the system. Much of this interpretation corresponded to the ways in which the effects of industrialism were perceived by contemporary observers – Marx himself, Engels, and Peter Gaskell. When he posited the development of a qualitatively new relationship between capital and labour, founded on a new form of purely economic exploitation, Marx was speaking specifically of the factory system – not only of the appropriation of surplus value, but also of the tyrannical forms of discipline the labourer was subjected to. Generations of historians influenced by Marx’s views have founded their understanding of industrial capitalism on the workings of the factory system. However, the equation of industrialization with the factory system is by no means unique to Marxists. There has existed a fairly clear consensus among historians on the issue.

This consensus is fairly obviously borne out by later development: after the 1820s and 1830s the factory system did come to dominate the landscape – both physical and mental – of industrial England ( and later of Europe ), and there were reasons why this happened. David Landes points to the insufficiencies of artisanal production when it came to handling demand from expanding overseas markets, the insufficiency of putting-out systems for the needs of mass production, and so on. What is problematic is the notion that the factory constituted a historical given in the context of the Industrial Revolution right from the beginning, a notion that has led to the marginalization of other experiences of organization and labour. Landes, Hobsbawm and other important historians do accept that in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution factories were not the dominant organizing space, and that a range of craft workshops, domestic industries, and decentralized forms of production were in operation. However, since factories contained the `seeds’ of later industrial development, they provide the underlying assumptions behind these historians’ conceptualization of structural change. Concomitant with this is the analysis of manufacturing in terms of the scale of production. All `successful’ and `competitive’ industries are seen to be striving towards expanded scales of production, particular kinds of organizational hierarchies, extended divisions of labour, and so on.

The historian who has done most to problematize this understanding of the Industrial Revolution is Maxine Berg. She points out that the preoccupation with large-scale production has led to a marginalization, in historiographical discourse, of forms of `proto-industrial’ management and organization that held sway for much of the early Industrial Revolution. The factory, in this phase, constituted just one of many experiences of industrial organization, and the centrality ascribed to it was really a thing of the future. Berg argues that industrial organization in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was actually highly differentiated, and it was only much later that the classic polarization between concentrated factory production and casualized forms of sweating, outworking and sub-contracting on the margins of the economy developed. She points out that there is no consensus about the definition of a factory in early industrial England, and contemporary accounts make a distinction between `mills’ ( where machinery was concentrated around a power source ) and `manufactories’ ( where labour was concentrated, divided, disciplined and pauperized ). A striking feature of early industrial organization, according to Berg, was that concentrated factory production – for instance in the major factory industry, cotton – was not large-scale at all, but dominated by small firms and small thresholds. An average primary processing firm in Manchester, for instance, employed only 260 hands. `Small-scale factories’ emerge in Berg’s account as a major, though neglected, category of organization. Equally importantly, differentiated experiences of organization were to be found within industries – again, most strikingly in the cotton sector. In Lancashire the Peels centralized their spinning and calico printing establishments, but organized weaving along extensive putting-out networks. The disjunction between the technologies and production processes of spinning and weaving in the cotton industry, in fact, logically indicated a cleavage in the forms of organization. Berg also suggests that large-scale capitalist organization had roots in the eighteenth century, and that a `plurality of capitalist structures’ operated, especially across the textile industry, where putting-out systems and systems of independent proprietorship interacted closely – and not always purely competitively – with artisanal forms.

Berg also questions Landes’ assumption that mechanization necessarily made for large-scale production. Much of the early textile machinery, for instance, was originally intended for use in cottage manufacture, medium-sized workshops, and the putting-out system. There were many organizational choices available, and many different choices made. The bureaucratic structures of large-scale production were often seen as disadvantageous, impeding the mobility of entrepreneurs, the flexibility of technologies, the skill-intensity of workers, and restricting the range of product choices for localized tastes. Landes himself points to the intensification of entrepreneurial risk in a system where much more investment had to be sunk in fixed plant, and ( concomitantly ) profitability was frequently harder to achieve. Even the modern mechanized cotton factory, argues Berg, depended on `traditional’ artisanal producers. Cotton manufacturers generally combined steam-powered spinning with the employment of dispersed domestic handloom weavers long after powered weaving technology was available, partly because this spread risks and the burden of losses did not fall exclusively on the manufacturer, and partly because it enabled them to deploy a cheap labour supply of women and children. The use of child and female labour, according to Berg and many other historians, was a crucial feature of early industrialization.

Finally, Berg makes the extremely important point that the choice of large-scale factory production often had very little to do with the question of the `efficiency’ of organization. Managerial control, the intensity of labour, maximized capitalist control of the production process, and the concentration of knowledge with proprietors and managers because of the divison of labour, frequently were more important in dictating organizational choices. Employers were also backed by State law. Till 1867, labourers faced imprisonment for breach of contract of service. This enabled intense managerial control in the form of long contracts and bonded service.

Thus, Berg’s studies importantly qualify many tacit assumptions about the nature of industrial processes and organization. They do not negate the importance of large-scale factory organization, but they demonstrate that there was no one predetermined path to this end, and that the experience of industrialization was differentiated, and offered a range of choices. Such a qualification has important consequences for the study of both economic and social history. Berg has laid stress on the importance of a correspondence between the two disciplines, and thus presents an unusual contrast to most of the major contemporary economic historians of the Industrial Revolution.

The Human Results

When examining what can, somewhat clumsily, be termed `the human results’ of the Industrial Revolution, it is possible to make a couple of general, and relatively uncontroversial observations. First, the experience of industrialization led to an unprecedented ruralization of the village, and a huge decline in autonomous village manufactures. The textile industry, and other part-time industrial activities were thoroughly urbanized, and the relative self-sufficiency of the village was destroyed. This corresponded to a steady migration of people from villages to cities, a process that in the terminology of economics is called the `release of labour’, but which actually represented a much more complex and differentiated migration of human experiences and skills. The village was now more thoroughly integrated with wider markets than it had ever been, even as it underwent the experience of ruralization. John Merrington has pointed out that industrial capitalism is the first economic system to achieve a genuinely thoroughgoing subordination of country to town, and this insight holds in the case of nineteenth-century Britain.

The obverse of this, naturally, was the growth of urbanism. In 1750, only Edinburgh and London had populations over 50,000. By 1850, there were 29 such towns, many of them located in the North and the Midlands. Besides towns like Liverpool and Bristol, which had been significant ports connected with slave and colonial trade for a long time, specifically industrial towns like Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham sprang up. The economic heartland of Britain shifted from the South and the East to the North and the Midlands, as larger numbers shifted from agriculture to manufacture. Manchester witnessed the most spectacular urban growth of this period. The specific form of urban life associated with early industrialism evoked complex responses among contemporary observers. The Romantics could denounce city life and celebrate direct experience of nature, but they could also celebrate the city. Wordsworth’s famous `Upon Westminster Bridge’ which begins with the lines Earth has nothing more fair to show…is an example of this latter mood. On the other hand there is the great moral anger and sarcasm of Dickens, directed at the mechanical, stultifying experience of city life – as for instance in his caricature of an industrial town, Coketown, in Hard Times. Socialists often reacted in a more complex manner. Owen’s experiments at New Lanark represented an attempt to transform the dystopia of an industrial factory into a utopia of organized, egalitarian community life. Engels’ observations on the working class in England exhibited a profound familiarity with the squalor, grime, lack of sanitation, crowding and disease produced by urban life. Yet in his work – and in the work produced by him and Marx generally – the city also represented the only space where a positive radicalism could flourish and where a more human society could emerge from, through the organized agency of the working class.

But these were all hopes and visions projected upon the experiences of industrial urban life, the construction of divergent imaginaries. Within the actual historical record of the changes produced in British society by the Industrial Revolution, certain threads can be teased out, others remain tangled. First, as Asa Briggs has argued, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a language – and an identity – of class, emerging against and to a large degree burying older social categories of rank and order. Industrial society, as Marx had said, had led to a `generalization’ of the working class, and the growth of a relationship between employer and wage-earner founded on the ties of a strictly economic exploitation. What this indicated was a polarization of social identity, tearing down earlier `connections’ of deference, duty, and paternalism between the rich and the poor. This should not be seen to imply an overnight transformation: neither were older ties of `connection’ and `attachment’ as hegemonic as they might appear, nor were the new antagonisms always immediately comprehended and translated into actual conflict. Yet a new self-picturing of sorts had begun to emerge, both among the middle and the working classes. Manufacturers, merchants and professionals assumed the label `middle-class’ with some pride – it seemed to carry with it the badge of the self-made man, the entrepreneur, the man of substance. Some early socialists – like Saint-Simon and Owen – posited a new identity, founded on harmony between the middle and the working classes – the `productive’ classes – against the `parasitic’ rich and aristocratic landed elites. However, this commonality was increasingly belied by the antagonisms between the two classes, and a sense that their interests were mutually opposed. The working class, as we shall see, constructed its own identity, and fashioned a radicalism that was – despite its lack of success – a major force in British society. The identity that was fashioned was not, of course, homogeneous, and the Industrial Revolution produced new kinds of divisions within the working population. The experiences and self-perceptions of the `labour aristocracy’ differed greatly from those of seasonally employed construction workers. However, the divisions and tensions within the working class did not cancel out a widely held notion of a common identity – with, of course, leaders and followers within it.

Before turning to the making of the working class, it is necessary to examine a debate that bedevilled social and economic-history writing in England up till the 1960s. This was the famous `standard-of-living’ controversy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of historians – the most important being J.L and Barbara Hammond – drawing extensively upon contemporary accounts – argued that the Industrial Revolution had produced an absolute deterioration in the living standards of working people. In response, `empiricist’ economic historians like John Clapham put forward what has come to be known as the `optimistic’ view of the Industrial Revolution – that the sufferings that were no doubt caused by the process of industrialization were compensated for by a general rise in national income per capita and the purchasing power of wages. The Hammonds in turn argued that Clapham’s statistics, with their emphasis on national `averages’, were regionally skewed, and concealed that the agricultural wages of 60% of the people covered by these statistics were below the average he’d computed.

As Thompson was later to point out, on many significant issues in the standard-of-living controversy there was a broad consensus between the optimists and the pessimists. It was nobody’s contention that living standards suffered a uniform decline through the period of Industrial Revolution, and it was never denied that the nineteenth century witnessed an absolute rise in living standards by its end. On the other hand, Clapham conceded the tentativeness of much of his data, and the inability of statistics to convey adequately the experience of industrialization. It was to be this second admission – the readiness to concede the validity of extra-economic data – that was to disappear from the `optimist’ view of the matter, and it was the importance of this that was – especially for Thompson – to form the basis of counter-arguments.

The case for optimism was restated in 1954, this time in much more obviously ideological terms, by T.S Ashton, one of the most important historians of the Industrial Revolution, in Hayek’s edited volume Capitalism And The Historians. Hobsbawm pointed out that the statistical evidence adduced in support of the view that the proportion of the labouring population who benefited in these years was greater than those who lost out was very slight, and based on unreliable data. To this Hobsbawm counterposed the rise in mortality rates between 1811 and 1841, adduced data for significant cyclical unemployment before the 1840s, and argued that the relative diversion of national income from consumption to investment produced abnormal pressures on working-class consumption in the pre-1841 period. Hobsbawm reiterated that he was not arguing for an absolute fall in working-class living standards throughout the period of industrial revolution, merely suggesting that the assumption that these standards rose uniformly throughout this period was faulty.

The interventions of E.P Thompson, beginning in the 1960s, rescued the standard-of-living debate from the morass of statistical abstractions. However, prior to this, in 1958, Hobsbawm had already published an uncharacteristically savage – and very acute – polemic against the `optimists’ in a brief but remarkable essay, `History and the Dark Satanic Mills’, which anticipated some of Thompson’s arguments. Among other points, Hobsbawm pointed to the very deliberate kinds of cruelty perpetuated against both factory and domestic workers by employers, a thread Thompson was to pick up and extend, especially in his study of child labour. He hinted at the authenticity of the experience of suffering, as illustrated by most of the relevant literary evidence.

It was Thompson, however, who was to first use the category of `experience’ systematically in the study of social history. The Making Of The English Working Class marked a major breakthrough in the historiography of early industrial England, and in British history in general. It exercised a powerful and humanizing impact that historians still are forced to come to terms with. It is often forgotten, though, that the recovery of experience was not the only strand within his book. In the central section, which dealt with the nature of exploitation and the history of three categories of working people ( field labourers, artisans, and weavers ), Thompson engaged in an exceptionally delicate and sensitive qualification of economic data about `living standards’ in this period, presenting arguments that transcended Hobsbawm’s. Drawing in substantial part on the Hammonds, he questioned Clapham’s search for average figures for standards of living, pointing out that the statistics used were drawn from different regions, times, and experiences. Thompson argued that Clapham’s attempt to balance the gains and losses of labouring people led him to an unrealistic juxtaposition of very different sets of evidence: new potato patches balanced against lost common rights, for instance, or against the impact of the draconian Poor Laws. He also questioned the `optimistic’ view of employment in urban trades, pointing out that the figures available applied only to skilled and organized artisans, and that the conditions of unorganized sweating and outworking revealed much insecurity and seasonality of employment. The limitation of `optimistic’ analyses – and here we approach Thompson’s main arguments – lay in its conflation of `average’ upward trends over a long period with a general situation of well-being and contentment. Thompson points out that during the early Industrial Revolution, what is important is not so much the balance of gains and losses, which in an economist’s tabulations might appear to indicate merely marginal or gradual changes, but the lived experience of profound social transformation. In a telling passage, Thompson wrote, `People may consume more goods, and be less happy or less free at the same time.’

Thompson points to two processes that determined the general working-class experience of industrial society in its formative stages. First, the traditional rights and liberties of the poor – their access to the commons, the protection their trades enjoyed, the existence of `just’ prices and wages – were whittled away, as the paternalist legislation of the State was replaced by the operation of laissez-faire market principles. The `moral economy’ of labouring people, their expectation that their right to minimum subsistence levels would be respected, was violated. Thompson has pointed out, in another famous study, that much of the class conflict of this period centred around memories of these liberties, and not around involuntary responses to economic stimuli. The other important context for the social transformations of this period was political: the struggle against the French Revolution and Jacobinism, and the repression of radical movements energized by these in England. The early nineteenth century was a period of significant unfreedom for the English labouring classes, as Pitt’s Combination Acts suppressed the right to organize, and movements of working people were met with savage repression – a case in point being the Peterloo Massacre. Thus, in the total experience of the bulk of working people towards the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth, the gradual, long-range upward movements in wages and living standards could not have been of great significance. Counterposed to this were a range of immiserations. The Poor Laws of the 1830s were predicated on the sinfulness of poverty, and provided conditions that were worse than those enjoyed by the lowest wage-workers. Big industrial towns are described in all their squalor and filth by contemporary observers. Both population and urbanization grew at breakneck speed, and provisions for health and sanitation did not keep pace. Thompson has described with eloquence and passion the inhuman conditions of labour, especially of child labour, which was extensively in use, and a focal point in the agitations of the phenomenon known as radical Toryism. Michael Sadler, a humanitarian Tory politician, set up a Committee to investigate child labour, and Sadler’s impassioned plea for protective legislation in Parliament is one of the great humanitarian documents of the age. The weaving industry, imbued in the eighteenth century with traditions of `independence’ and craft pride, was annihilated – not just by the power-loom, but also by repressive legislation. The early Industrial Revolution represented an experience of great suffering for the bulk of working people, and later gains do not cancel out this suffering. This, perhaps, is Thompson’s most important point: those who suffered and those who gained from the processes of early industrial society belonged to two different generations, were two different sets of people, and the fact that there were going to be people, down the decades, who benefited, could have been of very little consolation to those who were sacrificed.

The focal point of Thompson’s work, however, is the fashioning of working-class identity and culture in the crucible of the Industrial Revolution. The key insight here – and the key polemical ground, too – is that the labouring men and women who came to form the `proletariat’ were not simply the objects of history, made and moulded by impersonal processes, but actively engaged in their own making. They produced identities, movements, discourses that sought to come to terms – in varied ways – with the times they were living through, and their struggles shaped their present and future, and the present and future of industrial society. Their acceptances, too, helped shape this history – a theme not examined sufficiently by Thompson, whose object is quite plainly the recovery of radical traditions. However much this might qualify the nature of his conclusions, the point remains that Thompson uncovered experiences, traditions and ideologies that existed, and their existence in itself is significant. It is important to remember that Thompson was writing from within a Marxist tradition, and that his focus on agency as opposed to structure in a sense repudiated important currents within this very tradition, currents that spoke of historical inevitability, the inexorability of socio-economic laws, the determination of consciousness by objective conditions ( consciousness here being a passive object. Thompson, on the other hand, spoke of the determination of consciousness by experience, a much more fluid, dialectical relationship ), and other scattered dogmas.

Thus, Thompson’s narratives of early working-class radicalism rested on the notion that these were not just a product of an `objectively-determined’ class consciousness. On the contrary, radical movements also helped produce such consciousness, and such identity. The men and women who constituted the new working class had their own memories, their own ideologies and traditions of protest, and these contributed significantly to the forms that their new identity was to take. Thompson’s preoccupation with unearthing the experiential springs of radicalism led him to write the history of labour struggles from an entirely new angle. His study of late eighteenth-century radicalism, for instance, delved deep into the impact of the Jacobin Revolution and the writings of Paine. ( As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have recently pointed out, his narrative left much less space for the impact of abolitionist ideas, and, indeed, bypassed the multi-ethnic nature of the early radical consciousness of this period ). The agitations and ideologies enshrined in the London Corresponding Society were placed in this context. The classic eighteenth-century `food riot’ was the focus of Thompson’s formulation of a particular `moral economy’ in which, he argued, the poor believed. Food riots were the product of much more than hunger. They expressed popularly held conceptions of justice that ran against the emerging belief in market laws as the sole legitimate distributive authority, and as social movements they could boast both organization and a definite rationality. The movements of the early nineteenth century – Luddism for instance, which Thompson undertook a detailed study of in the Making – were seen not just as near-instinctual, illiterate responses to the coming of the machine, but as struggles with their own conceptions of right and wrong, rights and tyranny. Hobsbawm has drawn attention to the aspect of `collective bargaining by riot’ that was a feature of machine-breaking in England. However, he has little to say specifically about Luddism. Thompson approaches the problem differently, and identifies Luddism as a mid-way point between old and new forms of labour protest, a crucible for a new radicalism, and for an identity founded on this radicalism. Again, the Luddite incidents ( between 1811 and 1816 ) are invested here with a unique, particular, but genuine rationality. In the early nineteenth century, beginning with the Scottish weavers’ strike of 1812, the industrial strike was to emerge as a major – and eventually the major – weapon a working class that was substantially different from earlier labouring populations. Thompson’s speculations on the impact of clock-time on industrial labour are suggestive. Exploring the changing notations of time and the relationship of this to labour processes, Thompson points to the extremely rigid ways in which industrial labour came to be disciplined by the clock, shattering pre-industrial rhythms, which were much less regular and arguably less sharply differentiated from `leisure’. He argues that the relationship of the industrial working class to time underwent complex shifts, through processes of negotiation and conflict. Struggles against time and the discipline it imposed were gradually transformed into struggles about time: time-rates in work, the length of the working day, payment for overtime labour, and so on. Time came to function simultaneously as an instrument of power and of resistance.

The English working class of the second quarter of the nineteenth century was thus significantly different from earlier labouring populations, in its beliefs, modes of work, practices, and forms of protest. However, as Thompson demonstrates, this class was not without a history of its own. It did not just appear; it had to be brought into being. And to a substantial degree it brought itself into being. As a judgment from the legendary Preface to The Making would have it, `the working class…..was present at its own making.’

The study of the working class thus problematizes now commonsense notions of the Industrial Revolution as a purely economic phenomenon, one that can be explained satisfactorily by tracing the shifts in consumption patterns, mapping the changes in technological equipment, and computing the rate of growth of national income. These are, without doubt, important indices of `objective’ socio-economic change. However, it is impossible to understand the Industrial Revolution entirely through the prism of `pure’ economic history, because it also involved multiple transformations of human experience. These transformations can sometimes complicate notions of `positive’ and `negative’ social change, and bring into sharper focus the lived costs of one of the most tumultuous and radical processes the world has seen.