32. The economic development of the country in the 19th century.

One of the most significant things about the industrial development of the eighteenth century was the requirement of extensive capital to carry on industrial undertakings on the larger scale which now became the rule. It is obvious that a factory could not be built without a huge amount of capital for the building, the expensive machinery, the supplies of materials, and wages. This capital was largely created in the industry itself by the unflag­ging activity of the new entrepreneurs who stinted themselves to the limit, worked like slaves, and lived like slave-masters. Some of the new industri­alists married fortunes from the country, and still others received their start by advances from the London commercial houses, which, faced by heavier demands for goods than they could supply, advanced money to set up factories and shops. Those who pushed to the top were the sons of yeomen and small farmers, who were possessed of quick views, driving energy, and no small share of sagacity. Although sprung from the same social classes as the laborers, or only one step above them, the new capi­talists soon became conscious of their superior position, and presently the gulf between them and their workers became wider than the gulf between men whose families had been apart for generations.

As compared with the entrepreneurs of earlier times, such as the cloth­iers of the domestic cloth industry in the preceding age, the new captains of industry had to possess vastly greater abilities. They had to be able to gather, organize, and discipline their labor forces, invent and build their machinery, understand the sources of their raw materials and the state of foreign and domestic markets, secure working capital, and, above all, they had to meet the competition of their rivals, and to save for the extension of their plants. They were “Iron Masters of Men '', often without any of the social graces which would have softened their harshness and impatience of restraint in the face of the task of building up Great Britain’s industrial supremacy. It must be remembered that if they were sagacious, they were also ruthless; if they were building the nation's industrial supremacy, they were also heaping up fortunes for themselves; and in the long run it did not prove true that their own good and the good of all were identical. On that supposition, however, their apologists set up the doctrine of “laissez- faire”, that the state must not interfere with them in their business; and under the influence of that doctrine, Parliament proceeded to repeal all the old legislative protection of the workers.

As their co-workers in the new industrial development stood the work­ing population, the new industrial proletariat. Drawn from parish workhouses, transplanted from the country, carried over the sea from the wilds of Ireland, they were collected in a particular place because their fingers or their muscles were needed in a factory, furnace, or mine. At first the condition of the new factory hands was very much better than that of laborers in agriculture or in domestic industry. But as the development of large-scale industry continued and the nation grew ever richer, the lot of the workers grew worse. They had no share in the vast accretion of wealth which they helped to create each year. The reason for this, one of the major tragedies of history, is to be found in the fact that, in their insistence upon elbowroom, the new captains of industry asserted their right to be free of all interference from the government, and succeeded in obtaining the repeal of all legislation designed to prevent excessive competition between workers for jobs. With such legislation thrown into the discard it was pos­sible for the industrial entrepreneurs to recruit their labor force from among the wretchedly paid agricultural workers in boom times and then, when depression set in, to pit the former agricultural laborer with his low standards over against the older factory workers, and either force the older worker to reduce his standards to the levels of the worker from the country, or to lose his job.

Sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century an unprecedented growth in population began to occur.  Much of this phenomenal growth was concentrated in the towns and Manchester was a representative in­stance.  Manchester was the principal site  of  what  was  rapidly  coming  to  be  thought  of  as  the  Industrial  Revolution.  The  highest  rate  of  growth  was  reached  in  the  decade  1821-1831,  when Manchester’s  population  increased  by  almost  45  per  cent.  The  cotton  industry  dominated Manchester,  and  one  estimate  held  that  about  30  percent  of  the  town  was  directly  engaged  in  the  production  of  cotton.

Changes  in  colonial  holdings  and  trade  fed  into  a  rapidly  opening  and  expanding  market  economy,  which  fed  back  in  turn  into  the  system  of  for­eign  trade.  Both  of  these  were  connected  with  changes  in  agriculture  and  with  the  increasing  capitalization  of  a  farming  economy  in  which,  for  the  first  time  in  European  history,  the  peasant  had  disappeared.

Yet  the  place  in  which  the  entire  process  broke  loose  into  open  visi­bility,  the  focus  of  revolutionary  change,  accelerated  growth  and  ever  in­creasing  direct  and  subsidiary  demand,  as  a  world  market  for  the  mass  production  of  goods  for  mass  consumption  was  first  brought  into  being,  was  one  industry-cotton.  And cotton meant Manchester.

Cotton also meant overseas trade, since in contrast to the older dominant textile industry of wool, the raw material could not be grown at home. It meant overseas trade as well, in the sense that at the next stage of the process it was inseparably connected with the African slave trade and the slave plantations of the West Indies; these plantations became for a while the chief suppliers of the raw material, and after 1790 it was the slave states of the American South, that became the major producers for Lan­cashire’s mills. They were important consumers as well, as were the other “underdeveloped” parts of the world. Indeed, the market for a time seemed limitless-particularly since for part of the period England had a virtual monopoly not only on the means of production but over trade in large parts of the world. Under such conditions, and with the additional circumstance that the new technologies in cotton were relatively inexpensive and thus did not require heavy outlay in original capital investment, the rates of profit were astronomical and were only equalled by the rates of growth in production. By the middle of the century billions of yards of cotton cloth were being produced each year.

The fate of the handloom weavers in the decades when power looms came inevitably to displace them, is one of the most famous, as well as one of the earliest, of technological horror stories. Before that, however, it was in spinning that the drama was to be observed. With the increased mechanization of the spinning process, the work of spinning was further rationalized by having the machines driven by mechanical rather than human power. The immense cotton spinning factories or mills of the late eighteenth century were something new in the world. After 1815 weaving was increasingly brought into factories as well, and within a short time cot­ton became the first industry in which production was wholly mechanized.

It was cotton that, along with agriculture, dominated the national economy. That domination was expressed in various other figures, one of them, for example, showing that by the 1830’s the cotton industry was pro­ducing nearly one half of all British exports.

The historical experience of industrialization is not to be separated from that of urbanization. The two tended to occur together and reinforce one another, the reciprocating effects of each upon the other being further intensified by the demographic escalation that continued throughout the period. The industrial discipline, the conditions of work, terms of employ­ment, continual insecurity and continual competition are not to be segre­gated, in their effects as formative experiences, from the conditions of liv­ing in the new industrial towns, from the housing, sanitary provisions-or lack of them-institutions of relief or welfare-or lack of them-from all the new densities and stresses of existence in these unparallelled circum­stances. The working men and women who came out at the other end of this process were the first to go through what we now understand as a world-historical experience. As a group they bore the marks of survivors; they bear those marks to this very day.

The  new  society  which  was  coming  into  existence  with  the  growth  of  in­dustry  was  cut  off  from  the  stable  basis  of  land  and  agriculture  and  was  subject  to  every  fluctuation  of  trade.  From  1763  onward  there  was  a  series  of  financial  crises  which  were  new  phenomena  in  European  history.  At  first  such  crises  were  met  with  quiet  starvation;  but  as  the  industrial  popu­lation  became  larger  and  more  self-conscious,  they  resulted  in  demands  for  political  and  economic  changes  in  the  state.