IMAGINING
OTHER
How Enlightened was the
Enlightenment?
Links: Imagining Other
Index page
Week 3: science and
the philosophy of science.
Week 4 – economy and society
in 18th century
growth of capital, changing
class structures, wars (trading and colonial), agricultural and industrial
revolutions...
Summary:
1. Overview
2. Wars and
their effects on economy and politics in 18th century
2.1 A
‘traditional’ view
2.2 A Marxist view
2.3 Political
repercussions of war and revolution:
3. Agriculture and the industrial revolution
3.1 New techniques
and crops
3.2 Enclosures
3.3 Opposition to
enclosures (including examples from literature)
4. The industrial revolution:
4.1
Industrialisation
4.2 The British
disease? (science and technology)
4.3 Inventions
(coke, steam-power, spinning and weaving machines).
5. References
*******************
Notes:
1. Overview: [A.L. Morton: a
people’s History of
(p 320:)
In relation to
‘On the surface
the period seems devoid of startling changes. Society was relatively stable...
It was an age of the unquestioned acceptance of recognised authority, of the
dominance of squire and parson in the countryside, an age in which elegance was
more prized (*) than imagination, and in which the word enthusiasm... was
always used in a disparaging sense... Only, beneath the surface, the streams of
gold poured into the City... till the time when the flood burst out, transformed
by some magic into mills and mines and foundries, and covered the face of half
of England...’ This was the ‘industrial revolution’ – on which see below.
(*) Valentine de
Saint-Helme writes that the eighteenth century ‘finished in 1789, exhausted by
excess of luxury and wit... it was necessary to have an excess of wit to have
enough. Women particularly excelled in this... ‘ (etc!).
2. Wars and their effects on economy and politics in
18th century
2.1 A traditional view from: Gascoigne, Bamber
HistoryWorld (www.historyworld.net) – this account sees wars as either arising
from a ‘balance of power’ or from strategic demands i.e. access to the sea, or
acquisition of territory. [Gascoigne was educated at
Thus:
The balance of
powers was also further upset when, at the death of Charles II of
In the east,
Finally, after the
French Revolution of 1789, an attack on France by Austria and Prussia in 1792
precipitates the French Revolutionary
Wars and then the Napoleonic Wars
(which last for some 23 years)...
2.2 A Marxist view: from: A.L.Morton (Ch x) – here the emphasis is on trading and colonial wars and on economic factors which led to changes in
the class structure, all of which is
related to the way politics is conducted (in England in this particular book,
but of course the same approach can be adopted to all wars):
- he argues that
the changes that were happening in warfare
were important: war was expensive (and becoming more so with new technical
developments), and while
- Morton also
stresses the importance of the Bank of
England in lending money to the government – he describes it as ‘an
instrument of the dominant Whig financial clique.’ The Bank fought off attacks
by goldsmiths and by Tory squires, and became more powerful and more closely
connected with the government. [*] Note
at end.
- thus more credit became available, and there
was a growing system of speculation in stocks and commodities...
- costs of wars à expanding
National Debt... à more taxation, and the government issuing bonds to
raise money, which in turn à profits for minority bond-holders (also
arms manufacturers etc?) and thus a concentration of ‘fluid’ capital which helped finance the industrial revolution... (Tories, as
landowners, on the other hand lost because of higher land tax).
- speculation led to crises: the South Sea Company (founded in 1720) –
grew from slave trading and whale fishing to become rich and powerful enough to
plunder
The company issued
shares which were expected to keep on rising – bogus subsidiary companies were
formed, and members of the Whig government and the Prince of Wales were
criminally involved. When the (inevitable!?) crash came, it ruined thousands of
investors – and there were other financial crises in 1763, 1772, and 1793...
and the failure of Law’s Mississippi
Scheme damaged
Role in
The French arrived
in India later (at the end of the 17th c) and used arms to establish
bases in Mauritius, Pondicherry, Chandanagore – all close to towns held by the
English. ‘A clash was almost inevitable’. Both exploited the differences
between local rulers/officials...
The Battle of
Plassey 1757 à the conquest of
The Government
implemented controls over the Company, (ostensibly to check its excesses) but
in fact this enabled more exploitation by the British, and facilitated the move
from buying commodities to controlling the supply of manufactured goods,
especially cotton.
Of course, Morton
describes the strategic aims of war – such as
2.3 Political repercussions of war and revolution:
Morton also traces
(pp 312 - 319) the political effects of all this in
With the French Revolution, [also see later] there
was also on the one hand a reaction in
3. The agricultural and industrial revolutions:
(Notes from O’Hara
2010 unless otherwise indicated).
In
3.1 New techniques etc.
Crop rotation was a major breakthrough: growing different crops in
turn, it was discovered, had beneficial effects, and was used instead of the
old practice of leaving fields fallow: over-use of land for crops eroded the
soil of nutrients and encouraged the build-up of pests and diseases. In fallow
fields nothing would be grown for a year (every three or four years) for the
soil to recover. But fallow was wasteful, and rotation of different crops and
animals helped improve the output. Also, turnips and other roots crops - and
especially clover - put more nitrogen back into the soil. A key figure in this
development was the 2nd Viscount (‘Turnip’) Townshend (1674 – 1738).
He developed a four-crop ‘
Gibson (2010 p
217) says the agricultural revolution started in the 1650s, (the ‘yeoman’s
agricultural revolution’) but was really significant in the first half of the
18th century, with a 2 ½ -fold increase in wheat, barley and oats
between 1700 and 1850, in
Another factor in
the growth in agriculture was the discovery of new crops in the
Other techniques:
Watering by
channels, better livestock breeds, and machinery such as Jethro Tull’s seed
drill all contributed. Andrew Meikle invented a mechanised threshing machine in
1784. Reclamation and drainage (see next point) meant that the area under
cultivation in
3.2 Enclosures:
According to
Hobsbawm, enclosures - the ‘rearrangement of formerly common or open fields
into self-contained private land-units, or the division of formerly common but
uncultivated land into private property’ – had long been practised, and since
the middle of the 17th century (the Tudor period) with little
trouble in the early stages. (op cit p 100) (However, see below concerning
An overseas demand
for English wool was another factor in driving these changes.
Gibson (2010, p
38) describes the drainage, and subsequent enclosure with hedges, of the
Bedford Levels around Ely in the 17th century. However, from about
1760 landlords used Acts of Parliament to speed up the process, instead of
negotiating agreements with yeoman farmers. A large part of the middle of the
country was enclosed in this way between 1760 and 1820. The changes were seen
by landlords as ‘improving’ their farming: sheep were more profitable than
crops, and they needed fewer labourers. Gibson (p 106) cites as evidence of the
widespread practice of enclosure, Lord Kames’s 1776 publication: ‘The Gentleman
farmer, being an attempt to improve agriculture by subjecting it to the test of
rational principles’ – which ran to four editions by 1798! He also points out
that this was the heyday of landscaping – by Capability Brown for example.
Opposition
sometimes boiled over into violence (e.g.
In
As a result of the
clearances many peasants were moved from the Highlands to the Lowlands, or to
coastal areas, where they had to cope with bad weather conditions, but where they
could be employed gathering kelp (for soap, fertiliser, glassmaking). Or they
went (or were put on ships) overseas to
The
In
In
Hobsbawm says we
must distinguish the use of Parliamentary Acts from the wider, more gradual
process, the ‘general phenomenon’ of agricultural concentration. Labourers were
thrown off land – but also uncultivated land was brought into cultivation
(creating work). But ‘marginal cottagers and smallholders’ undoubtedly lost out
heavily, losing their common rights to pasture, firewood, etc (p 102). Above
all they now became ‘inferiors dependent on the rich.’ (Hobsbawm p 102 quotes
from a concerned Suffolk clergyman writing in 1844 abut the loss of the village
green etc).
By the end of the
18th century in England there was concern at the number of people
being driven off the land into penury, and the industrial sector was not yet
large enough to take them up: ‘By the 1790s the consequent decay of the village
poor had reached catastrophic proportions in parts of southern and eastern
England’ (Hobsbawm p 104). Hence changes were made to the Poor Law - the
‘Speenhamland System’ - in 1795, to try to ensure workers had a living wage. A
minimum rate was fixed according to the price of corn, and if wages fell below
it they would be supplemented from the poor rates (loc cit).
On the other hand,
Gibson (p 220) points out that larger farms with fewer labourers were the
outcome, and the labourer’s outlook became more insecure, with contracts down
from annual ‘hirings’ to monthly or weekly contracts. Thus a workforce was
being created that would eventually become the factory workers of the
industrial revolution.
Update: in ‘Kith:
The Riddle of the Childscape’, Jay Griffiths blames the enclosures for cutting us
(and especially children) off from nature.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/28/kith-riddle-childscape-griffiths-review.
However this review says that Griffiths
descends into ‘merely dotty navel-gazing’ – beyond the ‘very English
romanticism’ which she also expresses.
3.3 Opposition:
Gibson points out
that ‘Widespread resistance... was far more common than is often assumed’ (p
223).
Examples in
literature:
Poem by John Clare
in ‘The Tragedy of the Enclosures.’ Gibson p 223... Cited by Grififths (update
above): ‘The Enclosures spiked the nest of Clare’s psyche...’
Oliver Goldsmith:
The Deserted Village 1770
William Cobbett’s
Rural Rides 1830
4. The industrial revolution.
4.1 Industrialisation.
New technologies -
sometimes but not always resulting from the application of pure science, says
O’Hara – together with improved food production marked the beginnings of the industrial revolution:
Once standards of
living in the countryside improved, workers were tempted to move to the towns,
where factories promised even more improvement to their standard of living.
With these demographic changes, and the increase in trade with the colonies,
technology grew.
Morton (p 321)
argues that the ‘large scale and long continued wars waged by professional
armies’ led to a demand [my emphasis]
for ‘ever-increasing quantities of standard
[my emphasis] goods’ and it was this increased demand, ‘and not the genius of
this or that inventor, which was the basic cause of the Industrial Revolution.’
(See also pp 324 - 360).
Hobsbawm (1968)
discusses the many factors that led to
Since it was economic demand rather than curiosity
that motivated technological discoveries, most developments occurred in
countries such as
4.2 A brief digression on ‘The British Disease’:
Scientists, it has
been argued, were not good at getting their ideas applied…
applications of science spread more through social gatherings e.g. Lunar
Society in
It has often been
argued (e.g. by Anthony Sampson in The Anatomy of Britain) that this inability
to apply scientific knowledge is a feature of English culture: my own view is
that science was practised, and scientific knowledge publicised, by an
intellectual and social elite, and
this elite was often more interested in traditional landowner pursuits such as
hunting and shooting than in running factories, or in commerce.
One negative
consequence of this is that an ‘engineer’ has never had the status in
Another
consequence is that individuals with high ambition in this country aimed to become
landowners rather than to go into industry. Finally, we have seen the
development of a separate ‘managerial’ (or ‘entrepreneurial’) class to run our
businesses.
4.3 Inventions.
On the other hand,
there were many discoveries and
innovations associated with the Enlightenment and the industrial
revolution, which are well known, e.g.:
- Abraham Darby
developed coke instead of charcoal for smelting (1709), leading to less need
for timber, and the possibility of locating iron works away from forests; Darby’s
iron was superior, and thinner – so kettles etc were cheaper. Later his family
produced bar iron for forges, thus boosting small manufacture. (Gibson p 230)
One consequence of this was a growth in the number of coal mines – and Davy’s
‘safety lamp’ is usually cited (however, there is controversy over this – see
David Albury’s book Partial Progress). The lamp – it is argued by Albury –
enabled owners to get coal extracted from mines hitherto regarded as dangerous
from methane.
- steam power was
first developed in the Newcomen engine in 1705, then in 1712 the ‘atmospheric
engine’ which was more reliable - used to pump water from the mines; steam
engines could also be used to pump air into mines, so they also enabled deeper
mines... By 1733 there were 100 Newcomen engines in use in
- later James Watt
produced more steam engines, to power e.g. locomotives - leading to trains of
course;
- John Wilkinson
established a steam-powered blast furnace in the 1750s at Willey – he produced
large iron cylinders, which in turn could be used to build more and larger
steam engines (at first they had been used to make cannon...). Watt used
Wilkinson’s iron to build his engines.
- machines for the
cotton industry were crucial to this country’s economic growth:
Kay’s flying shuttle (1733) enabled
looms to be much wider, so weavers could work faster;
Hargreaves’ spinning jenny (1764) led
to an 8-fold increase in what a worker could produce;
Arkwright’s water frame (1769)
harnessed looms to water power, enabling increased production of stronger more
evenly woven cloth;
Crompton’s mule (1779) combined the
spinning jenny and the water frame.
(See Gibson op cit
p 234)
5. References (additional to those for the whole
course):
Albury, David,
& Schwartz, Joseph:: Partial Progress – the politics of science and
technology, Pluto, 1982.
Gibson, William: A
Brief History of
Gott, Richard:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/07/britains-empire-richard-gott-review
Hobsbawm, E.J.:
Industry and Empire, The New Press,
Morton, A.L.: a
People’s History of England, Lawrence and Wishart 1976 (first published 1938).
De Saint-Helme,
Valentine: The French Eighteenth Century and Revolution, The
************************
[*] according to
Morton religious differences still played a part: the Bank of England backed
William out of fear that if the Stuarts came to power they would not support
it...
Quotes:
1. A.L. Morton p
320 (2 paras)
2. Valentine de
Saint-Helme p 10 – 12, and 67 – 8 {and
ch v for the arts...}
3. O’Hara p 128 –
from Adam Smith on the potato...
4. Thomas More:
Utopia p 80
5. Richard
Gott p 49 – 50 (peasant resistance [anti-settler and p 50 anti-enclosure] in
6. E.J.
Hobsbawm Industry and Empire p102
7. From Gibson p
223: Poem by John Clare (1793 – 1864) ‘The Tragedy of the Enclosures.’
8. A.L. Morton p
321: on slave trade, profits from.