Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

27

The Idea of the Factory and Its Consequences

‘Coketown . . . was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound on the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.’¹

Who else but Charles Dickens in one his grimmest ‘industrial novels’, Hard Times? Coketown, Mr Gradgrind, the school headmaster, Mr Bounderby, the banker and manufacturer, Mr Sleary, the horseman, Mrs Sparsit, presiding over Mr Bounderby’s establishment and connected, in better days, to the Powlers and the Scadgers – the very names in Dickens always tell half the story. One of the main themes of the book, in Kate Flint’s words, is an investigation of the mind-set ‘of those who persist in seeing [the] workers as mere useful tools, as “hands”, rather than as fully functioning, complex human beings.’² But Dickens was never a didactic writer: he didn’t need to be.

If, as was maintained earlier, a crucial change in sensibility took place sometime between AD 1050 and 1200, to create what we may call the ‘Western mind’, a no less momentous change occurred in the eighteenth century. It had three elements. One was that the centre of gravity of the Western world moved away from Europe, to lie somewhere between it and North America, and this shift westward to an imaginary point in the Atlantic came about as a result of the American Revolution (see Chapter 28). A second momentous change involved the substitution of democratic, elected governments in place of the more traditional and often absolute monarchies of Europe. Apart from England, this owed its genesis for the most part to the French Revolution, which set off a chain of other revolutions which extended through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, and partly to the ideas worked out in America. The third change in the eighteenth century was the development of the factory, that symbol of industrial life, so different to what had gone before.³

Why did the factory and all that that implies occur first in Britain?⁴ One answer was that in England many feudal and royal restrictions which remained in place in other European countries had been swept away by the revolutions of the seventeenth century.⁵ Another reason, which we shall come to, was the shortage of wood, for this forced new developments in the use of the inferior but cheaper coal for fuel.⁶ We should also remember that the first industrial revolution occurred in a very small area of England, bounded to the west by Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, to the south by Birmingham, to the east by Derby, and to the north by Preston in Lancashire. Each played its part in what became the industrial revolution: at Coalbrookdale in 1709, Abraham Darby smelted iron with coal; at Derby in 1721, the silk-thrower Thomas Lombe designed and constructed the world’s first recognisable factory; in Preston in 1732, Richard Arkwright was born; in Birmingham in 1741 or 1742, John Wyatt and Lewis Paul first applied the system of spinning cotton by rollers, which Arkwright would appropriate and improve.⁷

The combined effect of factory organisation and technical innovation occurred first in spinning. The point of spinning machines is that they parallel the way humans, with their fingers, increase the tension on wool or cotton staples so as to draw out a continuous thread. One type of machine was invented by James Hargreaves in the 1760s and another patented by Richard Arkwright, a baker by trade. Their devices employed a series of spindles and rollers to gradually build up the tension. A decade or so later, Samuel Crompton invented a machine which performed both the functions of the other two men’s devices and the spinning machine was more or less perfected.⁸ The important point to take on board is that although Hargreaves and Crompton were inventors, it was Arkwright, the organiser with a nose for finance (who may even have stolen the ideas of the two earlier inventors), who patented the water frame and went on to make a fortune.⁹ He realised that it was not with wool but with cotton that the future lay, for the growing trade with India was what counted. It had never been easy to spin strong cotton thread by hand and, traditionally, English weavers had woven a cloth in which the weft was cotton but the warp was linen (in the loom the threads of the weft are left stationary, whereas those of the warp are constantly strained as the shuttle leads them to and fro). Arkwright knew that a cotton thread tough enough to be used as warp as well as weft would transform the industry.¹⁰

The first factories were powered by running water, and this is why they were located in the often remote river valleys of Derbyshire – it was only here that the streams could be relied on to have enough water throughout all the year. Children from foundling homes and workhouses provided cheap labour. This was not in itself a new practice – Daniel Defoe had observed Yorkshire villages in the 1720s where women and children spent long hours at spinning machines. The new element was the factories themselves and the brutal discipline they demanded. As things stood, at least the children had what little free time they were given in the countryside. But even that changed when the steam engine took the place of water power at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This made it viable for the factory to move to the source of labour, the town, coal being as plentiful there as in the countryside.¹¹

The first use of the steam engine was to pump water from mines. (This was an old problem. Evangelista Torricelli had discovered as early as 1644 that a suction pump could not raise water much more than thirty feet.¹⁵) The deeper mines, well below the water table, needed to be drained either by bailing out with buckets or with a series of pumps. The first engine to power these pumps was invented by Thomas Newcomen, in the copper mines of Cornwall, around the turn of the eighteenth century. In this early form of engine, the steam which powered the piston was condensed in the cylinder, with the piston being brought back by the suction that resulted from condensation. This worked, after a fashion, but the drawback was that the entire cylinder was cooled after each stroke by the water that was injected to condense the steam. This was where James Watt came in. As a skilled instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt made some calculations about the efficiency of Newcomen’s machine and began to wonder how the heat loss might be prevented or avoided. His solution was to condense the steam in a chamber that was connected to the cylinder but not part of it. This arrangement meant that the condenser was always cold, while the cylinder was always hot. Despite this breakthrough, Watt’s engine did not function satisfactorily in Glasgow owing to the poor quality of workmanship by the local smiths. Matters were transformed when Watt found much more ‘eminent casters’ in Matthew Boulton’s factory in Birmingham.¹²

This was, in many ways, the defining moment of the industrial revolution, the event which coloured so much of modern life. Once steam became the power base, coal and iron became the backbone of industry. In fact, iron technology was already well advanced. Until around 1700, only charcoal could reduce iron ore in the blast furnace. This was where the shortage of wood in England played a pivotal role. Wood remained plentiful in France and so charcoal continued to be used. But in England there was, in the place of wood, a rich supply of coal. Everyone knew this and more than one inventor grasped that one way to reduce iron ore would be to rid coal of its gases, thus converting it into coke, which enabled higher temperatures to be built up more safely.¹³ This was first achieved around 1709, the ironmasters who made it being Abraham Darby and his family, who managed to keep their secret for more than thirty years.¹⁴ The raw iron they produced still needed to be purified, to make it workable, but in time cast iron became, in Peter Hall’s words, the plastic of its day.¹⁵

The agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century also played a part. Viscount Townsend’s new methods of crop rotation, and Robert Bakewell’s innovations in cattle breeding, which vastly improved efficiency, helped push people off the land, destroyed village life and forced the population to the cities – and into the factories.¹⁶

But the industrial revolution was not only, and in fact not mainly, about the great inventions of the time. The long-term change that the industrial revolution brought about was due instead to a more profound transformation in industrial organisation.¹⁷ As one historian of this great change has pointed out, the abundance and variety of inventions ‘almost defy compilation’ but they could be grouped into three categories. There was the substitution of machines (quick, regular, precise, unflagging) for human skill and effort; there was the substitution of inanimate sources of power (water and coal) for animate ones (horses, cattle), most notably engines for converting heat into work, opening to man a virtually unlimited supply of energy; and finally, all this meant that man could make use of new raw materials – mainly minerals – which were abundant.¹⁸

The point of these improvements was that they enabled an unprecedented increase in man’s productivity and, moreover, one that was self-sustaining. In earlier times, any increase in productivity had always been quickly accompanied by a population increase which eventually cancelled out the gains. ‘Now, for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation.’ Among other things, this transformed attitudes: for the first time, the idea that something was ‘new’ made it attractive, preferable to something that was traditional, familiar, tried and tested.¹⁹

Some idea of the scale of the transformation can be had from the way the cotton industry progressed in Britain. In 1760 (generally regarded as the very beginning of the industrial revolution), Britain imported around 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton. In 1787 that had risen to 22 million pounds and by 1837 to 366 million pounds. At the same time, the price of yarn had fallen to about one-twentieth of what it had been and almost all of the workers in the cotton industry, save for the hand-loom weavers, worked in mills under factory conditions. The rise of modern industry, and the factory system, ‘transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between nations, and between civilisations; revolutionised the social order; and as much changed man’s way of thinking as his way of doing’.²⁰

The primary reason for this change has been reconstructed by historians and appears to be due to the fact that the earlier village system was unequally mechanised. For example, the weaver’s frame was an effective machine but the spinning wheel required little skill and, according to Daniel Defoe, ‘anyone age four and above could do it’. Because of this, it paid very badly and was treated by women as a secondary occupation – after housework and raising children. As a result, spinning often became a bottleneck in the system. A second shortcoming was that while in theory the weaver was his own man, in practice he often had no choice but to mortgage his weaving frame to the merchant. At times when business was bad the weaver had to borrow money to survive, and his only security was his machine. At the same time, this did not necessarily benefit the merchant because when the good times came the weaver usually worked just hard enough to feed himself and his family and no more. Put another way, when the weaver needed more work the system was against him, and when the merchant needed more product the system was against him. There was thus no surplus in the arrangement. It was this (unsatisfactory) state of affairs which led to the factory. The essence of the factory was that it gave the owner control over materials and over working hours, enabling him to rationalise operations which needed several steps, or several people.²¹ New machines were introduced that could be used by people with little or no training – women and children included.

For the workers, factory life was nowhere near so convenient. Thousands of children were recruited from the foundling homes and workhouses. William Hutton served his apprenticeship in the silk mills of Derby wearing pattens on his feet because he was too small to reach the machinery. Like the adults around them, children were subject to factory supervision and discipline. This was a new experience: tasks became increasingly specialised, time ever more important. Nothing like this had existed before; the new worker had no means of either owning or providing the means of production; he or she had become no more than a hired hand.²²

This fundamental change in the experience of work became all the more obvious when the invention of steam engines made the factory city possible. In 1750 there had been only two cities in Britain with more than 50,000 inhabitants – London and Edinburgh. By 1801 that had grown to eight, and to twenty-nine in 1851, including nine over 100,000, meaning that by this time more Britons lived in towns than lived in the country, another first.²³ The migration to the cities was forced on people – they had to go where the work was – but they were hardly enthusiastic and it is not hard to see why. Apart from being smoky and dirty, with a shortage of open spaces, and with sanitation and water-supply lagging behind the increase in population, the cities were home to epidemics of cholera, typhoid and pollution-induced respiratory and intestinal diseases. ‘Civilisation works its miracles,’ wrote the Frenchman, Alex de Tocqueville, who visited Manchester in 1835, ‘and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.’²⁴ But in the factory city, owners could immediately benefit from new inventions and new ideas, and this too was an important characteristic of the industrial revolution – that it was self-sustaining, intellectually as well as materially. It generated new products – in particular, iron products and chemicals (alkalis, acids and dyes), most of which required large amounts of energy/fuel for their manufacture. Another aspect of this arrangement was that the new industrialism stretched across the world, from the sources of the raw materials to the factories, and then on to the markets. This too stimulated new ideas and new demand for products. To give just one example, it was the developments in the industrial revolution that combined to make tea and coffee, bananas and pineapples everyday foods. According to David Landes, this change in man’s material life was greater than anything since the discovery of fire: ‘The Englishman of 1750 [i.e., on the eve of the industrial revolution] was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren.’²⁵

No less important in the long run, the industrial revolution also widened the gap between the rich and poor, helping to generate class conflicts of unprecedented bitterness.²⁶ The working class became not only more numerous but also more concentrated, and therefore more class-conscious. This change is worth dwelling on for a moment because it was to have an immense significance in politics. Pre-industrial labour was a very different entity from its later counterpart. Traditional peasants had their holdings or their craft shops, and they also had a master, with reciprocal duties (albeit very unequal ones). The industrial revolution, however, replaced the peasant or servant – the man – with the ‘operative’ or ‘hand’. It also imposed a regularity, a routine, a monotony, on work, which had been largely absent in the pre-industrial rhythms of labour, based on the seasons, or the weather.²⁷ (People in pre-industrial times quite often chose to start the working week on Tuesday. Monday was known ironically as ‘Saint Monday’.)

One reason for the poverty of the working classes, certainly for the low wages they were paid, was because income was diverted to the new business classes, who were investing in the new machines and factories. The industrial revolution did not create the first capitalists, ‘but it did produce a business class of unprecedented numbers and strength’.²⁸ These ‘chimney aristocrats’, as they were called, came to dominate domestic government policy throughout most of Europe in the nineteenth century.

A quite separate aspect of the industrial revolution was economic. The origin of economics – the discipline – was outlined in the previous chapter. Added to this in Britain was the phenomenon of private savings, which began to accumulate after 1688. The king used these savings to fund war, and in this way a public debt was established. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as part of this evolution, with merchants and landowners taking a share in the national debt, and drawing interest from it.²⁹ Government loans were paying 8 per cent before 1700, but by 1727 that had fallen to 3 per cent and this too had an effect on the industrial revolution. When interest rates are high, investors look for quick profits, but when rates are low, people are more willing to consider longer-term projects which might, in the future, offer better returns. This is a better climate in which to launch large-scale capital projects, such as sinking mines, digging canals, or building factories. The early factories – in the country – had been of such a scale that single families could afford to finance their construction but, as demand grew, and urban factories snowballed in size, to satisfy an expanding market, larger investment was needed.

Britain led the way in the industrial revolution, partly because many of the inventions were conceived there but also because the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars held mainland Europe back until around 1815. However, once these other countries achieved a measure of political stability they lost no time in creating their own forms of financial intermediary, in particular the joint-stock investment bank, or the crédit mobilier, designed to fund their large-scale capital projects. Again according to David Landes, the earliest examples were semi-public institutions – the Société Générale in Brussels and the Seehandlung in Berlin. These institutions were particularly effective in funding the development of the railways, ‘which needed money in unprecedented quantities’.³⁰

A parallel development arose in the schools of science and technology, which fulfilled for the mainland European countries the function of the dissenting academies in Britain (see below, this chapter). The French led the way, first with its École Polytechnique (originally the École Central des Travaux Publics) in 1794. The competitive character of the school – admission by examination only, and with a public ranking on admission, partial completion and graduation – attracted the best students. Graduates who wanted a career in the new industries went on to the Écoles des Mines or the Ponts-et-Chaussées, where they learned applied science and did on-the-job training.³¹ The École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, designed to teach engineers and business managers, was founded privately in 1829 but was taken into the state system in 1856. These French examples served as models for other countries, rather than the original dissenting academies, because by the end of the eighteenth century the British strategy of ‘learning by doing’, though it had worked well enough to begin with, had now been overtaken by the sheer weight of innovation. More abstract and theoretical tuition was now needed, and in two areas – electricity and chemistry – advances were being made in so many different locations that only in these new schools could students keep up.

Advances in electricity and in chemistry in particular underpinned many of the new industries which comprised the industrial revolution. Electricity moved ahead after the period dominated by Newton, because it was one of those areas that Newton himself had not spent any time on and where other scientists were not intimidated. People had known that there was such a thing as electricity for hundreds of years, men being aware, for example, that amber, when rubbed, attracted small bodies. It was also discovered in the early eighteenth century that friction – in the form of a barometer shaken in the dark – produced a green light.³² But the first real excitement was generated by Stephen Gray in 1729 when he was led to a more developed idea of electricity as something that could be sent over large distances. He first noticed that the corks which he put in the end of test tubes attracted small pieces of paper or metal when the tubes (not the corks) were rubbed. By extension he found that even silk loops that led from the tubes right round his garden also had the same property. He had discovered that electricity was something that could ‘flow from one place to another without any appearance of movement of matter’ – electricity was weightless, what he called ‘an imponderable fluid’. Gray also discovered something anomalous but basic: electricity could be stored in bodies like glass or silk where it was generated, but it could not pass through them. And, conversely, those substances which conducted electricity could not generate or store it.³³

Electricity became the rage in Europe, and then in America, after Ewald Georg von Kleist, in 1745, tried to pass a current (not that it was called that then) into a bottle through a nail. Accidentally touching the nail while holding the bottle, he received a shock. Soon everyone wanted the experience, with even the king of France arranging for a whole brigade of guards to jump as one by giving them shocks from batteries of jars. It was this idea which Benjamin Franklin took up, far away in Philadelphia. It was Franklin who realised that electricity in a body tends to settle at its natural level, when it is undetectable. If some were added, it became positively charged, and repelled objects, whereas if it lost some it was negatively charged, and attracted objects. This tendency to attract, Franklin also realised, was the source of sparks and shocks and, even more impressive, he realised that this was, essentially, what lightning was, a colossal spark. He demonstrated this by his famous experiment with a kite, showing that lightning was indeed electricity, and inventing the lightning conductor in the process.³⁴

In 1795 Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), professor of physics at Pavia, showed that electricity could be produced by putting two different pieces of metal together, with a liquid or damp cloth between them, thus creating the first electrical current battery. But these batteries were very expensive to produce and it was only when Humphry Davy, in 1802, isolated the new metals sodium and potassium, at the Royal Institution in London, that electricity began to be the subject of serious experimentation. Eighteen years later, in 1820, Hans Christian Oersted in Copenhagen discovered that an electric current could deflect a compass needle and the final link was made between electricity and magnetism.³⁵

More important even than the discovery of electricity, in the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, was the rise of chemistry. This discipline, it will be recalled from Chapter 23, had not really featured in the scientific revolution but now it came into its own. One reason it was held back was the enduring fascination with alchemy and the passion for finding ways to make gold. This is not so surprising as it may seem now. Paracelsus’ 1597 book, Alchemia, is the first good book on chemistry. Despite being absorbed in alchemy, Paracelsus recognised that coal-mining caused lung-disease and that opium deadened pain. However, only when chemistry became a rational science could it advance. The main area of interest, at least to begin with, was the phenomenon of combustion. What, actually, happened when materials burned in the air? Everyone could see that such materials disappeared in flame and smoke, to leave only ash. On the other hand, many substances didn’t burn easily, though if they were left in the air they did change – for example, metals rusted. What was going on? What exactly was air?

One answer came from Johan Joachim Becher (1635–1682) and Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734), who argued that combustibles contained a substance, phlogiston, which they lost on burning. (The name phlogiston was taken from the principle of phlox, or flame.) On this theory, substances which contained a lot of phlogiston burned well, whereas those that didn’t were ‘dephlogisticated’. Though there was something inherently implausible about phlogiston (for example, it had been known since the seventeenth century that metals, when heated, gained weight), there were enough ‘imponderable fluids’ about at that time – magnetism, heat, electricity itself – to make the theory acceptable to many. But the concern with combustion was not merely academic: gases (chaoses) were of great practical concern to miners, for example, who ran the risk of treacherous fire-damps and ‘inflammable airs’.³⁶ And it was this attention to gases that eventually provided the way forward, because hitherto, in experiments on combustion, just the weight of the ore had been measured. This, as J. D. Bernal puts it, made it impossible to ‘balance the books’ of chemistry. But when gases were taken into account, this led immediately to Mikhail Lomonosov’s principle of the conservation of matter, established as fundamental by Antoine Lavoisier in 1785. The man who showed this more convincingly than anyone else was Joseph Black, a Scottish doctor, who weighed the amount of gas lost by such carbonates as magnesia and limestone when heated, and found that the lost gas could be reabsorbed in water, with an identical gain in weight.³⁷

Black was followed by Joseph Priestley, who had the idea that air was more complex than it seemed. He experimented with as many gases as he could find, or manufacture himself, and one of them, which he made by heating red oxide of mercury, he called at first ‘dephlogisticated air’, because things burned better in it. After isolating the gas in 1774, Priestley went on to show, by experiment, that ‘dephlogisticated air’, or oxygen as we now call it, was used up, both in burning and in breathing. Priestley well realised the importance of what he was discovering for he went on to demonstrate that, in sunlight, green plants produce oxygen from the fixed air – carbon dioxide – that they absorbed. Thus was born the idea of the carbon cycle – from the atmosphere (another new idea of the time), through plants and animals and back to the atmosphere.³⁸

Priestley was the experimentalist but Lavoisier was the synthesiser and systematiser. Like his English counterpart, the Frenchman was first and foremost a physicist. (In the early days of chemistry most of the great figures weren’t chemists, who were too bogged down by alchemy and phlogiston.) Lavoisier appreciated that the discovery of oxygen, le principe oxygène, transformed chemistry, in effect turning the phlogiston theory on its head. It was Lavoisier who created modern chemistry by his realisation that he could now build on the work of Aristotle and Boyle, to create a much expanded, systematic, discipline. He realised that water was hydrogen and oxygen, that air contained nitrogen as well as oxygen and, perhaps most important of all, that chemical compounds were largely made up of three types: oxygen and a non-metal, which were acids; oxygen and metals, which were bases; and the combination of acids and bases, which were salts.³⁹ In doing this, Lavoisier introduced the terminology for compounds that we still use – potassium carbonate, lead acetate, and so on. This brought chemistry to a systematic level that put it at last on a par with physics. ‘Instead of being a set of recipes which had to be memorised, chemistry was now laid out as a system that could be understood.’⁴⁰

The study of gases also led John Dalton (1766–1844), a Quaker and schoolteacher in Manchester, England, to his atomic theory. He had a particular interest in the elasticity of fluids and it was he who realised that, under different pressures, and incorporating the principle of the conservation of matter, gases of the same weight must be differently configured. The creation of new gases, and the studies of their weights, led him to a new nomenclature that we still use – for example, N₂O, NO, and NO₂. This systematic study made him realise that elements and compounds were made up of atoms, arranged on ‘Newtonian principles of attraction and electrical principles of repulsion’.⁴¹ His observation of certain other chemical reactions, notably precipitation, when, say, two clear liquids, on being put together, immediately produce a solid, or a major change in colour, also convinced him that a basic entity, the atom, was being reconfigured. His reasoning was soon supported by the new science of crystallography, in which it was shown that the angles between the faces of a crystal were always the same for any particular substance and that related substances had similarly-shaped crystals. Christiaan Huygens, the seventeenth-century Dutch physicist, realised this must mean that the crystal was built of identical molecules piled up together ‘like shot’.⁴² Finally, on this score, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday showed that passing an electric current through salts separated out the metals, such as sodium, potassium and calcium and that, at base, all elements could be classified into metals and non-metals, with metals being positively charged and non-metals negatively charged. Faraday further demonstrated that the rate of transport of atoms in solution was related to the weights of the substances, which eventually led to the idea that there are ‘atoms’ of electricity, what we now call electrons. But they were not identified until 1897, by J. J. Thomson.

Besides his interest in the organisation of the elements, Lavoisier carried out a series of experiments which showed that a person’s body behaved in an analogous way to fire, burning the materials in food and liberating the resulting energy as heat. The behaviour of materials after heating (some melt or vaporise, others burn, char or coagulate) led to the division between inorganic and organic chemistry, which was fully explored by German scientists in the nineteenth century.⁴³

It is important to say that many of the inventions which created the industrial revolution were not made by traditional scientists, the kind who frequented the Royal Society, for example. The central preoccupation of the Royal Society had always been mathematics, regarded in a post-Newton world as the queen of the sciences. In such an abstract atmosphere, the practical inventor was not always regarded as a ‘proper’ scientist.⁴⁴ But in marked contrast there arose in the factory towns a series of ‘dissenting academies’, described as such because they originated as schools to educate Nonconformist ministers – Quakers, Baptists, Methodists – who were not allowed into the regular universities. But these academies soon broadened both their aim and their intake. The three most famous of the dissenting academies were the Manchester Philosophical Society, the Warrington Academy and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, though other academies were prominent in towns like Daventry and Hackney. The career of Joseph Priestley offers a good example of the way the academies worked. Starting at Warrington Academy, shortly after it opened, Priestley was at first a teacher of English and other languages – in fact, at Warrington he founded possibly the first courses ever given on English literature and modern history. But while at Warrington he attended several of the lectures of his colleagues, and in this way was introduced to the new sciences of electricity and chemistry.⁴⁵

Almost certainly the most influential scientific academy of the eighteenth century was the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Its members (known agreeably as ‘lunatics’) met informally to begin with, in the homes of different friends. Formal meetings began around 1775. The group was led by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and met monthly on the Monday nearest the full moon. Meetings petered out in 1791 after a riot at Priestley’s house (see below).⁴⁶ The kernel of the society, at least in its early days, was composed of James Watt and Matthew Boulton. Watt, as we have seen, had developed his famous steam engine in Scotland, but found that craftsmanship north of the border was not up to scratch and joined forces with Boulton, whose Birmingham workshops operated to a much higher standard.⁴⁷ But Watt and Boulton were by no means the only stars of the Lunar Society. Josiah Wedgwood was another: he founded the Wedgwood potteries, and modelled his ceramics on ancient Greek vases discovered in the Etruscan countryside in Italy (he named his works Etruria). Typical of his time, Wedgwood drove himself hard to obtain the highest standards of workmanship in his factories. Among other things, he invented the pyrometer (though he insisted on calling it a thermometer), to measure high temperatures, which helped him make the fundamental discovery that at high temperatures all materials glow in the same way – that colour measures temperature no matter what the material is. In time this would help give rise to quantum theory.⁴⁸ Other members of the Lunar Society included William Murdoch, who invented the gaslight (first used in Boulton’s Soho works in Birmingham) and Richard Edgeworth, one of the inventors of the telegraph.⁴⁹

Joseph Priestley did not arrive in Birmingham until 1780 but when he did he immediately established himself as the leading mind.⁵⁰ He also became a Unitarian minister. Unitarians were sometimes accused of atheism or deism and as a result were regarded as among the boldest thinkers of their time (Coleridge was a Unitarian).⁵¹ Priestley was certainly bold enough in his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), in which he may well have been the first to argue that the happiness of the greatest number is the standard by which government should be judged.⁵² Priestley’s brother-in-law John Wilkinson was also a member of the Lunar Society. His brother had been at the Warrington Academy, which is how his sister met and married Priestley, while he was a teacher there. Wilkinson’s father was an ironmaster and John too became brilliantly adept in the use of the metal. Abraham Darby and he designed and erected the famous bridge of iron at Ironbridge, opened in 1779. Wilkinson constructed the first cast-iron boat and sailed it under the bridge.⁵³ He died in 1805 and, true to his principles, was buried in an iron coffin.

As ever, we should not make too much of the Lunar Society’s ‘outsider’ status. Priestley did lecture before the Royal Society, and won its prestigious Copley Medal. The group had (intellectual) links with James Hutton in Edinburgh, whose work on the history of the earth is considered in Chapter 31; Wedgwood was close to Sir William Hamilton, whose collection of ancient vases would eventually adorn the British Museum, and stimulated the idea for the graceful Wedgwood pottery; several ‘lunatics’ corresponded with Henry Cavendish, whose interest in science would encourage his descendants to found in his honour the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (see the Conclusion); their activities were painted by Joseph Wright of Derby and George Stubbs. But between them the Lunar Society had many firsts to its credit: its members did much to promote the acceptance of machines in modern life, they were among the first to appreciate the notion of marketing, and advertising, and even shopping. These achievements also included: an understanding of photosynthesis, and its importance in life; an understanding of the atmosphere (achieved partly by their intrepid ascents in balloons); they made the first systematic attempts to understand and predict weather patterns; they developed modern mints for the printing of coins and improved the presses that would make mass newspapers practicable; their members conceived the idea of children’s books as a way to inculcate the young into the mysteries and possibilities of science. They were early campaigners for the abolition of slavery. In Jenny Uglow’s words: ‘They were pioneers of the turnpikes and canals and of the new factory system. They were the group who brought efficient steam power to the nation . . . All of them . . . applied their belief in experiment and their optimism about progress to personal life, and to the national life of politics and reform . . . They knew that knowledge was provisional, but they also understood that it brought power, and believed that this power should belong to us all.’⁵⁴

But let Robert Schofield, who made an earlier study of the Lunar Society, sum up its achievements and its significance. ‘Polite society, by state and custom established, might still be concerned with land and title, they might still spend their time disputing in an unrepresentative Parliament, discussing literature and the arts in London coffee shops, and drinking and gambling at White’s [a gentleman’s club]; but the world they knew was a shadow. Another society, in which position was determined by an ungenteel success, was creating a different world more to its liking. The French war and political representation delayed the formal substitution of new for old, but it was the new society that provided power to win the war . . . The Lunar Society represents this “other society”, pushing for place. If it was only qualitatively different from other provincial groups, then these deserve more searching study, for in the Lunar Society are to be found the seeds of nineteenth-century England.’⁵⁵

In 1791 there was an attack on the Birmingham home of Joseph Priestley because it was believed (wrongly, as it turned out) that he was attending a dinner ‘to celebrate the fall of the Bastille’. This was not the first of such attacks – it was part of an organised movement against people who were understood to sympathise with the aims of the French Revolution. In this case, Priestley’s home was ransacked and set ablaze. Although the rumours abated, Priestley had had enough: he left Birmingham and decamped to the United States. This was a dramatic move and revealing: at that time, and whatever their views on the French Revolution, many of the Nonconformist scientists and innovators just then were very sympathetic with the aims of the American variety. One reason for this was America’s successful realisation of the aims of the Enlightenment, discussed in the next chapter. Another was the more practical and pressing fact that the new manufacturing towns, such as Birmingham or Manchester, which had been mere villages until the industrial revolution, were as a consequence under-represented in Parliament.⁵⁶

Religious dissent and political dissent were different aspects of the same phenomenon. Men like Priestley and Wedgwood favoured free trade, a view which went diametrically against that of the landed aristocracy, who wanted above all to preserve the high price of grain grown on their estates. This turned into a significant difference. The German sociologist Max Weber was the first to advance the theory that the rise of Protestantism, especially Calvinism, was a crucial factor in the modern industrial economy. Others had made not dissimilar observations before but Weber was the first to come up with a coherent account of why the difference should exist and why the Protestants had the effect that they did. He argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination produced in believers a perennial anxiety about whether or not they would be saved, and this worry could only be kept under control if believers followed the kind of life that they thought would lead to salvation. This, Weber said, led them to adopt a life of ‘in-this-world asceticism’, where the only worthwhile activities were prayer and work. ‘The good Calvinist was thrifty, diligent, austere.’ In time, said Weber, this way of life became generalised. Even people who were not believers in salvation still lived – and worked – like Calvinists because they thought it was the right thing to do.⁵⁷

The Protestant ethic, as it came to be called, did more than instill diligence, thrift and austerity – it gave us the view that something is real only if it can be perceived, described and, yes, measured by anyone so long as they have the right instruments. In the Protestant mind, in Weber’s sense, a fundamental distinction grew up between two types of knowledge. On the one hand, there was the highly personal religious or spiritual experience and, on the other, scientific and technological progress that was cumulative and could be shared by anyone.⁵⁸ This distinction is still very much with us.⁵⁹

If we call the development of the Protestant ethic a religio-sociological phenomenon, the main political effect of the industrial revolution, especially in its early decades, was to widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and to transform the character of poverty, from rural and agrarian poverty to urban poverty. In the new cities – dirty, squalid, crowded – the divisions between employer and employed were sharpened and embittered and with this the nature of politics changed for close on two hundred years.

As E. P. Thompson has shown, in his The Making of the English Working Class, the characteristic experience of the labouring population between 1790 and 1830 was a narrowing process, as their position declined and weakened in the world. The essence of the industrial revolution for the working class in England was the loss of common rights by the landless and the increasing poverty of many trades brought about by ‘the deliberate manipulation of employment to make it more precarious’.⁶⁰ Before 1790 the English working classes existed in many disparate forms; the experience of oppression and the progressive loss of rights, which at first weakened them, eventually proved to be a major unifying and strengthening force which, again, helped to forge modern politics.

On the other side of what was now a growing divide, and as a result of the material successes of the industrial revolution (i.e., ignoring the human cost), it was the manufacturing interest, together with its blood-brothers in trade and finance, who now became the dominant force behind government policy, taking over – for the first time in history – from the landed aristocracy. This was not just because the urban factory was so important but also because the traditional form of land tenure (involving feudal privileges and communal rights) was deliberately usurped by unlimited ownership of enclosed parcels. This radically transformed what was left of rural life. So two things were happening at once. The working classes were being both driven off the land and sucked into the cities, crowded and filthy and unsanitary. At the same time, there was a proliferation of the middle classes, made up of the increasingly familiar professions – white-collar workers and engineers and the educational world – plus, another first, the new world of ‘services’ – for example, hotels, restaurants, and all the facilities associated with travel, now that railways and iron ships were an accessible reality. This bourgeoisie, newly installed, was every bit as self-conscious as the proletariat. In fact, many of them defined themselves by their differences from the working class. This too was new.⁶¹

And this division, which may be regarded as a defining characteristic of what became Victorian civilisation, produced new ideas in two crucial areas – in economics and in sociology.

Until the industrial revolution, the prevailing economic orthodoxy, as we have seen, was mercantilism, an approach first undermined by the so-called physiocrats in France, whose motto was ‘laissez faire’ and whose leader, it will be recalled from the last chapter, was François Quesnay.⁶² Although their ideas were never adopted outside France, they did show themselves as aware of the importance of the circulation of goods and it was this notion that was taken up by Adam Smith, whose ideas were also introduced in the last chapter. In the context of this chapter, it is important to reiterate that Smith himself was aware of the degrading effects of the factory regime on the lives of the workers, whereas it was those who followed him who seem to have turned a deliberate blind eye. Smith believed that the worker’s situation could improve but only if society expanded, which could only happen in an atmosphere of laissez faire. He believed, argued, that the worker, no less than the manufacturer, should be left free to pursue his own self-interest. Man’s nature, he said, must be accepted for what it was, and so it was not beneath the dignity of man to ‘regard our own private happiness and interest . . . [as] . . . very laudable principles of action’.⁶³ Smith, a religious man, understood that self-interest could go too far, and in The Wealth of Nations provided several examples of where this had happened and businesses had overplayed their hand and brought ruin on themselves.⁶⁴

In the short term, Smith’s book provided the employers of the industrial revolution with a neat theoretical underpinning for their behaviour but it was two other economists who added the twist which brought out the worst in the manufacturers. These men were Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus we have already considered. What we need to add here is that his conclusion – that whereas food production can only increase arithmetically, population can increase exponentially – was in the nineteenth century interpreted to mean that, in the medium-to-long term, the condition of the masses cannot be improved. This became a powerful case against providing public or private charity.

David Ricardo was the son of a stockbroker who was Dutch-Jewish and who converted to Christianity when he married and was disinherited by his family. There has always been a suspicion that Ricardo’s personal circumstances hardened his heart and, certainly, his theories made him a voice for the ‘new ruling class in a new ruling order’.⁶⁵ His main contribution to economic theory was that, if industry is to succeed, then the value created by labour must be greater than that paid out in wages. It followed, he said, that if wages were kept low, to a level ‘which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution’, then there would never be too great an accumulation of capital, nor a general over-production. As J. K. Galbraith reminds us, this became known as the Iron Law of Wages, and established ‘that those who worked were meant to be poor, and that any other state of affairs would threaten the whole edifice of industrial society’. Ricardo, known in Parliament, where he served, as the ‘oracle’, agreed with Adam Smith that an expanding economy would push up wages overall but this was the only concession he made to the poor.⁶⁶ As a classic laissez-faire capitalist, who argued that any taxes curtailed the amount of capital available for investment, he was one of those who provoked Karl Marx.⁶⁷

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism also needs consideration in this context because his idea of a ‘felicific calculus’, the overall aggregate of pleasure and pain, became identified with the maximisation of the production of goods, the most characteristic achievement of the new industrialism. The fundamental idea, ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, was soon amended to include the twist that, no matter how acute the hardship might be for a minority (in terms of unemployment, for example), it must be tolerated. Bentham went so far as to say that ‘one should steel oneself against compassion for the few – or action on their behalf – lest one damage the greater well-being of the many’.⁶⁸

Not everyone could harden their heart like Ricardo or Bentham. Robert Owen for one. In his Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System he concluded that, while there were some 900,000 families in Britain involved in agriculture, there were well over a million in trade and manufacturing and this number was increasing dramatically. Owen did not need convincing that the long labouring shifts in factories took an appalling toll on the health and dignity of workers. In the factory, he said, ‘employment’ had become ‘merely a cash relationship regardless of moral responsibility’.⁶⁹ This moral abdication was for him what mattered most. The poor man ‘sees all around him hurrying forward, at mail-coach speed, to acquire individual wealth . . .’⁷⁰ ‘All are sedulously trained to buy cheap and sell dear; and to succeed in this art, the parties must be taught to acquire strong powers of deception; and thus a spirit is generated through every class of traders, destructive of that open, honest, sincerity, without which man cannot make others happy, nor enjoy happiness himself.’⁷¹

Owen had started work at the age of ten, after he moved from Montgomeryshire, in Wales, where he had been born, to London. He managed to prosper and became a partner in a business in Manchester, later moving on to become a manager and partner at the New Lanark mills in Scotland. And it was there, over the next two decades, that he carried out his famous experiments at social reform within an industrial environment. He had been shocked when he had taken over at Lanark. ‘The workers lived in idleness and poverty, usually in debt; they were often drunk and traded in stolen goods. They were used to lying and argument, and were united only in their vehement opposition to their employers.’⁷² The position of the children was worse even than in a Dickens novel. They were provided from Edinburgh workhouses and were forced to labour from six in the morning until seven in the evening. It was scarcely surprising that Owen found that ‘many of them became dwarfs in body and mind’.⁷³

His response was radical. To discourage theft and drunkenness, he set up a system of rewards and punishments. He raised the minimum age of children from six to ten and funded a village school where the younger children were taught to read and write ‘and enjoy themselves’.⁷⁴ He improved housing, paved the streets, planted trees and created gardens. To his great satisfaction, he was able to show that his improvements not only eased life for the labourers, but actually helped increase their productivity. He then embarked on a campaign to do the same on a nation-wide basis.⁷⁵

This plan had three aims. First, Owen wanted free schools, state-funded, for all children between the ages of five and ten. Second, he campaigned for various Factory Acts to be passed, designed to limit the hours a person could work in any one day. He was successful insofar as a Factory Act was passed in 1819, though Owen himself did not feel it went anywhere near far enough. Finally, he campaigned for a national system of poor relief. He wasn’t advocating cash handouts. Rather, Owen proposed a series of co-operative villages, with roughly 1,200 individuals in each, with a ring of land surrounding it. Every village would have a school and provide for itself, causing the number of poor to fall as the village inhabitants evolved into profitable members of society.⁷⁶ One or two villages of this kind were tried (Orbiston, nine miles east of Glasgow, for example), but, in the main, it has to be said, nothing much came of this latter idea. (Owen was a fervent critic of organised religion and this meant that he antagonised many potential benefactors.) But his two other main ideas did succeed, even if they did not fly as far or as fast or as high as he wanted: two out of three isn’t bad. To an extent, he did manage to restore a certain dignity to the labouring classes which he felt had been lost with the arrival of the factory city.⁷⁷

As a visit to Ironbridge, in Shropshire, England, will confirm even today, Britain was only semi-industrial in the eighteenth century. The first factories were built on (literally) greenfield sites, in the valleys of the countryside.⁷⁸ It was only when the factories were transferred to the towns that the full horror of the industrial revolution became truly apparent, and it was not until the nineteenth century that industrialisation and the great divide between rich and poor that went with it combined to forge a self-conscious and bitter class of people who felt excluded from the vast fortunes being acquired by the industrialists. According to Eric Hobsbawm, the 1840s had been reached before pre-industrial traditions finally died out (in the form, for example, of such pastimes as wrestling matches, cock-fighting and bull-baiting; the 1840s also marked the end of the era when folksong remained the major musical idiom of industrial workers).⁷⁹

The important point, as several historians have observed, is that there was a marked deterioration in the conditions of the working class at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hobsbawm himself provides several vivid examples: between 1800 and 1840 there was a shortage of meat in London; out of 8.5 million Irishmen, close to a million literally starved to death in the famine of 1846–1847; the average wages of handloom weavers fell between 1805 and 1833 from 23 shillings a week to 6s 3d. The average height of the population – a good indication of nutrition – rose between 1780 and 1830, fell in the next thirty years, then rose again. The 1840s were known, even at the time, as the ‘Hungry Forties’. Riots, mostly related to food shortages, broke out in Britain in 1811–1813, 1815–1817, 1819, 1826, between 1829 and 1835, in 1838–1842, 1843–1844 and 1846–1848. Hobsbawm quotes a rioter in the Fens in 1816: ‘ “Here I am between Earth and Sky, so help me God. I would sooner lose my life than go home as I am. Bread I want and bread I will have . . .” In 1816, all over the eastern counties, in 1822 in East Anglia, in 1830 everywhere between Kent and Dorset, Somerset and Lincoln, in 1843–4 once again in the east Midlands and the eastern counties, the threshing machines were broken, the ricks burned at night, as men demanded a minimum of life.’⁸⁰ To begin with, the vast bulk of these riots occurred so that the rioters could get their hands on food. Beginning about 1830, however, the form of unrest began to change and, eventually, there arose the concept of a general trades union which had in its armoury ‘the ultimate weapon, the general strike’ (otherwise known, not entirely ironically, as the ‘sacred month’). ‘But essentially, what held all these movements together, or revived them after their periodic defeat and disintegration, was the universal discontent of men who felt themselves hungry in a society reeking with wealth, enslaved in a country which prided itself on its freedom, seeking bread and hope, and receiving in return stones and despair.’⁸¹ This is not only present-day Marxist historians talking. One American passing through Manchester in 1845 confided as follows in a letter home: ‘Wretched, defrauded, oppressed, crushed human nature lying in bleeding fragments all over the face of society . . . Every day that I live I thank Heaven that I am not a poor man with a family in England.’⁸²

In 1845 Friedrich Engels was working in Manchester (he got to know Owen). He was employed there in the cotton trade but he could see what was going on around him and was disturbed enough by what he witnessed to make his own exposé of the new industrial Britain. The Condition of the Working Class in England, released in that year, described in despairing detail the ‘sheer misery and material squalor’ in which tens of thousands lived. But, vivid though his book was, Engels only set the scene. It was his friend and collaborator who was to take the world by storm.⁸³

Karl Marx was very moved by Engels’ book but, as J. K. Galbraith has observed, the truth is that Marx was probably a ‘natural revolutionary’ in any case. Obsessed by freedom all his life, the thrust of Marx’s lifetime achievement may be understood as an investigation and exposé ‘of how man’s inherent freedom has become hidden from him’. Born in Trier, in Germany, the son of a lawyer who was also an officer of the High Court, Marx was raised as a member of the local elite and his marriage to Jenny von Westphalen, daughter of a local baron, underscored his social position.⁸⁴ The change came for Marx after he went to Berlin to study under George Hegel. Hegel’s dominant idea was that all economic, social and political life is in constant flux. This was his famous theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Once one state of affairs has evolved, said Hegel, a second emerges to challenge it. This argument had more going for it then than it may do now, because at the time Marx was studying under Hegel the new industrialists had emerged and were challenging the power of the ancien régime, the old ruling landed classes.⁸⁵ Change was the crucial concept here. Classical economics – in particular the system outlined by Ricardo – argued that the aim of economics was equilibrium, when the fundamental relationships in industrial society, between employer and worker, between land, capital and labour, never changed. Drawing a lesson from Hegel, Marx didn’t accept the conventional wisdom for one moment.

Not that he derived all his views from Hegel and from Berlin. As with Ricardo, his own experiences were relevant too. After his time in the Prussian capital, Marx transferred to Cologne, to become editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. This was (and it is an important fact) an organ of the new industrialists of the Ruhr valley, and to begin with he did a good job. But then, gradually at first, and in small ways, his paper began to support a set of policies that contravened the interests of many of his readers. For example, he published his support for the right of the locals to collect dead wood in the nearby forests. As in many countries around Europe, this was a traditional privilege, but the right had been recently removed because wood was needed for the new industries. As a result, any local who ventured into the forest was now guilty of trespass. Marx also argued for changes to the divorce laws, making the role of the church less important. This barrage of radical editorials was too much for the local authorities in Cologne, and Marx was dismissed. Now began a period of wandering. He went first to Paris, where his aim was to write for a German-language periodical distributed among German expatriates. The censors seized the first issue and the Prussians complained to the French that ‘harbouring Marx was an unfriendly act’.⁸⁶ He moved on to Belgium, but the Prussians hounded him there. After other adventures and expulsions he ended up in Britain.

By now of course he was a changed man and increasingly revolutionary. In Britain he collaborated with Engels on what J. K. Galbraith has called ‘the most celebrated – and energetically denounced – political pamphlet of all time’, The Communist Manifesto. In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels called the state under capitalism ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’, adding ‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.’ They argued that industrial society was divided into ‘two great hostile camps’, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, fundamentally antagonistic.⁸⁷ Warming to his theme, Marx embarked on his massive three-volume work, Capital. Engels edited the first volume and then, after Marx’s death in 1883, put together the last two volumes from notes and pieces of manuscript.

It would be inadequate to label Marx as simply an economist. Many people regard him, alongside Auguste Comte, as one of the fathers of sociology. This mainly has to do with the fact that his interests went much wider than the purely economic. For Marx, in order for man to be free he has to understand freedom, and it was always his aim to show how the material outcome of history has interfered with this understanding. For Marx, this understanding was a central drama of politics.⁸⁸

He was, above all, materialistic. He flatly rejected Hegel’s ideas about history as a dialectic of spirit and of thesis producing antithesis. For Marx, the course of history is the result of the material conditions human beings have been faced with.⁸⁹ In particular, he argued that it is the labour and technology that people use in their work which either does or does not bring them fulfilment. But he did use one idea of Hegel’s, the notion of alienation, though Marx adapted it to mean that people can appear to be free (in their work, mainly), and yet in reality they are fettered.⁹⁰

Throughout the 1850s, diligently burrowing away among the many facilities of the Reading Room of the British Museum, ‘working like the devil’, Marx consolidated his exposé of capitalist and industrial practices through which he intended to maintain that it is the material conditions of society – the way work is organised and wealth produced – that mould every aspect of that society, ‘from the way we think to the institutions society allows and approves’.⁹¹ It was a massive ambition and this is why Marx was much more than an economist. His main argument was that the conditions of production are the foundation, the fundamental base, on which society is built. ‘All social institutions – what he called the superstructure – stem from this, be it the law, religion, the different elements that make up the state. In other words, power is what counts.’⁹² Then, in equally copious detail (the book is three volumes long), he set out the personal consequences of this fundamental reality. Here, his most potent idea is the one alluded to above, his adaptation of Hegel’s notion of alienation. Marx argued that, in industrial society where the division of labour is essential for efficiency and for adding value, ‘the labourer is alienated from himself’. What he meant was that the very logic of factory organisation and production makes a man an automaton. The main human characteristic of factory life is that the identity of ‘factory hands’ is thereby diminished, since for the most part the workers hate what they do and, moreover, have no control over their work. No less important, and equally diminishing, they are forced to operate ‘well within their capabilities’. This is alienation.⁹³

Workers do not become aware that they are alienated, Marx says, because of something he called ‘ideology’. As a result of the way society is organised, the way power is organised, a set of beliefs – an ideology – is produced, regarding the conditions of that society. This ‘ideology’ includes theories about human nature itself, theories which in themselves serve the interests of the dominant class; they help it preserve its power but are for the most part false. Marx said that organised religion was a good example of what he meant by ideology in action because it taught that people must accept God’s will – the status quo – rather than take any action to change things.⁹⁴

As well as being more than an economist, Marx was also in some ways more than a sociologist, a philosopher almost. Nowhere in Capital does he actually discuss ‘human nature’, as philosophers or theologians might, but that is the point. For him, there is no abstract essence of man: instead a man’s sense of self emerges from his material situation, his relations with others significant in his life, and the economic, social and political forces by which he has been shaped. What mattered here, and what disturbed many people, was that Marx’s argument implied that a man can change his nature by changing his circumstances. Revolution was psychological as well as economic.⁹⁵

The final layer in Marx’s new way of looking at the world was what many people found the most contentious of all. This was the idea that his work was scientific, that his investigations in the British Museum had uncovered something hitherto hidden but now revealed as objective about society, and that therefore his analysis unveiled a progression that was inevitable. While many objected to this, for others it gave ‘Marxism’ the character of a millenarian religion, the more so as his huge book divided human history into stages, each stage being characterised by the dominant method of production. For Marx, the origins of the modern world occurred with the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And then, perhaps most famously of all, he went on to argue that economic instability and class conflict are inherent aspects of the history of production which must ultimately result in revolution, and the final transition – to communism. ‘The knell of capitalist private property sounds.’ (Before ‘revolution’, Marx first used the word ‘dissolution’.)⁹⁶

The timing of Capital was crucial. Here was a new world view, a theory beyond economics, beyond sociology, beyond even politics, imbued with a post-enlightenment scientific aura, which offered, or purported to offer, an all-encompassing understanding of human affairs at a time when religion was visibly failing. As a result, during the 1860s Marx himself became a political figure. Particularly after publication of the first volume of Capital, in 1867, he was taken up by the various European revolutionary movements, as the man who had, after years of research in the British Museum, provided scientific validation of revolutionary action. For example, his ideas were behind the Working Men’s International Association, the so-called ‘First International’, which was established in 1864, and where the term ‘Marxism’ was first used.⁹⁷

Among the imaginative responses to the industrial revolution was a set of ‘industrial novels’, written and set in Britain. These included Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), both by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sybil (1845), by Benjamin Disraeli, a future prime minister of Great Britain, Alton Locke (1850), by Charles Kingsley, Felix Holt (1866), by George Eliot, and Hard Times (1854), by Charles Dickens, an extract from which began this chapter. The main themes of these books were not only criticism of the new society, but also a fear of violence that was felt might erupt from the working classes at any time.

While some of these books exerted a great impact, then and since, from the perspective of the twenty-first century a remarkable set of observations, about the new uses of certain words, are more pointed. The British critic Raymond Williams has shown that ‘in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of new words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or, where they had already been used in the language, acquired new and important meanings.’ He went on to say that these words described a general pattern of new ideas which reflected a wider transformation in life and thought, and which, as we shall see, ‘bear witness to a general change in our characteristic thinking about our common life’. These words were industry, democracy, class, art and culture.⁹⁸

Before the industrial revolution, Williams said, the word ‘industry’ could be paraphrased as ‘skill, assiduity, perseverance, diligence’. Although this traditional usage survives, industry also now came to be a collective word for manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their characteristic activities.⁹⁹ It was followed by ‘industrious’, ‘industrial’ and, from 1830, by ‘industrialism’. The key phrase ‘industrial revolution’, he says, was first coined by French writers in the 1820s, modelled explicitly on an analogy with the French Revolution.¹⁰⁰ (Others credit its first use to Engels, see here.) ‘Democracy’, although in use from Greek times as a term for ‘government by the people’, only came into popular use at the time of the American and French Revolutions. In England, although there may have been democracy, at least in theory, since the Magna Carta, or since the Commonwealth, or since 1688, it did not call itself a democracy and at the end of the eighteenth century democracy was more or less equivalent to Jacobinism or mob-rule. ‘Democrats, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, were seen, commonly, as dangerous and subversive mob agitators.’¹⁰¹ ‘Class’, in its important modern sense, dates from about 1740. Before that it was used mainly in its scholarly setting, to indicate a group in schools or colleges. First came ‘lower class’, to join ‘lower orders’, then ‘higher classes’ in the 1790s, followed by ‘middle’ or ‘middling classes’, with ‘working classes’ not appearing until about 1815, ‘upper classes’ soon after. ‘Class prejudice, class legislation, class consciousness and class conflict and class war follow in the course of the nineteenth century.’¹⁰² Williams is not so naïve as to claim that this was the beginning of social divisions in England but he is adamant that the new usage reflected a change in the character of those divisions. People were more aware of divisions, and found the vaguer meaning of ‘class’ more useful than ‘rank’, which had been used previously and now applied less and less.

The changing use of ‘art’, he said, was very similar to the changing use of industry. Its traditional meaning was ‘skill’ – any skill. ‘Artist’ had meant a skilled person, as had ‘artisan’. But ‘art’ now came to stand for a particular group of skills, the imaginative or creative arts, and ‘Art with a capital A came to stand for a special kind of truth, imaginative truth, making the artist a special kind of person . . . A new name, aesthetics, was found to describe the judgement of art and . . . The arts – literature, music, painting, sculpture, theatre – were grouped together, in this new phrase, as having something essentially in common which distinguishes them from other human skills. This is when the distinction between artist, on the one hand, and artisan and craftsman, on the other, arose, and when genius, which originally meant “a characteristic disposition”, came to mean “exalted ability”.’¹⁰³

The change in the meaning of ‘culture’ was perhaps the most interesting response of all. This term had originally meant a culture of something, as in the tending of natural growth, the biological sense. Its change in meaning went through several phases. ‘It came to mean, first, “a general state or habit of the mind,” having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole”. Third, it came to mean “the general body of the arts”. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean “a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual”.’¹⁰⁴ Matthew Arnold, in particular and most famously in Culture and Anarchy (1869), defined culture as an inward journey, an attempt to rid ourselves of ignorance, ‘a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically.’¹⁰⁵ Arnold thought that in each class in the new industrialised society there was ‘a remnant’, a minority which existed alongside the characteristic majority, who ‘were not disabled’ by the ordinary notions of their class and who loved human perfection. Through culture, in the sense he defined it, these people would develop their ‘best selves’ to set a standard of beauty and human perfection, thus ‘saving’ the greater mass of men. He did not see this as in any way elitist.¹⁰⁶ Arnold’s ideas were a long way from Marx’s, or Owen’s, or Adam Smith’s, and the very concept of ‘high culture’, which is what he really had in mind, is now under much criticism and, to an extent, in retreat. All the more important, therefore, to add these lines of Arnold’s which are often omitted: ‘Culture directs our attention to the natural current there is in human affairs, and its continual working, and will not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us see, not only his good side, but also how much in him was of necessity limited and transient . . .’¹⁰⁷

Kenneth Pomeranz has recently argued, in The Great Divergence, that the economies (and therefore the civilisations) of Britain and Europe accelerated after 1750, quickly outstripping those of India, China, Japan and the rest of Asia, to create the great inequalities in the world which we see around us today (and which are in the process, in some regions, of being rectified). He argues, however, that the industrial revolution, which is generally given credit for both the acceleration and divergence, is only part of the picture. For the full impact of the industrial revolution to be understood, he says, we need to allow for two extra factors. One is the invention of steam-driven transport (especially steamships), which greatly reduced the cost of long-distance trade, in the process making the second factor, the existence of the New World, a more viable economic market. The New World, with its mineral and other resources, its slave society (helping generate unprecedented profits), and its vast geographical extent, provided exactly the kind of market conditions to reciprocate with the new technologies and economies of scale represented by the industrial revolution. He says that the economies of India, China and other Asian regions in the early eighteenth century were not so different – hardly less sophisticated – than in Europe, and that the ‘second acceleration’ of the West (after the first surge ahead between 1050 and 1300) would not have been so decisive without this conjunction of factors. The growth of empires also played their part – they were essentially protected markets.¹⁰⁸

A related, and possibly the most important long-term, effect of the industrial revolution was that the world was at peace for a hundred years between 1815 and 1914. This link is not often made but the case was persuasively set out in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, published in 1944 but reissued in 2001.¹⁰⁹ Polanyi’s argument was that the vast fortunes formed by the industrial revolution, and the prospect of equally or even vaster fortunes to be made in the future, together with the international character of many of the new businesses (cotton, railways, shipping, pharmaceuticals), plus the development of the bond market, which had matured since the sixteenth century, to the point where, generally speaking, foreigners owned a substantial proportion of any government’s public debt (say 14 per cent), meant that, for the first time in history, there emerged ‘an acute peace interest’ and this was, he says, ‘a distinct stage in the history of industrial civilisation’. After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace.¹¹⁰ The institution which most characterised the ‘peace interest’, he said, was what he called haute finance, by which he meant international finance.

Polanyi didn’t deny that there were ‘small wars’ in the nineteenth century (and more than one revolution) but insisted there was no general or long war between any of the major powers from 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War. (Lawrence James characterises this period as a ‘cold war’; and just how unusual it was may be seen from the statistics in Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus, where he quotes figures to show that there were 1,000 European wars between 1400 and 1984: ‘On average a new war begins every four years and a Great Power war [i.e., a war involving more than one Great Power] every seven or eight years.’) Haute finance, Polanyi said, functioned as the main link between the political and economic organisation of the world. These high financiers were not pacifists and had no objection to any number of minor, short or localised wars. ‘But their business would be impaired if a general war between the Great Powers should interfere with the monetary foundations of the system.’ Haute finance was not designed as an instrument of peace, he said, and it had no specific pro-peace organisation, but since it actually was independent of any single government, it comprised a new power in the world. The vast majority of holders of government securities, as well as other investments, were ‘bound to be the first losers’ if a general war should break out. These powerful people, therefore, had a vested interest in peace. The crucial factor, he said, was that loans, and the renewal of loans, hinged upon credit, and credit upon good behaviour. This was reflected in constitutional government and the proper conduct of budgetary affairs. Polanyi gave a few examples where financiers had in effect taken over (at least some of) the reins of government for a short time, in places such as Turkey, Egypt or Morocco, to administer financial problems (usually debt supervision) that were threatening political stability. All of which, he said, showed that trade had become linked with peace. This was the time that saw the emergence of financiers such as the Rothschilds. In 1830 James de Rothschild went so far as to quantify the cost of war – he said that, in the event of hostilities his rents would drop by 30 per cent. Disraeli calculated that the 1859 Franco-Italian challenge to Austria was costing 60 million sterling on the stock exchange, and the marquess of Salisbury observed in regard to the lack of outside investment in Ireland: ‘Capitalists prefer peace and 3 per cent to 10 per cent with the drawback of bullets in the breakfast room.’ The picture has been expanded and deepened by recent scholarship showing that exactly this period, 1820–1917, saw the greatest growth of democracy, and democracies, in history, apart from the years after the Second World War.¹¹¹

In the end, haute finance failed to avert the First World War, which in turn would bring about a fundamental change in the banking system of the West. But a watershed was reached in 1815. Before then, governments and merchants had always accepted that wars provided the opportunity to expand trade. After the industrial revolution, with the rise of a prosperous middle class, the economics of war changed for all time. The hundred years peace, as Karl Polanyi called it, allowed the industrial revolution to spark the development of mass society, a totally new form of civilisation.