Right.
 
Well, the Glorious Revolution
of 1688,
so-called, which I described
last time,
began as a relatively bloodless
coup,
but it did go on to usher in
some pretty massive changes in
the structure of government and
also in Britain's standing in
the world.
 
In the twenty years after the
Revolution Britain began to
emerge as one of Europe's great
powers,
and we'll look at that in the
final full lecture after the
break.
 
But part of understanding that
change requires us to understand
how Britain was able to sustain
that kind of role after 1688 and
that brings us back to the
economy,
especially in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries.
 
So you have your lovingly
handcrafted handout,
a sort of artisan handout,
and that contains the basic
facts and I'll take you through
it.
I always notice whenever I
announce there's going to be a
lecture in economic history that
it seems to have the same effect
as the great plague of 1666 on
our numbers;
but it matters.
 
Okay.
 
Right.
 
Well, a few weeks ago I left
the narrative of economic and
social change at the point in
the mid-seventeenth century when
population and prices began to
stabilize after over a century
of growth but,
as I said then,
the dynamic of change that had
been unleashed in the later
sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries didn't stop.
Rather it continued in a
changing and increasingly
favorable climate,
and central to that new context
was the relative stability of
population and prices.
In 1641, as you'll see on table
one of your handout,
the population was just over
five million and it remained at
approximately that level for
many decades to come.
In fact, in some parts of the
late seventeenth century
population growth rates for
particular decades were in fact
negative.
 
In 1701, the population was
still just over five million and
it was only about five and a
half million by the
mid-eighteenth century.
 
Renewed growth didn't start
until the late eighteenth
century.
 
Well, the reasons for this
relative stability seem fairly
clear in the light of research
by demographic historians.
As table two indicates,
fertility, as measured by the
gross rate of reproduction,
reached its nadir in the third
quarter of the seventeenth
century,
and thereafter from about the
1670s it began to recover a
little but very,
very slowly and it didn't reach
its sixteenth-century levels
again until after 1760.
Any potential that there might
have been for renewed growth was
choked off by two further
factors.
First of all,
the late seventeenth century
saw a decline in life
expectation at birth.
It was as low as thirty-three
on average by the end of the
seventeenth century.
 
It's a paradox that mortality
was so bad in a period which
actually saw the final
disappearance of plague from
Britain.
 
The outbreak in London in 1665
to '6 was the last great
outbreak,
but the absence of that kind of
crisis mortality didn't prevent
generally high levels of what
the demographers refer to as
background mortality from
infectious diseases.
 
One of them,
Mary Dobson,
has shown that high levels of
mortality were particularly
associated with urban centers,
with low-lying areas,
with poor water supplies,
with the growing industrial
areas of the kingdom,
and with the areas along
significant trade routes.
 
And her suggestion is that
these facts are the outcome of,
in the first place,
denser concentrations of
population in the cities and
also those areas which shared
that density in the countryside
and which were linked by
communications which made the
transmission of infectious
diseases that much easier.
 
A more closely interconnected
society was one in which disease
transmission could take place
more effectively.
So, mortality was pretty bad in
the late seventeenth century.
And secondly a further factor
was migration.
That was partly overseas
migration.
Between 1650 and 1699,
almost a quarter of a million
migrants left England for
overseas destinations;
mostly to the Americas,
mostly going either to the West
Indies or to the southern
colonies of mainland America as
indentured servants.
 
And a second part of the
migration factor was internal
migration;
internal movement of people to
the rather unhealthy urban
centers and industrial centers.
The high death rates in those
places did much to wipe out the
surplus births of healthier
areas,
as people moved into less
healthy urban or industrial
centers.
 
So, population stability for
almost a century.
The century after 1650 also saw
a new era in price trends and
they're represented on section
three of your handout.
As you'll see from that,
the index shows that the prices
of wheat and barley,
the principal bread corns,
were actually falling from the
1650s through to about the 1680s
and then after a few bad
harvests in the 1690s,
they fluctuated at about 20%
below the level they had been in
the mid-seventeenth century.
 
In contrast,
the prices of meat remained
fairly stable,
even rose modestly.
The impact of this,
falling prices for bread corns,
stable prices for meat,
on the standards of the common
people was quite considerable.
 
The actual wage rates that
people were being paid didn't
change a great deal in the late
seventeenth century but people's
real wages,
the purchasing power of their
wages,
increased quite substantially
for the first time in over a
century.
So the evidence suggests that
by the 1680s real wages,
the purchasing power of wages,
were up by about 50% over the
levels of the 1630s.
 
For people who could find
regular work,
the costs of feeding their
families were falling,
and that released some
purchasing power for goods over
and above those that they needed
for basic subsistence.
So then, population
stabilization,
declining prices of basic
agricultural products,
growing real wages for
craftsmen and wage laborers.
And to understand the outcome
of these trends we have to
remember that all of this is
happening in what was already a
more commercialized economy,
in which the livelihoods of
most people were increasingly
dependent on the markets for
their products and their labor
in a more integrated economy.
And the outcome of all of this
was a further development in the
processes of economic growth
which had been set in motion
earlier.
 
One can sum it all up as being
a process of increased regional
economic specialization,
intensified national economic
integration,
and also increasing
participation in a nascent world
economy.
That sounds very grand,
but we can follow through with
the processes step by step as to
how all of this fit together.
In agriculture the key to
change was basically the fact
that although markets for
different products had
stabilized somewhat and
reoriented,
they didn't actually decline.
 
The population stabilized,
but it didn't decline.
There was still a large market
for agricultural produce and
that placed general pressure on
commercial farmers to try to
keep up their market share by
reducing their unit costs and
competing with other farmers to
produce more,
more effectively,
at prices which would enable
their profit margins to remain
reasonable.
And that meant a renewed
emphasis on agricultural
improvement.
 
Basically one can say that the
late seventeenth century saw a
more general spread of many of
the innovations in agricultural
techniques which I described
coming in in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries.
 
It's been said by one
agricultural historian that many
of the novel techniques of a
century earlier had become
general practice,
general best practice,
by the early eighteenth
century.
All of that involved,
and was part and parcel of,
a general regional
reorientation in land use.
Increasingly,
the east and the southeast of
the country were predominantly
arable.
That was the best price area
for cereals.
It had major markets in London
and the towns of the southeast
and also markets in nearby
continental Europe,
but elsewhere in the kingdom
livestock husbandry became more
prevalent in the north and in
the west.
They'd always had a bias
towards livestock.
It became more marked.
 
One mustn't exaggerate all this
into complete regional
homogeneity,
but there was a definite trend
toward specialization of that
kind within particular
agricultural countries.
 
And that made easier the
diffusion and adoption of
innovations by example.
 
People saw what their neighbors
were doing.
There is an excellent account
of all of this by one of the
writers of the late seventeenth
century,
John Aubrey,
who describes what was
happening in his home county of
Wiltshire down in the southwest,
to the southwest of Oxford,
and in Wiltshire Aubrey
describes how various
innovations were brought in.
He names names;
who was the first to do this or
to do that,
and he describes how their
neighbors copied them when they
saw that particular innovations
were successful and profitable.
 
Overall the whole process
greatly raised agricultural
output.
 
It's been estimated that the
cereals yield in eastern and
southeastern England was up by
about 40% between 1650 and 1750;
an environment then of rising
agricultural productivity,
induced by a more competitive
commercial climate.
Well, that agricultural
specialization facilitated,
and was in turn encouraged by,
the continued growth of the
urban population and the
continued growth of the
population in the
nonagricultural rural areas,
the rural areas where many
people were employed in various
kinds of industry.
 
And in turn,
growing agricultural
productivity released labor for
nonagricultural occupations and
enhanced the purchasing power of
those who lived by wages in such
occupations.
 
One of the most striking
features of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries
is that although population as a
whole stabilized the population
of the towns and the population
of the rural industrial areas
continued to grow both
absolutely and relatively.
 
There was a regional
redistribution of population.
Table 4A shows the figures
which have been calculated for
this by E.A. Wrigley.
 
As you'll see if you look at
4A, rural agricultural
population declined from just
over 60% in the 1670s to about
46% by the 1750s.
 
Those living in towns of more
than 5,000 rose from just over
13% to about 21% of the national
population and those living in
rural nonagricultural areas rose
from about 26 to about 33% over
the same period.
 
Now a good deal of that urban
growth was of course,
as you would expect,
occasioned by London,
as usual.
 
By 1700, London had a
population of 575,000 and was
the biggest city in Europe.
 
By 1750, its population had
reached 675,000.
So London continued to grow in
absolute terms,
but in fact its share of the
national population had somewhat
stabilized at about 11%.
 
What seems to have been
happening was that a great deal
of the urban growth of this
period was going on in other
towns as well.
 
So, for example,
in 1600 England had had twenty
towns with a population of more
than 5,000;
by 1670 it had twenty-six;
by 1700 it had thirty-two.
Provincial cities of more than
5,000 inhabitants were making up
an increasing proportion of the
national population,
by 1700 probably something like
5.5%.
By 1750, it was closer to 10%.
 
All of this amounted to a kind
of re-articulation going on
within the hierarchy of towns
and cities.
Obviously, London remained at
the top, un-challengeably,
but some historic regional
centers were stabilizing or
growing only very slowly.
 
The old city of York,
for example,
remained stable at about 12,000
population through most of this
period.
 
The real growth was going on in
different kinds of towns.
It was going on above all in
ports, especially the ports of
the west.
 
If you look at table 4B,
Bristol, the principal port of
the west of England,
grows from about 20,000
population in 1670 to 50,000 by
1750.
Liverpool, which was emerging
from having been a small market
town in the early seventeenth
century,
grew from about 5,000 people in
1670 to about 22,000 in 1750.
The other kinds of towns which
were growing disproportionately
seem to have been industrial
centers.
Newcastle in the northeast,
based on the coal trade,
grew from 12,000 to 29,000 in
the period covered by our table;
Leeds, center of the worsted
manufacturers in the cloth
industry, from 6,000 to 16,000;
Birmingham, center of
metalworking,
from 6,000 to 24,000.
This shift was especially
pronounced at the turn of the
eighteenth century.
 
It's been shown that in the
early decades of the eighteenth
century whereas what have been
described as ten historic
centers,
old cathedral cities and so
forth, grew in population by
only 18%,
a sample of eight ports shows
58% growth and a sample of new
manufacturing towns 159% growth.
 
So the urban system was
becoming more polycentric.
It had more major centers than
it had done and,
as will be apparent from what
I've already said,
the dynamic of growth was in
commerce,
in trade, and in industry,
taking off in the late
seventeenth century and
accelerating in the early
eighteenth century.
 
So, let's turn to what was
going on there,
to commerce,
about which you've already read
a little.
 
In the 1960s,
as a result of the work of
Ralph Davis,
who was the first economic
historian to really map the
trends in trade in this period,
people began to talk of the
late seventeenth century as a
period of 'commercial
revolution',
which is a description which
has some justice to it.
The focus in Davis' work was on
the major growth of
extra-European trade,
especially with the Americas
and with the East.
 
Now in considering this it's
important always to remember
that the well-established trades
with European countries
continued and indeed in many
ways they grew;
but the overall pattern of
overseas trade was undoubtedly
shifting,
as initiatives which had been
pioneered by enterprising people
in the early seventeenth century
began to pay off,
became consolidated and
extended.
 
And there are four major
aspects of this change which are
illustrated in different ways on
the second side of your handout
in these figures dealing with
overseas trade.
The first can be illustrated if
we look at London's domestic
exports in section A of that
table.
As it shows,
in 1640 in the eve of the Civil
War London's exports were still
dominated by woolen cloth.
Some 92% of exports were woolen
cloth.
By the later 1660s,
though, that was down to 74%
and by 1700 it was down to 72%.
 
Now that change took place not
because woolen exports were
actually declining,
but because of the rise of
other kinds of domestic exports;
greater exports of foodstuffs
and of raw materials,
agricultural products,
fish, lead, tin,
coal, animal hides that had
together--
all of that together had--made
up only five percent of London's
exports in 1640;
it was over 12% by 1700.
 
And then the export from London
of other domestic manufactures;
2.6 percent of London's exports
in 1640, just over 15% by 1700.
So there was a reorientation in
the export trade in domestic
products.
 
Secondly, if we look at
London's imports,
which is section B of the
table, that brings out the
continued growth in the value of
imports from established
European trading partners;
wines from southern Europe as
you'll see growing dramatically
in the value of these imports
between the 1630s and the 1690s;
silks again,
often from France or southern
Europe, rising quite
significantly;
iron and steel imports mostly
from Scandinavia,
from Sweden in particular,
rising dramatically from 16,000
to 118,000 pounds in value.
So, considerable growth in the
imports from these European
trading partners,
but that was dwarfed by the
imports which were coming in
from the East and the Americas.
Those imports were increasingly
becoming predominant in London's
import trade so we have
continued growth in such
commodities as pepper and
tobacco,
but massive growth in the
import of calicos--
that's cheap cotton cloth from
India--
and sugar from the West
Indies--almost,
well, a fivefold increase in
the value of the sugar imported
from the West Indies in the
later seventeenth century.
Thirdly, a great deal of these
new imported goods were not
consumed domestically but were
re-exported to European markets.
So for example two thirds of
the tobacco that was landed in
England was re-exported to
European markets mostly in
northern Europe.
 
A third of the sugar that was
landed was re-exported to
Europe.
 
Nine tenths of the pepper that
came in from the East was
re-exported.
 
You can look at the rising
value of those re-exports in
table 5C.
 
We have the value of domestic
exports,
the value of imports and the
value of re-exports,
and look how it grows in the
course of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries.
 
What was happening then was a
flood of tobacco,
sugar, calico,
other products coming in from
distant overseas origins which
was then re-exported,
bringing income to the English
merchants who re-exported it to
Europe.
 
One of the interesting things
about all of these products is
that they were cheap.
 
A hogshead of tobacco might be
expensive in itself,
but by the time it was broken
down in to small parcels,
was sold by the pipe,
it had a mass market--
it was cheap.
 
Similarly sugar.
 
Sugar might be in the form of a
great sugarloaf,
but by the time something had
been chipped off it,
wrapped up and sold in small
quantities it had a mass market.
Calico cloth was very cheap,
the kind of cheap and colorful
Indian cotton cloth which we're
still familiar with,
which could be bought by
servants.
A mass market for these goods,
and in fact the figures that we
have here don't tell us the
whole story.
It's well known that there was
a great deal of smuggling and
evading the customs.
 
The figures are based on the
customs records.
The reality may have been even
greater change than the figures
actually represent.
 
Right.
 
Well, these new trades were
based upon and involved
elaborating more complex and
multilateral trading patterns,
the fourth feature of the
changing trade.
These are often described as
the triangular trades.
So for example you would get
vessels leaving the western
ports of Britain for the
fisheries in the north Atlantic
around Newfoundland from which
they would bring the dried cod
to southern Europe where it was
in great demand and then they
would bring southern European
products back to Britain;
a triangle.
 
Or ships would leave London
usually heading for the East
Indies.
 
They would trade around the
East Indies between the Indian
mainland and what's now
Indonesia and then bring
products back to Britain.
 
The most famous of these
triangles of course is the
so-called Atlantic Triangle;
the export of manufactured
products,
weaponry, and liquor to West
Africa,
the buying there of slaves to
be taken across to the Caribbean
and the southern mainland
colonies,
the notorious Atlantic Triangle.
That was of course a ghastly
trade with terrible mortality of
both the slaves and indeed the
English crews on the 'middle
passage',
but it was vital to the
development of the Atlantic
economy and contemporaries
simply seem to have accepted it
as such;
little comment initially on
what it involved,
few voices raised in protest.
 
Slavery in itself of course was
nothing new.
What was new was the scale and
systematization of the trade as
it developed in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries.
 
And if it offered any ray of
hope in all of this it was
simply that as people became
more familiar with its realities
voices began to be raised
against it;
but not yet.
 
This transformation of trade
was well established by the
1680s and then it stabilized and
continued to grow steadily right
through to the mid-eighteenth
century and indeed beyond,
and all of it was vigorously
defended by legislation,
the Navigation Acts which made
every effort to keep these
trades in English hands.
 
Certain goods could only be
exported to the colonies in
English ships.
 
Certain goods could only be
landed in England before being
re-exported to other
destinations;
an effort to keep this new
burgeoning trade in the hands of
English merchants and in
particular to squeeze out their
greatest competitors,
the Dutch.
Okay.
 
Well, this expansion of
overseas trade created income
obviously;
it created employment in
shipping in the commercial
infrastructure of the growing
port cities;
it was directly linked in that
way to urban growth.
 
And above all London of course.
 
Three quarters of English
overseas trade still went
through London.
 
Half the merchant fleet was
based in London.
London was the dominant center
for shipbuilding and repairing,
all the ancillary crafts of the
shipping industry.
It was the center for sugar
refining and tobacco processing
and many other manufactures
linked to trade,
silk for example.
 
But increasingly the so-called
"out ports,"
the other ports,
were getting a bigger share.
London's relative dominance,
especially in the Atlantic and
re-export trades,
was being whittled down
somewhat.
 
By 1700, about a third of
tobacco imports by value and
about a fifth of sugar imports
by value came in not through
London but through out ports
like Bristol and Liverpool.
And after the union between
England and Scotland the city of
Glasgow,
which became the major British
center of the tobacco trade as
the eighteenth century advanced.
The health of trade was also of
immense significance to the
development of other industries,
both directly and indirectly.
Of course, the trade in woolen
textiles,
which remained so important,
had always been heavily
influenced by overseas markets
for high-quality woolen cloth.
That continued to be the case,
but the new trades also
established new markets for both
traditional and new goods.
Prominent amongst these markets
were of course the Americas and
the growing colonies there.
 
In 1686, a survey of London's
exports that year shows that
London was already exporting 598
different commodities to North
America,
in 329 ships if you want to
know.
 
They were going to Barbados,
to Jamaica, to the Chesapeake
colonies, to New England.
 
The total value was prodigious
and it involved trade in
textiles,
in clothing,
in metal wares,
in miscellaneous manufactures
which were not produced in the
colonies themselves.
For example,
in 1686 they exported to the
colonies 3,000 wine glasses;
they exported 6,000 saddles.
These new markets encouraged
bulk manufacture.
They encouraged the production
of standardized goods which
could be ordered and could be
produced by workers who were
required to produce a certain
standardized article in the
'putting out' industries.
 
So bulk manufacture of
standardized goods was steadily
growing, another feature of
industrial change.
So developing markets for
English products were of
powerful significance,
but much of the output of
manufacturing industries was
still consumed at home.
As I've already indicated,
cheaper food raised real
incomes for ordinary people,
gave them a margin above their
basic subsistence needs.
 
At least at some point in their
life cycle they had more
spending power and that money
was often spent on simple,
cheap manufactured goods:
calico cloth,
linen, domestic utensils and so
forth.
Moreover, a lot of the
additional income which was
being generated in trade and
manufactures themselves,
income which went to the
mercantile and commercial
classes,
the "middle sort of
people,"
enabled those people to afford
a greater variety of goods which
are often described as the
"decencies of life";
not luxuries,
not necessities,
but the decencies of life,
often domestic goods of one
kind or another,
or better clothing.
 
Taken together,
the new overseas markets and
the growing domestic markets
encouraged the development of a
larger,
a stronger and a more flexible
industrial base.
 
Take textiles for example.
 
Woolen cloth manufacture
continued as a major industry.
There was a continued
diversification of its products,
partly for particular overseas
markets.
The cloth-weaving villages of
the West Country for example
produced most of the trade
blankets which went to supply
the fur traders in North
America;
the wonderful Hudson Bay
blankets which you can still buy
in Canada.
 
They're still made in the west
of England.
These colorful trade blankets
which you see in portraits of
native Americans in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries were already being
produced specifically for that
market.
 
In west Yorkshire in the area
around Leeds and Bradford there
was a great growth in another
dimension of the woolen cloth
industry,
the production of worsted cloth.
It was aimed at the cheaper end
of the market,
mostly domestic.
 
In Lancashire,
around Manchester,
there were further significant
new developments,
Manchester lying just to the
east of Liverpool.
In that area the linen
manufacturing industry became
concentrated in the late
seventeenth century,
producing not only linen for
domestic needs but also
producing sailcloth for the
growing merchant fleet and
canvas.
 
The Manchester area gradually
shifted over from linen to the
development of cotton
manufacturing.
They were imitating the
imported cotton cloth from
India, trying to produce it at
home.
By 1700, a million pounds a
year's worth of raw cotton was
being imported,
much of it via Liverpool,
to supply that growing
industry.
The cotton at this stage tended
to come from the Mediterranean
rather than North America.
 
By the 1740s two million pounds
a year worth of raw cotton for
Manchester's looms.
 
The finished cotton cloth had a
big market at home and it was
also exported to West Africa and
to the Americas.
So by 1750 the Manchester area,
when a survey was done,
had almost 5,000 looms working
producing cotton.
That was an important precursor
of things that were to come in
the cotton industry of
Lancashire,
but as yet many of the really
significant developments were
outside textiles.
 
The pottery industry was taking
off in the west Midlands in
Staffordshire to the north of
Birmingham.
First of all,
it concentrated on the
production of coarse earthenware
and on so-called 'Delftware',
which was in imitation of the
Delft pottery produced in the
Netherlands.
 
Production of that kind of
pottery doubled in the late
seventeenth century.
 
Then they moved on to stoneware
particularly after the 1680s,
and as the potteries expanded
employment in this industry
trebled.
 
This was the age which saw the
foundation just a decade or two
later of such firms that are
still familiar as Wedgwood and
Royal Doulton in that area of
the potteries;
the west Midlands.
 
Metal wares were also taking
off.
The city of Sheffield in south
Yorkshire had long been involved
in the production of edge tools
but they began to diversify.
They began to produce scissors
and files and metal buttons and
razors and forks.
 
Forks were a novelty.
 
Prior to this period people ate
their meat by stabbing it with a
pointed knife and putting it in
their mouths.
Forks were coming in,
Sheffield was manufacturing
them for this new market.
 
They were amongst the
'decencies' of life.
In the west Midlands there was
comparable growth around
Birmingham especially from the
1690s.
Birmingham had long made nails
and tools and weaponry and
saddlers' ironmongery,
but they began to make fancy
buckles and buttons and pots and
pans and kettles and what they
described as "toys."
 
Toys were steel jewelry often
made with wire twisted in
elaborate ways.
 
They began specializing also in
the production of boxes which
imitated Japanese imports;
it was known as 'Japanning',
the production of lacquered
boxes in imitation of these
popular products which had been
introduced by the trade with the
East.
 
In this version they were
affordable by people of the
middling sort,
not simply by the elite.
They also had big markets in
guns,
many of which were exported to
North America and to Africa,
and they supplied the planters
of the American colonies with
cast nails,
with holes, with sugar cane
knives,
with chains for their oxen to
pull heavy weights and so forth.
 
And so one could go on for
other less dramatic developments
in regional industrial
specialization and growth.
And finally,
all of this required of course
raw materials.
 
Some of those raw materials
were being imported,
another stimulus to trade;
the cotton from the
Mediterranean,
the steel from Sweden,
some specialized high-quality
wools which were used in the
woolen manufactures--
they came from Spain,
some of them.
 
But a great deal of the raw
materials used were being
produced at home.
 
The period saw a major
expansion in the iron and steel
industries from the 1670s.
 
Tin mining down in the
southwest in Cornwall took off;
copper mining expanded;
lead mining in Derbyshire in
the Midlands,
here, and in north Wales also
increased very significantly.
 
And there was a massive growth
in the coal industry,
coal being the ubiquitous fuel
not only for domestic fires but
for any industrial process which
required heat.
They still couldn't use it for
smelting iron,
but they used it in many other
industrial processes which
simply required a source of
heat.
So coal production in Newcastle
in the northeast,
which had already been a
prodigious half a million tons
in 1650,
was 1.3 million by 1700 and
over two million by 1750,
and there were significant
expansions of coal production in
other areas too.
Areas where it hadn't been
previously economical to produce
and transport coal now got
involved because demand had
increased.
 
The coal industry bred other
innovations.
Steam engines were invented at
the end of the seventeenth
century to drain coal mines;
that was their original purpose.
Wooden wagon ways,
railways built of wood along
which wagons would run to
transport coal more cheaply and
easily,
wagons pulled by horses,
were introduced from the 1660s
and were commonplace in the coal
mining areas by the early
eighteenth century.
One proud coal owner said that
one of his wagon ways which he'd
built for several miles to get
his coal to market was as
prodigious an engineering feat
as the Via Appia near Rome,
and he was right.
 
Some of these industrial
undertakings were the biggest
civil engineering projects which
had been undertaken in Britain
since the Romans had left.
 
Eventually, of course,
you put together the steam
engines that drained the mines
with the railways,
the wagon ways that carried the
coal,
and you have locomotives;
George Stephenson.
So, in the areas of growth of
this kind,
especially as you have noticed,
areas in the north and in the
Midlands and in parts of the
West Country,
the picture is one of what's
been described as industrial
'agglomeration';
a greater density of
involvement in particular areas.
 
And that kind of agglomeration
as more and more communities are
involved in these activities had
many effects.
It could reduce transportation
costs.
It could encourage spin-off
developments.
It could encourage the spread
of innovations;
the transmission of skills
amongst the local population
well used to its involvement in
these industries;
the formation of partnerships
to raise capital;
flows of information regarding
markets and innovative products
and processes.
 
It resulted eventually in the
creation of highly specialized
local economies,
distinctive occupational
regions: the coal mining areas
of the northeast,
the cloth weaving areas of the
West Country,
the metal ware areas of
Birmingham and so forth.
These were essentially the
origins of the distinctive
regional identities of
industrial Britain as it was to
be.
 
The roots of some of this
activity of course lay deep in
the past,
especially the cloth industry,
but the period between 1660 and
the mid-eighteenth century saw
the full emergence of all of
this activity as part of a new
regional economic structure.
 
Now of course every one of
those zones was centered upon a
major town or towns,
another part of the story of
urban growth,
and the interconnections
between them were facilitated by
the role of towns as central
places in the circulating
systems of commerce.
The late seventeenth and very
early eighteenth centuries saw a
second great wave of
intensification in internal
trade,
comparable to but exceeding
that which had taken place in
the late sixteenth century.
Trade in both agricultural and
industrial products.
It was a great age of
improvement in communications as
well as in agriculture and
manufactures.
Without improvement in
communications this kind of
regional specialization wouldn't
have been possible.
You had to be able to move the
goods around effectively.
The coastal trade grew
enormously.
It's been said that the long
coastline of Britain became like
one great river with coastal
traffic flowing to and fro.
Efforts were made also to
improve the navigation of the
great river systems,
the Thames, the Severn,
the Trent and so forth.
 
There were over forty acts of
Parliament for river navigation
improvement schemes passed
between 1660 and 1700.
Efforts were also made to
improve the roads.
Turnpike trusts were devised as
a way of improving road quality
by charging a toll,
the money from which would be
used to maintain a higher
quality highway.
All of the major routes in the
county of Gloucestershire,
just around Bristol,
were turnpiked between 1690 and
1740,
to take just one regional
example.
 
Every major route there had
been turnpiked and proliferating
turnpiking was taking place all
over the kingdom,
radiating out,
in particular,
from London.
 
Along those improved roads were
improved regular carrier
services delivering goods to and
fro throughout the kingdom.
So in a sense it was an age of
intensified traffic on all these
arteries of communication,
by river, around the coast,
along the turnpike roads.
 
And that inevitably produced an
intensifying relationship of
exchange between urban and rural
society, between different rural
regions;
the influence of all of this
activity percolating right down
to the level of the individual
village.
 
One indicator of that,
to close, is the proliferation
of village shops in this period.
 
It's a period which sees a
proliferation of little shops in
villages.
 
For example,
in a far from prominent place
up here in the Lake District in
the northwest,
the town of Kirkby Lonsdale,
there was a man called Abraham
Dent who kept a shop at the turn
of the eighteenth century.
His inventory survives.
 
It lists all the goods that he
stocked and the suppliers to
whom he owed money;
very useful.
Abraham Dent stocked goods from
fifty-one different origins,
some of them way overseas.
 
He had his tobacco,
he had his sugar and so forth,
and many English manufactured
products.
He had bought goods from one
hundred and ninety different
suppliers scattered all over the
country and they'd reached him
in his obscure town in the Lake
District.
Such local tradesmen as Abraham
Dent showed how far England's
local economies had moved away
from the era of relative
self-sufficiency which I
described at the beginning of
this lecture course,
and the existence of shops like
Dent's symbolize,
in a sense, the completion of a
massive process of commercial
integration and transition.
John Brewer puts it very well
when he says "the
shopkeeper linked the market
town and the local community to
a network of markets that now
stretched beyond the nation's
boundaries,
across oceans,
across continents";
and that's correct.
They linked together the
farmers, the craftspeople,
the merchants,
the seamen, the hunters,
the plantation slaves,
all linked together in an
increasingly closely articulated
whole;
a market economy,
a nascent world economy.
Some people describe all this
as "archaic
globalization,"
some of the earlier stages of
that familiar process.
 
It's a commercial civilization
in which Britain increasingly
played a core role.
 
It was still,
as E.A. Wrigley has put it,
an "organic economy."
 
It still depended pretty much
on muscle power,
human and animal muscles,
or wind and water to power its
machinery and so forth.
 
It was not yet what he
describes as the
"mineral-based energy
economy"
of the Industrial Revolution
era.
But if it was still an organic
economy it was a very advanced
organic economy,
and already in many ways
beginning to anticipate the
transformations which would come
in the later eighteenth century
with the introduction of steam
power and mechanization.
 
So we'll leave it there.
 
Well, have a good break and
we'll reassemble to get the end
of the story as far as the state
is concerned in the week after
Thanksgiving.
 
 
 
