The Industrial Revolution – I

Rashed Rahman

The Industrial Revolution (IR) in Britain, where it began, did not reveal its repercussions in an obvious and unmistakable way before at least 1830. It is only then that society began to be overtly haunted by the rise of a world in which all social bonds crumbled except the implacable ones of the cash nexus. It was not until about 1840 that the great stream of official and unofficial literature on the social effects of the IR began to flow: the major Bluebooks and statistical enquiries in England and scores of troubled or appalled observers from Germany to Spain and the US. It was not until the 1840s that the proletariat, the child of the IR, and Communism, which was now attached to its social movements – the spectre of The Communist Manifesto – was visible across Europe. The IR preceded the storming of the Bastille. Without elucidating it we cannot understand the impersonal groundswell of history on which the more obvious men and events were borne, i.e. the uneven complexity of its rhythm.
What does the ‘IR’ mean? It means that in the 1780s, for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human society, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid, limitless multiplication of men, goods and services. This is now described by economists as the ‘take-off into self-sustained growth’. No previous society had been able to break through the ceiling that a pre-industrial social structure, defective or undeveloped science and technology, and consequently periodic breakdown, famine and death, imposed on production. The 1780s was the decisive decade when all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards that marks the ‘take-off’.
The IR was not an episode with a beginning and an end. Its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm. Nevertheless the period of initial industrialisation began with the ‘take-off’ in the 1780s and to have concluded with the building of the railways and the construction of a massive heavy industry in Britain in the 1840s. By any reckoning this was probably the most important event in world history, at least since the invention of agriculture and cities. It was initiated by Britain, but whatever the advance was due to, it was not scientific and technological superiority. In the natural sciences the French were ahead of the British, an advantage the French Revolution accentuated very sharply in mathematics and physics for the Revolution encouraged science in France while reaction suspected it in England. In the social sciences too the British were still far from the superiority that made – and largely kept – economics a pre-eminently British subject. Here the IR put them into unquestioned first place.
Fortunately for Britain, few intellectual refinements proved necessary to make the IR. Its technical inventions were exceedingly modest, and in no way beyond the scope of intelligent artisans experimenting in their workshops, or of the constructive capacities of carpenters, millwrights and locksmiths. Mentionable inventions include the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the mule. Even its scientifically most sophisticated machine, James Watt’s rotary steam-engine (1784), required no more physics than had been available for the best part of a century. Given the right conditions, the technical innovations of the IR practically made themselves, except in the chemical industry. The right conditions were visibly present in Britain, where more than a century had passed since the first king had been formally tried and executed by his people and since private profit and economic development had been accepted as the supreme objectives of government policy. For practical purposes the uniquely revolutionary British solution of the agrarian problem had already been found. A relatively small handful of commercially-minded landlords already almost monopolised the land, which was cultivated by tenant-farmers employing landless or smallholder peasants. The many relics of the ancient collective economy of the village still remained to be swept away by the Enclosure Acts of 1760-1830 but one can no longer speak of a ‘British peasantry’. Farming was already predominantly for the market. Manufacture had long been diffused throughout an unfeudal countryside. Agriculture was already prepared to carry out its three fundamental functions in an era of industrialisation: to increase production and productivity so as to feed a rapidly growing non-agricultural population; to provide a large rising surplus of potential recruits for the towns and industries, and provide a mechanism for the accumulation of capital to be used in the more modern sectors of the economy. A considerable volume of the expensive general equipment necessary for the entire economy to move smoothly ahead was already being created, notably shipping, port facilities and the improvement of roads and waterways. Politics was already geared to profit. The businessman’s specific demands might encounter resistance from other vested interests (e.g. the agrarian lobby). On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.
The businessman was in the process of getting more money, for the greater part of the 18^th century was for most of Europe a period of prosperity and economic expansion. Sooner or later this expansion, assisted by a gentle inflation, would have pushed some country across the threshold that separates the pre-industrial from the industrial economy. However, much of 18^th century industrial expansion did not lead immediately to industrial revolution, i.e. to the creation of a mechanised ‘factory system’ that produces in such vast quantities and at such rapidly diminishing cost as to no longer be dependent on existing demand, but to create its own market. Given that the main social foundations of an industrial society had already been laid, as they certainly had in the England of the later 18^th century, the new emerging industrialists needed two things: an industry that already offered exceptional rewards for the manufacturer who could expand his output quickly, if need be by relatively cheap and simple innovations, and a world market largely monopolised by a single producing country.
In all countries embracing the new industrial capitalism, the lead in industrial growth was taken by the manufacturers of mass consumption goods – mainly, but not exclusively, textiles – because the mass market for such goods already existed, and businessmen could clearly see its possibilities of expansion. Once Britain had begun to industrialise, other countries enjoyed the benefits of the rapid economic expansion that the pioneer industrial revolution stimulated. British success proved what could be achieved by it, British technique could be imitated, British skill and capital imported. Naturally Britain itself enjoyed no such advantages. But it possessed an economy strong enough and a state aggressive enough to capture the markets of its competitors. The wars of 1793-1815, the last and decisive phase of a century’s Anglo-French duel, virtually eliminated all rivals from the non-European world, except to some extent the young US. Moreover, Britain possessed an industry suited to pioneering industrial revolution under capitalist conditions and an economic conjuncture that allowed it to: the cotton industry and colonial expansion.
The British, like all other cotton industries, had originally grown as a by-product of overseas trade. Colonial trade had created the cotton industry, and continued to nourish it. In the 18^th century it developed in the hinterland of the major colonial ports, i.e. Bristol, Glasgow, but especially Liverpool, the great centre of the slave trade. Each phase of this inhuman but rapidly expanding commerce stimulated it. In the 18^th century, slavery and cotton marched together. The African slaves were bought, in part at least, with Subcontinental (Indian) cotton goods. When the supply of these was interrupted by war or revolt in and about the Subcontinent, Lancashire was able to leap in. The plantations of the West Indies, where the slaves were taken, provided the bulk of the raw cotton for the British industry. In return the planters bought Manchester cotton checks in appreciable quantities. Until shortly before the ‘take-off’ the overwhelming bulk of Lancashire cotton exports went to the combined African and American markets. Lancashire later repaid its debt to slavery by preserving it, for after the 1790s the slave plantations of the Southern US were extended and maintained by the insatiable demands of the Lancashire mills, to which they supplied the bulk of their raw cotton.
The cotton industry was thus launched by the pull of the colonial trade to which it was attached, a trade that promised not only great but rapid and above all unpredictable expansion, which encouraged the entrepreneur to adopt the revolutionary techniques required to meet it. In 1750-69, the export of British cottons increased over ten times. In such situations the rewards for the entrepreneur who came into the market first with the most cotton checks were astronomical and well worth the risks of leaps into technological adventure. But the overseas market, and especially the poor and underdeveloped areas not only expanded dramatically from time to time, but expanded constantly without apparent limits. The British cotton industry succeeded in monopolising all or almost all of this overseas market, aided by the aggressive support of the British government. In terms of sales, the IR can be described as the triumph of the export market over the home. By 1814 Britain exported four yards of cotton cloth for every three used at home; by 1850 this had climbed to 13 for every eight. Within this expanding export market the semi-colonial and colonial markets, long the main outlets for British goods abroad, led by a significant margin. In 1820 Europe took 128 million yards of British cotton, America minus the US, Africa and Asia 80 million, but by 1840 Europe took 200 million yards while the underdeveloped areas took 529 million. Within the latter British industry had established a monopoly by means of war, other people’s revolutions and her own colonial rule.
The Subcontinent had been the traditional exporter of cotton goods, helped by the interests of the East India Company. But as the industrialist vested interest prevailed in Britain, the Subcontinental ones were suppressed. The Subcontinent was systematically deindustrialised and became in turn a market for Lancashire cottons. In 1820 the Subcontinent took 11 million yards, which grew to 145 million by 1840. This was a major landmark and reversal in world history. Since ancient times Europe had always imported more from the East than sold there because there was little the latter required from the West in return for the spices, silks, calicoes, jewels, etc., that it sent there. The cotton shirtings of the Industrial Revolution for the first time reversed this relationship, which had hitherto been kept in balance by a mixture of bullion exports and robbery. Only China still refused to buy what the West had to offer until between 1815 and 1842 western traders, aided by gun-boats, discovered the ‘ideal’ commodity that could be exported from India to China: opium.
The cotton manufacture had other advantages too. All its raw material came from abroad. Its supply therefore could be expanded by colonial means – slavery and the opening up of new areas of cultivation. From the 1790s on British cotton found its supply, to which its fortunes remained linked until the 1860s (the Civil War in the US), in the Southern states of the US. At crucial points of manufacture (notably spinning) cotton suffered from a shortage of cheap and efficient labour and was therefore pushed into mechanisation. An industry like linen, which had initially better chances of colonial expansion than cotton, suffered in the long run from the ease with which cheap, non-mechanised production could be expanded in impoverished peasant regions through the home-based ‘putting-out’ system in which workers – sometimes former independent craftsmen, sometimes peasants with time during the off season – worked the raw material with their own or rented tools, receiving it from and delivering it back to merchants who were in the process of making the transition to employers. The bulk of expansion in the initial period of industrialisation continued to be of this kind. Even in the cotton industry processes such as weaving were expanded by creating hosts of domestic handloom weavers to serve the nuclei of mechanised spinneries. Everywhere weaving was mechanised a generation after spinning, leading to a lingering death for the handloom weavers when industry no longer had need of them.
The traditional view that has seen the history of the British IR primarily in terms of cotton is thus correct. Cotton was the first industry to be revolutionised. As late as the 1830s cotton was the only British industry in which the factory or ‘mill’ predominated, at first (1780-1815) mainly in spinning, carding and a few ancillary operations, after 1815 increasingly also in weaving. The ‘factories’ with which the new Factory Acts dealt were, until the 1860s, assumed to be exclusively textile factories and predominantly cotton mills. Factory production in other textile branches was slow to develop before the 1840s, and in other manufactures was negligible. Even the steam engine, though applied to numerous other industries by 1815, was not used in any quantity outside mining, which had pioneered it. In 1830 ‘industry’ and ‘factory’ still meant almost exclusively the cotton manufacture of the UK.
There was of course innovation in other consumer goods, notably in other textiles, food and drink, pottery and other household goods, greatly stimulated by the growth of cities. But these employed fewer people. No industry remotely approached the million and a half people directly employed by or dependent on employment in cotton in 1833. Their power to transform was therefore much smaller. The transformation demand derived from cotton – for more building and all activities in the new industrial areas, for machines, chemical improvements, industrial lighting, shipping and a number of other activities – is enough to account for a large proportion of the economic growth in Britain up to the 1830s. The expansion of the cotton industry was so vast and its weight in the foreign trade of Britain so great that it dominated the movements of the entire economy. The quantity of raw cotton imported into Britain rose from 11 million pounds in 1785 to 588 million pounds in 1850, the output of cloth from 40 million to 2,025 million yards. Cotton manufactures formed 40-50 percent of the annual declared value of all British exports in 1816-1848. If cotton flourished, the economy flourished; if it slumped, the economy did too. Its price movements determined the balance of the nation’s trade. Only agriculture had comparable power, and that was visibly declining.
(To be continued)