Every historian of the modern world must at some point tackle the Industrial Revolution and Britain's special role in it. All those who have not kept up with developments in this field will welcome the edited collection in honor of Patrick O’Brien. The contributors take O’Brien's work as a starting point, revisiting the role of the state institutions in economic growth, taxation, and debt, the British navy and empire, agricultural productivity and the diffusion of innovations, and comparisons of Britain with other European economies. Those unfamiliar with O’Brien's work would do well to begin with Gianni Toniolo's tribute at the end of the volume.
It should be stated at the outset that the contributors, each in their own way, agree that eighteenth-century Britain had some special qualifications that allowed it to become “the workshop of the world” by 1850: internal causes that pertain to its political and social institutions, its greater labor productivity, and its large farms, or external demand for British goods, its privileged position in India and North America, and its commitment to its navy as bulwark of international trade. English agricultural productivity increased, allowing the urban population to rise dramatically after 1700, although the relationship between agricultural productivity and industrialization still remains uncertain. For agricultural change the significant period remains for these authors 1650–1750, but otherwise they differ on the pace of change and on the moment when technological and institutional advances made their impact. All agree that British exceptionalism dates back to the “long eighteenth century” (1680–1815), when a fortuitous convergence of needs and available resources (such as coal) combined with a flexible string of institutions to stimulate technological, fiscal, commercial, and military solutions that ensured primacy over European rivals. The contributors turn most frequently to the Continent to contextualize English progress. This version is not triumphalist, and the contributors insist that what most differentiated Britain from other countries was its ability to profit from pan-European innovations and to use its parliamentary system to support ever-rising taxation and float loans. British ingenuity has hence dropped from the picture as has the particular mentality of a freedom-loving people. Culture, when it appears in these essays, refers to legal systems or “openness” to ideas wherever they come from.
The collection begins with an overview of British economic development by Robert C. Allen that stresses the higher productivity rates that England maintained in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while they fell elsewhere and the high rate of urbanization compared to the Continent (except for the Dutch Republic). Demand for goods was the main stimulus to higher agricultural productivity. Javier Cuenca Esteban follows with a long essay on colonial trade that emphasizes England's luck in its peculiar footholds in India, North America, and the West Indies, and demonstrates how land, slave labor, and cheap Indian calico production freed British labor to work in agriculture but especially in urban manufactures. The English also took advantage of their special needs for coal to develop technological improvements that were applied to other sectors. He (quite correctly, in my estimation) accords chance a far greater role in British advances than do other contributors, but does not let all rest on serendipity.
The next section deals with the relationship between agriculture and industrialization. James Simpson, in his article on the “Agricultural Revolution,” and Nicholas Craft and C. Knick Harley, in theirs proposing a “general-equilibrium” perspective on British industrialization, conclude that capitalist farming on large farms put Britain ahead of its European competitors and freed labor to work in industry. I am less convinced by their arguments because they simplify the relationship between agriculture and industry, especially in favor of abstract models. Part 3 on technological change is far more persuasive as each of the three authors focuses more narrowly on a particular aspect even while addressing major historiographical questions. Coal and cotton were certainly the domains of British technological inventiveness, but as Christine MacLeod argues, inventiveness was not British and they drew on European inventions and scientific advances. James Thomson and Rainer Fremdling then take up the individual stories of cotton mechanization and the ways in which coal and charcoal production differed, and hence the problems with straightforward technological transfer from one country to another.
In the next section, financial institutions, credit, and debt display England's advantages compared to France and even the Netherlands, the great innovator in that domain. Larry Neal compares Dutch, French, and English banking and credit mechanisms. Richard Bonney makes a masterly comparison of English and French fiscal history. Forrest Caspie's focus on British monetary supply and the importance of trust in financial dealings seems less ambitious than the other two. All in all, these authors concur that the English borrowed from the Dutch and innovated; that flexibility in political arrangements, support from elites, and co-option of bankers and moneylenders (unlike France), put Britain in a pivotal position to control international finance. The English parliamentary system encouraged trust in British solvency rather than parliamentary oversight of finances, for British prime ministers controlled the purse strings as surely as any absolute monarch. Britain sustained far higher taxation than France, raised long-term loans, without the opposition of vested interests, and had no alternative mode of investment such as venality created in France. Whereas war and debt proved fatal for France, the wars that England fought allowed it to retain its control over global trade. Globalism enters here by the back door in Bonney's article, and it is a significant addendum.
British naval power gets an excellent overview from Daniel Baugh, who compares its size and policies to France's (and to some extent Spain’s) and explains the advantage the English obtained by establishing dockyards abroad. Baugh concludes, “These Old Regime monarchies were thoroughly convinced that maritime commerce was the key to national power and understood that naval power was its necessary guarantor” (254). They managed, however, to raise the number of ships, but could not match English seafaring experience and its victualling service. Steadfastness in long-term policy seems pivotal here, in contrast to the innovation and flexibility stressed by other contributors.
Stanley Engerman concludes the volume with a reminder that Britain did not achieve real “supremacy” until the middle of the nineteenth century, and much of this due to its empire. Reviewing the types of questions addressed by the contributors (and hence by O’Brien), he speculates the longest on institutions’ role in shaping economic progress. For example, given their new Bourdieusian acceptance as “organisations or rules that constrain or influence human behaviour” (270), should they be treated as exogenous or not? More interrogative than conclusive, Engerman reminds us that although Britain achieved preeminence, the process was multistranded and deserves continued examination.
The contributions are of a very high level, easily accessible, and historically grounded. Cambridge University Press would do well to bring out the collection in paperback, to enable scholars to include this in graduate seminars.
John Broad's study focuses on one family, the Verneys, and their role in stimulating agriculture in three North Buckinghamshire parishes and their strategies to augment both their incomes and social standing in the years 1600–1820. The Verneys offer a particularly good case study because of the size of the surviving family archives, and, although he is aware of the pitfalls, Broad treats them as exemplars of larger societal changes. His Verneys are profit maximizing, forced as they are by Court expenditures and large families (in the seventeenth century) to live beyond their means. One strategy to settle and negotiate debts—and Broad wants us to see this as a thought-out plan—was to consolidate their landowning and to turn villages from open-field copyhold into enclosed short-term leaseholds. By 1787, 85 percent of the parish consisted of farms over 150 acres. Pasturing and dairying became the main sources of agricultural revenue, and, as typical landowners of their era, the Verneys experimented with saifoin, turnips, and especially potash as fertilizer.
Another conscious strategy, pursued after the Civil War, was to marry heiresses and to give daughters small dowries. In choosing brides of a lower social standing, the Verneys sacrificed the benefits that better-connected wives might bring and lost prominence at Court. However, this policy allowed them to purchase more land; by the middle of the eighteenth century they were major local landowners and prominent County figures. Claydon House had been removed further from the village and surrounded by parkland (with a deer park and fish ponds comme de rigueur). Given the wealth of local records, Broad can follow practices such as charity—seesawing between paternalism and hardheaded calculation—hiring of servants, and oversight of village affairs.
Broad weaves a moral tale around the Verneys, that the successful Verneys understood their duty to marry for money, to spend wisely, and to stay out of debt. Then, as of 1752, the system crumbled. The heiress brides produced fewer and fewer children. The second earl Verney's (the title was bestowed in 1743) wife miscarried time and again and, without the hopes of an heir, Ralph Verney “lived for the moment,” dissipating his fortune and hers, leaving debts of some £140,000 (£100,000 raised on his estates).
His money had gone on land, on unfortunate commercial and industrial ventures (£50,000 lost on East India company futures), mansions, lavish sponsorship of the arts, but especially on establishing a political power base in Buckinghamshire, and playing a role in national politics where he supported radical causes. A member of Parliament for much of his life, he never attained the prominence to which he aspired. Having disastrously mismanaged his private affairs, he refused to face up to his obligations and countersued all those who tried to sue him for payment (running as many as thirty-six suits at one time). At his death in 1791, his niece and heir, Mary Verney (baroness Fermanagh), sold his houses in London and the property he had acquired, and settled his debts. The Claydons, however, remained, as they had been, in Verney hands.
It is a pity for Broad that not much happened in the way of agricultural innovation beyond the switch from arable to pasture and a fairly smooth (and mostly uncontested) process of enclosure in this corner of Buckinghamshire, even if it allows him to argue, contra Robert Allen, that pasture could be as productive as arable in the south Midlands. The Verneys, as he is at pains to show, did not differ from the common run of gentry in their agrarian practices, estate management, and profit seeking. Their very ordinariness, however, demonstrates the ways in which landed families cobbled together incomes and navigated crises, indebtedness, large and small families, modest and grandiose ambitions.
