I remember reading a book that argued that agriculture in England was substantially more productive than in other places in Europe, leading to a large proportion of residents living in cities. (I think the author was named something like Ellen Meiksins Woods?) The argument was that England had a much more extensive market for agricultural land, leading to people who rented farm land to focus on raising yields and profits and for successful farmers to bid up the price of land. Was England unusually urbanized and did it have an unusual agricultural surplus?
Nice post. I'd add one other factor, literacy. The UK has a very long history of people being able to both read and write. This gave individuals without formal education the possibility to learn, about their business, about their rights, contracts. It helped level the playing field with the Church and State and the Landed Gentry. It also allowed much more complex economic interactions, with contracts for leasing of land, sub-letting, contract farming and harvesting etc. Literacy is absolutely essential.
I am interested in your basic premise that the landowning elites of S.E. England had the commercial structure in place to capitalise (literally) on the seeds of industrialisation. It was the landowners that has access to cash and could borrow from moneylenders to fund factories, even as they funded warehouses for traded goods.
But i will take issue with your commonly held belief that the sea was a moat. It was not. The sea was the highway, the autoroute, the great connector.
Take the early society of Dumnonia, that included Devon, south Cornwall and south Dorset on the English south coast, and northern Brittany from Roscoff to St Malo and the Normandy border in Brittany, now France. The kingdom lasted 400 years (and still is relevant today), traded routinely across the 100 miles of sea, shared their princes and royal family, shared priesthoods, shared crops and traded food and many other goods, and worked as one in trading deals from Portugal and the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and Russia, all by sea. Did you know that their sea trading links with Russia resulted in a trade deal secured by a Russian princess marrying a Dumnonian nobleman in around 700AD?
The logistics are simple: Farmers in, say, Devon harvest in the late summer and a few small farms may end up with, say 100 tons of grain to sell. But the market for such a quantity will be a long way from their farm, and that might mean ox carts, each with 6 oxen pulling up to 7 tons of grain at 3mph, for up to 6 hours a day, and driven by two men. This is on mud tracks, just as the weather is deteriorating into autumn and the rains will turn the tracks into mud, especially as 15 wagons and 90 oxen trundle through! All the while, the men have to eat and sleep and feed the oxen, and they can be robbed, or fall ill, or simply get stuck in bad weather. Nightmare!
The alternative is the grain is delivered to the nearest quay or riverbank, and loaded onto one or two small ships, and a crew of three can sail each ship to Portsmouth or London or Brittany or even Paris in two or three days sailing. It is much cheaper, faster, safer and more efficient.
All the earliest cities were ports because shipping was the only way to feed a large population or people and animals as a city expanded and built on its farmland, and it was ships that made food transportation logistics possible. So the sea wasn't a moat, or a barrier, or a boundary. The sea was the highway, and for an invading army, it was the fastest way to sneak up on your target and catch them unawares. As the Vikings proved in filling ships with an army and taking over Normandy, and their descendant Norman Vikings then taking over England in turn.
The advantage of England was in developing mercantilism through sea trade, and sea power to protect it, and so the surplus production by workers and factories had a suitably large market to buy the products of waged labour, then mechanisation, and then steam power.
I am not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. The key issue is not access to capital but innovation of new technologies and the skills to use them. I don’t think capital was the key constraint.
Land-owning elites were rarely a source of capital for entrepreneurs. Most had their money tied up in managing their estates or spending on a lavish lifestyle. Though rich in landed wealth, they typically were cash poor due to their spending practices.
I did not mean to imply by using the term “moat” that the English Channel made trade hard or impossible. I was talking about military invasion. Of course, proximity to the ocean and also the mouth of rivers in Northwest Europe (Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, etc) greatly aided opportunities for trade.
My exact quote was: “The “world’s largest moat” was a substantial geographical barrier to Medieval armies who lacked organized naval power.”
“This lack of a clear military threat meant that England never needed the huge standing armies that the Continental powers found necessary to survive. While kings on the Continent had to fight to survive, the English monarchs could largely choose their wars, and if they lost, the entire kingdom was generally not in danger. This meant that the gentry and the monarchy gradually worked out a balance of power that maintained a centralized government that protected society from hostile external powers while respecting the economic rights of citizens.”
Is the argument here that
1) Being an island reduced need for a large expensive standing army, thus one was not built, and
2) Lack of standing army allowed the gentry to rise up as a balance of power to the monarch that was not practical in other realms, and
3) This enabled institutions to be more inclusive and thus conducive to commercial society while still being protected from external threats?
2) The lack of a standing army did not allow the monarchy to crush the political autonomy of gentry and aristocracy.
All European nations that had some form of feudalism experienced a military competition between the gentry/aristocracy and the monarchy. In most of the Medieval period, the gentry/aristocracy had the advantage, and monarchs were weak.
Strong military competition between monarchs enabled them to leverage agreements from the estates (essentially Parliaments of gentry/aristocracy) to increase taxes to build an army. This was usually due to emergencies in war, but over time this led to large standing armies. Each war gradually ratcheted up the ability of the monarch to tax and build a strong er army. In most kingdoms, this led to a powerful royal army and a powerful gentry/aristocracy.
I do not know that much about Norman England (roughly 1066-1200) but my understanding is that it was one of the most centralized monarchies in Europe. But since the King could never convince the nobles that a standing army was necessary to defend England, the King was never able to erode noble rights. This was very different from France, Spain, Prussia and Austria.
I believe that without the channel, England would have ended up like those other nations because the King would have kept concentrating power to fight wars.
So many of the commercial currents flowing into England from the continent predated the 1688 Glorious Revolution? Thinking of Shakespeare and the Merchant of Venice? :-) While the connection to William III probably helped the process along, it was basically a late addition? Maybe even with his campaigns against the French, he kept that military "tied up" so it avoided worrying about England? And yet the foundational outlook goes back to Magna Carta and common law developments (jury trials by peer of the accused, probably a lot of legal developments around property ownership, inheritance, etc.?). Also the political competition among guilds, city governments, shire reeves, landed gentry, court magistrates, etc. ???
I gather there was something of a parallel development to learn about God's laws of nature (Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, et al.) but such studies were probably only supportive of "common sense technological" advances (metallurgy, chemistry, textiles, etc.?) rather than something approximating basic science (which came later in the 1700's).
Yes, while the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was an important political event, it was not a fundamental turning point in British society as it is sometimes presented. 1688 forced a compromise between the monarchists and the parliamentarians in favor of the latter, but it did not lead to great changes in British society. It also wiped out the political influences of Catholics. The changes were primarily constitutional and legal, not social and economic.
England, particularly the southeastern part, was a Commercial society long before 1688, and this was one of the primary reasons for the English Civil War between 1642 and 1651.
Thanks for the comment. I will check out your articles.
I have also read "The Age of Revolution 1789-1848" by Eric Hobsbawm (although it was a few decades ago.
If you are interested in the topic, I would recommend expanding your reading. This book is very dated and heavily influenced by ideology.
The term "Industrial Revolution" is somewhat deceptive. It was a long, slow process, but if you compare it to the history before it, I think the term revolution applies.
The transition from agriculture to industry actually happened centuries before the 1780s. I would encourage you to read about Commercial societies that came long before. Many of them had thriving textile industries.
You can view my reading on the topic here (unfortunately, the articles are displayed in reverse chronological order)
Before providing an extended discourse on your theories in the comments. please be sure that you first understand my beliefs. Otherwise, the discussion goes nowhere.
There is much that I agree with, but I will disagree on the following:
1) The UK was clearly not a republic. The other commercial societies could have done fine with a constitutional monarchy. So it was not the government that made them unique. Your use of the term shows an excessive focus on government.
2) The government plays far less role in the process of economic development than you assume. In most cases, the government is a hindering factor in development, not a coordinating factor.
3) I don't think anything special happened in the UK in the 1780s. There certainly was no "revolutionary transformation of the social structure" or "reordering of the national economy." I don't think many historians will agree with you on this point.
4) I don't think the formation of the UK in 1707 had huge economic consequences, except perhaps in Scotland. Again, you focus far too much on government and politics.
5) The Dutch Republic and potentially other Commercial societies had as much industry and global trade as the UK in 1780.
One of the problems with the discipline of political economy is that it puts far too much importance on government. Progress comes from society, not from government.
I don't know what "post-feudal," "post-parliamentary" and "post-puritan" mean. They seem like needless jargon.
What was unusual about the Industrial Revolution in Britain was the widespread application of fossil fuels. This is what separated 19th Century UK from previous Commercial societies. It was not government policy or "revolutionary transformation of the social structure, the way the national economy was organized."
I remember reading a book that argued that agriculture in England was substantially more productive than in other places in Europe, leading to a large proportion of residents living in cities. (I think the author was named something like Ellen Meiksins Woods?) The argument was that England had a much more extensive market for agricultural land, leading to people who rented farm land to focus on raising yields and profits and for successful farmers to bid up the price of land. Was England unusually urbanized and did it have an unusual agricultural surplus?
Nice post. I'd add one other factor, literacy. The UK has a very long history of people being able to both read and write. This gave individuals without formal education the possibility to learn, about their business, about their rights, contracts. It helped level the playing field with the Church and State and the Landed Gentry. It also allowed much more complex economic interactions, with contracts for leasing of land, sub-letting, contract farming and harvesting etc. Literacy is absolutely essential.
I am interested in your basic premise that the landowning elites of S.E. England had the commercial structure in place to capitalise (literally) on the seeds of industrialisation. It was the landowners that has access to cash and could borrow from moneylenders to fund factories, even as they funded warehouses for traded goods.
But i will take issue with your commonly held belief that the sea was a moat. It was not. The sea was the highway, the autoroute, the great connector.
Take the early society of Dumnonia, that included Devon, south Cornwall and south Dorset on the English south coast, and northern Brittany from Roscoff to St Malo and the Normandy border in Brittany, now France. The kingdom lasted 400 years (and still is relevant today), traded routinely across the 100 miles of sea, shared their princes and royal family, shared priesthoods, shared crops and traded food and many other goods, and worked as one in trading deals from Portugal and the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and Russia, all by sea. Did you know that their sea trading links with Russia resulted in a trade deal secured by a Russian princess marrying a Dumnonian nobleman in around 700AD?
The logistics are simple: Farmers in, say, Devon harvest in the late summer and a few small farms may end up with, say 100 tons of grain to sell. But the market for such a quantity will be a long way from their farm, and that might mean ox carts, each with 6 oxen pulling up to 7 tons of grain at 3mph, for up to 6 hours a day, and driven by two men. This is on mud tracks, just as the weather is deteriorating into autumn and the rains will turn the tracks into mud, especially as 15 wagons and 90 oxen trundle through! All the while, the men have to eat and sleep and feed the oxen, and they can be robbed, or fall ill, or simply get stuck in bad weather. Nightmare!
The alternative is the grain is delivered to the nearest quay or riverbank, and loaded onto one or two small ships, and a crew of three can sail each ship to Portsmouth or London or Brittany or even Paris in two or three days sailing. It is much cheaper, faster, safer and more efficient.
All the earliest cities were ports because shipping was the only way to feed a large population or people and animals as a city expanded and built on its farmland, and it was ships that made food transportation logistics possible. So the sea wasn't a moat, or a barrier, or a boundary. The sea was the highway, and for an invading army, it was the fastest way to sneak up on your target and catch them unawares. As the Vikings proved in filling ships with an army and taking over Normandy, and their descendant Norman Vikings then taking over England in turn.
The advantage of England was in developing mercantilism through sea trade, and sea power to protect it, and so the surplus production by workers and factories had a suitably large market to buy the products of waged labour, then mechanisation, and then steam power.
Thanks for the comment.
I am not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. The key issue is not access to capital but innovation of new technologies and the skills to use them. I don’t think capital was the key constraint.
Land-owning elites were rarely a source of capital for entrepreneurs. Most had their money tied up in managing their estates or spending on a lavish lifestyle. Though rich in landed wealth, they typically were cash poor due to their spending practices.
I did not mean to imply by using the term “moat” that the English Channel made trade hard or impossible. I was talking about military invasion. Of course, proximity to the ocean and also the mouth of rivers in Northwest Europe (Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, etc) greatly aided opportunities for trade.
My exact quote was: “The “world’s largest moat” was a substantial geographical barrier to Medieval armies who lacked organized naval power.”
“This lack of a clear military threat meant that England never needed the huge standing armies that the Continental powers found necessary to survive. While kings on the Continent had to fight to survive, the English monarchs could largely choose their wars, and if they lost, the entire kingdom was generally not in danger. This meant that the gentry and the monarchy gradually worked out a balance of power that maintained a centralized government that protected society from hostile external powers while respecting the economic rights of citizens.”
Is the argument here that
1) Being an island reduced need for a large expensive standing army, thus one was not built, and
2) Lack of standing army allowed the gentry to rise up as a balance of power to the monarch that was not practical in other realms, and
3) This enabled institutions to be more inclusive and thus conducive to commercial society while still being protected from external threats?
Close. #1 and #3 are correct.
I would rephrase #2 as:
2) The lack of a standing army did not allow the monarchy to crush the political autonomy of gentry and aristocracy.
All European nations that had some form of feudalism experienced a military competition between the gentry/aristocracy and the monarchy. In most of the Medieval period, the gentry/aristocracy had the advantage, and monarchs were weak.
Strong military competition between monarchs enabled them to leverage agreements from the estates (essentially Parliaments of gentry/aristocracy) to increase taxes to build an army. This was usually due to emergencies in war, but over time this led to large standing armies. Each war gradually ratcheted up the ability of the monarch to tax and build a strong er army. In most kingdoms, this led to a powerful royal army and a powerful gentry/aristocracy.
I do not know that much about Norman England (roughly 1066-1200) but my understanding is that it was one of the most centralized monarchies in Europe. But since the King could never convince the nobles that a standing army was necessary to defend England, the King was never able to erode noble rights. This was very different from France, Spain, Prussia and Austria.
I believe that without the channel, England would have ended up like those other nations because the King would have kept concentrating power to fight wars.
So many of the commercial currents flowing into England from the continent predated the 1688 Glorious Revolution? Thinking of Shakespeare and the Merchant of Venice? :-) While the connection to William III probably helped the process along, it was basically a late addition? Maybe even with his campaigns against the French, he kept that military "tied up" so it avoided worrying about England? And yet the foundational outlook goes back to Magna Carta and common law developments (jury trials by peer of the accused, probably a lot of legal developments around property ownership, inheritance, etc.?). Also the political competition among guilds, city governments, shire reeves, landed gentry, court magistrates, etc. ???
I gather there was something of a parallel development to learn about God's laws of nature (Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, et al.) but such studies were probably only supportive of "common sense technological" advances (metallurgy, chemistry, textiles, etc.?) rather than something approximating basic science (which came later in the 1700's).
Yes, while the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was an important political event, it was not a fundamental turning point in British society as it is sometimes presented. 1688 forced a compromise between the monarchists and the parliamentarians in favor of the latter, but it did not lead to great changes in British society. It also wiped out the political influences of Catholics. The changes were primarily constitutional and legal, not social and economic.
England, particularly the southeastern part, was a Commercial society long before 1688, and this was one of the primary reasons for the English Civil War between 1642 and 1651.
Thanks for the comment. I will check out your articles.
I have also read "The Age of Revolution 1789-1848" by Eric Hobsbawm (although it was a few decades ago.
If you are interested in the topic, I would recommend expanding your reading. This book is very dated and heavily influenced by ideology.
The term "Industrial Revolution" is somewhat deceptive. It was a long, slow process, but if you compare it to the history before it, I think the term revolution applies.
The transition from agriculture to industry actually happened centuries before the 1780s. I would encourage you to read about Commercial societies that came long before. Many of them had thriving textile industries.
You can view my reading on the topic here (unfortunately, the articles are displayed in reverse chronological order)
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/t/commercial-societies
On January 19th, I will be published a list of these articles in my recommended order for reading them. I hope that you find them useful.
Before providing an extended discourse on your theories in the comments. please be sure that you first understand my beliefs. Otherwise, the discussion goes nowhere.
There is much that I agree with, but I will disagree on the following:
1) The UK was clearly not a republic. The other commercial societies could have done fine with a constitutional monarchy. So it was not the government that made them unique. Your use of the term shows an excessive focus on government.
2) The government plays far less role in the process of economic development than you assume. In most cases, the government is a hindering factor in development, not a coordinating factor.
3) I don't think anything special happened in the UK in the 1780s. There certainly was no "revolutionary transformation of the social structure" or "reordering of the national economy." I don't think many historians will agree with you on this point.
4) I don't think the formation of the UK in 1707 had huge economic consequences, except perhaps in Scotland. Again, you focus far too much on government and politics.
5) The Dutch Republic and potentially other Commercial societies had as much industry and global trade as the UK in 1780.
One of the problems with the discipline of political economy is that it puts far too much importance on government. Progress comes from society, not from government.
I don't know what "post-feudal," "post-parliamentary" and "post-puritan" mean. They seem like needless jargon.
What was unusual about the Industrial Revolution in Britain was the widespread application of fossil fuels. This is what separated 19th Century UK from previous Commercial societies. It was not government policy or "revolutionary transformation of the social structure, the way the national economy was organized."
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-significance-of-the-industrial