Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Part 1:

Material Explanations

of the World’s Enrichment

Do Not Work

Chapter 1:

Modern Growth is a Factor of at Least Fifteen
One result of the bourgeois virtues and their new prestige was modern economic growth. Right through to the neoclassicals of the 1870s and into the mid-20^th century it was viewed as small, coming from specialization and trade. Smith, Mill, Marshall, even Keynes posited a little-growth backdrop, being falsified as they wrote.
Locke sank into a swoon;

The Garden died;

God took the spinning-jenny

Out of his side.

Yeats, “Fragments” (1928),

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats

(Macmillan, 1956), p. 211)

The blessed Adam Smith, may his tribe increase, wrote two books on bourgeois virtues. The Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759, which he loved and revised for a sixth edition in the last year of life, 1790, made one set of arguments, centered on temperance (or self command, as he called it). His other, later drafted, and more famous book, The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations of 1776, made the arguments for prudence in its own, material terms. The prudence was necessary. Had capitalism not succeeded materially to the extent it in fact has we would not be discussing such a strange subject as “bourgeois virtues.” They would merit discussion, but they wouldn’t get it. Indeed, without the material success of capitalism the gigantic class of educated people who spurn it would instead be tilling the land and minding the kitchen. You and me, for example. Consider for a start, then, the merely prudential side of the bourgeois era.

It turns out to depend on its ethical side.

The heart of the matter is fifteen. Fifteen, or even a lot more, is the factor by which real income per head nowadays exceeds that around 1700 in, say, Britain and in other countries that have experienced modern economic growth.¹⁴ You, oh average participant in the British economy, are fifteen times better supplied with food and clothing and housing and education than your remote ancestors. If your ancestors lived in Finland, it is more like a factor of 29, the average Finn in 1700 being not a great deal better off in material terms than the average African at the time. If your ancestors lived in the Netherlands it is only a factor of 10 or so, since in 1700 the Netherlands was the richest (and the most bourgeois) country in the world, 70 percent better off than the soon-to-be United Kingdom. If in Japan, the factor since 1700 is fully 35.¹⁵ If South Korea, the factor merely in the past half-century, since 1953, when income per head, despite access to some modern technology, was about what it had been in Europe 450 years before, is almost 18, crammed into four decades instead of, as in the first and British case, stretched out over two centuries.

The statistics are not perfect. “Real income” means what the nation as a whole earns, abstracting from mere inflation. It’s the stuff we have, not the mere dollars or yen. That’s why economists call it “real.” Now it’s very true that what is measured by stuff (which covers non-stuff stuff like education and entertainment) does not include all of human happiness and does not measure what it measures perfectly well. Stuff unimaginable in 1700 crowds our lives, from air conditioning to anesthesia. That by itself makes the factor of fifteen an understatement. But to mention the other direction of bias, the forests primeval and the hosts of golden daffodils are more rare—if on the other hand more cheaply reached by people with more leisure and travel funds to reach them. Nor is the income per head divided out perfectly fairly, then or now.

But the factor of increase could be ten or twelve or thirty-five, rather than fifteen, and leave the heart of the matter entirely undisturbed. Conservatively measured, to repeat, the average British or American or French person has fifteen or more times additional bread, books, transport, and innocent amusement than the average such person had three centuries ago. Nor have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the equality of distribution has improved. The poorest have benefited the most from modern economic growth, both statistically and substantively. After all, moving from starvation to having a weight problem is more substantive a change than moving from having one diamond necklace to having fifteen. No previous episode of enrichment approaches it—not China or Egypt in their, primes, not the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome.

The fact is in rough outline not controversial among competent economists and historians, though its magnitude is not something that people suspicious of capitalism know on their pulse. If you ask the average regular reader of The Nation or even The National Review how much better off in material ease the average American was in the time of the first President Clinton as against the time of President Monroe she will come up with a figure such as, perhaps, 50 percent or even 200 percent—not, as is the case, 2100 percent, a factor of nearly 22, which is the American history.

Need more here, especially hours to buy X. Statistics on income distribution. Life span. Education. As concrete as possible. Not reversed by now.

The gigantic enrichment of all—the average person as well as the captain of industry—who allow capitalism and the bourgeois virtues to do their work is one argument in favor of them. It is so to speak a practical justification for the sin of being neither soldier nor saint. You may reply, and truly, that money isn’t everything. But as Samuel Johnson replied, “When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor.”¹⁶ Or you may ask the inhabitants of India (average per capita income in 1998 in 1990 dollars $1,746) or China ($3,117) whether they would have liked an American income at that time ($27,331). And more so now. Or you can note the direction of permanent migration. And more so now.

Britain was of course first. And Britain was also first in the study of economics, from the political arithmeticians of the seventeenth century through David Hume, Adam Smith, T. R. Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and the British masters of the subject in the early 20^th century. Economics was for long a British and even disproportionately a Scottish subject. Only after the Second World War did it like many other fields of the intellect become mainly American.

What is odd is that the British economists did not recognize the factor of fifteen as it was happening. The economists’ theories took useful account of little changes—a 5 per cent rise of income when cotton textiles grew or a 10 per cent fall when Napoleon ruled the Continent. But they did not notice that the change to be explained, 1780-1860, was not 10 percent but 100 per cent, and was on its way to that 1,400 per cent relative to what is was in the year of Our Lord 1700. Only recently, beginning in the 1950s, has the inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations begun to recognize this astonishing oversight.

In 1954 Joseph Schumpeter was scornful of the classical economists for their failure to see what was happening. Malthus and Ricardo "lived at the threshold of the most spectacular economic development ever witnessed. . . . [yet] saw nothing but cramped economies, struggling with ever-decreasing success for their daily bread."¹⁷ Their student John Stuart Mill even in 1870 "had no idea of what the capitalist engine was going to achieve" (same place). What Mill lacked, and Schumpeter had, was an appreciation of how Romantic motivations drove even businessmen, and how amazingly productive such motivations were.¹⁸

To restrict attention to what Mill could have known, between 1780 and 1860, dates covering the classic industrial revolution, British national income per head doubled, though population also more than doubled. A much larger nation was much richer per head, early in the factor of fifteen. In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) the Anglican priest and economist T. R. Malthus had predicted the opposite.

Malthus told a great truth about earlier history. In medieval England during the centuries before 1348 a rising population had become poorer, and in Elizabethan England the impoverishment happened again: more Englishmen meant less to go around per head. But in late Georgian and early Victorian England a rising population became, richer, much richer. The fact was contrary to every prediction of the economists, those “dismal scientists,” in Carlyle’s phrase (who called them so, by the way, not at all on this account, as is commonly believed, but because they were opposed to a paternalistic slavery).¹⁹ Most economists believed then as now that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the sweat of your brow shall you earn your bread. And therefore they saw nothing in prospect c. 1830 but misery for the working man and riches for the landowners.

The economists, in other words, did not notice that something entirely new was happening 1780 1860. Economists have been even in our time slow to grasp the extent of modern economic growth. As the demographer Anthony Wrigley put it a while ago, “the classical economists were not merely unconscious of changes going on about them that many now term an industrial revolution: they were in effect committed to a view of the nature of economics development that ruled it out as a possibility.”²⁰ At the moment (say, 1848) that John Stuart Mill came to understand an economy in equilibrium the economy grew away from the equilibrium. It was as though an engineer had satisfied himself of the statics that kept a jumbo jet from collapsing as it sat humming on the tarmac, but failed to notice when the whole thing proceeded to launch into dynamic flight.

The mistake the economists made, believing right down to the present that they had a complete theory of the social laws of motion, was to overlook applied ingenuity. In 1767 Josiah Wedgwood was writing that “a revolution was at hand,” at any rate in the making of pottery.²¹ By 1787 the dissenting preacher, political radical, and insurance actuary Richard Price was more broadly optimistic:

It is the nature of improvement to increase itself. . . . Nor are there, in this case, any limits beyond which knowledge and improvement cannot be carried. . . . Discoveries may, for aught we know, be made in future time which, like the discoveries of the mechanical arts and the mathematical sciences in past time, may exalt the powers of men and improve their state to a degree which will make future generations as much superior to the present as the present are to the past.

Price 1787

As was Humphrey Davy in 1802: we may look for . . . a bright day of which we already beyond the dawn.”²² By 1814 the merchant and calculator Patrick Colquhoun believed that “the improvement of the steam engines, but above all the facilities afforded to the great branches of the woolen and cotton manufactories by ingenious machinery, invigorated by capital and skill, and beyond all calculation.” And by 1830 an historian like Thomas Macaulay, respectful of the economics of his day but with a long view, could see the event better than could most of his economist friends. He wrote: “If we were to prophesy that in the year 1930 a population of fifty million, better fed, clad, and lodged than the English of our time, will cover these islands, that Sussex and Huntingdonshire will be wealthier than the wealthiest parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire now are, . . that machines constructed on principles yet undiscovered will be in every house, . . many people would think us insane.’²³ Later in the 19^th century and especially in the socialist days of the mid-20^th century it was usual to deprecate such optimism, and to characterize Macaulay in particular as hopelessly “Whiggish” and progress-minded and pro capitalist. He certainly was all that, a bourgeois to the core. But Whiggish and progress-minded and pro-capitalist or not, he was exactly correct, even in his estimate of British population in 1930—if one includes the recently separated Irish Republic, he was off by less than 2 per cent. The pessimists of his times, both economists and anti economists, were wrong, though fashionable as always —Schumpeter remarks in this connection that "pessimistic views about a thing always seem to the public mind to be more 'profound' than optimistic ones."²⁴ The economic optimists of the 1830s and 1840s (as Schumpeter called them), Henry Carey in the United States and Friedrich List in Germany, with engineers like Charles Babbage in England, "saw vast potentialities looming in the near future."²⁵ It makes one suspect the pessimists nowadays.

In the suggestive jargon of statistics, the startling rise of income 1700 or 1780 to the present can be called the “first moment,” the average change. There’s little historical disagreement about the first moment, I repeat, at least in its order of magnitude. Macaulay was correct in prospect and so are the dozens of economic statisticians who have confirmed it in retrospect. Few doubt that by the third decade of Victoria’s rule the ordinary English person was better off than eighty years before, and was about to become still better off.²⁶ And no one doubts that the average modern English person is vastly better off than her great-great-great- . . . [say it eight times, my dears] grandmother.

The second moment is the variability of the change, its pattern of acceleration and deceleration. Second moments are more difficult to measure. You can know the average height of British women more exactly than you can know its variability. As Simon Kuznets, the economist who pioneered the historical study of national income, once said, perhaps too gloomily, during our period “the data are not adequate for testing hypotheses concerning the time patterns of growth rates.”²⁷ An error of plus or minus 20 per cent in measuring income c. 1700 may not matter much for the 1,400 percentage points of change to the present, but will matter a great deal in deciding whether working people in fact paid for the incessant French Wars of the eighteenth century. It’s how historians earn their living, quarreling about whether the first generation of workers in modern industry were exploited to get it, or whether late Victorian Britain failed economically, or whether socialism when it came to Britain finally in 1946 was a good idea or a bad one. But the point is: waves there were, but the flood was unstoppable.

When did it start? Various emblematic dates have been proposed—the famous day and year 9 March 1776, when Adam Smith’s The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations provided a rhetoric for the age; the five months in 1769 when Watt took out a patent on the separate condenser in his steam engine and Arkwright took out a patent on the water frame for spinning cotton; or 1 January 1760, when the furnaces at Carron Ironworks, Stirlingshire, were lit. It sometimes seems that each economic historian has a favorite date, and a story to correspond. Elizabeth Carus Wilson spoke of “an industrial revolution of the thirteenth century”: she found that the fulling mill (that is, a machine for thickening wool cloth) was “due to scientific discoveries and changes in technique” and “was destined to alter the face of medieval England.”²⁸ Looking at the matter from 1907, the American historian Adams could see a “movement from unity into multiplicity, between 1200 and 1900, . . . unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration” (1907: 498). The economic historians Eric Jones and Joel Mokyr have taken a similar long view of European exceptionalism.²⁹ The most widely accepted period for It, whatever exactly It was that led to the factor of fifteen, is still the late eighteenth century, and recent work on China has suggested that until 1800 there was not all that much exceptional about Europe.³⁰ New quantifiers in the 1980s concluded that the “take off” in Britain was exaggerated by the pioneering generation of quantifiers.³¹ Growth could be faster for the late comers. Sweden and Switzerland could adopt what Britain and Belgium had invented. But the first industrial nation, rather unsurprisingly, was slow in coming.

If the onset of modern economic growth fed on itself, then its start could be a trivial accident. Yet one might wonder why then it did not happen before. “Sensitive dependence on initial conditions” is the technical term for some “nonlinear” models—a piece of so called “chaos theory.” But history under such circumstances becomes untellable.³² Joel Mokyr identifies another pitfall in storytelling (1985c: 44): rummaging among the possible acorns from which the great oak of the industrial revolution grew “is a bit like studying the history of Jewish dissenters between 50 B.C.E. and 50 C.E. What we are looking at is the inception of something which was at first insignificant and even bizarre,” though “destined to change the life of every man and woman in the West.”

Anyway it happened slowly, at a stately pace. Britain was no factory in 1850. Even cotton textiles, growing apace, could not re-employ all the many workers in agriculture. The economic historian John Clapham made the point in 1926, observing that still in 1850 half the population was in employment untouched by “the first industrial revolution.” As Maxine Berg and Patricia Hudson have noted, some technologically stagnant sectors (building, say) saw large expansion, some progressive sectors little or none (paper); some industries working in large scale units did little to change their techniques (naval shipyards early in the period), some in tiny firms were brilliant innovators (the metal trades).³³ Big factories in the famous sectors were not the whole of the factor of fifteen. And steam power in Britain increased by a factor of fully ten from 1870 to 1907, long after the dark satanic mills first enter British consciousness.³⁴ The central puzzle is not why there was in Britain after 1750 or so a burst of what Joel Mokyr calls “macroinventions” (steam, textile machinery) but why the burst did not fizzle out later, as earlier times of innovation had. “The ‘classical’ Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century,” Mokyr notes, “was not an altogether novel phenomenon.”³⁵

Surely the slow start is why industrial change was largely invisible to economists and some others watching it—though not to many possessed of common sense and eyes to see. Macaulay wrote in 1830, “A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.”³⁶ Arthur Hugh Clough did not have praise for capitalism in mind—though the son of a cotton manufacturer, he was extremely dubious about the whole thing, like most Romantics —but his verse captures it well:

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

Productivity change 1780 1860 was famously fast in textiles. You can see it---this is the best way of finding out productivity change before we get modern statistics on aggregates like “the capital stock”---in the prices of things. A piece of cotton cloth that was sold in the 1780s for 70 or 80 shillings (two months’ wages for a workingman) was by the 1850s selling for around 5 shillings (a few days’ wages), on its way by now to a few minutes’ wages. Cotton cloth moved from fashionable to commonplace, in the manner a century and a half later of nylon (first called “artificial silk”) and other synthetics, or indeed silk itself, which is now much cheaper than it was even twenty years ago. A little of the decline in the price of finished cotton cloth was attributable to declines in the prices of raw cotton itself after the introduction of the cotton gin (invented in 1793) and the resulting expansion of cotton plantations in America. But in other ways the price of inputs rose: by 1860, for example, wages of cotton workers had risen markedly. Why then did the price of manufactured cloth fall? It fell because organization and machinery were massively improved in cotton textiles, 1780 to 1860. Though not as massively as was to come.

The case is typical in showing more about that “second moment” than one might at first think knowable. It shows for example that productivity growth slowed in cotton, because power weaving, which came late, was apparently less important than power carding of the raw wool and power spinning of the wool into yarn. And it shows that invention is not the same thing as innovation (cf. Chapman and Butt 1988). The heroic age of invention ended by the late 1780s, by which time Hargreaves, Arkwright, Kay, Crompton and Cartwright had flourished. But the inventions saw steady improvement later. One of the main findings of quantitative economic history since the 1960s is that the pattern is typical, invention being only the first step (the same is true, for example, of railways, which improved in scores of small ways right into the twentieth century, with large falls in real costs). The real cost of cotton textiles had halved by the end of the eighteenth century. But it was to halve twice more by 1860. And then again and again.

Few sectors were as progressive in the classic period of the Industrial Revolution as cotton textiles. Productivity in iron grew a half to a third as fast, which makes the point that productivity is not the same as production. The production of iron increased enormously in Britain 1780 to 1860—by a factor of 56, in fact, or at 5.5 per cent per year (Davies and Pollard 1988; “small’ growth rates,” as you might think 5.5 is, make for big factors if allowed to run on: 5.5 per cent is explosive industrial growth by historical standards, a doubling every 72/5.5 = 13.2 years; thus South Korea since 1953).

The expanding British industry crowded out the iron imported from Sweden and proceeded to make Britain the world’s forge. But the point is that it did so mainly by applying a somewhat improved technology (called puddling) to a much wider field, not by the spectacular and continuous falls in cost that cotton witnessed. The cost of inputs to iron (mainly coal) changed little from 1780 to 1860. During the same span the price of the output (wrought iron) fell from £20 a ton to £8 a ton, a Good Thing, surely. The fall in real costs, again, is a measure of productivity change. So productivity in wrought iron making increased by a factor of about 2.5, an admirable factor of change. Yet over the same years the productivity in cotton textiles, we have seen, increased by a factor of 7.7.

Other textiles imitated the innovations in cotton (Hudson 1986), significantly cheapening their products, though less rapidly than the master industry of the age: as against cotton’s 2.6 per cent productivity growth per year, worsteds (wool cloth spun into a thin yarn and woven flat, with no nap to the cloth) experienced 1.8 per cent and woolens 0.9 per cent (McCloskey 1981b: 114). Coastal and foreign shipping experienced rates of productivity growth similar to those in cotton textiles (some 2.3 per cent per year as compared with 2.6 in cotton). The figure is derived from North’s estimates for transatlantic shipping during the period, rising to 3.3 per cent per year 1814 60 (1968). Again the “low” percentage is in fact large in its cumulative effects: freights and passenger fares fell like a stone, from an index of around 200 after the Napoleonic Wars to 40 in the 1850s. Canals and railways experienced productivity growth of about 1.3 per cent (Hawke 1970). Transportation was therefore among the more notably progressive parts of the economy.

But many other sectors, like iron as we have seen, experienced slower productivity growth. In agriculture the productivity change was slower still, dragging down the productivity of the economy as a whole; taking one year with another 1780 1860, agriculture was still nearly a third of national income. Productivity change varied radically from one part of the economy to the other, as it has continued to do, one sector taking the lead in driving up the national productivity while another settles into a routine of fixed technique, computers taking over the lead from chemicals and electricity. Agriculture itself, for example, came to have rapid productivity change in the age of the reaper and the steam tractor, and still more in the age of genetic engineering in the twentieth century. But from 1780 to 1860 textiles and transport were the leaders.