State versus market in the early historiography of the industrial revolution in Britain c.1890–1914

Abstract

This article reveals how the emerging historiography of industrialisation in Britain moulded a lasting division between two explanations of its origins, one emphasising discontinuity, individual enterprise, and free markets, the other evolutionary change, the role of the state and the importance of empire. Both views were historically informed but led in contrary directions in the highly polarised politics of early twentieth-century Britain, the former linked to support for free trade and liberalism as the basis of economic welfare, the latter to support for Conservative tariff reform and imperial reconstruction.

Keywords:

• Industrial revolution
• free trade
• tariff reform
• state
• market

JEL codes:

• B15
• N01
• N13
• N43

Notes

¹ The original text (1884) went through five editions by 1908, when a ‘new and cheaper edition’ was published and was frequently reprinted until going out of print in 1927. While primarily associated with Toynbee, the term ‘industrial revolution’ had earlier, especially French precedents (see Jones 2002).

² John L. & Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (London: Longmans, Green, 1911) began a series of works which included a general study of the Industrial Revolution, The Rise of Modern Industry (London: Methuen, 1925). For full study, see Weaver (1997).

³ For the impact of the ‘Great Depression’ (1873–96) in undermining faith in economic orthodoxy, see Coleman (1987), pp. 57–8.

⁴ Times, 1903, 15 Aug., p.4b; for letters of dissent, ibid. p.4b (L. L. Price); 18 Aug., p.6a; 20 Aug., p.10c (including Foxwell and Hewins); 22 Aug., p.5b; see also Coats (1968; Cannadine 1984, pp. 137–8).

⁵ Gibbins's works also included an updated version of the partisan Augustus Mongredien, History of the Free Trade Movement in Britain (London: Cassell & Co, 1897).

⁶ This was an enlarged version of his Industrial History of England (London: Methuen & Co, 1890); Gibbins was cited in support of free trade by Percy Thornton, Times, 1903, 12 Nov., p.5e; see too Gibbins (1903), pp. 146–7; 179–83.

⁷ On Hewins’ joining the tariff campaign, Ashley (21 Nov. 1903) wrote to congratulate him, for ‘the matter is of the utmost importance to the Country and the Empire, and the crisis demands from us, who think as we do, every sacrifice that we can possibly make to it’; Hewins in turn had spoken of the good done by Ashley's book, The Tariff Problem (London: P. S. King & Son, 1903): Hewins Papers, box 46, fos. 226–7, Sheffield University Library.

⁸ These quotations have been checked against the separately printed (Cambridge, 1908) edition entitled The Industrial Revolution which combined Part 3 (‘Parliamentary Colbertism’) of The Mercantile System with Laissez Faire. For a recent view of the Whig commercial tradition, see Pincus (2009, pp. 366–99).

⁹ This noted that ‘Mr Chamberlain's speech on May 15 1903 marks an epoch, as it recognised the necessity of bringing our economic policy into accord with Imperial ideas’. Semmel (1960, p. 192), notes the degree to which Cunningham's later editions removed any traces of earlier ‘Cobdenism’ but the substance of his volumes changed relatively little after 1903. Cunningham was later to become President of the Cambridge Branch of Page Croft's National Party, a right-wing splinter from the Unionist Party (Winch 2009, pp. 266–7).

¹⁰ This work also noted ‘the extraordinary progress which took place in every department of economic life under this highly protective system’; ‘the eighteenth century, when protection was carried out most consistently, was a period of wholly unique progress both in agriculture and industrial enterprise’ (p. 33); see too Kadish (1989, p. 217).

¹¹ Warner also foresaw that the rise of foreign competition might encourage opinion ‘more ready to foster measures whose avowed object is to foster national industries than it was thirty years ago’ (p. 353.), while competing world empires might require ‘in the future the more need of a firm use of national power to maintain the source of wealth on which power rests’ (p. 360).

¹² Herbert S. Foxwell, a leading historical economist, had been a prominent advocate of bimetallism and supported tariff reform without playing a key part in the debate (Koot 1987, pp. 122–34; Winch 2009, p. 266).

¹³ Reviews included those by Hugh Lancelot Beales, noting the paucity of copies before 1928, Economica 25 (1929), 117; English Historical Review 21 (1906), 594–6 (Price); Economic Journal 16 (1906), 413–5 (Tawney). 1928 also saw the publication of Beales's much slighter, The Industrial Revolution: an introductory essay (London: Longmans, Green and Co.). Beales subscribed to the ‘discontinuity’ thesis but was primarily interested in the social consequences of industrialism. See Hutton (2016).

¹⁴ ‘The question of Free Trade v. Tariff Reform has been argued – certainly on the Tariff Reform side- too much from the historical point of view only’, Seaton (1912), p. 37. Cunningham, against the experts’ appeal to the expediency of Free Trade, believed ‘it was necessary to point out that there ought to be an appeal from this dictum to Economic History’ (1905, p. 305). Coleman (1987, pp. 81–5), interestingly classifies the pro-tariff economic historians as ‘reformers’ but their opponents such as Gonner and Scott as ‘neutralists’, without noting the latter's commitment to free trade.

¹⁵ The full list was C. F. Bastable; A. L. Bowley; E. Cannan; L. Courtney; F. Y. Edgeworth; E. K. C. Gonner; A. Marshall; J. S. Nicholson; L. R. Phelps; A. C. Pigou; C. P. Sanger; W. R. Scott; W. Smart; G. Armitage Smith.

¹⁶ G. E. Buckle interestingly suggested Cannan as a respondent to Hewins's Times letters in support of tariffs: Buckle to Hewins, 8 June 1903, Hewins papers, vol. 46, fo. 31, Sheffield University Library.

¹⁷ The Free Trade Movement and its Results (London: Blackie & Son, 1898; 2nd ed. 1903).

¹⁸ Bastable ‘was sympathetic to the historical method in economics as developed by his [Irish] compatriots J. K. Ingram and T. E. Cliffe Leslie’, Black (2004).

¹⁹ Bowley (1893) had won the Cobden Club prize at Cambridge, his early statistical research focused on prices and wage rates, data still central to the standard of living controversy in the 1960s and 1970s, Hartwell (1971, p. 85).

²⁰ Clapham (1945-6) noted himself as a ‘modest combatant on the free trade side in the days of Joseph Chamberlain's Tariff Reform Movement’, For the broader context of his later work, see Weaver (2004).

²¹ Meredith was also the author of a historical survey, Protection in France (London: Methuen, 1904).

²² Price's article on ‘The Industrial Revolution’ in Dictionary of Political Economy ed. Robert H. I. Palgrave (3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1894–1913), ii. 399–401, followed Toynbee closely.

²³ In her review of Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904) Knowles criticised Unwin's underestimating the effectiveness of trade regulation in England, while noting that ‘During the Whig rule, when the encouragement of industry was tried on the largest scale ever attempted in England, she definitely became the workshop and carrier of the world’, Economic Journal 14 (1904), 579–83. Knowles, ‘country tory, patriot and imperialist’ (ODNB) was closely linked with the views of the historical economists; as Lillian Town she had acted 1895-6 as Cunningham's research assistant for the third edition of The Growth of English Industry and Commerce. She was appointed to a teachership at the LSE in 1904.

²⁴ ‘the abundant evidence as to the maintenance of the fundamentals of mercantilism, both in the statute book and in practical life until the days of Adam Smith’, McArthur (1906). McArthur had co-written with Cunningham, Outlines of English Industrial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895).

²⁵ Shaw is identified as author in some library catalogues but also authoritatively in his obituary by Clapham, Proceedings of the British Academy, 29 (1943), 349–55. Clapham quoted one source which deemed Shaw a man of ‘the extreme right’. Ironically he had won a Cobden Club prize at Owen's College.

²⁶ Garvin was editor of the pro-tariff The Outlook (1904-6) and of The Observer from 1908. See Gollin (1960); Startt, (1991, pp. 15–18, 42–8).

²⁷ This became a pointed contrast with the support for free trade by Burleigh's descendant, the Unionist Lord Hugh Cecil.

²⁸ Thus Cunningham sought deliberately to bring economic history to bear for tariff reform in response to the way it was supposed the ‘academic experts’ had urged ‘the expediency of free trade’: ‘it was necessary for others to point out that there ought to be an appeal from this dictum to Economic History’ (305).

²⁹ For a similar polemic, see Joseph W. Welsford, The Reign of Terror: an experiment in Free Trade Socialism (London: Women's Unionist and Tariff Reform Association, 1909), written to accompany lantern slides. Cunningham was to write a preface to Welsford's anti-free trade history, The Strength of England (London: Longmans, Green, 1910).

³⁰ Cf. Warner (1899, p. 322), for whom the Corn Laws were a ‘survival of the old Mercantile system’.

³¹ Robertson (1908) was considered the “bible for free traders”, Freeden (2006); see too Amery and Robertson (1909, p. 7).

³² Typically, MacDonald noted that poverty and misery before 1846 were not the result simply of Protection but ‘The country was undergoing an industrial revolution’ (1903, p. 81); similarly, Snowden wrote of the ‘greatest revolution this nation or any nation has ever known...This revolution was brought about by the discovery of the control of steam power and the invention of machinery’ (1913, p. 47).

³³ As a student Ashton had been inspired by S. J. Chapman with whom he wrote his first article in 1914; for his family attachment to Gladstonian Liberalism, Ashton (1930); see too Ashton (1954) first presented at a meeting in 1951 of the Mont Pèlerin Society (‘to discuss the problems of the preservation of a free society against the totalitarian threat’ (Preface). See too Coleman (1987, pp. 82–3).

³⁴ R. M. Hartwell Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Minutes, publications, conference papers, and agenda of the Mont Pèlerin Society; Cockett (1994, p. 118).