The Age of Voltaire Page 8
The peasants might have been content with the varied vitality of their homes if they had been allowed to preserve their ancient ways in the fields. They remembered when the landlord had permitted them, or their forebears, to graze their livestock on the manor’s common fields, to fish freely in its streams, to cut wood in its forest; now, by a process begun in the sixteenth century, most of the “commons” had been enclosed by the owners, and the peasants found it hard to make ends meet. There was no serfdom left, and no formal feudal dues; but enterprising landlords, and city merchants investing in land, were farming on a larger scale, with more capital, better implements, greater skill, and wider markets than were available to yeomen tilling their narrow areas. Gregory King had reckoned some 180,000 such freeholders in the England of 1688. Voltaire, about 1730, reported “in England many peasants with 200,000 francs’ worth of property, and who do not disdain to continue cultivating the earth that has enriched them, and in which they live free”; but this may have been propaganda for French stimulation. In any case, by 1750 the number of freeholders had declined.3 The fatter landlords were buying up the thinner tracts; the small homestead, designed for family subsistence or local markets, was giving place to larger farms capable of profiting from improved methods and machines; the farmer was becoming a tenant or hired “hand.” Moreover, the system of tillage predominant in England in 1715 divided the land of a village into different regions according to their fertility and accessibility; each farmer received one or more strips in the separate localities; co-operation was necessary, individual enterprise was balked, production lagged. The enclosers argued that large-scale operation under unified ownership increased agricultural production, facilitated sheep pasturage, and allowed a profitable output of wool; and doubtless they were right. Economic progress shut at least one eye to the human turmoil of displacement and transition.
It was chiefly on the expanded farms that agricultural technology advanced. The profit motive brought wastelands under cultivation, disciplined labor to greater efficiency, stimulated the invention of new tools and ways, promoted experiments in animal breeding, and sustained the toil of draining marshes, checking soil erosion, and clearing woods. Between 1696 and 1795 some two million acres were added to the cultivated area of England and Wales. In 1730 Charles Townshend introduced the four-course system of crop rotation instead of the wasteful plan of letting a third of the land lie fallow in each year: he planted wheat or oats in the first year, barley or oats in the second, clover, rye, vetches, rutabaga, and kale in the third, turnips in the fourth; then the sheep were brought in to eat the turnips or trample them into the ground, while their offal fertilized the soil; so the earth was prepared for a rich crop of wheat in the next year. His neighbors laughed at him, and called him Turnip Townshend, until a thirty per cent increase in his crops turned them to imitation. As Townshend was a viscount, other aristocrats followed him in improving their land; it became the fashion for an English lord to take a personal interest in agriculture, and the talk of the manors passed from hunting and dogs to turnips and manure.4
Jethro Tull was a lawyer; his health failing, he went back to his father’s farm; his sharpened mind was fascinated by the miracle and profits of growth, but was repelled by the wasteful methods of tillage that he saw—farmers broadcasting nine or ten pounds of seed to an acre so carelessly “that two thirds of the ground was unplanted, and on the rest ’twas so thick that it did not prosper.”5 Traveling in France and Italy, he studied agricultural methods; returning, he bought a farm, and shocked his neighbors with inventions that doubled production. He began (c. 1730) by making a four-coultered plow that would uproot and bury weeds instead of merely shoving them aside. But his most decisive invention (c. 1733) was a horse-drawn drill mechanism that fed seed through notched funnels at a specific spacing and depth in two parallel rows, and then covered the seeds by a harrow attached to the drill. The machine saved seed and labor, and allowed the cultivation, aeration, irrigation, and weeding of the soil between the seeded rows. This apparently trivial change in sowing, and the improvement of the plow, shared in what came to be called the agricultural revolution, whose effects can be measured (even allowing for inflation) by the tenfold rise, during the eighteenth century, in the value of the lands where the new methods were used. The increased productivity of the soil enabled the farms to feed more workers in the towns, and made possible that growing urban population without which there could have been no Industrial Revolution.
Neither the peasants nor the town workers shared in the growing wealth. Peasant proprietors were squeezed out by large-scale competition; peasant laborers were paid as little as the fear of unemployment compelled them to accept. Hear the learned and high-caste Trevelyan:
The social price paid for economic gain was a decline in the number of independent cultivators, and a rise in the number of landless laborers. To a large extent this was a necessary evil, and there would have been less harm in it if the increased dividend of the agricultural world had been fairly distributed. But while the landlord’s rent, the parson’s tithe, and the profits of [landowning] farmer and middleman all rose apace, the field laborer, deprived of his little rights in [the common] land and his family’s by-employment in industry, received no proper compensation in high wages, and in the Southern Counties too often sank into a position of dependence and pauperism.6
The natural concentration of wealth was in some measure mitigated by taxation and organized charity. The English rich, unlike the French nobles, paid the larger part of the taxes that supported the government. The Poor Laws, which had begun in 1536, required each parish to succor persons in danger of starvation. The able-bodied unemployed were sent to workhouses, the disabled were committed to almshouses; the children were bound out as apprentices to those willing to lodge and feed them for their services. The expenses of the system were paid by a tax on the households of the parish. A parliamentary committee reported that of all the children born in workhouses, or those received in infancy, in the years 1763–65, only seven per cent were alive in 1766.7 It was a hard century.
2. Industry
The self-sufficient home of the countryside retarded, for good or ill, the specialization of labor and the Industrial Revolution. Why should the nascent capitalist finance a factory when he could have a hundred families weave and spin for him under their own roofs and the automatic discipline of competition? In the West Riding district of Yorkshire this domestic industry produced 100,000 pieces of cloth for the market in 1740, and 140,000 pieces in 1750; as late as 1856 only half the woolen production of Yorkshire came from factories, half still came from homes.8 Nevertheless those busy households were incipient factories: the head of the family invited servants and outsiders to join in the work; additional rooms were equipped with spinning wheels and looms. As these domestic operations increased in size, and the market widened through improved roads and control of the seas, domestic industry itself created a demand for better tools. The first inventions were implements rather than machines; they could be installed in homes, like Kay’s flying shuttle; only when the inventors made machines that required mechanical power did the factory system replace domestic industry.
The transition was gradual; it took almost a century (1730–1830), and perhaps “revolution” is too dramatic a term for so leisurely a change. The break with the past was not so sharp as the romantification of history once suggested. Industry was as old as civilization; invention had progressed at a quickening pace since the thirteenth century; in Dante’s Florence factories were as numerous as poets; in Rembrandt’s Holland capitalists were as numerous as artists. But taken in its progressive stages of steam, electricity, oil, electronics, and atomic energy, the industrial transformation of the last two centuries (1760–1960), as compared with the rate of economic change in Europe before Columbus, constitutes a real revolution, basically transforming not only agriculture, transport, communication, and industry, but also politics, manners, morality, religion, philosophy, and art.
Many factors flowed together in compelling industrial charge. The wars that followed the fall of Walpole’s ministry (1742) intensified the urge to accelerate production and distribution. The growth of population, as a result of the rising food supply, offered a swelling domestic market for both agriculture and industry, and encouraged the making of better machines and roads. The machines required skills, which led to a specialization and division of labor promoting productivity. Huguenot and other immigrants brought to England their salvaged savings and their crafts; it was a Huguenot descendant who invented the first spinning machine (1738). The adoption of protective tariffs by Parliament (e.g., the “Calico Act” of 1721, prohibiting the use of imported printed calicos) narrowed foreign competition, and gave the English textile industry full control of the home market; while the growing influence of the merchants on legislation favored the extension of the British economy. In the middle and lower classes the Puritan tradition—soon to be reinforced by the Methodist movement-encouraged the virtues of industriousness, enterprise, and thrift; capital was accumulated, wealth was sanctioned, and the bourgeoisie seemed to enjoy the special grace of God.
Meanwhile the development of mining offered an expanding supply of coal as a fuel for industry. Wood had hitherto been the major fuel for homes and shops, but forests were being thinned to extinction; of sixty-nine great forests known to medieval England sixty-five had disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century.9 Timber had to be imported from Scandinavia or America; it cost more and more, and demand arose for a cheaper fuel. But the mining of coal was still a primitive process; shafts were shallow, ventilation was crude; methane and carbonic-acid gas choked the miners; and the problem of pumping water out of the mines remained unsolved till the steam engines of Savery and Newcomen; indeed, this problem was the chief incentive to the development of such engines. Despite these difficulties the production of coal mounted and spread, so that by 1750 the coal burned in homes and factories was already darkening the London sky.10
The importance of coal for the Industrial Revolution lay especially in its use for smelting iron ore into purer, tougher, malleable iron by separating the metal from the minerals attached to it. Smelting required fusion, which required a high degree of heat; this, since the fourteenth century, had been produced by burning charcoal (i.e., charred wood) in blast furnaces supplied with heavy drafts of air; but now charcoal was becoming costlier through the falling supply of wood. In 1612 Simon Sturtevant recommended coal as smelter fuel; “Dud” Dudley claimed in 1619 that by these means he reduced the cost of smelting iron by one half; but his charcoal-using rivals united to drive him out of business. Finally (c. 1709) Abraham Darby I, settling at Coalbrookdale, where coal was plentiful, successfully and economically smelted iron ore by heating it with coke—i.e., coal “cooked,” or burned, sufficiently to free it from its volatile elements. Coke itself had been known as far back as 1590. Abraham Darby II developed the use of coal or coke in smelting, and improved the blast furnace with bellows worked by a water wheel; soon he was able to outsell all other ironmasters in England. In 1728 the first English rolling mill was set up to pass iron between a succession of cylinders to compress it into desired forms. In 1740 Benjamin Huntsman invented the crucible process by which high-grade steel was produced through heating and purifying metal in clay pots. It was these developments in the marriage of coal with iron that made possible the machines of the Industrial Revolution.
3. Invention
The first half of the eighteenth century saw no spectacular acceleration of invention as compared with the two preceding centuries; and half a volume might be required to list the inventions that this age inherited from the past. As one example, the clock, so necessary in science, industry, and navigation, was almost perfected in the seventeenth century; by 1758 it reached a degree of accuracy (one minute’s deviation in six hundred days) not surpassed till 1877.11 The workers themselves, though often the source of inventions, discouraged them as threatening technological disemployment; so the hostility of labor compelled the abandonment of the first English sawmill (1663); not till 1767 was the attempt successfully renewed. Industrial invention was further retarded by poor roads; there was little incentive to increase production so long as the expansion of the market was hindered by difficulties of transport. Marine transportation, however, was improving; colonies, almost entirely agricultural, were avid customers for manufactured products; here was a rising stimulus to invention. The profit motive helped; Parliament granted patent rights for fourteen years. Foreign competition in the export trade provided another stimulus; so the textiles of India, produced by skilled but low-paid labor, spurred English manufacturers to economy of production through improved mechanical equipment. Hence it was in textile machinery that invention inaugurated the great change.
The first outstanding invention in textile production was John Kay’s “flying shuttle” (1733); here might be dated the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Previously, with minor exceptions, the width of the cloth to be woven had been limited to the stretch of the weaver’s arms, for he had to throw the shuttle (the instrument that passed the threads of the woof through those of the warp) from one side of the loom with one hand and catch it with the other hand at the opposite side. Kay arranged a mechanism of wheels, hammers, and rods whereby a sharp tap of the hand would send the shuttle flying from one side to an automatic stop at any predetermined width, with a considerable saving of time. When he sought to install his invention at a mill in Colchester the weavers denounced him as trying to deprive them of their daily bread. He fled to Leeds (1738), and offered his patent to the cloth manufacturers for a fee; they took his invention, but withheld his royalties; he sued, and was ruined by legal costs. He went to his native Bury, but there the populace rose in a riot against him (1753), sacked his home, and threatened to kill him. One woman, however, greeted his machine with enthusiasm, crying, “Weel, weel! The warks o’ God be wonderful, but the contrivance o’ man bates Him at last!”12 Kay found more acceptance in France, whose government adopted his invention and awarded him a pension. Not till 1760 did the flying shuttle surmount all opposition and pass into common use.
The textile industry was hampered by the fact that weavers could weave yarn faster than spinners could spin and supply it. Till 1738 spinning was done by hand, on wheels that still adorn homes idealizing the past. In that year Lewis Paul, son of a Huguenot immigrant, patented a spinning machine built apparently on lines suggested by John Wyatt: a system of rollers drew out the corded ropes of cotton or wool into threads of any desired fineness, and spun it on spindles, all with a minimum of toil. Paul and Wyatt sold the patent to Edward Cave, friend of Dr. Johnson. Cave set up five machines in a Northampton factory in 1742—the first of a long succession of spinning mills in old and New England.
Now that iron could be treated to make strong machines, and economic conditions called for large-scale production, the problem remained of finding some mechanical power to substitute cheaply for the muscles of men and the patience of women. The earliest solution was through water power. In a hundred countries the great water wheel, leisurely turning with the flow of streams, had from time unremembered moved pumps, bellows, rollers, hammers, even, since 1500, heavy iron machines. It continued to be the main source of mechanical energy through the eighteenth century; it survived into the twentieth; and the hydraulic installations of our time are water power transformed into portable electricity. The motive power of winds was not so reliable; comparatively little use was made of it in the calm lands of the south; but in northern latitudes the air currents were set to work turning windmills whose “sails” could be set into the “eye of the wind” by a hand-moved winch at the base. This clumsy and unsteady engine reached its zenith in the United Provinces in the eighteenth century, and then entered into its picturesque decline.
Meanwhile the inventors were striving to bring the steam engine to a profitable efficiency. It had already a long history, from Hero’s steam-
operated doors and toys in the third century A.D. through Jerome Cardan (1550), Giambattista della Porta (1601), Salomon de Caus (1615), Giovanni Branca (1629), the Marquis of Worcester (1663), Samuel Morland (1675), Christian Huygens (1680), Denis Papin (1681), and Thomas Savery (1698) to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine of 1712; this is a tale a thousand times told. Here again, at 1712, is a possible birth date for the Industrial Revolution; for Newcomen’s “fire-engine” was equipped with piston, rocking beam, and safety valve, and was effectively applied to draining water from deep mines. It remained the basic model for steam-operated pumps for three quarters of a century.
4. Capital and Labor
As machines increased in size and cost, and required mechanical power for their operation, enterprising men found it profitable to replace domestic industry with factories that gathered men and machines into buildings located preferably near streams that could provide both energy and transportation. Factories, as we have seen, were no novelty; hundreds of them had existed in Elizabeth’s England and Colbert’s France. The “factory system”— if we define it as an industrial economy in which production is carried on chiefly in factories—hardly existed anywhere before the nineteenth century. But after the inventions of Kay and Paul textile factories began to take over more and more of the spinning and weaving that had been done in homes. In 1717 Thomas Lombe set up at Derby a textile factory 660 feet long, with three hundred workers operating 26,000 wheels. Soon other structures of like immensity rose at Stockport, Leek, Birmingham, Leominster, Northampton …