Month: January 2018

Many of the great feats of manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution in England were made possible by the availability of new technologies that vastly expedited the formerly slow, tedious process of textile manufacturing. Inventions such as John Watt’s steam engine and the Arkwright water frame contributed greatly to the massively increased levels of productivity and general economic expansion of the time period. These inventions were themselves made possible by the evolving economic mindset sparked by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

John Watt, driven by this experimental mindset, took it upon himself to improve upon the preexisting Newcomen engine in order to produce steam power at a greatly increased rate and efficiency. This new steam engine, patented in 1769, reduced operation costs and, as a result, became widespread in factory contexts across England.

In addition, the Arkwright water frame, also patented in 1769, contributed to the expedition of textile manufacturing by improving the speed at which threads could be spun using water power. The frames also did not require skilled laborers, allowing factories to hire larger quantities of cheap, unskilled laborers, further decreasing factory operation costs.

The rapid technological advancements during the Industrial Revolution should, however, not be seen as an instigator of the economic growth of the period. Instead, they should be viewed as a direct effect of a changing economic mindset that provided greater incentives for experimenting with the manufacturing process.

The Great Reform Act (Often referred to as the Representative of People Act of 1832), was an legislation which changed the way Britain’s electoral system was managed. The electoral system was notoriously corrupt; several constituencies did not have secret ballots, and furthermore, certain members of Parliament could buy votes in their parish. The Parliament of the time was not representative of the people it was required to cater to. Paupers could not vote in most parishes, and even worse, there were constituencies like Manchester that had not had representation of any kind for 80 years.

There had been internal attempts to reform the system in 1831, but the House of Lords shut it down. This rejection of the people lead to widescale riots in most major English cities. Although all types of Englishmen participated in the rioting, the lower and middle classes were the ones who had the most influence on the passing of the Great Reform Act. Due to the French Revolution, King George IV was concerned that there could possibly be a similar revolt in the country. After several months of unrest with 300,000 pounds of physical damage (around 31 million today) as well as scores of arrests and executions, the Great Reform Act was passed into law in 1832. The law allowed for all men with at least 10 pounds of property to vote in elections, as well as fixed some of the issues surrounding bribery and unrepresented districts, but most paupers were prohibited from voting because of the property requirement.

Coulson, Ian. “The National Archives Learning Curve | Power, Politics and Protest | The Great Reform Act.” The National Archives, The National Archives of England, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/politics/g6/.

Butler, J.R.M. “The Passing of the Great Reform Bill.” Questia.com, www.questia.com/read/72380627/the-passing-of-the-great-reform-bill.

Jonas Hanway (1712 – 1786) was a merchant and philanthropist. Making his wealth working with the Russia Company, his work as a philantropist made him a central figure regarding public policy on the poor.

Hanway was particularly concerned with expanding the population of Britain. He was elected governor of the Foundling Hospital in 1756 after his £50 donation, which amounts to about £10,000 today. Thanks to the House of Commons’ decision to subsidize the Foundling Hospital, Hanway oversaw the general admission period (1756-1760), when any child who was dropped off was admitted. While this attempt proved too costly to continue for long, Hanway was fully invested in the process, involving himself in a variety of concerns ranging from smallpox vaccines to the weight of coal buckets.

Hanway also heavily advocated for policy change. His advocacy in particular led to the passage of two Acts, both of which would become known as Hanway’s Act. The first one, passed in 1762, which required parishes to keep records regarding the children in their care, formed the foundation for later reform work. The second one, passed in 1767, stemmed from Hanway’s belief that London was deadly to children who lived in the workhouses. The new policy mandated by the Act relocated infants born in London workhouses to rural environments. While the system was later plagued by abuse, the act likely saved thousand of lives.

Sources:

“Inflation.” Bankofengland.co.uk, last modified January 8, 2018. https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation.

Taylor, James Stephen. “Hanway, Jonas (bap. 1712, d. 1786), merchant and philanthropist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, last accessed January 21, 2018.  http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb//odnb-9780198614128-e-12230.

1789 marked the beginning of the French Revolution, and as a result fundamental changes in state and society occurred. During the years leading up to the Napoleonic War, Britain and most of Europe waged war against France. From 1792 to 1814, the French and other European powers were involved in nearly continuous warfare with the exception of a year because of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802. The war against Bonaparte, more commonly known as the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1805), proved to be costly for the British, in terms of capital and other resources. In 1792, Parliament had deployed 75,000 troops in their bid against France. However, during the latter part of the effort against France, Parliament deployed 500,000 troops.

From 1813-1817 the State spent nearly 35 million pounds in defense, compared to 7 million during the earlier years. When considering British exports, historians have observed that the final two decades of the 1700s held high rates of trade because America was importing many British goods. Furthermore, the French, Dutch, Spanish, and others were excluded from international commerce, making Britain the largest supplier of goods in Europe.

Because of prosperity in trade, it may have seemed that the British economy was doing well; however, this was not the case for many English people. The reinforcements for the war came at no small costs. People were left in poverty and misery with high tax rates, high cost of living, and high unemployment rates. The lack of jobs left many men deciding to join the military, also causing a rise in mortality rates. After the war, many were left hopeless and impoverished. In fact, many questioned Britain’s ability to reconstruct their economy.  A notable group, The Female Reform Society of Manchester, questioned the established structures of government and wondered if the only ones benefiting were those of the “corrupt” aristocracy. Although this was just one group, they embodied the thoughts and sentiments of many English people after the war.

Prison conditions in the 18^th century were incredibly brutal. Dirty and crowded prisons were the norm in early England due to large numbers of prisoners – in particular, debtors. After the Black Act in 1729, crime laws were significantly tightened, and many crimes became punishable by death. This meant these debtors along with other less severe offenders made up a large portion of the prison population. However, these conditions were especially bad for the poor. Prisoners, rather than receiving salaries or benefits, had to pay for their own food and bedding, and were sometimes required to pay a fee before their release. This meant that inmates were forced to live on very little, and often to stay much longer than their sentence.

John Howard was a prison reformer and philanthropist during this time. When he became high sheriff of Bedfordshire, England, in 1773, he was deeply disturbed by those appalling living conditions endured by the prisoners he would supervise. This prompted him to travel across the country observing the conditions of other prisons, where he found no improvement. Howard’s distress over the prison situation in England led him to become one of a handful of people responsible for the creation of the Penitentiary Act of 1779.

The act was put in place in hope of reforming prison conditions in England. Howard’s reform emphasized solitary confinement, hard labor and religious instruction, which were aimed not only at deterring the people from committing crimes that would lead to their imprisonment, but to reform those who did become imprisoned as well. This changed the entire ideology of the prison system in England, from a “relaxed and informal prison regime” to “one which was obsessively and excessively regulated.”

“Background – Prisons and Lockups.” London Lives 1690 to 1800, April 2012, www.londonlives.org/static/Prisons.jsp (21 January 2018)

Clark, Robert. “Penitentiary Act; Panopticon.” The Literary Encyclopedia, 28 October 2000,
https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=841 (21 January 2018)

“History – Historic Figures: John Howard (1726 – 1790).” BBC, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/howard_john.shtml (21 January 2018)

Founded on July 27^th, 1694 by royal charter under William and Mary (two of its original stakeholders), one of the institution’s major duties was to keep ownership of the nation’s debt and to help manage finances for the war with France.[1]

The foundation of the bank represented a crucial milestone of the Commercial Revolution, which had begun in Europe as early as the 11^th century. In England, the Commercial Revolution would define the nature of the relationship between the state and the economy. As a tool of the monarchy, the bank was an attempt minimize the influence England’s creditors could exert on the crown. The bank was the beginning of the economic transition from agricultural goods and raw materials to an economy reliant on banking, stock exchange, and insurance. This new service economy was part of a symbiotic relationship with England’s growing mercantile fleet that generated the demand for the services. In fact, the Bank of England began as a joint-stock operation.[2]

The strength of England’s financial service sector caused ripple effects throughout English society. Well before the foundation of the bank, the new class of wealthy clerks and merchants laid the foundations of the British middle class. The most successful of these early financiers pushed their way into influential political positions, since they possessed the capital that the land-rich aristocracy lacked. An early example, Thomas Cromwell used his foothold in trade to become a successful lawyer and was one of the major players in the English Reformation.[3] His distant relative, Oliver Cromwell, would control England for five years as Lord Protector. The bank marked the institutionalization of whole sector of professions that had long been looked down upon and demonstrated the success of these professionals in securing their stake in the country as a whole.

[1] “Our History.” Bank of England, 5 Dec. 2017, www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/history.

[2] Henry Keyser, The law relating to transactions on the stock exchange, (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1850), 1.

[3] F. Donald Logan, “Thomas Cromwell and the Vicegerency in Spirituals: A Revisitation,” The English Historical Review, (July 1988): 103 (408): 658–67. JSTOR 572696

The late eighteenth century marked a period of intense demographic changes in Britain. Having remained relatively stable at 5.1 million through the seventeenth century, the British population reached eight million at the end of the following century. Mortality crises caused by widespread disease (plague) and agricultural dearth was notably less frequent by this time and contributed in its absence to the population boom. The rising prominence of the industrial sector in the economy, too, was linked to the demographic growth of the period. Many citizens participated in the mass transition from finding work in the agricultural, trades, and cottage industry to that in the large-scale mineral processing and consumer goods industry. Evidently, Britain’s ‘dual economy’ of the feudal-industrial order shifted from a 90-10 percentage split in 1760 to a remarkable 50-50 in 1830.

Of course, the hallmarks of progress did not come without their underlying currents of unease. As Britain began to undertake a heightened consumer revolution and unprecedented numbers in the wage labor force, government agencies, social scientists of a budding field, and everyday citizens alike internalized growing concerns about the exploding population. The wary wave of thought affected perspective on the sustainability of traditional parish-based welfare, structures of poverty, the inevitability of famine, and other issues.  In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his fears that spoke for a generation: An Essay on the Principle of Population. Following Malthus’s publication, the Parliament enacted the Census Act of 1800 to place matters of accounting for and regulating demographic changes in governing hands—in the form of a ten-year census collection cycle. 1801 saw the distribution of the first ever census in Britain.

Fideler, Paul. Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England: The Old Poor Law Tradition. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006. Print.

Office for National Statistics United Kingdom. Focus on People and Migration. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Accessed web version 21 Jan. 2018.

Timmins, Geoff. “Working Life and the First Modern Census.” BBC History. Last updated 18 Sept. 2014. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018. Web.

The County Asylums Act of 1808 established the foundations of a national institutional network of insane asylums. It authorized the founding of publicly funded, county asylums to accommodate more mentally ill people. These asylums particularly helped paupers, whose other choices were remaining in their potentially hostile communities or living in workhouses. This Act stemmed from a string of legislation in the 18^th century attempting to curb abuses in asylums, some of which were founded in the 14^th century with unchanging views on treatment. Bethlem hospital was the most important example of this medieval approach to mental illness. In Bethlem, patients were on display to the public. People came to visit as one in the 21^st century goes to visit a zoo: for entertainment and to gawk. This came to be the 18^th and 19^th century standard of what not to do in caring for the mentally ill.  However, at institutions like St. Luke’s (founded in 1751 to accommodate more people than could Bethlem), the desire to give patients privacy led to a lack of visitation by outside officials, leading to rampant abuse. From 1750-1850, provision for the insane through private, volunteer-based, and publicly-funded asylums attempted to improve the abusive conditions through establishing networks and more centralized systems of quality control through visitation. However, enforcement was inconsistent due to its local nature until the passing of the County Asylums Act. This Act and the national network it created were turning points in the push for asylum reform.

Sources:

Smith, Leonard. ‘“The Keeper Himself Must be Kept’: Visitation and the Lunatic Asylum in England 1750-1850,” Clio Medica, Vol. 86 (2010): 199-222.

In 1764, Cesare Beccaria published On Crime and Punishment, a work that advocated for reform in the European criminal justice system. Borrowing from the works of Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu, Beccaria advocated for a system in which penalties matched the severity of the crimes they punished and where the threat of the gallows wasn’t the main tool for keeping the citizenry in line. This idea of institutions being judged on what did the most good for the most people foreshadows the ideas of utilitarianism that would become better developed in the early 19th century.

The work was a hit across Europe, and as other philosophers read it, a new, more enlightened, way of looking at punishment emerged. The emphasis began to shift away from purely punitive measures and towards the idea of reforming criminals. Drawing from the Enlightenment idea of the perfectibility of humans, reformers believed they could devise institutions that would turn criminals into better people.

The Englishman Jeremy Bentham was one such reformer. Remembered as one of the pioneering philosophers in the development of utilitarianism, Bentham took the ideas that Beccaria alluded to and applied them to life as a whole rather than just criminal justice. He believed that the best way to manage society was through a broad network of institutions that confined people based on their category, such as pauper or orphan, and controlled every aspect of their inhabitants’ lives. While Bentham’s so-called panopticons never came to dominate Europe, the idea of a total institution being used to reform certain social groups formed the basic scaffold of what many workhouses aimed to do.

Allen, Francis A. “Cesare Beccaria.” Encyclopædia Britannica. June 20, 2017. Accessed January 17, 2018. www./britannica.com/biography/Cesare-Beccaria

Driver, Julia. “The History of Utilitarianism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. March 27, 2009. Accessed January 2, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/

Ignatieff, Michael. A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.