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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.

In 18th-century Europe, smallpox, commonly known as the “speckled monster”, affected all levels of society: from the elite to the poor. Jenner’s vaccination against smallpox radically changed public health in England and laid the foundations of modern immunology.

At age 13, Edward Jenner was apprenticed to a country surgeon and apothecary near Bristol. There, he learned that dairymaids never had smallpox after suffering from cowpox. Ten years later, whilst practicing medicine, he pondered the phenomenon of smallpox-resistant dairymaids and concluded that exposure to cowpox protected the dairymaids against smallpox and that this immunity could be transmitted from one person to another. He decided to investigate further. In May 1796, Jenner inoculated cowpox lesions from a sick dairymaid, and placed it in an 8-year-old boy. The boy fell sick but recovered after 10 days. Then, Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox lesions and no smallpox developed. The boy was immune to smallpox.

After this major discovery, Jenner encouraged all people to get vaccinated and even built a hut beside his house to vaccinate the poor for free. His vaccination program was so significant to the public health initiative that poor law officials almost immediately adopted Jenner’s method to vaccinate the poor. “Pest houses” were often erected adjacent to the workhouses to contain the poor that were either afflicted by smallpox or had just received the vaccination. By 1800, most European countries adopted vaccination practices. Ultimately, Jenner’s push to vaccinate all people emphasized the need for more public health and social welfare initiatives in England.

 

Sources:

Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination,” Proceedings (Baylor University Medical Center) 18 (January 2005): 21-25.

Higginbotham, Peter. “Loddon and Clavering, Norfolk.” Accessed January 21, 2018. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Loddon/

For roughly 200 years, from the middle of the 17^th century to 1807, Britain was heavily involved in the trade of slaves from Africa to its colonies in the Caribbean and America. During this time, British slave traders transported approximately 3.1 million Africans to the Caribbean and Americas, 2.7 million of whom survived the gruesome middle passage. The 18^th century abolition movement in Britain, a popular response to atrocities of the slave trade, was based on the same Enlightenment and Protestant principles that informed discussion of reform of the English poor laws.

The movement emerged in the 18^th century with such early abolitionists as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Josiah Wedgewood, and gained momentum towards the end of the century. Many of those who supported the movement at its height were white women, including Mary Birkett, Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as many working and middle-class women. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had bought his freedom, published an autobiography which described the horrors he had endured as a slave. This autobiography brought more attention to the abolitionist movement, as did the involvement and contributions of other Africans.

The Abolition of Slave Trade Act was passed in 1807 and officially banned involvement of any British ship in the trade of slaves. Scholars argue British Enlightenment thought and Protestant religious values, by inspiring widespread critiques of slavery, drove the abolitionist movement in Britain. Quakers, Evangelists, and Rational Dissenters are cited as the most vocal religious groups in the movement.

Page, Anthony. “Rational Dissent, Enlightenment, and Abolition of the British Slave Trade.” The Historical Journal 54, no. 3 (2011): 741-72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23017270.

“Abolition of Slavery.” The National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/slavery/. (Accessed January 20^th, 2018)

Ali, Linda, and Siblon, John. “Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Black Presence: Asian and Black History in Britian, 1500-1850. The National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/abolition.htm. (Accessed January 20^th, 2018)