Institutionalizing Economic Advancement in 18th Century England, Study notes of Social structure and social organization

Download Institutionalizing Economic Advancement in 18th Century England and more Study notes Social structure and social organization in PDF only on Docsity! 62 Tom Burns Organisation and Social Order Chapter XXVII [unfinished – section numbers out of sequence] INVENTION OF INVENTION Considerations like these, while not off the point, are perhaps best seen as beside it. Our concern is with the organisational or, more broadly, the institutional, character of innovation rather than with what 'causes' it - or, more accurately, what leads to an acceleration or deceleration in the rate and significance of technological advance. It now seems generally agreed that technical innovation, indeed all innovation, whether in politics, art, music, morals, economic behaviour, or whatever, is a social phenomenon. Innovation, that is, is an activity which, in quite matter-of-fact ways, occurs when the kind of milieu the innovator lives in prompts, rather than permits, him to devote himself to a specific task which holds the promise of reward in money, power, fame, or even self-esteem. The notion of the hermit genius, spinning inventions out of his intellectual and spiritual innards, is a nineteenth-century myth. On the surface, it was a myth which seemed to apply to nineteenth-century conditions; it was also probably useful, as myths always may be. For the institutional context of innovation during most of the nineteenth century was dominated by the profusion of general, specialist and popular journals, by a multiplicity of learned and professional associations, and by popular public lectures. Public lectures began to be popular in the eighteenth century, when "Boys from the middling orders were getting a more down-to- earth and applicable education than at any previous time. When they were a little older, it was just these people who formed the audiences for another major new venture in free- market instruction: popular lectures."1 All these served to diffuse scientific and technical information randomly among a very large proportion of the literate population. So inventions might appear almost anywhere, might be lighted upon by almost anybody. And they did, and were.2 The disciplined attack on one difficulty after another, which is how the gap between speculative project and demonstrable actuality is bridged, was still essential to the achievement, but the process could be an individual enterprise; and often enough, as in the case of Swan and Edison, Hertz and Marconi, individuals at great removes from each other could be involved over a period of years in the development of a single invention. Earlier, however, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, which is usually taken as from 1780 to 1820, one is in a period well before scientific journalism came to 1 R.Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p.180 2 T.Burns, "The Social Character of Technology",Impact, Vol. 7, 1956, pp.147-165. 63 play its part as a diffuser of scientific and technical information on a massive scale - although a few periodicals began to appear after 1800 for people with an interest in science ('natural philosophy'). It was the societies which were started up in almost every town of any consequence towards the end of the eighteenth century which discharged much the same function as the later periodicals. They were clubs, and modeled on the Lunar Society of Birmingham rather than learned societies like the Royal Society of London. They shared the character, in fact, of the political and literary clubs which flourished at the same time. They were, in fact, simply attempts to institutionalise the coteries and informal associations of personal friends and acquaintances with shared interests which had figured so large at the middling and higher levels of eighteenth century society. And at those levels, there is no need to search very hard for the motivating force, the energiser, of the innovative drive which brought the Industrial Revolution into being. It was money. VI For there were three unprecedented features of technological development in the eighteenth century. First, there was the sheer number of them compared with anything which had gone before, and the fact that they went on increasing in number. Secondly, wherever they originated - and a good many innovations, especially those to do with chemical processes, derived from inventions and discoveries made elsewhere - by far the greater number of innovations were related, in the first place, specifically to production in Britain. Thirdly, the greater number, again, lent themselves to, even required, the organisation of production on a larger scale than the household-cum-workshop. In short, they opened up new opportunities for profitable capitalist enterprise - and again for the first time - in manufacture rather than trade. It is doubtful whether the Industrial Revolution could have occurred at all, at that time, or at any rate in Britain, had it not been for the revolution in the management of capital which preceded it. Was it that Britain became a comparatively wealthy nation, with a rising tide of prosperity making more and more capital available for investment, to the point at which capital growth could 'take off' into industrialisation proper? This was for many years the favourite explanation of the Industrial Revolution's occurring when and where it did. The idea was first adumbrated by Simon Kuznets and followed up by W.A.Lewis in the early 1950's, when economists, impressed by the speed of post-war reconstruction in Europe and eager to try their hand at finding some solution to the problem of how to promote industrial development in the 'Third World', seemed to agree that the key to the problem lay in capital accumulation; it was popularised by W.W.Rostow in an article and in a subsequent book.3 The argument has been long and variously contested and, while not completely 3 W.W.Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, C.U.P., 1960. 66 possession. There was nothing new in the techniques or the system itself. Simple deposit banking, by which money deposited for safe keeping was lent to others at interest, which had been introduced into England by foreign exchange brokers, money-changers, and goldsmiths in the later Middle Ages, By the sixteenth century, scriveners had taken the next step of paying interest to depositors in return, presumably, for entitlement to lend out their money. But it was the goldsmiths, who started up the same kind of business in the next century, who were responsible for the expansion of deposit banking after 1650. "From then on the goldsmith bankers accepted from merchants and large landowners deposit at both current account and on term; they lent money at interests by opening credit on current account" (overdraft) "or by advances, and discounted inland or outland bills and various official securities; in exchange for money deposits on term they issued interest- bearing certificates in the form of simple promissory notes with bearer's clause;" (i.e., the notes might be used, within limits, as currency); "they also made the money deposits on call transferable by drawing note or cheque. Goldsmiths' notes were not confined to deposit certificates; they were soon issued for the financing of discount business and loans as well. This was deposit, clearing, discount, and issuing banking in the modern sense of the term."8 The principal customers of the London money market were, to begin with, of much the same kind as they had always been. Landed proprietors raised mortgages to pay for their gambling debts and their new country houses, but also for agricultural improvements. Richer merchants borrowed on the security of their stock-in-trade or their holdings in Government bonds. But the eighteenth century saw the creation and growth of the banking-cum-credit system throughout the whole of England, and in Scotland and Ireland. This was, in the present context, the most significant element in the new developing credit system. There are several reasons for the geographical expansion. There was a chronic shortage of circulating coin. Bills of exchange, promissory notes, and notes issued by banks were much safer than cash to carry about, since they were of no value except to the person to whom they had been endorsed, or who had a claim on the debtor enforceable at law. But the important factor was that they did not 'stand for' their identical value in bullion or cash but represented a contract by the original signatory or any endorser to pay on demand or at a specified date, Local attorneys and scriveners, dealers, merchants, brewers, iron-masters, became practised in issuing notes and tokens, which circulated as currency in their district; as the century wore on, many such men started banks. By the end of the century, there were nearly 300 country banks. Britain being still overwhelmingly an agricultural economy, the pace was set and the lead given to expanding the credit system outside London by agricultural transactions. "Generally the issuers" (of local notes) "were country banks: country not merely in the 8 H. van der Wee, "Money, Credit and Banking Systems,"p.351. 67 sense of being extra-metropolitan, but also in the sense of rural. They were the creation largely of local corn-dealers, cattle-drovers, wool-staplers, brewers, or shopkeepers and their chief function was the provision of a currency for farmers and tradesmen. This was true even as late as the forties of the nineteenth century. 'The whole, or nearly the whole, of the private country circulation is concerned in the agricultural districts of the country,' said a witness before the Committee on Banks of Issue in 1841."9 Sales by advance contract to grain dealers, butchers, brewers and, of course, army and navy commissioners did much, perhaps most, to break down the old 'moral economy' of local markets controlled in the consumer's interest. Victualling the army and navy meant a link with the government system of credit finance - for military costs were still by far the most considerable and enduring financial burdens on all governments, and governments were notoriously slow in settling up. Apart from agriculture, and the country banks, it was bills of exchange and promissory notes, which had been in familiar use for short-term credit transactions, that became an increasingly important element in business for the growing number of merchants involved in funding manufacture. Discounting bills of exchange was a major activity of finance houses and the richer London merchants, and it was a comparatively simple matter for Lancashire merchants and manufacturers, later in the eighteenth century, to draw a bill on a London house through an intermediary who specialised in the business. "By the end of the eighteenth century the bill on London had become the chief means of remittance in commercial transactions, though smaller local payments continued to be made by paper drawn by one small trader on another."10 VI This brings us to the last of the strands I have separated out in this account of the transformation of the economic order of society. It has to do with the removal of much of the legal (essentially political) control over market transactions, a move designed to reconstitute the economic order on lines which allowed much more freedom for competitive commercial and industrial enterprise. It is this which is nowadays regarded as largely responsible for the emergence of capitalism in its modern form. Beforehand, though, there are three caveats which have to be borne in mind. 1. The first concerns the principle of free trade. Britain is credited with having inaugurated, advocated, eventually to have accomplished - if not universally, then in large measure - the institution of free trade on an international scale. When the eighteenth century began, Britain was already the largest free-trade area in the world. During the century, its industrial life, to begin with, became permeated with the principles and practices of the free, competitive, market which had existed for centuries within the country. But foreign trade continued on its relatively unfree way throughout 9 T.S.Ashton, "The Bill of Exchange and Private Banks in Lancashire", Economic History Review Vol. xv, 1945, repr. in T.S.Ashton and R.S.Sayers, Papers in English Monetary Theory, O.U.P., 1953, p.40. 10 T.S. Ashton, "The Bill of Exchange and Private Banks in Lancashire", p.40 68 the century and for some fifty years thereafter. Shipping flourished under the Navigation Acts and then under the protection of the Navy. Customs and excise duties doubled their tax-raising role with handicapping any competition there might be in manufactured goods from Ireland no less than from India and France. 2. The second caveat pertains to the assumptions on which modern business organisations are founded. Eighteenth-century Britain became the birthplace of modern industrial capitalism. From that time on, industrialism has become permeated, and then dominated, by large-scale enterprises. This confronts us with a somewhat paradoxical situation. It is generally acknowledged that the large-scale enterprise and free competitive market are connected by more than chance coincidence. Yet the political, legal, economic and moral victory of the competitive market (however far it fell short of complete 'laissez-faire') over the controlled economy favouring the interests of consumers and workers (however incomplete and misapplied its provisions were) was the signal for the emergence of business organisations which in fact abrogate the operations of the market in important ways. (See ch.XVIII) 3.The third warning note applies to the long-term consequences of regarding the Bank of England as a 'money-raising machine' for government, and the 'magical attributes' ascribed to credit (see above, p. ). Such attitudes, which were widely held, helped convert the issue of Government-backed bills from a useful fiscal device into the happy hunting ground of the tribe of stock-jobbers so reviled a hundred years later by Cobbett. The diatribes of Cobbett - and of Dickens and others after him - were dismissed easily enough at the time as ignorant moralising, but in recent years there has been mounting alarm at what must be regarded as a natural sequel. Stock-jobbing was extended to the market in shares, when the capital of large business enterprises became more and more dependent on the issue of shares at a fixed price, which could thereafter be freely traded in national (and nowadays, international) stock markets. Increasingly, too, owning shares became a matter of acquiring legal entitlement to a fraction of the profits of an enterprise, or to any increase in the price at which the share might be sold, or both. There was virtually no incentive for the ordinary shareholder to monitor, control, or even be interested in the way executives conducted the businesses which he or she owned (along with many thousands of others). By the twentieth century, the dispersal of share-ownership - and therefore of corporate control - among very large numbers of shareholders had resulted in control passing from shareholding owners to the executives who managed firms supposedly on their behalf. The problems associated with this were documented and analysed extensively in a study published at the time of what we have come to call the 'Great' depression.11 There have been counter-arguments to the effect that in such circumstances control may nevertheless be exercised by 'market competition'. In economies where the stock-market 11 A.Berle & G.Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Macmillan, 1932. 71 declaring that trade ought to be free, and refused to take any action. In doing so, they invoked a principle as old as that to which the petitioners were appealing, namely the freedom of any person to practise his trade. Yet this same principle was in fact originally designed to counter restrictions imposed by servitude, indentures, and any local powers- that-be. By 1759, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield felt constrained to voice wholesale disapproval of the old statutes which reserved the entitlement to practise crafts to those who had served their full apprenticeship of seven years, and forbade employers to hire semi- skilled or unskilled labour for work designated as a craft. "If none must employ, or be employed, in any branch of trade, but who have served a limited number of years in that trade, the particular trade would be lodged in a few hands, to the danger of the public, and the liberty of setting up trade, and the foundations of the present flourishing condition of Manchester will be destroyed. In the infancy of trade, the act of Queen Elizabeth might well be calculated for public weal, but now it is grown to that perfection we see it, it might perhaps be of utility to have those laws repealed, as tending to cramp and tie down that knowledge it was first necessary to obtain by rule."18 When, at long last, the statutes of apprentices were repealed (in 1814), they had long been in practice largely inoperative. By then, in C.B.Macpherson's view, not only had the economic system been transformed into a competitive market economy, but the social order itself had become a market society, one in which market relationships "so shape or permeate social relations that it may properly be called a market society, not merely a market economy."19 A pervasive view of social relationships outside the family (and sometimes inside it) as governed by competitive market dealings, an evaluation of people and personal qualities, as well as things, as commodities, amounts to an image of society as essentially a market. It is this, Macpherson argued, which provides the clue to many of the distinctive characteristics of social institutions which interlock with, and give support to, modern industrialism. The appropriate psychological interpretation had been prefabricated in the previous century. Hobbes had conceived of men as driven to rivalry by the will to power, by fear, and by the desire to be conspicuous. When Locke softened the motivation to 'desire for some absent good', the transition to a morally and philosophically sanctioned competitive market society was fully prepared for. The institutional life of the country relevant to all kinds of transaction became permeated with the value-system and the characteristic patterns of behaviour and relationships of the competitive market. One hardly needs a special psychological theory to account for the birth of a new and stronger 'need for achievement'20 among the eighteenth-century 18 Quoted Holdsworth, History of English Law, Vol.XI, 1928, p.420. 19 C.B.Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism O.U.P.,1962, p.48 20 E.E.Hagen, for one, has argued, on the basis of D.C. McLelland's general theory concerning the 'need for achievement', that there was a significant increase in the 'needfor achievement' among the Englishmen born in the early eighteenth century, sufficient to produce a numerous tribe of entrepreneurs and innovators. (See papers by E.E.Hagen and others in T.Burns and S.B.Saul, eds., Social Theory and Economic Change, Tavistock, 1967) 72 English; the point is that 'achievement' was now much more open than before to prowess in business and manufacture; access to these kinds of endeavour was available to a far wider field of entrants than those in which success meant earning the approval of the powerful and the privileged. The arousal and spread of a drive for competitive achievement in business - now the mark of the entrepreneur - was the inevitable accompaniment of the establishment of a free, competitive, market in land, labour, and goods. Each furthered the other. Appropriately enough, Richard Arkwright, whose name is indissolubly linked with the Industrial Revolution, is himself testimony to fact that this whole complex process of institutionalisation came to maturity in the later eighteenth century. He died a millionaire, his whole life testimony to the facility with which inventions and improvements had become marketable commodities. It also shows the kind of success which could attend somebody who, like Arkwright, "had fertile brains for devising means of rising in the world and.....knew how to drive a good bargain, the sort of diplomacy in which he had been trained being akin to that of the pedlar or the horse- dealer."21 It was this same eighteenth century world which accepted the traffic in electoral votes and parliamentary seats as part of the machinery of politics; politicians might be condemned as venal, but the market system was as defensible in that respect as in any other. Votes, ideas for inventions, a capacity for business enterprise were all saleable resources, as were land and labour - and as were, by 1800, the products of literary, musical and artistic effort, for the system of patronage which had supported the writer and musician and artist gave way to commercial publishing and the academy market. Profitable dealing was nothing new, of course, and selling one's goods or one's services to the highest bidder had always been regarded as understandable, if not always entirely proper. But there had always been a tight limit to the kind of goods and services which might be disposed of in this profit-maximising way, and to the circumstances in which it might be done, Above all, whatever the practical realities of the situation, or the historical trend which hindsight allows us to discern, there was a traditional moral consensus about buying and selling which affected the necessities of life. This consensus was articulated, or reflected, in laws which date from the fifteenth century and which, for the most part, served merely to convert customary practice into positive law. There was, as E.P. Thompson has put it, a "model of the manufacturing and marketing process.....appealed to in Statute, pamphlet or protest movement - against which the awkward realities of commerce and construction were in friction."22 The model applied most clearly and strictly to cereals. Corn had to be marketed direct, as far as possible, from farmer to consumer, and brought in bulk to the local market. Farmers "should not sell it while standing in the field, nor should they withhold it in the hope of rising prices. The markets should be controlled; no sales should be made before stated times, when a bell would ring; the poor should have the opportunity to buy grain, flour or meal first, in small parcels, with duly supervised weights and measures. At a certain hour, when their needs were satisfied, a second bell would ring and the larger dealers (duly licensed) 21 P.Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, rev. edn., Methuen, 1961, p.221. 22 E.P.Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century", p.83 73 might make their purchases."23 It may well be that such regulations were framed by merchant guilds and enacted by boroughs in order to protect local millers and dealers from 'foreigners', but it seems equally likely, and makes equal sense, that the interests of local consumers, poor as well as rich, were protected by the same regulations, and were intended to be so. This was certainly so in the city-republics of medieval Italy, and in European towns generally. Also, beyond these provisions, there was the same kind of elaborate set of rules for consumer protection. "Millers and - to a greater degree - bakers were considered as servants of the community, working not for profit but for a fair allowance;"24 and, for London and the larger towns, where such rules were impracticable, there was the Assize of Bread, which assigned a price to the loaf related to the ruling price of wheat. What Thompson set out to argue in his essay was that "the breakthrough of the new political economy of the free market" spelt "the breakdown of the old moral economy of provision."25 Just what the force of the distinction between a 'moral' and a 'political' economy is in this context is not clear; it seems self-evident that both are normative conceptions of principles which ought to govern economic transactions, and that both are equally 'moral' just as both are equally 'political'. Moreover, what moral restrictions there were on profitable trading were strictly local in their application; there were few such restraints when it came to dealing with outsiders, still less with foreigners. However, the important point is that the transition from a market economy embedded in the social order to a social order embedded in the market economy did not just happen. It was made to happen by the political action of individuals and groups moved by values more in accordance with the later order than with the earlier; it involved, to begin with, flouting the law as well as infringing moral principles, and was consummated by political decisions which changed the law so as to promote conditions favourable to the operation of free competitive markets and to the new values of self-interest, maximising profits, and promoting competitive enterprise. It is this last element which Peter Mathias saw as critically important in his assessment of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution took place first in Britain: "When the statement is made, therefore, that the crucial distinguishing mark of the Industrial Revolution in Britain was that of the 'market economy', or 'responsiveness to market forces', or 'institutionalising market forces', or 'the smallness of the subsistence sector', we are making a positive statement about political decision-making in England; not implying simply the absence of political decision-making. A market is always politically determined in the sense of requiring a legal framework."26 The force of this statement - an echo of Maitland's pronouncement (see p. ---) - lies not so much in the understanding implicit in it that markets are constructs, or that market transactions have to follow a prescribed set of conditions, enforceable at law, as that the 23 E.P.Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century", p.83. 24 A.B.Hibbert, "The Economic Policies of Towns", CEHE, Vol. III, C.U.P. 1963, p.172. 25 E.P.Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century", p.83. 26 P.Mathias, "British Industrialisation: Unique or Not?", Colloques int. du C.N.R.S. no 540: L'Industrialisation en Europe au XIXe. Siecle Edns. du CNRS, 1972 76 as trade in manufactured goods grew. And it is this movement, and the expansion of opportunities as trade grew and the terms of market transactions in favour of industrial entrepreneurs which altered the structure of industrial organisation - or rather, which allowed new forms of organisation to be tried out and, where they seemed to succeed, to be imitated, extended, and multiplied. III The accuracy of this picture of the dominance of eighteenth-century English society by market values is not in question. There is a sense in which the sheer vocabulary of technical ideas and the grammatical rules for linking them together were infused by the spirit of market transactions. Still, this picture of the past is of that particular past. In this, as in innumerable other ways, we have learned that time does not stand still. For even while eighteenth-century experience was confirming its operational validity on an ever-increasing scale, transformations were occurring which would make explanations based solely on the openness and freedom of the market society of the eighteenth century is subject to as many limitations as any other generalisation about any given human situation. The first shift was hardly noticeable, being part of a much bigger change: the growth of towns and of the 'middling orders' of society. The expansion of London is well enough documented, but Liverpool and Birmingham doubled in size between 1700 and 1750, whereas London had grown by less than a third, as did Bristol and Norwich, the next biggest towns. The growth in size of provincial cities and towns was of course in response to growing commercial prosperity, and the beginnings of industrial activity, and this was attended by a sizeable increase in the number of merchants and business entrepreneurs and also of professional men - lawyers, surgeons and apothecaries, teachers and tutors, bookkeepers and surveyors. It was the later eighteenth century that saw the rise of a middle class - the term first gained currency around 1780 - that was self-conscious socially and politically. It took a whole generation before the term 'working-class' began to gain recognition in place of 'lower orders'. The difference in time proved later to be consequential in economic as well as political and social terms. What is more immediately pertinent is that the eighteenth-century proclivity for like- minded middle-class men to adopt some of the manners and social practices of their betters and to form clubs and meet regularly in coffee-houses or inns and to talk about or debate current issues in politics, literature, art or religion, so well established and familiar an aspect of London society, now extended to provincial towns. And there it tended to include scientific or technical matters: 'Towards the close of the last century', says Smiles in his life of Boulton and Watt, 'there were many little clubs or coteries of scientific and literary men established in the provinces, the like of which do not now exist..... The provincial coteries of which we speak were usually centres of the best and most intelligent society of their 77 neighbourhoods and were for the most part distinguished by an active and liberal spirit of enquiry. Leading minds attracted others of like taste and pursuits, and social circles were formed which proved, in many instances, the source of great intellectual activity, as well as enjoyment. At Liverpool, Roscoe and Currie were the centres of one group; at Warrington, Aiken, Enfield and Priestley of another; at Bristol Dr. Beddoes and Humphrey Davy of a third; and at Norwich the Taylors and Martineaus of a fourth. But perhaps the most distinguished of these provincial societies was that at Birmingham, of which Boulton and Watt were among the most prominent members."31 The presence of such names as Priestley and Davy in Smiles' account reveals the extent to which people who had made - or went on to make - a considerable reputation as scientists were involved in the discoveries and inventions which were making Britain the 'first industrial nation'. They were, in fact, following - or taking up again - the lead established by the Royal Society more than a hundred years before. The Royal Society itself had drifted towards a membership dominated by, if not confined to, wealthy landowners. It was the Royal Institution, founded towards the end of the eighteenth century by Count Rumford, which now served, to a limited extent, as a focal point of interest; a miscellany of people attended the lectures and demonstrations by scientists like Faraday and Davy. (Its declared purpose, curiously enough, was the promotion of technology as a means of assisting the poor). Even earlier, a group based on the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh had included men responsible for prime discoveries and inventions of the industrial revolution and for the technical applications and commercial ventures which exploited them. The rapidity of the technological development in the workshops and laboratories of Glasgow and Edinburgh was the direct outcome of close personal association between people with different skills and different resources. But association between people like Watt, Black and Roebuck was founded not so much on their membership of a common profession or organisation as on membership of a small, closely integrated, social class of intellectuals and professional men.32 In eighteenth century Scotland, acquaintance of such men with each other was almost inevitable. IV After the beginning of the nineteenth century, one finds the institutional context of invention in Britain changing yet again. By the second quarter of the century, industrial invention, creature as it was of competitive entrepreneurship, was developing needs too widespread and diverse to be fed by an institutional system ranging from intimate and undisturbed communication by conversation and correspondence to gatherings convened under the auspices of formally constituted societies, even when they were nation-wide. The founding, in 1831, of the British Association, a self-conscious attempt to institute personal links between all scientists and technologists, may be regarded as marking the end of the period when a network of personal relationships on the necessary scale was feasible. There is a significant difference between the influence it was able to exert and 31 S.Smiles, Life of Boulton and Watt, 1872, p. 367. 32 A. and N. Clow, The Chemical Revolution, Batchworth, 1952, pp. 593-4 78 what had been achieved a generation earlier by the Royal Institution. In fact, the advance of science and technology was becoming too rapid to be accommodated by adapting and multiplying the institutions of sociable intercourse, vigorous as they had proved themselves to be. They stayed in place for some time, of course, but the clubs and coteries of people who were at once friends and fellow scientists or business partners, and whose common interests included some which were scientific, technological, or financial were supplemented by an assortment of other institutional institutional arrangements, formal and informal. 1.) Still of central and growing importance was the direct application of technical knowledge, methods and skill to the solution of practical problems. For most of the eighteenth century, the principal agents in this process had been skilled craftsmen, with a few interested amateurs among them. This tradition, proper to what I have called the craft revolution, was very much alive during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Technically competent craftsmen were still very much in the forefront. But alongside of them, 'practical opportunities' were beginning to be perceived as one of the end results of scientific experiment and discovery, and as pointing a way ahead for science. The initiative could come from either side: knowledge of practical problems which might be solved by applying to people still known as 'natural philosophers' (the word 'scientist' was not in use until the 1850's) or by such men putting the knowledge and methods they had acquired to serve practical ends. 2.) The invention of the Davy lamp was the key episode of the junction sought by people who were searching for a solution to practical need from people with scientific knowledge. In the northeast of England, coal-mining, an established industry five centuries old, had by 1800 grown into a major industry with its own ancillary engineering and transport undertakings. The Newcomen engine had proved capable of dealing with flooding, especially after Watt's improvements (double-acting piston, governor and condenser) were added - to be superseded, after 1800, by Trevithick's high- pressure Cornish design. All these advances were the product of men who were specialist craftsmen, now becoming known as engineers. By the early nineteenth century, mining was facing a more dangerous and difficult kind of problem: methane gas ('fire-damp') was a far more lethal menace than flooding. In May, 1812, ninety-two men were killed by an explosion at Felling Colliery - one of the most disastrous mining accidents, and one that happened in what had been reckoned to be an up-to-date pit. But the new world of industry was beginning to create its own institutional potency. In the following year, a Society for Preventing Accidents in Coal- Mines was founded in what is now Sunderland, and the chairman, who happened to be acquainted with Humphry Davy, wrote to him early in 1814 in the hope that he might 'direct his attention to a subject, upon which, of all mean of science, he appeared to be the best calculated to bring his extensive stores of chemical knowledge to a practical 81 There is in eighteenth century England the impression of wholesale changes in agriculture, commerce and industry, and in social and intellectual life being superimposed on each other in a way that was virtually unprecedented. Varied as the revolutionary transformations were, each had its connections, some of them close, with the others, so that together they created a single, tidal, movement. Land improvement, in which an element of fashion and rivalry played a part, as well as the prospect of higher yields and bigger rents was, like country-house building and landscaping, given wider scope by the increased availability of capital and credit. New patterns of consumption were prompted by the farther reach of foreign trade, which also brought in the money to realise them. But, by and large, the revolutions brought with them, or were, their own instruments of change. They introduced or demanded kinds of commodities, activities and transactions which were new in themselves, and opened up new fields of enterprise. They presented new problems for solution, too, but in an important sense the problems that arose were incidental, matters of tactical contrivance and of opportunities to grasp rather than of strategic choice and planning; Arkwright was more representative a figure than Wedgwood. The strategies of change were either patently obvious in the demand itself, as in the case of the new 'consumerism', or were arrived at through a series of trials and errors in response to known demand. The expansion of foreign trade created increased demand for manufactured products; the country-wide spread of banking and credit facilities and the London money market made the capital resources needed to expand production more readily available than before. Technological innovation, though, was different. The essence of successful innovation lies in first defining the problem and then searching for solutions: a strategy has to be worked out, action over a relatively long period has to be planned, and contingencies allowed for. True, the craze for clocks and watches (as potent a factor in the new consumerism as muslins and lace) allied with popular fascination with instruments of all kinds, and backed by the exercises in 'haute vulgarisation' which began to percolate through magazines and booksellers' shops, can be seen as testimony to the widespread interest in the promise of 'natural philosophy'. Widespread interest, however, can of itself do no more than multiply the number of interested parties. This may, in favourable circumstances, improve the chances of solutions being found, but does little more than does increased demand to help formulate problems. In parallel fashion, the organisation of industrial production on a scale commensurate with expanded demand and the opportunities offered by new technology, and now made feasible by easier access to capital, made itself apparent from the end of the seventeenth century on as a set of new and unprecedented problems. This puts innovation and industrial organisation into a category of their own, separate from the other sets of circumstances which enter into any account of the formation of modern industrialism. Industrialism may be looked on as the product of two technologies - of technical innovation in the organisation of industry and commercial and financial business, linked with technical innovation in the products and processes of industry. Industrialism developed in spasmodic fashion from the rudimentary forms available at the beginning 82 of the eighteenth century by advances first in one technology and then in the other. The elementary form of industrialism lies, as Adam Smith saw, in the conjunction of the division of labour traditional in the western societies of his time with the extansion of its advantages by "those machines by which labour is so much facilitated and abridged."35 Entrepreneurship. The conventional answer is that it was the entrepreneur who solved the problem of industrial organisation. From Samuel Smiles to Joseph Schumpeter, there is general agreement that, in Charles Wilson's words, "the great figures of the movement made their reputation as organisers. Their distinctive characteristic was that they filled in one person the function of capitalist, financier, works manager, merchant and salesman. Here was 'a new pattern of the complete business man.' So much is common knowledge."36 The entrepreneur as organisational innovator stands alongside the inventor as the true industrial revolutionary. The eighteenth century British entrepreneur, like his nineteenth century American successor, has become something of a legendary figure. Schumpeter's portrait, though perhaps more flattering than most, is still fairly representative. He presents an image of the entrepreneur as hero, as the energiser of the golden age of industrialism: "The function of the entrepreneur is to reform or revolutionise the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganising an industry, and so on. Railroad construction in its earlier stages, electrical power production before the first World War, steam and steel, the motorcar, colonial ventures offer spectacular instances of a large genus which comprises innumerable humbler ones - down to such things a making a success of a particular kind of sausage or toothbrush."37 Schumpeter was hardly aiming at rigorous definition, but his image of the entrepeneur has been so influential that it is worth while pointing out that it does identify entrepreneurship with innovation in industrial production, and, also, with a kind of revolutionary boldness. It omits any reference to those traders and voyagers who built up the world's trade or to the financiers and merchants who also played a part in the exploitation of new inventions and the opening up of new forms of material supply and new markets - as well as leaving out of account the organisational flair which Wilson thought important. Entrepreneurship, it might be said, is no more than opportunism writ large. And these considerations transfer some of the glamour which economic historians have cast around the classic figure of the eighteenth and nineteenth century entrepreneur from the individual to the social and institutional context in which he flourished. Entrepreneurial opportunism involved risk, of course, but risk is precisely what commercial interest and credit are about. During the eighteenth century, and long after, interest rates were very low, and credit was being extended more and more widely. The 35 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p.9 36 C.Wilson, "The Entrepreneur in the Industrial Revolution in Britain," History, Vol.42, 1947, p. 103. 37 J.A.Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, (1943) Allen & Unwin, 1965, p.132. 83 balance between opportunity and risk, consequently, was changing in favour of opportunity. It was this, principally, which multiplied the connections between capital, commerce, and the run of transactions in the everyday economy. This increased connectedness, in turn, was at work to induce more and more people to take, or make, the opportunities offered by expanding markets and new technology, and to turn entrepreneur. As the century grew older, opportunities, although plentiful enough in commerce, tended to grow faster in manufacture. Most of the early ventures in machine manufacturing were made by merchants, or backed by them, but in any case, the diversion of a bigger proportion of investment fro commerce to industry was being made easier. Not only was there more money about, but means were becoming available outside the charmed circle of London merchants and finance houses whereby what capital there was for new investment could be put to greater, more frequent and wider use. This was a matter of the adaptation and spread of new ideas of banking throughout the dense network which grew up during the eighteenth century of London finance houses, country banks, and hundreds of lawyers and scriveners throughout the country who advised, or acted for, their moneyed clients. All of them had a special interest in converting the business of moneylending into profitable investment, and so in the assessment of creditworthiness and entrepreneurial ability. Technical innovation in such business was minimal; by the end of the century, and even later, the accounting and banking practices being followed had hardly advanced beyond what had been common practice for hundreds of years. What happened was that the institutional system of established capitalism - banking, discounting, the common use of bills of exchange, the issue and circulation of 'paper money' as ordinary currency, and all the other practices of the money market, now firmly grounded on credible and reliable fiscal practices by government - invaded the world of everyday economic transactions, even down to paying wages. So far as what might be called the technical apparatus of capitalism and of entrepreneurial business was concerned, therefore, the decisive process in the eighteenth century was one of diffusion. Established and institutionalised financial practices spread far beyond their previous limits. People all over Britain, in town and country, down to traders, small-scale manufacturers, farmers and workpeople, became directly involved in the organisational apparatus of capitalism, to the point of there being, in Roy Porter's words, few people in the boom towns of England who were not implicated in the cash economy. Indeed, in the sentence immediately following the passage on the character of the entrepreneur which was quoted earlier, Schumpeter slips in a hint of the influence exerted on entrepreneurial activity by institutional factors - although, as he puts it, the influence of 'the environment' is of a negative kind: "To undertake new things is difficult and constitutes a distinct economic function, first, because they lie outside the routine tasks which everybody understands and, secondly, because the environment resists in many ways that vary, according to social conditions, from simple refusal either to finance or buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man 86 prevailing in Britain, yet in one generation after the 1830's Germany overhauled and at many points outdistanced the technical advance of British industry. One possible clue to this sudden acceleration lies in the alliance of the new ethos of nationalism with science and technology as presumptive heirs to the future. The cult of Reason along with nationalism in revolutionary France had set the fashion. This alliance was becoming the orthodox basis of politically 'progressive' ideas all over continental Europe, but the arrest of political liberalism in Germany, and its later asphyxiation may have channelled aspirations much more powerfully in the direction of cultural, scientific, technical and industrial achievement, a movement in which government, especially in Prussia, was a powerful ally. Whatever the reason, there is little doubt that the rise of German industry was in large part the consequence of the energy and enthusiasm with which academic scientists like Liebig and the members of the Berlin Physical Society preached their technical gospel and, in the case of the Siemens brothers, themselves created industrial empires, with the younger brother establishing an important branch of the firm in Britain as early as the 1840's.43 Given this kind of liaison, the appropriate educational system followed. In the last quarter of the century, leading industrial firms in Germany had grown to a size which, in accordance with what had become standard organisational practice, demanded a bureaucratic structure. VI The involvement of the state could in fact cut both ways, as was evident - in very different ways - in France as well as in Britain. While France to some extent matched the German effort in education (the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, although not inaugurated until 1829, was indication enough of government interest in training factory owners in the principles of industrial management) France was much slower than Germany in developing railways, largely because of the firm grasp of the state over the planning and construction of railway tracks: the lines were designed to radiate from Paris, duplicating the pattern of routes nationales, they were to be managed by the state, along with main roads and canals, and they had to be built to last. The hand of the Conseil d'Etat, which had to approve all joint-stock ventures, is also said to be visible in the slow development of large industrial enterprises, which were predominantly family concerns or partnerships. One further possible explanation for this is the preference of investors for foreign loans and - after the rebirth of French colonial ambitions under Louis-Philippe - overseas ventures. As for Britain, it was the inaction - the unconcern - of government and what one can now call 'the establishment', intellectual and economic, that proved its undoing, as far as the overtaking of Britain's lead in industrial invention was concerned. 'A large share in the responsibility for the relative decline of Britain at this time must certainly be ascribed to those who failed to see the basic importance of education, and 43 See J.D. Bernal, Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 1954, pp. 63-4. 87 above all of technical education, because intellectually they were still living in the first stage of the Industrial Revolution.' 44 This understates the issue. The policy and the attitude of the powers that be were determined by two factors. The first was the laissez-faire attitude which had come to permeate their concern for political, economic and social matters throughout the Industrial Revolution (apart from those which affected the wealthier landowners, of course). The second was the fear of social and political unrest among the working class, in particular workers in the new industrial towns, which they saw as inspired by the French Revolution. True, there had been some small efforts to curtail the hours worked by women and children in textile factories. (The Factory Act of 1833 provided that children between the ages of 9 and 13 could be employed in textile factories only if they produced a certificate showing that they had attended school two hours a day throughout the previous week; a provision notoriously difficult to enforce. In that year about 800,000 children were estimated as attending church schools and the like.) But industrial disturbances, followed by Luddism and then Chartism had provided sufficient grounds to sustain that fear. Even the Mechanics Institutes (where mention of political or economic matters was actively discouraged) which started up in the 1820's could be seen as "hotbeds of radicalism ('I had rather see my servants dead drunk than I would see them going to the mechanics' institutes', wrote one critic)".45 In any case, the basic literacy required for anyone to profit from attendance was all too often not there. "In 1841, 33 per cent of the men and 49 percent of the women signed the marriage register with a mark."46 The engines and machines that were the showpieces of the 1851 Exhibition were largely the work of skilled mechanics and master men who had matched the opportunities all around them with the basic training of their apprenticeship, self-acquired mathematics, and a clear grasp of the principles of the new engineering. Yet even then, development by invention, improvement and new application was becoming a task beyond the capacity of men trained according to traditional craft methods. The outclassing of British products by European competitors at the 1867 Paris Exhibition made this quite explicit. The Royal Commission appointed thereafter to survey technical progress in a number of countries confirmed the impression that Britain was losing, or had lost, the technical lead established in the previous hundred years. The answer to the problem was sought - at long last - in an improved system of education. Unfortunately, it was a rather different system from that followed in Germany, even though it was devised in imitation of Germany, as it was thought. What it did was to widen the breach between science and industry. To begin with, new provincial university colleges were founded in the provinces. The 1870's saw the inauguration of universal elementary education funded by the state. As the number of scientists rose, with the foundation of the provincial universities and 44 C.Singer, E.J.Holmyard, A.R.Hall, T.L.Williams, Preface, History of Technology, Vol. V, O.U.P., 1958, p. vii. 45 Eric Ashby, "Education for an Age of Technology", Chapter 32 in C.Singer, E.J.Holmyard, A.R.Hall, T.L.Williams, History of Technology, Vol. V, O.U.P., 1958, p. 776. 46 ibid.. 88 university colleges, another educational system was devised 'to meet the needs of industry for technical training'. It was all rather too late, and designed in a too crudely ad hoc fashion. By the end of the century, science in England was largely confined to groups of scientists working in and supported by universities or quasi-academic institutions. The unity of 'natural philosophy became separated into departments of chemistry, physics, geology, and later derivatives and hybrids. Information was organised in the form of textbooks and courses; traditions as to what was relevant and irrelevant were created under the authority of qualifying examinations. The intellectual segregation of scientific specialists was promoted by the way in which the new and reformed universities organised studies and teaching. Exchanges of the kind which had been characteristic of the earlier social milieux tended, outside the departmental enclave, to become formalised in the meetings and journals of learned societies, where geologists produced papers for other geologists, physicists communed with physicists, and so on. By 1900 scientists were salaried professional men. Graduate scientists went for the most part to teach in the schools and universities.47 For industry, there were the polytechnics, technical colleges, trade schools and evening institutes. So, alongside the founding of provincial universities and technical colleges, a parallel network was created. A central examining body was provided in the City and Guilds Institute. By 1902, when local government authorities became largely responsible for all education below university level, the main structure of a separate educational system 'to meet the needs of industry for technical training' was established and lasted for the first half of the present century. Unfortunately, the institutional context of industrial innovation had changed. Before 1850 the worlds of science and industry, though separate, had not been distinct; the very existence, on such a large scale of non-professional scientific and technical enquiry demonstrates the ease of access to the world of science enjoyed by anyone with interests which might be satisfied by scientific information. By 1900, so far as Britain was concerned, science and industry were for the most part distinct social systems, entered by different routes, and with very few institutional relationships by which people or information could pass between them. The one exception was the chemical industry, which incorporated scientific laboratory work as part of their normal organisation, but apart from the notable association of Lawes and Gilbert in fertilizer production, the function of the laboratory seems to have been what it remained in smaller chemical concerns until the second half of the twentieth century: to test the product, and to control and refine the processes. As in other branches of industry in the nineteenth century, discovery was normally the starting-point of a new concern which exploited it, but firms did not set aside resources of capital and technically qualified people to search for further innovation. In Britain the change came 47 D.S.L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, Heinemann, 1957. 91 was too strong to be ignored any longer. It was the twenty-year-old Marconi who constructed, on the basis of Hertz's work as described in an Italian journal, homemade equipment which was sufficiently advanced after three years' work to communicate messages over eight miles, and to bring into being the Marconi company. Any one who has read accounts of technical advances and inventions during the nineteenth century will perceive this pattern of development as in many ways typical - not of the way in which invention 'happened' but of the way people thought it happened. Invention was seen as the product of genius - wayward, uncontrollable, often amateurish; or if not of genius, then of accident and sudden inspiration. As such, it could not be planned for and organised as part of industry - the idea was intrinsically absurd. In Britain, the archetypal formula for the process of technical innovation was enshrined in the fantasy of Watt and the kettle. The fitting of this myth to the key episode of the earlier technical revolution was itself characteristic. Of course, the myth of accident and inspiration did go some way towards accounting for the facts. And the outstanding fact was that the random dissemination of scientific and technical information through the new journals and institutions - and the continued exploitation of major inventions by craftsmen - made it seem possible for any individual innovation to be produced by almost anybody almost anywhere. If the disciplined attack on one difficulty after another - which is how the gap between the scientific idea and the ultimate product is bridged - was still intrinsic to the achievement, the process was still an individual, usually personal, enterprise. So the boy Watt sat dreaming in front of a boiling kettle and later invented the steam engine. The essential condition of membership of a closely linked group of 'applied scientists' in or well acquainted with the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, the special circumstance of close association with Joseph Black whose discovery of latent heat lay at the bottom of Watt's improvement of the Newcomen engine, the presence of the industrialist Roebuck in the circle of acquaintanceship - these, the really significant factors, were elided. They were seen as commonplace social circumstances, not essential conditions. VII 'The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method itself; that is the real novelty, which has broken up the foundations of the old civilisation.'50 Whitehead's encapsulation of what happened in the nineteenth century is rather too neat; in neglecting 'the details of change' he also misses out the actualities of what was happening. The 'invention of invention' came about through a series of institutional changes working on social organisation in accordance with the almost continuous metamorphosis of the circumstantial postulate of individual members of different categories, sometimes groups, even organised institutions, of people: scientists and 50 A.N.Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, C.U.P., 1926, pp.120-1 (1933 impression) 92 technologists, financiers and entrepreneurs, industrial managers, craftsmen and mechanics, educationists, politicians and civil servants. It calls to mind Michal Polanyi's account of the formation of 'the community of scientists' (see Preliminaries, pp. 25-7), although there are of course major differences. To begin with, the world of industry could hardly be said to represent the realisation of a 'cultural ideal' - except in the broadest, anthropological sense of 'culture'. On the other hand, the community of scientists we know did in fact originate and grow at a certain (though not easy to specify) time in history, and in certain geographical places. And what we regard as 'the world of industry' originated and grew in much the same way, as this chapter has sought to explain. What is odd is that first science and then modern industry came into being one after the other, in fairly rapid succession, relatively speaking, and in the same part of the world. So there are two questions arising: why then? and why there? The usual response is to point to the Renaissance - the revival of learning which meant, to begin with, the rediscovery of Europe's classical age and thereafter led on to the expansion of interest in philosophy, in art and literature, in the discovery of hitherto unknown lands, in natural philosophy (later 'science'), and invention and the manufacture of material goods. All of which simply leads us back to the two questions. One can nowadays dismiss the notion of some evolutionary principle at work in human history. There is every reason to believe that the people of what we know as the classical world, from the Roman to the Chinese Empire, were at least as clever, and as intellectually enterprising, as those of the contemporary world. But something must have occurred in the centuries which saw the birth and maturing of what we label the Renaissance - from, say the thirteenth to the sixteenth - which opened up enquiry and enterprise along novel and unprecedented lines, and eventually expanded the horizons of knowledge and practical ability to a wholly novel and unprecedented extent. The only suggestion which might lead to an approximate answer that I have come across may seem improbably remote and insufficient. There is not much I can offer by way of supporting evidence. It comes from a reading of Noam Chomsky's published account of his responses to questions in the discussion sessions which followed his five 'Managua Lectures'.51 The first question (p. 171) elicited a rather lengthy answer, and he returned to the topic more than once in later discussions. Here is the question: "If a child is raised in a rich environment, then the child will develop very differently from the child who has been neglected or who has been sent to an orphanage or something like that. What's the difference?" Chomsky's answer begins by pointing to the established fact that the visual system of mammals (humans or cats, for example) tends to interpret visual representations of a straight line, different angles, a triangle and so on - which are almost always rather distorted versions of the ideal Euclidean objects they are meant to represent (there being 51 N. Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge, M.I.T. Press, 1988. 93 no such thing in nature as an ideal straight line) - as a line, a triangle, and so on. Even a young infant, or a kitten, that will presumably see these lines as a distorted triangle, etc., will interpret them as a line, a triangle, and so on. However, if you raise a new-born kitten with its eyes covered so that everything it sees is rather blurred, the computational system which would allow it to interpret distorted representations of the physical world in the 'accepted' way is irretrievably damaged. 'So the mature cat will literally no see objects if it has only been presented with diffuse light and not patterns. 'Now this illustrates a very general idea about the biology of organs. There has to be sufficiently rich environmental stimulation for the genetically determined process to develop in the manner in which it is programmed to develop. 'The term for this is "triggering"; that is, the experience does not determine how the mind will work but it triggers it, it makes it work in its own largely predetermined way.' Later on in the same session, dealing with a subsequent question, he says "Acquisition of language is something that happens to you; it's not something you do. Learning language is something like undergoing puberty. You don't learn to do it; you don't do it because you see other people doing it; you are just designed to do it at a certain time." The point lies in the conjunction of 'triggering' and 'rich environment' with timing. This can be disrupted by neglect in the case of an infant, and its ability to learn damaged, but can also be impoverished by constraint, or some of its 'richness' reduced by the interposition of wrong, badly administered, or misdirected, information. Lastly, there is the possibility of an alternative 'rich environment' which presents itself at the appropriate time of 'triggering'. In the fourth question and answer session, he refers to a time he was invited to Puerto Rico to talk about linguistics but also to look at the language programmes in the schools. "Well, in Puerto Rico everyone speaks Spanish, but they have to learn English. Now at that time every child went to school for twelve years. They were taught English five days a week for twelve years, and when they came out, they couldn't say 'How are you?'" What he found, on further enquiry, was that English was taught by 'pattern practice, according to the latest scientific theories. ... language is a habit system, and the way you learn language is just by learning the habit. So it is kind of like catching a ball or something like that. You just keep doing it over and over again until you get good at it.' The suggestion arising out of all this is that the Renaissance came at a time when the 'rich environment' of medieval Christianity was being fragmented and, in certain major respects, eroded. Chomsky then goes on to illustrate his meaning by turning a key in the ignition in order to start a car. (Which is rather misleading, because turning the key simply makes a connection between the battery and the ignition system; to activate the starting motor needs a slightly bigger, but momentary, turn.) But the meaning stays clear: seeing is one thing; seeing a recognisable object is something else. It is a little like an automobile. When you turn the key in the ignition, it acts like a car, 96 The kind of 'processing' effected by the industrial system has changed with its own institutional character. For this has changed as well as the inputs of effort and materials and the outputs of goods and services. It is still changing. The general theme of this first kind of study is the nature of these changes. Material and Social Technologies in the First Three Phases of Industrialism Industrialism itself is the product of techniques of social organisation linked with techniques of manufacture. It has developed in spasmodic fashion from the rudimentary forms of the eighteenth century by alternate advances in first one technology and then the other. Bearing in mind the machine-mindedness of the French elite during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, the extension of bureaucracy to industry and business with the onset of industrialisation is hardly surprising. Yet the history of its origin, growth and spread is rather more complicated. Given the preoccupation with war of European states during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it might be expected that armies claimed attention first. True, the beginnings of new, more rigorous discipline (in regard to battle formation, especially) are evident in the Netherlands by the end of the sixteenth century, then in Sweden, and finally in England, in Cromwell's 'New Model Army' (which actually introduced uniform - the red coat which the British army wore until 1914). All were 'national' as against the polyglot assemblies of mercenary, mostly foreign, lansquenets, and all were also fired by Protestant fervour. Louis XIV's much larger army was also more disciplined that its predecessors, although this was more noticeable to its officers and men than to the people, both foreign and domestic, whom they encountered. The first major turning point comes, of course, with Frederick William and Frederick II of Prussia - but more because of conscription, long service, and the spring and autumn months of training in towns than with any new code of discipline or army organisation. With the Revolution and Napoleon, numbers counted most, but a trained and organised officer-class, and promotion by merit, helped, but none of this held good after 1815. Not until the third quarter of the nineteenth century can one speak of 'modern armies', (in the British Army, notoriously, commissions were purchasable until the 1870's.) and this followed - was consequent upon - the increase fire-power which new weapons brought to the infantry as well as the artillery. The growth of a bureaucratic system of control which made possible the increase in scale of undertakings opened up other possibilities, first brought to public notice in 1932. The divorce of ownership and management, although by no means absolute,59 had gone far enough to render survival of the top management at least as important as the survival of the enterprise itself and, indeed, as the maximisation of profit - which, in reality, wears a different aspect in the large-scale organisation.60 More important, the growth of bureaucracy as a social technology which made possible the second stage of industrialism, with its concomitant feature of growth in scale, was 59 A.A. Berle and G.C.Means The Modern Corporation and Private Property Macmillan, 1932. 60 See B.S. Keirstead, The Theory of Economic Change, Macmillan, 1948, p. 254. 97 only feasible at the time because the growth of material technology was held steady (see p.821 above). The early years of industry based on major technical advances show a high death rate among enterprises; enterprises can grow only when they survive. The rate of technical advance can be slowed down by standardising consumer demand through price reduction, publicity; the consequent restraint of technical progress enables undertakings to maintain relatively stable conditions in which large-scale production can be built up through the conversion of manufacturing processes into routine cycles of activity for machines or semi-skilled assembly workers. It is this second phase of industrialism which is regarded as having dominated the institutional life of Western societies. Between 1870 and 1930, the formal organisation of industrial undertakings along bureaucratic lines, coupled with a similar pattern of growth in scale and increasing bureaucratisation in armed forces and government administration, suggested to sociologists that bureaucracy was as intrinsic to the character of modern society as was science and technology. For Weber, the 'founding father' of the study of bureaucracy, it exhibited the same feature of rational thought applied to the social environment of man as does science and technology as does science and technology to the physical environment It is bureaucratised industry and business which has given advanced industrial societies their distinctive social character. Managers, clerical workers, functional specialists, industrial scientists, technologists and the professional experts employed by large business and industrial concerns are regarded as a new middle class, larger in size than, and different in interests and values from, the earlier middle class of small entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, doctors and lawyers 61. Less attention has been given to the effects of the ordering of people in these new social hierarchies. Most positions in a bureaucratic structure involve their incumbents in the role of both subordinate and superior. The structure also serves as a career ladder, and cooperation for the success of the organisation goes alongside, or masks, or even expresses competition for careers success62. More easily dramatised are the alienating effects (in Freudian terms) of immersion in the occupational roles provided by bureaucratic systems63 and the alienating effects (in Marxist terms) of the ideologies and institutions created in response to the need to adapt conduct and beliefs to the requirements of effective cooperation and 61 See, for example, A.M. Carr-Saunders and P.A. Wilson, The Professions, O.U.P., 1933; T.H. Marshall, "The Recent History of Professionalism," Canadian Journal of Economic & Political Science, Vol. 5, 1939; D. Lockwood, The BlackCoated Worker, Allen & Unwin, 1951; C.W. Mills, White Collar, O.U.P., 1951, Carr-Saunders et al. A Survey of Social Conditions in England and Wales, O.U.P., ch.9, 1958. 62 Some aspects of the ambiguity of the demands of rationalised functional roles and the pursuit of promotions are discussed in R. Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry. op. cit.. See also T.Burns, "Cliques and Cabals in Occupational Milieux", Human Relations, Vol. 8, pp. 467-486; R. Lewis and R. Stewart, The Boss, Phoenix House, 1958; W.L. Warner and J.G. Abegglen, Big Business Leaders in America New York, 1955 63 These form the theme of D. Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Doubleday, 1953 and W.H.Whyte's The Organization Man, Penguin, 1956. For a general statement of the Freudian thesis, see H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Routledge, 1956. 98 competition.64 Most economic historians are content to end their search for an explanation of why the Industrial Revolution occurred when and where it did by noting the institutional features of eighteenth-century Britain which distinguished it from its continental neighbours - the so-called non-economic factors. Among these the openness of British society receives perhaps the greatest stress (Landes, 1965). This openness applies not only to social mobility, but to the way in which different sections and strata of society were permeable by new scientific, political and moral ideas. It extends to the facility with which the English formed associations and partnerships in commercial, religious and political undertakings outside the safe confines of the family network. And, even more pertinently, the notion applies to the freedom with which men could dispose of themselves as resources of skill and labour. It is the prevalence of both the assumption and the experience of labour mobility in this sense which more than anything else was of critical importance. Technical developments in transport and communications, the impact of the international exhibitions of London and Paris, freer trade, and the armaments revolution, supported by the development of machine tools and of steel and chemical technology, all combined during the 1850's and 1860's to form the springboard, in material technology, of the next advance in the social techniques of industrial organisation. As yet, there is no very clear or reliable account of how that advance took place. One possibility is that it began with the rapid expansion of railways and armaments manufacture in Germany and the United States, where the requirements of coordinating the serial manufacture and assembly of complicated engineering products like rifles and railway engines forced enterprises into planning operations sequentially so as to avoid the costly build-up of work in progress. All that can be said with assurance is that by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the extension of the factory system into engineering and chemicals, iron and steel processing, food manufacture and clothing, required organisational developments which provided for the conduct and control of complex series of production processes within the same plant. The overt sign of this is the increase in the proportion of salaried officials employed in industry. According to Bendix, quoting unpublished sources, the proportion of 'administrative employees' to 'productive employees' in Britain had risen to 8.6 per cent. by 1907 (and by 20 per cent. by 1848)65. Similar increases took place in Western Europe and the United States. The growth in the numbers of administrators, functionaries, or managers reflects the growth of organisational structures. Production department managers, sales managers, accountants, inspectors, planning engineers, training officers, publicity managers, research and development managers and the rest emerged as specialised parts of the general management function as industrial concerns increased in size. Their jobs were in fact created out of the master's either directly or at one or two 64 See, for example, W.H. Whyte, Is Anybody Listening?, Simon and Schuster, 1952, and R.Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry. 65 R.Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry, p. 214 101 familiar an aspect of London society, now extended to provincial towns. And there it tended to include scientific or technical matters: 'Towards the close of the last century', says Smiles in his life of Boulton and Watt, 'there were many little clubs or coteries of scientific and literary men established in the provinces, the like of which do not now exist..... The provincial coteries of which we speak were usually centres of the best and most intelligent society of their neighbourhoods and were for the most part distinguished by an active and liberal spirit of enquiry. Leading minds attracted others of like taste and pursuits, and social circles were formed which proved, in many instances, the source of great intellectual activity, as well as enjoyment. At Liverpool, Roscoe and Currie were the centres of one group; at Warrington, Aiken, Enfield and Priestley of another; at Bristol Dr. Beddoes and Humphrey Davy of a third; and at Norwich the Taylors and Martineaus of a fourth. But perhaps the most distinguished of these provincial societies was that at Birmingham, of which Boulton and Watt were among the most prominent members."68 The presence of such names as Priestley and Davy in Smiles' account reveals the extent to which people who had made - or went on to make - a considerable reputation as scientists were involved in the discoveries and inventions which were making Britain the 'first industrial nation'. They were, in fact, following - or taking up again - the lead established by the Royal Society more than a hundred years before. The Royal Society itself had drifted towards a membership dominated by, if not confined to, wealthy landowners. It was the Royal Institution, founded towards the end of the eighteenth century by Count Rumford, which now served, to a limited extent, as a focal point of interest; a miscellany of people attended the lectures and demonstrations by scientists like Faraday and Davy. (Its declared purpose, curiously enough, was the promotion of technology as a means of assisting the poor). Even earlier, a group based on the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh had included men responsible for prime discoveries and inventions of the industrial revolution and for the technical applications and commercial ventures which exploited them. The rapidity of the technological development in the workshops and laboratories of Glasgow and Edinburgh was the direct outcome of close personal association between people with different skills and different resources. But association between people like Watt, Black and Roebuck was founded not so much on their membership of a common profession or organisation as on membership of a small, closely integrated, social class of intellectuals and professional men.69 In eighteenth century Scotland, acquaintance of such men with each other was almost inevitable. IV After the beginning of the nineteenth century, one finds the institutional context of invention in Britain changing yet again. By the second quarter of the century, industrial invention, creature as it was of competitive entrepreneurship, was developing needs too 68 S.Smiles, Life of Boulton and Watt, 1872, p. 367. 69 A. and N. Clow, The Chemical Revolution, Batchworth, 1952, pp. 593-4 102 widespread and diverse to be fed by an institutional system ranging from intimate and undisturbed communication by conversation and correspondence to gatherings convened under the auspices of formally constituted societies, even when they were nation-wide. The founding, in 1831, of the British Association, a self-conscious attempt to institute personal links between all scientists and technologists, may be regarded as marking the end of the period when a network of personal relationships on the necessary scale was feasible. There is a significant difference between the influence it was able to exert and what had been achieved a generation earlier by the Royal Institution. In fact, the advance of science and technology was becoming too rapid to be accommodated by adapting and multiplying the institutions of sociable intercourse, vigorous as they had proved themselves to be. They stayed in place for some time, of course, but the clubs and coteries of people who were at once friends and fellow scientists or business partners, and whose common interests included some which were scientific, technological, or financial were supplemented by an assortment of other institutional institutional arrangements, formal and informal. 1.) Still of central and growing importance was the direct application of technical knowledge, methods and skill to the solution of practical problems. For most of the eighteenth century, the principal agents in this process had been skilled craftsmen, with a few interested amateurs among them. This tradition, proper to what I have called the craft revolution, was very much alive during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Technically competent craftsmen were still very much in the forefront. But alongside of them, 'practical opportunities' were beginning to be perceived as one of the end results of scientific experiment and discovery, and as pointing a way ahead for science. The initiative could come from either side: knowledge of practical problems which might be solved by applying to people still known as 'natural philosophers' (the word 'scientist' was not in use until the 1850's) or by such men putting the knowledge and methods they had acquired to serve practical ends. 2.) The invention of the Davy lamp was the key episode of the junction sought by people who were searching for a solution to practical need from people with scientific knowledge. In the northeast of England, coal-mining, an established industry five centuries old, had by 1800 grown into a major industry with its own ancillary engineering and transport undertakings. The Newcomen engine had proved capable of dealing with flooding, especially after Watt's improvements (double-acting piston, governor and condenser) were added - to be superseded, after 1800, by Trevithick's high- pressure Cornish design. All these advances were the product of men who were specialist craftsmen, now becoming known as engineers. By the early nineteenth century, mining was facing a more dangerous and difficult kind of problem: methane gas ('fire-damp') was a far more lethal menace than flooding. In May, 1812, ninety-two men were killed by an explosion at Felling Colliery - one of the most disastrous mining accidents, and one that happened in what had been reckoned to be an up-to-date pit. But the new world of industry was beginning to create its own 103 institutional potency. In the following year, a Society for Preventing Accidents in Coal- Mines was founded in what is now Sunderland, and the chairman, who happened to be acquainted with Humphry Davy, wrote to him early in 1814 in the hope that he might 'direct his attention to a subject, upon which, of all mean of science, he appeared to be the best calculated to bring his extensive stores of chemical knowledge to a practical bearing.'70 It took some months of fairly hazardous experiments to solve the puzzle, but what came out of it was the Davy-lamp, the first scientific invention, product of the direct application of scientific knowledge to practical need. What was perhaps the most significant element in the whole episode is that the initiative came not from scientists but from non-scientists - bystanders, some of them - who were acutely conscious of a particular 'practical need': how to avoid, or at least reduce, the number of horrifying mining disasters and who appealed to a well-known scientist for help in doing so. 3.) At the same time, many of the more important inventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed the reverse path to that which involved Humphry Davy in the invention of the safety lamp. The electric telegraph, an early instance of this reverse process, was the product of a series of attempts by people working for the most part independently of each other and in different countries - Scotland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and England - beginning halfway through the eighteenth century and aimed at supplementing -or perhaps replacing -the semaphore devices now being adopted by armies and navies by signaling apparatus using static electricity, produced by primitive electric cells. Ultimate success was undoubtedly the consequence of the series of experiments and inventions by Galvani and Volta, and, following them, Oersted and Ampere, whose names are preserved in the terminology of electrical engineering. It still took a number of years for the first working telegraph, designed by W.F.Cooke and Charles Wheatstone (professor of natural philosophy at the new King's College in London) and based on Oersted's observation of the action of electric current on magnetic needles, to be constructed for the Great Western Railway between Paddington and Slough. It took only a year or two for the telegraph to be adopted for railways in the United States. 4.) Fourthly, there was the printed word, which began as supplement to the role of the provincial societies and then virtually replaced them. Publication - books, journals, essays printed as pamphlets - establish means of leisurely and undisturbed communication impersonally, randomly, and with large numbers of individuals. It is an institutional change of a particularly potent kind; we are familiar with the part played by printing in the diffusion of ideas in the Renaissance and Reformation, and in eighteenth- century France, and thus acting as a multiplier of their social impact. A similar function as accelerator and diffuser may be ascribed to the appearance of scientific journalism in the nineteenth century. After 1800, roughly after the great days of the provincial societies - information about scientific discoveries became available to a wider variety of people. 70 David Knight Humphry Davy, (1992) C.U.P., 1998, p. 105.