Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  England’s political and geographic integration, reinforced by the role London played in it, gave a compactness and concentration to its national life matched nowhere else. France lacked the myriad interurban and interregional connections Britain possessed by 1700. Its road network followed the paths and needs of royal administration: maritime commercial centers like Marseilles and Bordeaux were better connected to distant regions outside the country than to other French cities; most places that housed provincial parlements engaged in little or no long-distance trade, so that the networks in which they participated were largely limited to those associated with state activity (a difference still evident enough in the 1770s for Adam Smith to remark on it in The Wealth of Nations).9 In Germany the still greater depth and power of both political and economic division meant that the same kinds of relations stood out in even sharper relief. Hamburg, the preeminent German commercial city, had closer ties to London and even to regions outside Europe than to other German places, a situation that would continue to mark its history – with certain dangerous consequences, as we shall be reminded below – to the end of the nineteenth century. No English city, certainly none of the provincial centers such as Bristol, York, Norwich, Exeter, or Newcastle, had so remote or weak a relationship to the national life around it (even though the trade of sixteenth-century Exeter, for instance, was largely with France). This exceptional integration of the country provided the foundation for a precocious modernity that was not merely anticipatory, in the manner of Renaissance Italy or Golden Age Holland, but bore an unbroken continuity with defining features of nineteenth-century life.

  Markets, principles, and forms of production

  This modernity made itself felt in all three of the chief spheres of national life, the economy, politics, and culture, giving impetus to the transition from “ordained” or “teleocratic” principles to ones that were “autonomous” in the sense I proposed in Chapter 1. In the rest of the current chapter I look at some of the ways these effects were made evident in each realm.

  To speak of economic institutions and practices as “ordained” or “teleocratic” means two things in concrete terms: first that production and exchange were supposed to be directed and limited by moral considerations, and second that the wealth produced was expected to preserve and maintain inherited positions, the differences of status inscribed in the social order through both custom and law. In England each of these principles exhibited clear signs of weakening from at least the seventeenth century. By then what Keith Wrightson describes as “an emergent national economy which was increasingly influenced by participation in a nascent world economy” was creating situations (however locally distinct) “in which the livelihoods of individual households had become increasingly dependent on the markets for their products, skills and labor.” A persistent sense of moral obligation limited the impact of this market dependency on behavior, but the conflicts spawned by the Reformation made moral questions subject to dispute. In this situation, as Richard Grassby puts it, increasing numbers of people found it necessary or convenient “to accept and follow those interpretations of the normative order which best suited their purposes,” and thus to adjust their behavior to the demands and opportunities they confronted. This was especially true where traditional inhibitions were diminished by geographical and social distance, allowing the “norms of a more competitive economic environment” to gain power through the “daily accretion … of decisions taken and transactions concluded in the course of simply earning a living.”10 In other words, activities once directed by goals set outside the domain of economic interactions were coming to be regulated by principles that developed out of those exchanges themselves.

  Such shifting attitudes did not find expression without provoking public controversy. The original premises that provided the background for such discussions were simultaneously religious and economic, restricting the degree to which individuals were supposed to pursue private interest at once in terms of biblical injunctions to act with charity and protect the poor and weak, and on grounds that assumed the existence of pre-existing limits to what both nature and labor could provide. The world of what E. P. Thompson famously called the “moral economy” was a pessimistic one, structured around the conviction that the product to be divided in a given community could not expand beyond already-known limitations – although it might well contract in bad times. In such a situation it could seem only just to make communal survival the first priority, and to stand against attempts by those with holdings big enough to yield a surplus to sell their produce in the market instead of adding it to the common store, especially when reduced harvests led at once to shortages and to higher prices. But as expanding urban markets for agricultural products encouraged farmers to clear and improve land, and to find ways to increase yields, evidence mounted that these limits could be stretched, allowing more and better food to be produced. In the debate that ensued some quickly argued, in terms that would later come to be widely diffused, that the larger product, even if brought forth in conditions that heightened inequality, could provide better for the community as a whole, including its poorer members, than the traditional arrangements. In this way they justified the “enclosures” that aristocratic and gentry landowners sought to practice on their holdings, fencing off and taking over formerly common lands in ways that threatened the livelihoods of poor villagers by excluding them from the arable fields previously farmed in scattered strips, and from less easily cultivated ground where they had been able to pasture a few animals.

  As Joyce Appleby’s work makes clear, the argument was joined in quite modern terms in mid seventeenth-century pamphlets. “The advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the publick,” a landowner and minister wrote, “if men by good husbandry, trenching, manuring their Land &c do better their Land, is not the Common wealth inriched thereby?” The author of these words did not make clear how he thought those without work would survive, but he argued that with an expanded product, greater resources would be available than before to relieve the plight of the poor. And he specifically rejected custom and tradition as guides to economic behavior: “Suppose it … hath heretofore been so, is it therefore necessary that it be so alwayes?”11

  Other seventeenth-century writers agreed, considering economic questions from a utilitarian viewpoint that made moral considerations dependent on practical ones, and justifying the pursuit of self-interest as a path to greater well-being for society as a whole, even if a community’s more vulnerable members had to suffer in the short run. To a number of observers in the 1690s, “it was the pervasive and universal capacity of demand to grow from the desires of ordinary men and women that made it a natural and powerful stimulant to productivity.” Some of these writers drew the conclusion that restrictions on trade with other countries should be eliminated in order to allow market pressures to do their bracing work, but most who argued this way were merchants who could profit from expanding imports and exports; by contrast both manufacturers and landowners feared foreign competition and favored protection (similar line-ups in debates about free trade and protection would long persist). These latter were able to put their stamp on British commercial policy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, contributing to the preservation of both commercial monopolies by powerful groups of organized traders (deplored by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations) and of the import duties that would draw the fire of liberals in the anti-Corn Law movement after 1815.12 All the same, it is clear that the thickening web of distant relations within which production and exchange were carried on, and the expanding horizons this brought, were drawing people to question the subordination of economic behavior to ends rooted outside it, and to offer new principles derived from the operation of market networks themselves. Whether people subscribed to these principles did not depend on whether they were aristocrats or bourgeois, but on the particular relationship they had to such networks.

  Many traditional restrictions on economic activi
ty remained in pre-industrial Britain, but one declined markedly, namely the power of guilds to determine who could practice a given occupation and offer its products in the market. Often religious in their origins (a connection preserved in ceremonies and rituals), guilds of artisans and merchants were primarily economic institutions by the sixteenth century. As “the principal weapons of economic restriction and regulation,” they controlled apprenticeships, production standards, and competition among the masters, while working to keep outside competitors at bay. The tone in which they defended the monopolies of their members was often highly moralistic, as illustrated by the tailors’ guild of Leicester, who protested publicly against non-members “who like drone bees to the hive, paying neither scot nor lot [i.e. town taxes], lie lurking in the suburbs and other secret places in and about this town, and rob your suppliants of the work which they should do, to their great disgrace and utter undoing.” Such complaints echoed both the language of the moral economy and the assumption that markets ought to be regulated so as to preserve acquired position and privilege. Many who made them deserve to be called middle class. But the power of guilds was waning by late in the seventeenth century for a number of reasons: sometimes because competition from producers located outside the reach of urban authorities could not be blocked; sometimes because town magistracies influenced by manufacturers with ties to unregulated rural industry turned a deaf ear to more traditional producers; and sometimes because competition between guilds over which of them had the right to produce or sell certain products could not be resolved. In London, artisans had long been able to escape guild regulations by taking up residence outside the area where having the “freedom” of the town was a requirement for offering goods in the market. By 1700 suburban expansion had reached a point where London craft companies lost any real ability to regulate production, and in 1712 the city abandoned the attempt to enforce the “freedom” in regard to merchants trading overseas in joint-stock companies. Although the weakness of some guilds at certain moments may have been a consequence of economic difficulties, overall (as two recent historians conclude) the guilds’ decline “indicates the discrediting of the kind of commercial protectionism which they had exemplified. Whether out of choice or necessity civic policy was becoming less restrictive,” and guilds that had once jealously protected the economic interests of their members were turning into mere social clubs.13

  This English story was not matched elsewhere. To be sure, ambitious people had long sought to escape the restrictions guilds imposed on them, and some of these, for instance a German wool producer active in late seventeenth-century Nordlingen, argued (like the landowners encountered just above) that by avoiding guild regulations they could expand production and thus provide a livelihood for larger numbers of people than the regulated economy allowed. Against such practices town officials upheld the duty of citizens, “who should stand by one another through thick and thin, and must partake of each other’s joys and sorrows,” to resist innovations that might “cause any further diminution of each other’s livelihoods, which are already far too difficult to obtain.”14 Such debates continued, but guild power survived in German towns and regions at least until early in the nineteenth century, when Napoleon abolished it (temporarily, as it turned out) in the areas that came under his control, an example followed by German reformers convinced that freeing up economic activity would enrich subjects and expand tax revenues. In France a distinction existed in theory between villes libres and villes jurées, but the “free” quality of the first merely meant that guilds did not have the legal status of sworn associations (jurandes), and that regulation was in the hands of the city government, as opposed to the syndics of the guilds themselves; in practice, entry into occupations was subject to rigid restrictions throughout the country. Both journeymen and outsiders objected to the power this conferred on an often self-perpetuating group of masters in the name of tradition and equity, and sometimes both urban magistrates and royal officials were on the side of liberalization. In 1614 the last Estates General to meet before the one called in 1789 even abolished jurandes. But the howl of protest sent up by aggrieved master artisans caused the government to reverse itself. The scenario was replayed in 1776 when Louis XV’s minister Turgot, acting in accord with the physiocratic theory I will consider later, again did away with the corporations de métiers, but had to retreat in the face of guild supporters who did not hesitate to depict the hierarchical organization of industry as essential to social cohesion, so that its abolition would destroy the “primal links that gather men together,” turning each one into “nothing more than a gnawing individual.”15

  Consumption, industry, and the economy of manufacture

  By the middle of the eighteenth century the combined effects of the London market in fostering productive energies throughout the country and of the transportation system set up to make it accessible had created a network of economic connections sufficient to constitute a national market for both agricultural and manufactured goods in England. Regions retained much autonomy to be sure, and specialized in particular kinds of products (a circumstance that would be brought into higher relief with the beginnings of mechanized industry), but many types of goods circulated readily through the country as a whole. A century before it could be called “the workshop of the world,” Britain had become what Neil McKendrick and his colleagues dubbed “the first modern consumer society.” Contemporaries were struck by the rate at which people at many social levels bought up household goods such as furniture, rugs, pottery, cooking implements, cutlery, soap, and beer, as well as clothing and accessories of all kinds – coats, dresses, stockings, ribbons, buttons. Statistics drawn from records of the excise tax suggest that consumption was growing twice as fast as the population. Merchants traveled widely in search of raw materials and customers, and advertising occupied much space in newspapers. An enthusiasm for fashion spread outward from London and down the social scale, not always meeting with approval to be sure. In 1781 an observer groaned that he wished “with all my heart that half the turnpike roads of the kingdom were plough’d up,” since they had “depopulated the country” and spread London manners too widely: “I meet milkmaids on every road, with the dress and looks of Strand misses.” Descriptions of shop-window displays with goods arranged to attract buyers already sound much like later department stores. As McKendrick concludes, “a mass consumer market awaited those products of the industrial revolution which skillful sales promotion could make fashionably desirable, heavy advertisement could make widely known, and whole batteries of salesmen could make easily accessible.”16

  That these developments predated the era of industrial innovation that began in the second half of the eighteenth century has been one reason why many historians have come to stress the gradual nature of economic change, casting doubt on the classic image of an “industrial revolution.” It is necessary to avoid getting too deeply drawn into the debates that rage around this question, but they cannot be avoided entirely. That the textile industry was rapidly transformed in the decades just before and after 1800, with the mechanization first of spinning and later of weaving, seems undeniable, just as does the sharp impact railroad building had on metals and machine making a few decades after. But neither the reality of those transformations nor the strong consciousness of change they fostered in contemporaries should lead us to think that the story ought to begin or end with them. If, as a recent analysis argues, British manufacturers were spurred to invest in machine technology earlier than their counterparts elsewhere because labor costs were relatively high in Britain, while the price of coal to drive engines was comparatively low, this situation owed much to the precocious integration of markets there, and the role played by London in bringing it about: the demand for labor fed by expanding consumption put upward pressure on wages, while the early development of the coal industry to supply the city’s need for fuel spurred developments in mining that cheapened production costs. Colonial markets and supply sources
were crucial to London’s growth and its role in national life, to be sure, but the expanding domestic market kept pace with international trade and spurred industrial innovation.17 In an illuminating essay, Samuel Lilley plotted the major inventions that transformed cotton spinning in the last decades of the eighteenth century along a line showing the consumption of thread at the same time; in each case (the spinning jenny, the water frame, the “mule”) a spurt in demand preceded the new machine. Moreover, each of these innovations was technically quite simple, involving the combination or multiplication of common tools and techniques, so that the encouragement provided by growing demand could have been enough to incite clever artisans to imagine them, and then to try them out.18 Other important innovations had roots in the special qualities of English society to which I pointed earlier. The large proportion of people at higher social levels drawn into market relations contributed to making class barriers more fluid and permeable than elsewhere, helping to purge British life of the haughty disdain for practical activities, and the knowledge connected to them, visible in upper classes elsewhere, especially in France. A number of historians assign this difference considerable weight in Britain’s earlier turn to industrial innovation, since it fostered easier communication between the holders of theoretical and practical knowledge, and a more widespread interest in how things worked.19