by Andrew Marr
So great was the smallpox scourge, however, that variolation slowly became more popular. As practised in England, it was a horrible experience. The boy or girl to be inoculated would be starved for several weeks so as to weaken the constitution, then bled so as to thin the blood, while being kept on a sparse vegetable diet. Then the cut would be made and smallpox inserted by tying bandages with dried scabs around the wound. To keep the disease from spreading, the child would then be tied down and kept in a ‘pest-house’ or barn with other sufferers, for ten days until the new scabs fell off. The conditions were foul and the experience scarred many people mentally as well as physically. One eight-year-old child who went through the ordeal in smallpox-ravaged Gloucestershire later complained that he had been reduced to a skeleton and never slept well afterwards. His name was Edward Jenner.
Jenner had lost most of his family early on and was brought up by a kindly and much older brother, a moderately well-to-do vicar. From an early age he was fascinated by botany and soon became determined to become a doctor, a job that then meant apprenticeship rather than university. In London he became a favourite of the greatest surgeon of the age, John Hunter, and was offered the chance to go on Captain Cook’s second voyage to Australia. He preferred, however, to return to Gloucestershire for the quieter pleasures of country doctoring. There he regularly came across the ravages of smallpox. In between practising medicine, growing cucumbers, experimenting with balloons and caring for an ill wife, he kept his ears open; and found himself pondering on a local folk-tale.
Apparently, milkmaids sometimes caught a bovine version of smallpox, called cowpox. Once they had been infected with this much milder disease, it was said, they were immune for life from the great scourge. It has even been suggested that the long tradition of songs and poems describing the creamy beauty of milkmaids started because they had unpoxed complexions. At least one farmer, Benjamin Jesty, had been sure enough of the truth of the story to infect his wife with cowpox pus, in 1756. All sorts of strange things happened in the countryside.
But it was forty years later that the now middle-aged doctor did his famous experiment. Hearing that a farmer’s daughter, a milkmaid called Sarah Nelmes, had contracted cowpox in the village of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, on 14 May 1796 Jenner persuaded her to let him take some matter from her sores, and keep it. He then cut the arm of a boy called James Phipps, the son of a local labourer, and infected him. Young Phipps duly went down with the milder disease. Once he had recovered, on 1 July Jenner cut him again and tried to infect him with the smallpox material. (The ethics of using animals for medical experiment are hotly debated today; in eighteenth-century England, using a working-class boy seems to have caused little comment.) James failed to catch the disease. Jenner, who by then had been a doctor for twenty-four years, was certain enough of the result not to bother with many more tests, and quickly wrote up his idea in a pamphlet. It was an almost instant bestseller.
The story of how, and why, the news spread so fast is almost as interesting as the discovery itself. First, Jenner was a member of the local scientific debating club, and he presented his breakthrough as proven science, not simply as a country remedy. Though much of his argument was wrong, it took hold because there was a large and open-minded audience ready and waiting for it. Second, though a mere country doctor, he was well connected. Thanks to the fashionable spa town of Cheltenham – one of the resorts that grew up when the French wars made it impossible for wealthy Britons to travel abroad – he was in touch with influential aristocrats and writers, who spread the word.
Soon the cowpox treatment became all the rage in Britain, then quickly travelled abroad. In 1799 Princess Louisa of Prussia wrote to Jenner asking for ‘vaccine’ matter (the word comes from the Latin for ‘cow’), and in the same year this new medical star was presented to George III. Where royalty and aristocracy led, the middle classes followed. The next year, the host and hostess of a dinner party that Jane Austen was attending insisted on reading out Jenner’s pamphlet to the assembled company. By 1801 the Royal Navy was inoculating its sailors, while at his country home, Monticello in Virginia, the US President Thomas Jefferson inoculated thirty people himself. That year the empress of Russia named the first child vaccinated in her country, ‘Vaccinof’, and it was estimated that a hundred thousand people in Europe were treated. The great discovery even leapt across the barriers thrown up by the interminable European war: in 1804 Napoleon had a medal cast to honour Jenner, then had his armies inoculated. In fact, Napoleon so revered Jenner that when the country doctor wrote to him on the subject, the French emperor agreed to free some British prisoners of war. One of Jenner’s greatest supporters in Paris was our famous do-gooder Dr Guillotin.
But the discovery was attacked, too. Ignorant cartoonists mocked the notion of infecting people with stuff from cows. Doctors warned that nothing good would come of it. More seriously, another famous intellectual of the age, Thomas Malthus, included a blast against Jenner in the second, 1806, edition of his famous book warning against overpopulation. For Malthus, the death-toll caused by smallpox was a good thing, keeping the population numbers down naturally. If the vaccine worked, then other diseases would simply pop up to take the place of smallpox and make the necessary cull. ‘Nature will not, nor cannot be, defeated in her purposes,’ wrote Malthus. ‘The necessary mortality must come, in some form or another.’
In fact, the vaccination system would make smallpox the first great scourge to be eradicated. Arguments delayed the necessary legislation in many countries, including Britain, till later in the nineteenth century. Smallpox continued to kill, blind and maim people across the world well into the twentieth. But, thanks to Jenner’s discovery, the United Nations was able to announce in 1980 that the disease had been completely eradicated. The country doctor, using the new belief in experimentation and the power of publication, had done infinitely more for the happiness of humanity than any of the political revolutionaries of his age so loudly declaring the rights of man.
Part Seven
CAPITALISM AND ITS ENEMIES
1800–1918: The Industrial Revolution Upends Life around the Planet – and Then Attacks Itself
The Industrial Revolution
Between the mid-1700s and the end of the 1900s, the world would change more than at any time since the invention of farming. The term ‘industrial revolution’ technically makes no sense, since ‘revolution’ implies a return to something previous, while this was all new. But it has stuck. This mega-change, based on machines that used the earth’s stored energy (in coal and oil) to produce everything from cheap clothes to tinned food – and, not least, to build other machines – reshaped mankind’s relationship with nature. It allowed people to travel far more quickly across the sea, by steamship, and across the land, by train. It allowed them to light their homes and workplaces cheaply and effectively, greatly extending their useful hours, particularly in northern latitudes. It brought well made clothes, household goods and entertainments to millions of people in Europe and America who could never before have dreamt of enjoying such things.
But it came at a price so high that many thinkers hated this revolution, and questioned whether it was worth while. For it forced millions into repetitive, grindingly hard indoor jobs and into crammed, insanitary urban housing. Its environmental effects, in densely populated towns or valleys, could be terrible. Victorian Britons died in huge numbers from lung diseases caused by air pollution – almost a quarter of deaths were caused by bad air.1 In 1866, government inspectors found one river, the Calder, so polluted that its water made effective ink, while the Bradford Canal, teeming with the chemical by-products of industry, was regularly set on fire by local boys, the flames rising six feet along it.2
As the revolution spread to the United States and continental Europe, then Japan, the same thing happened to the huge rivers and lake systems there. This revolution also made wars far more destructive. It made it easy for the industrially advanced countries to bully, take
over and exploit the less advanced ones, destroying in the blink of an eye cultures that had existed for centuries. Indeed, this was the most significant period of ‘creative destruction’ that human societies had ever experienced. And although the countries leading it included some that would dominate the story of the twentieth century, above all the United States and Germany (with France and Russia following not far behind), this transformation began in the damp islands of Britain.
There, the harnessing of coal, chemicals, ores and electricity was slow, compared with any political revolution. It took place in Britain over the course of a century or so, from the mid-1700s to about 1850, beginning in relatively remote areas such as Coalbrookdale in the Iron-bridge Gorge, Shropshire, where coal and iron were traditionally found near the surface, and in the Cornish tin-mining areas; and around the then modest town of Birmingham. Its pioneers were men of business and gentleman-scientists, rather than visionary change-makers; their ceramics and their metal trinkets were deliberately made to mimic old, familiar handmade objects, and the use of machines was all about immediate profit. There was no master plan, no revolutionary cell. The profits were big enough to inspire rapid, even desperate, copying and competition. By the time the industrial revolution spread to Germany and the United States, as well as to smaller countries such as Belgium, the cascade of changes was gathering speed, and on the back of early British breakthroughs.
So why Britain? And why then?
Industrialization was more about politics than about geographical chance, even though Britain did have large deposits of coal and iron. It could not have happened without capitalism – the capital-intensive, market-based, relentlessly disruptive, creative/destructive system of funding, buying and selling that the world still lives under today. Industrialization can also happen without capitalism. The Soviet Union and Communist China showed that. But in both cases it required extreme violence, huge waste and above all, the theft or purchase of capitalist-created technology. We cannot run control experiments with history, but it seems that industrialization could not have been brought about and sustained outside a market system. And that, in turn, to get going properly, needed a special set of circumstances.
Such circumstances occurred first in Britain in the eighteenth century, not because the British were specially gifted by nature – think of the Chinese and Greek inventors, the French and Spanish explorers, the Italian and German craftsmen – but because happy coincidences collided to make something entirely new, rather as a chance mixture of chemicals can produce a chain reaction.
The coincidences occurred in what had seemed a pretty poor country. Britain had nothing like the gold and silver wealth of the Spanish colonies, nor the huge army and glittering court of France. It had decapitated one monarch, had had to beg his exiled son to return, and had then imported a foreign dynasty. Any overseas conquests it had at the beginning of its capitalist period were still marginal and, with the notable exceptions of tobacco and some sugar plantations, still unprofitable. Nor was this a time of peace when Britons could concentrate on affairs at home. Having just staggered through destructive civil wars, Britain was now entering a period, from 1689 to 1815, when almost one year in two would be spent at war with her European rivals. The country was still thinly populated but already mostly denuded of timber. In 1696 a civil servant called Gregory King had reckoned the population of England and Wales to be just five and a half million, of whom about a tenth lived in London. Many of the more independent-minded and ambitious, particularly religious dissenters, were desperate to emigrate and start again.
Yet behind this somewhat desolate picture, huge changes were afoot. The first was happening away from the cities, on flat and rolling agricultural land where improving landowners, making use of shorter leases, plus some new, professional, farmers, were greatly increasing the yield of their fields. The key effect would be on people, both on their numbers and on where they lived. It has been estimated that before the seventeenth century, no developed country had been able to feed its population without four-fifths of its people being employed as farmers.3 From China to France, from the new USA to Russia, this left an absolute maximum of a fifth of the population to do everything else – to be the soldiers, sailors, priests, rulers, bureaucrats, craftsmen and traders. These had surplus wealth, but they did not add up to nearly enough consumers for a capitalist take-off.
In England, however, the enclosure of common land, drainage, and new systems of crop rotation changed those proportions radically. You cannot much improve agricultural yields on the traditional small strips of land; nor is there an incentive to invest in new techniques, hedges or drainage if the leases are short. But from the late 1500s and accelerating through the following century, the takeover and enclosure of what had been common land was changing the shape of the English countryside. Larger fields, where more food could be grown, were being carved out, protected by longer hedges and longer leases. This was a controversial procedure, ripping up by the roots ancient traditions of ownership and husbandry. To modern eyes the English countryside can look cosy, even dozy, but to country people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries much of it would have looked bleakly new, raw and unfamiliar, with its great, stark squares of tillage. The Church and many writers protested at the devastating effect of all this on the new rural poor. The pain being caused to Old England echoes through plays by Shakespeare and from the angry rural poetry of John Clare.
But the consequence was that by 1700 England’s agriculture was the most productive in Europe, probably twice as productive as that of her nearest rivals. A year later, Jethro Tull introduced his famous horse-drawn seed drill. Soon after that, four-field crop rotation, using clover and turnips to keep fields rich and abundant, was brought in from Flanders. Lacking any scientific knowledge, farmers nevertheless successfully bred new, much larger varieties of sheep and cattle: within a century, at London’s Smithfield market the average weight of a sheep rose from twenty-eight pounds to eighty.4 The changes happened raggedly, with Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Leicestershire leading the way, but by the 1750s or thereabouts they were reaching more of the Midlands and the north too, driven by enthusiastic reforming propaganda in the newspapers, themselves the product of new and faster printing presses. Far fewer people were producing much more food, allowing far more people to do . . . something else. Soon the labour force in the English fields was not 80 per cent of the population, but around 32–33 per cent, an astonishing change.5 Other countries were also learning to feed themselves with fewer farmers, but not to the same extent.
For Britain this meant two things, both important for the leap into capitalism. First, the ancient fear of famine was receding. There would still be times of hunger after wet, cold springs, but surplus grain was being stored and new foods imported. People are less likely to take risks when they are scared of being hungry, so the spirit of adventure thrived. Second, there were now far more people available to become shopkeepers, artisans, traders and the like, paid with coins rather than, in the old days, with food. The new town-dwellers would be the new consumers. Thanks to the accelerated international trade already described, bringing spices, Indian fabrics, wines, tobacco, sugar, silks and ceramics to Britain’s shores, these people now had things to consume – new wants they had not known before. Supplied and protected by her ships, both merchant and military, Britain became a market economy long before she was an industrial one.
A better-fed market economy meant more people. By 1700 life expectancy in England was around thirty-seven years, which sounds very low but was better than France’s twenty-eight. It requires only a very slight improvement in the rate of reproduction and survival to produce a very fast growth in population. By 1850, at the zenith of the British industrial revolution, the population had tripled.6 Without the changes in the fields and villages, this could not have happened. But without the right political system, the same is true. As we have seen, the wars and the political revolution of the previous century had
hacked away much of the independent power of the British monarchy, which now found itself embedded in Parliament. This set-up represented not ‘the people’, but the well-off people such as landowners (who included owners of mines), wealthy merchants and investors in trade, as well as the ruling cliques of towns and cities.
Put like this, Britain might seem to have simply swapped a monarchy for an oligarchy. But the wars of religion had shaken Britain up quite a lot more than that. The overthrow of royal supremacy resulted in a genuinely independent judiciary, while Parliament had sole authority for setting taxation. Britain still had her great landowners, but her tradition of primogeniture kept the numbers of the aristocracy limited, while the trauma of the Civil War led the earls, the barons and the viscounts to tread more carefully. France, by contrast, had an ever-growing aristocracy entitled to many perks and rights and weighing more heavily on their food-producing peasants.
In Britain, one consequence of the relative weakness of the old order was that the bad habit of raising money by selling such perks and monopolies began to wither. Under James I, it has been said, the typical Englishman had a house built with monopoly bricks and heated by monopoly coal. ‘His clothes are held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins’, and he ate ‘monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, monopoly lobsters’.7 The countless trade tariffs and barriers continued across France, Germany and Italy, but were disappearing in Britain. The British developed a national bank using the government’s authority to back its loans, thereby stabilizing the national debt and bringing some sense of security to the capital markets. London was nothing like as important a financial centre as Amsterdam, but it was getting there. After the Bank of England was founded, in 1694, local banks began to spring up all across the country.