SYLLABUS-NARRATIVE
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN
GERARD M. KOOT, HISTORY
DEPARTMENT
THE UNIVERSITY OF
MASSACHUSETTS DARTMOUTH
and
THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT
FOR THE HUMANITIES
at the
INSTITUTE FOR
HISTORICAL RESEARCH, LONDON and
RUTLAND HALL
UNIVERSITY OF
NOTTINGHAM
June 27 to July 30,
2010
Introduction and overview of the topic:
The purpose of this five-week NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers is to develop a critical appreciation for the experience of industrialization in Britain, the historiography of the subject, and the lasting influence these interpretations have had on cultural values. We will study contemporary accounts, seminal interpretations and visit some of the key places that experienced the first industrial revolution. One of my chief aims in the seminar is to demonstrate that historical interpretations are a product of particular times and perspectives. We will ask such questions as: How did contemporary observers interpret what others later called the industrial revolution? How did the historical experience of our authors, and their vision of the future, influence their work? How do the historical sites help us to understand the texts? If history is primarily a scholarly humanistic discipline, what is its relationship to the social sciences, to literature, and the arts? In short, we will attempt to probe our assumptions about the nature of historical scholarship and its social and intellectual uses.
Contemporary works to be studied are: selections from travel accounts and efforts to define the new 'factory system'; a selection of poetry, including poems by William Blake and William Wordsworth; the early nineteenth century debate between the poet Robert Southey and the essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Charles Dickens' novel, Hard Times (1854). The seminar will analyze the following Important twentieth century historical interpretations: John L. and Barbara Hammond, The Town Labourer: The New Civilization, 1760-1832(1917); T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830(1997 ed.); E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (1999 ed.); Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (1987 ed.); Maxine Berg, Luxury & Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain (2005) and some chapters from The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998). All these works are recognized as landmarks in the historiography of the industrial revolution and are works of synthesis rather than narrow monographs. In addition we will use a brief 2004 introduction to the subject, Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change, 1750-1850 (2004).
There can be little argument that the complex process of industrialization is one of the central experiences of human life during the last two centuries. However, at a time when serious questions have been raised about the Euro-centric nature of American humanities education, one might fairly ask why we should examine mostly English authors and study the British experience of the industrial revolution. While historians have noted that China developed considerable large-scale industry a half millennium before the West, it was the industrial revolution in Britain that accelerated a cumulative multiplication of productive power that transformed the West and challenged the very existence of traditional societies around the world. Moreover, it occurred within a capitalist framework and in a nation that made an important contribution to the development of constitutional government. Both factors have a special relevance to our own history. Whether one interprets the origin of industrial capitalism in Britain as a tribute to the genius of free human beings, or as the enslavement of the human spirit by Western materialism and imperialism, or as something in between, it remains one of the crucial contributions of the West to the world's historical development. Further, the power of industry that propelled British goods and guns around the globe also brought its views of the first industrial revolution in its wake. Indeed, interpretations of Britain's industrial revolution not only helped shape values and public policies in Britain, but also fostered attitudes toward capitalism and modern industry elsewhere. Finally, state curriculum guidelines routinely feature the British industrial revolution as an important subject to be studied in the schools.
The seminar will explore the apparent paradox that, while historical scholarship is often said to be about the past, its greatest importance may lie in its ability to serve as a powerful force in shaping the future. In contemporary culture, for example, the pejorative connotation that the term industrial revolution often retains is a result of artistic, literary and historical interpretation. Many of the artists, poets, essayists, and novelists of early nineteenth century Britain, such as Blake and Southey, lamented the momentous changes that the coming of modern industry brought to the landscape, social relations, and the very souls of England's people caught up in its impersonal power. Others were much impressed by humanity's new ability to order nature and to harness its energy for material welfare. Liberals, such as the historian Macaulay, insisted that the well being of the common people was not a matter of "rose covered cottages" but of "steam power and independence." Socialists of the time, as well as subsequent critics of capitalism, have echoed literary critiques of market society and added a thesis of class exploitation. By contrast, modern conservatives have repeated earlier liberal views and protest that society's predilections toward the welfare state and its distrust of capitalism are rooted in a false and unduly pessimistic interpretation of the industrial revolution. Gender roles have long been a crucial subject for debate and recent scholarship on the industrial revolution has argued persuasively that gender roles have been powerfully influenced by the changing nature of work and family brought by the coming of modern industry.
In recent years the 'new economic historians'--those who study economic history by relying heavily upon quantitative evidence, statistical techniques, and economic theory--have challenged the very idea of a British industrial revolution. Instead, they emphasize the relative slow rate of growth of the British economy during the period, as well as the partial and restricted nature of its industrial transformation. While their work, especially the emphasis on regional differences, has brought a new sophistication to the subject, they have not yet been able to convince a majority of historians, or the culture at large, of the broader historical validity of their interpretation. Within contemporary culture, the British industrial revolution continues to conjure up a picture of cataclysmic change, dark satanic mills, urban squalor, poverty, greed, and an uncaring government dominated by a class and ideology that put the interests of some individuals before the well-being of the community. How do we explain these very different views?
As I have argued in my published work, part of the answer may lie in the increasing specialization by which much of modern historical writing, and especially modern economic history, has managed to obscure broad historical issues with a host of very narrow, technical and theoretical topics, which discourage the non-specialist. Added to this may be reluctance among many humanists to study economic issues. By contrast, those interested in economics often see it as an exclusively scientific and mathematical study and tend to neglect historical and humanistic approaches. The danger, of course, is that the problem of the two cultures is being extended to the worlds of the humanities and the social sciences. The systematic study of some of the most influential interpretations of industrialization offers an excellent opportunity for humanists to deal with some of the central concerns of social scientists.
2, The works to be studied, their importance, and the approach
We will begin by reading a brief but excellent current overview of the subject by Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change 1750-1850 (2004). Absent from many modern analytical discussions is the sense of wonder expressed by contemporary accounts of the coming of the factory system. We will use contemporary accounts by both critics and champions of industrialization (see the photocopied selection of primary source material, as well as the printed material and images on the seminar's web site at www.umassd.edu/ir). We will illustrate the nature of Britain's eighteenth century economy, society, and landscape, through selections from Daniel Defoe, Arthur Young, and others. To provide a sense of the nature of the new factory system, the growing scale of enterprises, the alteration of the physical environment, and the new social relations which it required, we will use selections by Patrick Colquhoun, Edward Baines, William Cobbett, Friedrich Engels, Andrew Ure and others.
It is important to remember that the upheavals associated with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars took place during the classic industrial revolution in Britain and that revolutionary ideals and the strains of war mingled readily with social unrest caused by economic change. While the French were defeated in 1815, social and political unrest, fueled by both political ideals and economic dislocation, continued into the 1840's. Writers, artists, and idealists did not always keep these changes separate and portrayed them as combined elements in their work. The four decades after 1790 also saw the creation of an English romantic sensibility that put its indelible stamp on interpretations of the industrial revolution. It was William Blake who coined the phrase "the dark satanic mill" and gave us a new understanding of the implications of the new industrial epoch. We will study some of Blake's poems, such as"Holy Thursday," "The Chimney Sweeper," and "London." While Blake's work was not widely known in his own time, we can better appreciate his apocalyptic vision. The romantic poets and painters endowed nature and traditional society with an idealized spiritual power and created a classical landscape out of the Cumbrian Lake District and the Wye valley that stood in dramatic contrast to the growing cities and the new industrial sites. We will study William Wordsworth's vision of nature in "Tintern Abbey," his evocative portrayal of the passing of traditional values in "Michael," and his view of freedom in "The French Revolution." Contemporary tourists and artists not only visited the idealized locations of the poets but also flocked to the new industrial wonders and depicted the new world of work. We will use slides of works by William Blake, Joseph Wright of Derby, G. P. De Loutherbourg, J. S. Gotman, Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Peter De Wint, Ford Madox Brown and others to interpret contemporary views of nature, industry and work. Later in the seminar, we will have an opportunity to use slides to illustrate the technology of industrialization as well as explore such themes as "Railroads and the Victorian Imagination" and "The Great Exhibition of 1851."
The contemporary debate between the poet Robert Southey and the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay is still often cited in the literature on the industrial revolution. Macaulay's essay of 1830, "Southey's Colloquies," became the classical liberal defense of the coming of industrial society and the utilitarian ideology that accompanied it. In a review of Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829), Southey argued that the material, moral, and cultural conditions of the peoples of Britain were better in the time of Sir Thomas More--not just better in More's utopia--than in contemporary Britain and that the prospects for Britain's future were darkened by industrial progress. Macaulay, on the other hand, insists that those critical of modernity failed to understand that modern industry had already improved the standard of living of the people and in the future would vastly increase their material comforts.
These contemporary documents and visual representations demonstrate that by the 1830's many of the political, economic, social, and philosophical arguments that continue to vex the interpretation of the industrial revolution to this day had been articulated already by perceptive observers. We will probe the historical context and conflicting philosophical and artistic assumptions that led some to champion utilitarianism, political economy, and liberalism, while others believed that a variety of radical and conservative visions of community, religion, government and society would secure the future liberty and independence of the common people.
Macaulay said of Dickens that his novels encouraged a "sullen socialism." It was especially the "Condition of England" novels of the 1840's and 1850's, which sketched the catastrophic interpretation of the industrial revolution and sealed, in Carlyle's phrase, the fate of political economy as the "dismal science" into popular culture and teaching. I have chosen Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854) because it is one of the best known of the social novels. Despite a century of scholarship in economic history, for most the image of the industrial revolution was not constructed by statistical tables or historical documents, but was formed by a literary consciousness consisting of Coketown, the Gradgrinds, Bounderby, and Stephen Blackpool. We will examine Dickens' critique of utilitarianism and political economy and ask what he offered as an alternative social vision. We will also ask what was Dickens' view of the industrial revolution's effect on women and the family. Finally, we will reflect on the relationships between literature and history.
Although the term révolution industrielle had been used earlier in the century to compare the coming of modern industry to the French Revolution, and although Karl Marx had used the term casually, it was later scholars that gave the phrase currency in the English language. By the early twentieth century the orthodox view of the industrial revolution was that of a period of massive technological change and rapid economic growth that had failed to improve the condition of the working classes despite its vast increases in productivity. The best-known early proponents of this view were John L. and Barbara Hammond. They were professional journalists and writers instead of academics. They wrote well. Their work was immensely popular between the wars and had a considerable impact on the development of social democracy and the labor movement in Britain. We will analyze the second of their famous labor trilogy, The Town Labourer: The New Civilization, 1760-1832 (1917). The Hammonds provided an account of the lives of the common people during the industrial revolution that was nearly as concrete as that of Dickens, while it also enjoyed the credibility associated with historical scholarship. While many of the particulars of their interpretation have been seriously modified by modern scholarship, their quotation of a wealth of primary sources, and the moral power of their view, founded a vital tradition of scholarship that remains central to the subject. This classic of economic and social history emphasizes the traumatic impact of industrialization upon the lives and values of the common people, the role of religion in forging the "new discipline" of industrial society, and a critique of the mind and political economy of the rich. We will closely examine the arguments of the Hammonds, their methods, their use of sources, and the political and social ideals that influenced their scholarship
Between the wars, scholars challenged the dominant pessimistic interpretation. Using new categories of documents, neoclassical economic theory, and quantitative methods, professional economic historians suggested that perhaps the material condition of the people during the industrial revolution had not been as bleak as had been argued. The most important of these inter-war scholars was J.H. Clapham, but his work is contained in a massive three-volume study that is too large to use for a seminar. Instead, we will discuss the best selling statement of the revisionist position, T.S. Ashton's classic essay of 1948, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1997 ed.). We will examine Ashton's thesis that the standard of living had improved for the common people during the first half of the nineteenth century and that it was the industrial revolution that had offered the workers an opportunity for independence through the coming of democracy and the organization of trade unions. His use of economic theory and quantitative analysis brought a new sophistication to economic history. Ashton, however, was also interested in the use of economic history in contemporary political debate and played an important role in the conservative counter attack on social democracy on both sides of the Atlantic.
During the 1960's there arose in Britain an influential Marxist interpretation of history. The seminar will discuss Eric J. Hobsbawm's classic British Marxist interpretation of the industrial revolution contained in his widely read synthesis, first published in 1968, Industry and Empire (1999 ed.). Hobsbawm is also the author of a well known four volume study of modern world history which explores the implications of what he calls the dual revolutions of the late eighteenth century: the industrial revolution that began in England and the political revolution that shook France. Hobsbawm's wider perspective will challenge the seminar to examine the insular nature of the previous works. He explicitly links the theme of empire to the origin of the industrial revolution, an approach that we will develop further by using chapters from The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998). Hobsbawm's important moderate Marxist interpretation of history will encourage us to examine such topics as class-consciousness, the debate about slavery and capitalism, the economic interpretation of imperialism, and the wider revolutionary implications of the British industrial revolution upon world history.
During recent years, scholarship on the industrial revolution has raised many previously neglected issues. The most far reaching of these is the impact of industrialization upon gender roles, women, and the family. Although women scholars did important work on this in the early 20th century, it is the recent flood of scholarship on the history of women that has brought these perspectives to the foreground. We will use the classic and influential 1978 study, Women, Work, and Family (1987 ed.), by Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott. Both of these scholars were trained as social historians and their work will allow us to examine their important use of historical sociology, historical demography, the comparative method and their feminist perspective. We will examine why Tilly and Scott suggest that, despite the suffering that the industrial revolution inflicted upon the lives of many women and children, women and men were able to pursue family strategies that permitted a remarkable continuity in family life. At the same time, industrialization helped create ideals of domesticity, laws that controlled the working lives of women, new patterns of fertility and work, and the rise of the male demand for a "family wage." Such factors combined to construct the classic gender roles of nineteenth century industrial society that retain a powerful influence in our own time.
During the last third of the 20th century, the 'new economic history,' which uses sophisticated tools of economic and statistical analysis, challenged many of the long held assumptions about the nature of the industrial revolution. Its conclusions have created a new orthodoxy among economic historians, which emphasizes that aggregate British economic growth was moderate during the classical period of industrialization and that many sectors and regions remained fairly traditional before 1850. At the same time, contemporary historians, such as Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, while agreeing with the new orthodoxy that aggregate rates of growth and technological change have indeed been slower, and what were called the new 'factories' were confined to particular regions and industries during the classic period of industrialization, the overall result nonetheless remained revolutionary. Not only, these historians insist, did the dynamic regions and industries experience their own dramatic transformation in technology, the physical environment, the scale of enterprises, the social roles of owners and workers, demographic behavior and the place of the family and child and female labor in their own localities, which were so widely noted by contemporaries, but these revolutionary changes encouraged new social and intellectual attitudes, patterns of trade, roles for the state, forms of politics, notions of class, and changes of social relations that eventually transformed more traditional industries and regions. Unlike the economic historians, however, who assume that the classical model of industrialization of steam driven large factories was a necessary stage through which manufacturing eventually had to pass toward a higher standard of living, recent work on British industrialization is much less deterministic. Instead of relying primarily upon the economists' growth models and stage theories, which, as Berg argues, have narrowed our account of historical processes to aggregate and macroeconomic analysis," recent work emphasizes the complex relationships between social history, economic history and the history of technology to offer an account of the "age of manufactures" which sees an intricate web of improvement and decline, large and small scale production, and machine and hand processes that created the new and revolutionary market society. More recently, historians such as Maxine Berg have sought to shift the debate, which has long emphasized the supply side, to the side of demand.
Reflecting the mass appeal of internationally available designer and luxury goods in contemporary rich societies, historians have recently pointed to consumer demand and international trade as underlying factors of the industrial revolution. We will use Maxine Berg's influential and elegantly written study, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth Century Britain (2005), to study this scholarship. Already in the 18th century, David Hume explained: "if we consult history, we shall find, that in most nations foreign trade has preceded any refinement in home manufactures, and given birth to domestic luxury…Thus men become acquainted with the pleasures of luxury, and the profits of commerce; and their delicacy and industry being once awakened, carry them on to further improvements in every branch of domestic as well as foreign trade." Berg argues that Britain was especially successful in responding to the new commodity trade with Asia. First, Britain imported Asian luxuries. Then it created its own designs for Asian goods and had these made in Asia for the British and European market. Finally, it manufactured these luxury goods at home. However, instead of just imitating Asian luxury goods, Britain created its own versions, invented new ones, and used new materials. Other Europeans also manufactured the new luxury goods but it was the British who dominated the luxury trade by the early 19th century. We still recognize some of the famous products: Wedgwood and Dalton ceramics, Boulton candlesticks and cutlery, Paisley silks, and Chippendale furniture. Add to these the new colonial groceries of tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, sugar and spices. All these, according to Berg, and a myriad of other household goods, none of them necessities, drove the 18th century industrial revolution in Britain. By the late 18th century, Britain was the richest nation in Europe with the largest middle class that could afford such luxuries. Moreover, Britain had reared up in America a consumer society with a white population that had an even higher standard of living than in Britain with an insatiable demand for British 'luxury' goods. American independence did nothing to dim this demand. Britain's defeat of Napoleonic France expanded demand for its goods on the Continent and to its growing formal and informal Empire. These goods were not the fabulous luxuries of Oriental or European royal aristocratic courts, but middle class luxuries that signaled the arrival of a consumer society that fueled the first industrial revolution and made Britain the 'workshop of the world.' We will not only seek to understand Berg's influential work but we will ask how her views, like those of our other authors, reflect contemporary concerns and values.
3, Structure, cooperative learning groups and seminar essays
The seminar will meet three mornings per week from 9 to 12 with a short break for "morning coffee and biscuits." Except during the first week, Wednesdays are our travel days. During the fourth week we will be away Wednesday through Friday. I will be available for individual meetings with participants Monday through Thursday.
Seminar participants will be organized into four cooperative learning groups. Each group will lead the discussion on a rotating basis, suggest questions, present information on the authors or artists, and provide an historical context for their work. We will learn from each other and all of us will attempt to both listen and talk.
Since the process of writing is as crucial to learning as reading and talking, each participant will be asked to keep a journal in which to record daily reactions to the reading, discussions, and site visits. A few participants will be asked to share these reflections during each meeting. Each participant will also write an interpretive essay (8-10 pages) or project on any topic related to the seminar. Projects can be in the form of a well-developed and scholarly teaching unit. Interpretive essays or projects may deal with the participant's reaction to the texts studied and to the wider issues raised or consist of original research topics. Essays or projects will be discussed within each cooperative learning group and I will be happy to read, comment on and discuss all essays provided to me. Participants will submit an essay or project to be published on our seminar web site: http://www.umassd.edu/ir. Please include references and a bibliography. Please send me an electronic version of your essay or project as soon as possible but no later than Labor Day. Keep the formatting as simple as possible so that your essays can be posted more easily on the web. Please use a 12pt Times font with a line and a half spacing. If you include illustrations, please include these within a MS Word document (as a separate paragraph rather than in the middle of the text), or place them at the end. For projects, you may want to use a PowerPoint format that includes a good deal of textual analysis and proper scholarly documentation.