The Industrial Revolution and the Working Classes: A Brief Introduction into the Historiography of...

HIST 7020DR. SELWOOD

The Industrial Revolution and the Working Classes

A Brief Introduction into the Historiography of the Standard ofLiving Controversy

Tyler J. Kubik11/6/2014

Kubik, The Industrial Revolution and the Working Classes

Introduction

Historians have debated the meaning, extent, and effects of

the period known as the Industrial Revolution in Britain—roughly

1760-1832—for over a century. While all these questions are

debatable, that there was “a set of changes that occurred in

Britain between about 1760 and 1830 that irreversibly altered

Britain’s economy and society”—changes that went beyond merely

“the way [in which] goods and services were produced”—is beyond

question.1 Historians have posited the cause of this change, its

direction, its magnitude, and what it entailed for the human

condition, especially for those on the lower rungs of the

socioeconomic ladder, with mixed success.

Whether the Industrial Revolution increased misery or

happiness has been one of the central planes of inquiry in the

historiography of the Industrial Revolution, as well as one of

the most hotly contested. Joel Mokyr, in a historiographical

essay on the causes and controversies surrounding the Industrial

Revolution, identified four distinct schools of thought regarding

1 Joel Mokyr, The Industrial Revolution in Britain (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1999),6; Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 4.

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the emphasis placed on changes occurring during this period and

why they mattered. 2 The Social Change School—which viewed the

alteration of social interactions precipitated by the changing

structure of economic exchange as a fundamental discontinuity and

break with the past, as well as generally objectionable—and its

opponents will occupy a central place in the following

discussion. These will be referred to here as the pessimist and

optimist schools, respectively, as a sizable body of historical

work has likewise done. E.P. Thompson is perhaps the most famous

historian of the pessimist school, and occupies a prominent place

in the historiography of the effect of the Industrial Revolution

on the working classes. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class

(1963) classically contended that industrialization left behind

many of the working classes, although in its stead the working

class was forged.

Over the course of this essay, it will be suggested, as R.M.

Hartwell firmly argued, that while it is virtually impossible to

quantify the magnitude of the change in the standard of living

2 Mokyr, British Industrial Revolution, 7-8. They are as follows: The Social Change School, the Industrial Organization School, the Macroeconomic School, and the Technological School.

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over this period with certainty—whether by real wages,

consumption data, or other indicators—the preponderance of

evidence suggests the direction of the change is tilted in favor

of an increasing standard of living.3 Accordingly, this essay

will favor the optimist view of the Industrial Revolution, not so

much because of any positive virtues or indisputable certainty in

the methodology or reasoning of this group, but due to pervasive

and insurmountable defects in the methodology and reasoning of

the pessimist school, which will be considered below. The focus

of this essay will not be on the objective, material conditions

of the working classes, although these factors will be considered

throughout, but on the more subjective features of the debate

belabored by E.P. Thompson, concerning workers perceptions of

their condition, their choices, and the historical treatment of

these considerations.

Causes of the Industrial Revolution

While not the focus of the present essay, it is useful to

explain some of the many historical attempts to exposit the cause

3 R.M. Hartwell, “The Rising Standard of Living in England, 1800-1850,” The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 13, no. 3 (1961): 412. This first point will notbe substantiated in any great deal over the course of this essay due to space limitations, although exposition of the topic must naturally occur throughout.

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of the Industrial Revolution and why it began in Britain. Most

recently, three explanations have been the center of attention:

the Incentives School, the Ideological School, and the Historical

Materialist School.4 The first group sees the Industrial

Revolution as a puzzle that can be explained once we understand

what incentives made the invention of labor-saving machinery in

Britain advantageous to undertake. Thus, the correct incentives

were necessary and perquisite to an Industrial Revolution in

Britain.5 The Ideological school sees the perquisite for the

creation of incentives conducive to growth as an ideological

climate receptive to such changes.6 The historical materialists

take cues from each of the preceding schools, believing that

ideology and values have an important place in the narrative, but

4 Gregory Clark, “A Review Essay on The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain1700-1850 by Joel Mokyr,” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 1 (2012): 85-86.5 See Broadberry, Stephen and Bishnupriya Gupta. “Lancashire, India, and Shifting Competitive Advantage in Cotton Textiles, 1700–1850: The Neglected Role of Factor Prices.” Economic History Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 279-305; Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).6 See Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010).

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this understanding is incomplete if it is not realized ideology

is constrained the material circumstances.7

For Robert C. Allen, of the incentives school, high wages in

Britain provided an impetus to greater research and development

that could yield labor-saving inventions that would lower the

cost of production.8 Allen notes that the inventions during this

period were greatly skewed towards saving labor over other

efficiency-increasing purposes, thus supporting his hypothesis.9

He also attributed the presence of large deposits of coal to

power the labor-saving machinery as crucial to the Industrial

Revolution. Deirdre McCloskey, a champion of the ideological

school, argued vigorously against the incentives approach,

contending that cheap coal could not explain the increasing

innovation across a wide expanse of industries, as Allen wanted

to argue.10 Mokyr takes a different approach, arguing that it was

not the changed status of the entrepreneur and bourgeois virtues

that led to the Industrial Revolution, but a change in the people7 See Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).8 Robert C. Allen, “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention, and the Scientific Revolution,” Economic History Review 64, no.2 (May 2011): 359–64.9 Ibid., “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British,” 371-4.10 Clark, “A Review Essay,” 90.

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caused by the Enlightenment and its rationalism.11 A consensus

view on the singular driving cause of the Industrial Revolution

that would explain why it happened in Britain in the late

eighteenth century is not forthcoming, despite the flurry of

historical activity on the subject.

It Begins with Toynbee

The beginning of the historical treatment of the Industrial

Revolution’s legacy can be largely credited to the work of Arnold

Toynbee, a British social historian at Oxford University who

delivered immensely popular lectures, the notes from which were

collected and published in 1884 after his untimely death a year

earlier.12 As his nephew Arnold J. Toynbee, the noted historian

and philosopher of history, explained in the introduction to the

1956 edition of his father’s lectures:

Toynbee was the first economic historian to think of, and to

set out to describe, the Industrial Revolution as a single

great historical event, in which all the details come

together to make an intelligent and significant picture. In

11 Ibid., 92.12 Arnold J. Toynbee, preface to The Industrial Revolution by Arnold Toynbee (Boston:Beacon Press, 1968), ix; R.M. Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (London: Methuen & Co., 1971), 111.

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doing this, he created the frame within which all subsequent

work on the Industrial Revolution has been carried out.13

Toynbee’s vision of the Industrial Revolution—a term which he

popularized14—was a dim, but still magisterial one: In this

version, “the essence of the Industrial Revolution,” he said,

“[was] the substitution of competition for medieval regulations

which had previously controlled the production and distribution

of wealth,”15 or the transition from mercantilism to capitalism.

In such a situation of rapid change, the historian should pay

close attention to the social problems during the era of the

Industrial Revolution both to understand the period properly and

comprehend the continuity of the social problems.16

All was not rosy for Toynbee. In a chapter entitled “The

Decay of the Yeomanry,” Toynbee remarked “that the more we

examine the actual cause of affairs, the more we are amazed at

the unnecessary suffering that has been inflicted upon the

people,” which he believed could be seen during the Industrial

Revolution.17 Toynbee went on to claim that “the agricultural 13 Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution, ix.14 Mokyr, British Industrial Revolution, 6.15 Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution, 58.16 Ibid., 6.17 Ibid., 30.

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laborer…in the south of England, was much better off in the

middle of the eighteenth century than his descendants were in the

middle of the nineteenth,” although he concurrently concludes

that the condition of the artisans had improved “since Adam

Smith’s time.”18 Most significantly, Toynbee, in concluding his

chapter on the “Chief Features of the Revolution,” stated the

thesis that would spark successive generations of historians,

namely, that a measured increased in the standard of living of

the working classes—wealth—doesn’t necessarily correspond with an

increase in the happiness of these groups—well-being.19

The Age of Hammond and Clapham

Remarks such as these set off later researchers such as J.L.

and Barbara Hammond who would write about those individuals and

groups who experienced suffering and misery between 1760 and

1832. Their works, which include The Village Labourer, The Town Labourer,

The Skilled Labourer, The Bleak Age, and The Rise of Modern Industry, all

examined the effects that the Industrial Revolution had on the

working classes, in what we would now consider social history.

18 Ibid., 41-3.19 Ibid., 66. T.S. Ashton, R.M. Hartwell, E.J. Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and countless others have explicitly recognized this possibility in their works.

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The Hammonds’ books described “rapacious landlords and

conscienceless capitalists,”20 and focused on the social problems

they believed were created or exacerbated by the Industrial

Revolution. For all their browbeating of capitalism and

industrialization, 21 the Hammonds had chinks in their armor that

would be exploited by later historians. For instance, J.L.

Hammond observed that it was not the majority of the working

classes that suffered calamities, stating, notoriously, “that so

far as statistics can measure material improvement there was

improvement.”22 Speaking about working classes, the Industrial

Revolution “offered him [the worker] one incentive and one only,

the hope of becoming rich. For he lived in a world where more men

were becoming rich, and where it was easier for a man, starting

poor, to become rich, than at any other time in history”23; this

meant Hammond had conceded that the Industrial Revolution

20 David Cannadine, “The present and the past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880-1980,” Past and Present 103 (1984): 135.21 Cannadine, “Present and Past,” 135. Both the Hammonds and the Webbs (historians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, contemporaries of the Hammonds), saw theIR as a lesson that laissez faire capitalism needs to be replaced with trade unionism and regulation.22 J.L. Hammond, “The Industrial Revolution and discontent,” Economic History Review 2, no. 2 (January 1930): 217-219.23 Hammond, “The Industrial Revolution and discontent,” 223.

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increased opportunities for the laboring poor, something that we

will see undermines the pessimist theory.

Following the Hammonds, historians such as John Clapham in

his An Economic History of Modern Britain kept up with the theme of the

divergence between prosperity and happiness, famously arguing

that “Economic advance is not the same thing as human

progress.”24 Clapham, however, was no pessimist. Considered the

resolute founder of the optimist school,25 Clapham engaged in a

prolonged debate with the Hammonds over the legacy of the

Industrial Revolution. Clapham’s work used a variety of

statistical data—based on earlier studies by A.L. Bowley and G.H.

Wood26—to conclude that the average workers real wages increased,

meaning nominal wages increased at a degree exceeding the rate of

increase of the cost of living. Even the profound optimism of

Clapham had its limits; he had noted that even by 1850, half of 24 John H. Clapham, Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750 (London;New York: Cambridge University Press, 1949), xvii. Though, Clapham himself took an optimistic view of the Industrial Revolution. He did not think it produced an abundance of immiseration as the Hammonds and later historians thought it did. In his words, from An Economic History of Modern Britain: the Early Railway Age, 1820-1850, he sought to erase “the legend that everything was getting worse for the working man, down to some unspecified date between the drafting of thePeople’s Charter and the Great Exhibition”; Ibid., vii.25 E.J. Hobsbawm, “The British Standard of Living 1790-1850,” The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 10, no. 1 (August 1957): 48.26 Hartwell, “Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England: A Methodological Inquiry,” Journal of Economic History (June 1959): 222-3.

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the workers remained in positions that the industrial revolution

had not reached.27

As we can see, despite strong conclusions, Toynbee, Clapham

and the Hammonds each expressed reservations about the effects of

the Industrial Revolution on the working classes, a profound

contradiction between technological progress and social dilemma

that would shape the dialogue on industrialization throughout the

twentieth century.

Social Change & the Standard of Living Debate

The standard of living debate—that was inaugurated during

the Industrial Revolution itself—found its debates intensified in

the 1950’s and 1960’s. There has often been a rough correlation

between one’s ideological inclinations and the legacy one accords

to the Industrial Revolution. Socialists such as E.P. Thompson

and Eric Hobsbawm have derided industrial capitalism as

exploitative and a manufacturer of misery—despite its nominal

increases in the measured standard of living—while classical

liberals and conservative optimists such as Nobel laureate F.A.

Hayek, T.S. Ashton, and R.M. Hartwell emphasized that the rise of

27 Mokyr, British Industrial Revolution, 248.

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industrial capitalism had a liberating effect. They applauded

that it freed the working classes from the oppression of

mercantilist systems through which the government distributed

special benefits, such as monopolies, to the politically favored

(the rich and powerful). The pessimist case, however, has

remained persuasive for many, especially in public memory.28 As

Hobsbawm memorably put it, “At no other period in modern British

history [1820’s to the 1840’s] have the common people been so

persistently, profoundly, and often desperately dissatisfied.”29

In addition to the sizable differences in conclusions, there

have also been methodological differences evident in the

historical work on the period. Social historians have emphasized

qualitative analysis of the effect of the Industrial Revolution

on the working classes rather than quantitative analysis, as

economic historians have always gravitated to in their efforts to

use statistics to study and measure historical change.30 E.P.

Thompson was the most famous expositor of the qualitative

viewpoint, which he used to great effect in his seminal 1963 28 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., review of Capitalism and the Historians, edited by F.A. Hayek, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 293 (May 1954): 177-8.29 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (New York: The New Press, 1999), 51.30 The discipline is often referred to as econometrics or cliometrics.

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work, The Making of the English Working Class. Following on the heels of

the debate between Eric Hobsbawm and R.M. Hartwell in the

economic history journals, he excoriated earlier economic

historians for using and abusing “wage-series, price-series, and

statistical indices”—quantitative data—as proxies for happiness

and misery—a qualitative condition.31 Most historians agreed;

Donald McCloskey, for instance, argued that “what is measured…

does not measure all of human happiness and does not measure what

it measures perfectly well.”32 As Thompson rightly noted, it is

conceivable that individual standards of living can rise while

the subjective mental and physical states of these individuals

can deteriorate, echoing Toynbee.33 However, he failed to

perceive the weakness in his own position relative to that of the

economic historians, viz. that the use of economic data to

measure standards of living is a much closer approximation than

31 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 210.32 D.N. McCloskey, “The Industrial Revolution 1780-1860: A Survey,” in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Volume 1: 1700-1860, ed. R.C. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 242. “Statistics,” J.L. Hammond said “should only [be] a subordinate part [of one’s] estimate” ofthe measurement of enjoyment and suffering”; Hammond, “The Industrial Revolution and discontent,” 220.33 In this sense, debates on the standard of living are much more objective and measurable, while quality of life is a subjective, felt phenomenon that inherently cannot be measured.

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the aggregation of vast swaths of qualitative, descriptive

evidence as an approximation of happiness or misery. There also

exists a great danger of selection bias in choosing qualitative

data that fits one’s own conclusions, since there are actual,

physical (spatial) limitations in what can be presented in a book

length study.34 To summarize the problem succinctly, it is “hard

to measure happiness for any group at any point in time,”35 and

any method of doing so must either be indirect or incomplete.36

Nonetheless, Thompson stressed some important conclusions

that ought to be evaluated by the weight of the evidence.

Thompson asserted that during the Industrial Revolution, the

working classes were subjected to “intensified exploitation,

34 Admittedly, the same bias can work its way into economic studies as well, but not because of physical constraints.35 Peter H. Lindert, “Unequal Living Standards,” in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, Volume 1: 1700-1860, ed. R.C. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 359. In addition: “The truth is that it is not possible to compare the welfare of two groups of people separated widely in time and space”; T.S. Ashton, “The Standard of Life of the Workers in England, 1790-1830,” The Journal of Economic History 9 (Fall 1949): 33; “It is difficult enough to strike a balance between what is good for people and what they consider desirable…It is even more difficult to assign relative weights to incommensurables, including matters which can hardly be measured at all”; E.J. Hobsbawm, “The Standard of Living Debate,” in The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution, ed. Arthur J. Taylor (London: Methuen & Co., 1975), 186.36 Even the voluminous studies of Thompson and the Hammonds, that shed light on hundreds or thousands of voices who expressed their misery or dissatisfaction with their material condition, must necessarily ignore countless other, possibly alternative, perspectives.

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greater insecurity, and increasing human misery.”37 Despite the

political overtones of the word exploitation, it is important to

evaluate whether the term succeeds as an accurate descriptive

term of the nature of labor arrangements during the Industrial

Revolution. This might involve evaluating whether the workers’

happiness or misery increased; but, as we’ve seen, such a

calculation leaves much to be desired both qualitatively and

quantitatively. In his chapter in McCloskey’s Economic History of

Britain since 1700, entitled “Unequal living standards,” Peter

Lindert provides us with a saving grace: “To weigh seemingly

immeasurable qualities of life against the purchasing power of

income or consumption, the key is to use the values of the people

whose welfare is being weighted.”38 This means one needs to

examine the settings in which workers, for example, chose between

various employments, with their choice indicating they prefer the

37 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 212. Here, it is proper to note that the use of the word exploitation in any historical work to describe voluntarily contracted employment arrangements is extremely problematic. Though the historian cannot avoid inputting his or her own bias into their work, the use of value-laden languagesuch as exploitation should be avoided in favor of descriptive, value-neutral language.38 Lindert, “Unequal Living Standards,” 376.

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situation they chose to the others they had forgone.39 What is

clear from the migration of individuals during this period is

that many workers, on their own volition, chose to move to cities

and take up jobs in the factory.40 Nutrition had traditionally

been a mark in favor of the pessimist case, with even the more

recent optimistic estimates observing a mild decrease in calories

per capita.41 However, as Horrell and Oxley observe, though it

may have been that the range of choices was unhealthier, “people

chose palatability and ease of effort over (little understood)

nutritive content [emphasis added].”42 It might be regrettable

that people chose an unhealthy or calorically inferior food

39 On the discipline of human action, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatiseon Economics, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves, vol. 1 (Indianapolis, In.: Liberty Fund, 2007). This, states Mises, is an a priori truth deduced from the action axiom, namely that human action is purposeful conduct invoked to remove felt uneasiness, whereby all action is necessarily indicative that one prefers the chosen state of affairs to the others that were forgone. In essence, humans act in order “to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one”; so if workers chose employment on the filthy, dangerous factory floor over the backbreaking labor of the fields, we must accept that these individuals believed the former to be more desirable than the latter; Ibid., 11-13.40 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 4. Surprisingly, as Lindert notes, the increase in population of cities and industrial jobs during this period was not as significant as one might think. As he states, “the rise of industrial jobs…wasonly about 10 per cent of the labour force… [and] the rise of the share of thepopulation living in cities was only 14.89 per cent”; Lindert, “Unequal LivingStandards,” 377.41 Sara Horrell, and Deborah Oxley, “Bringing Home the Bacon? Regional Nutrition, Stature, and Gender in the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 65, no. 4 (November 2012): 1354.42 Ibid., 1355.

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product for consumption, but this is hardly something one can

indict the Industrial Revolution with, as we observe this

phenomenon today, when people chose processed foods over fresh

ones. In The state of the poor, a study written by Sir Frederic Morton

Eden in 1797, Eden discovered that working class wages were not

insufficient for survival, provided the poor used their resources

economically, but this was often not the case, as the poor tended

to be victims of their own injudiciousness.43 If the condition of

the poor was largely a function of their own choices, it is

problematic to second guess their decision by imposing present-

day evaluations of what options improved the standard of living

of the poor.

Additional complaints of pessimists have ranged from

charging the Industrial Revolution with increasing the

concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich, failing to

provide any discernible culture, and perverting the nature of

labor. Invariably, much of the discussion has delved into

arguments over values and the proper operation of the social

43 Sir Frederic Morton Eden, The state of the poor: or, an history of the labouring classes in England, vol. 1 (1797), 491, quoted in Horrell and Oxley, “Bringing Home the Bacon,” 1356.

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system, something the historian has no exceptional faculty for.

Thus, differing conceptions of what factors contributed (most) to

happiness have permeated the conversation. “Whereas some argued

that the result was harmful, with deleterious effects on morals

health, happiness, and income [Toynbee, Thompson, Hobsbawm, the

Webbs, the Hammonds], others claimed that industrialism freed men

from the old bondages of soil and weather, of a constrictive

social system, and gave them opportunities for a larger and

richer way of life [Ashton, Hayek, Hartwell, Emma Griffin,

McCloskey, Clapham].”44

Consulting over 350 autobiographies (5) composed by members

of the working class who lived through the Industrial Revolution,

and addressing the theme “that the industrial revolution

degraded and exploited workers,”45 historian Emma Griffin

concluded that these workers—contrary to what social historians

such as the Hammonds, Webbs, and E.P. Thompson had been telling

us—saw the period as one of expanded opportunity, even going so

far as to call it the “dawn of liberty,”46 despite all the

44 Hartwell, “A Methodological Inquiry,” 242.45 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 5, 10.46 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 20.

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hardships they faced. It was an age of growth in working classes’

opportunities, personal freedom, empowerment, increased work and

cultural enrichment of both men and women, in varying degrees.47

Additionally, according to Griffin there must be the recognition

that although the pre-industrial society “sheltered the very

young from the workplace…it also left them without sufficient

food,” so “we should be careful not to idealise [sic] their

lot.”48 Indeed, this idealization of the pre-industrial period as

a golden age has been problematic since it was first propounded

by Friedrich Engels in 1844.49 Engels classic formulation stated

that “the workers vegetated throughout a passably comfortable

existence, leading a righteous and peaceful life in all piety and

probity; and their material position was far better than that of

their successors.”50

47 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 19, 244-5.48 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 245.49 Hartwell, “A Methodological Inquiry,” 246. See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). Griffin claims that Toynbee, the Webbs, and the Hammonds are all derivative works from Engels, each taking on the theme that there were “declining living standards accompanied by a deterioration in social life” as well as a corresponding embellishment regarding the idyllic conditions of early eighteenth century Britain; Griffin,Liberty’s Dawn, 12.50 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), 2

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In order to assert that the industrial period was a

harbinger of misery and brought a diminution in the standard of

life of the working classes, as Engels thought, the period before

must be typified as correspondingly better. The comparisons are

all too often never made, leaving it to be assumed that because

of how bad conditions were during the industrial revolution, it

could not have been worse in the preceding period.51 Sidney and

Beatrice Webb, for example, believed that “if the Chartists in

1837 has called for a comparison of their time with 1787, and had

obtained a fair account of the actual social life of the working

man at the two periods, it is almost certain that they would have

recorded a positive decline in the standard of life of large

classes of the population.”52 The pessimist indictment of

industrialism, however, is misplaced. This can be accounted for

due to their ignorance of the autobiographical working-class

literature: “[I]t is not possible to frame the autobiographical

literature within the dark interpretation without imposing a

51 Hartwell, “A Methodological Inquiry,” 245. As such, the implicit comparisonmade is between the nineteenth century and the twentieth, rather than the relevant comparison between the nineteenth and eighteenth. 52 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Labour in the Longest Reign (Fabian Tract 75; London: The Fabian Society, 1897), 2, quoted in Hobsbawm, “The British Standard of Living,” 61.

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wilful distortion upon the messages our writers are seeking to

communicate.”53 Emma Griffin, like antecedent Ivy Pinchbeck,54

concluded that for women the Industrial Revolution was an

important driver that struck a first blow against the tyranny of

patriarchy for women, whose lot increased during the period.

Joyce Burnette also added to our understanding of the Industrial

Revolution’s effect on women, disagreeing with Humphries and Berg

who suggested women were paid customarily, rather than with

market wages.55 Burnette contended that the wage gap could not be

explained as a product of discrimination, as most would assume,

since a combination of other factors could account for most of

the gap.56 Using statistics, she found that “most of the work

53 Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn, 16. On the lack of research going into the autobiographies, she says “it is surely surprising that in spite of ongoing interest in how the industrial revolution was experienced by the poor, no one has opened the pages of the books and notebooks where the poor wrote about just that”; Ibid.54 Pinchbeck, in her book Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (London: Routlege,1930), 311, stated "Although the workers did not participate to the extent they might have done in the advantages arising from the use of machinery, yet even so, for the majority of workers the factory meant higher wages, better food and clothing and an improved standard of living. This was especially so in the case of women.”55 Joyce Burnette, “An Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap during the Industrial Revolution in Britain,” Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (May 1997): 257. See Maxine Berg, “What Difference Did Women's Work Make to the IndustrialRevolution?” History Workshop, no. 35 (Spring 1993): 22-44; Jane Humphries, “’Lurking in the wings . . .’: Women in the Historiography of the Industrial Revolution.” Business & Economic History, 2nd ser., 20 (1991): 32-44.56 Burnette, “Female-Male Wage Gap,” 278.

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women did was performed in competitive markets where they

received market wages,”57 rather than monopolistic market where

they could receive customary wages. Thus, although women were

discriminated against during the Industrial Revolution as they

were through most of human history, the job market was usually

not where it happened.

Much more could be said about the problems in the pessimist

historiography, if only there were time and space to do so.

Suffice it to say that E.P. Thompson and other pessimists’

admonitions that it is the voices of the working class men and

women themselves that need to acknowledged and relegated from

obscurity, they have often ignored the most important instances

of their preferences, including the autobiographical literature

and individual choices, such as when workers both chose to leave

the countryside to go to the cities and to consume less

nutritious meals over more nutritious ones, among numerous other

instances.

CONCLUSION

57 Ibid., 279.

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As of late, British historiography has been less friendly to

the pessimistic interpretation of the Industrial Revolution.58

Notable works by Mokyr, Allen, Clark, Griffin, and McCloskey,

while recognizing, as that Ashton did in 1949, that “the

existence of two groups within the working class needs to be

recognized,”59 have dismissed the theory that the Industrial

Revolution on average made things worse for the working

classes.60 The qualitative issues raised by Thompson have

received less discussion in recent years, although they always

loom large in any discussions on the standard of living, even if

they have not been dealt with in any great depth. Conversely, the

vigorous optimism of individuals such as Clapham and Ashton has

also been discarded, in favor of a more nuanced approach. The

Industrial Revolution is not seen as a period of substantial

growth, but one that points in the direction of growth rather

58 Some would say that the recent optimism goes back to the publication of Peter Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson’s 1983 article “English Workers’ Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look;” which posited a doubling of real wages between 1819 and 1851; Joel Mokyr, “Is There Still Life in the Pessimist Case? Consumption during the Industrial Revolution, 1790-1830,” The Journal of Economic History 48, no. 1 (Mach 1988): 71-3.59 T.S. Ashton, “The Standard of Life,” 38.60 Per se, these works (excepting Griffin) have concerned the cause of the Industrial Revolution, but have each dealt with the standard of living controversy in explicit terms.

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than decay, even if the exact change cannot be measured with

scientific specificity. Finally, both optimists and pessimists

have recognized crucial arrows in the opposition’s quiver:

Optimists have recognized that the subjective mental states of

misery or happiness are difficult to capture in statistics but

are nevertheless important, while pessimists have admitted that

statistics are important ways to substantiate historical

theories, even if they are insufficient on their own. In

addition, as Hartwell wrote 53 years ago in the midst of his

debate with Hobsbawm, both sides recognize “it is as foolish to

ignore the sufferings of this period as to deny the wealth and

opportunities created by the new industry.”61

What is ahead for the standard of living debate? There will

always be additional statistics drudged up from dispersed

archives that can be incorporated into the equations calculating

wages or prices during the period, just as there will be room for

additional personal narratives in the historiography of the

working class (as both Jane Humphries62 and Emma Griffin have

61 Hartwell, “The Rising Standard,” 413.62 See Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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recently shown). Additionally, there exists a large vacuum where

studies of women’s roles in the Industrial Revolution can be

examined, as well as the effects it had on them. That being said,

it seems unlikely that another regression being run is going to

tip the scale substantially in any direction, since the body of

the historiography is a testament to the studies that run

opposite on each side of the debate. The Industrial Revolution,

for all it has failed to do and all those who failed to benefit

from it, was the beginning of a set of changes that profoundly

altered the course of British history for the better, setting the

pace of technological change and condition of the working classes

on an exponential path of advancement.

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Books:

Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Ashton, T.S. The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830. London; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Clapham, John H. Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750. London; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1949.

Clapham, John H. An Economic History of Modern Britain: the Early Railway Age, 1820-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926.

Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Eden, Sir Frederic Morton. The state of the poor: or, an history of the labouring classes in England. Vol. 1. 1797.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working-Class in England. Translated by Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892.

Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013.

Hammond, J.L. and Barbara. The Rise of Modern Industry. 7th ed. London: Methuen & Co., 1947.

Hartwell, R.M. The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth. London, Methuen &Co., 1971.

Hartwell, R.M., ed. The Industrial Revolution. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

Hayek, F.A., ed. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.

Henderson, W.O. and W.H. Chalconer. Introduction to The Condition of the Working-Class in England, by Friedrich Engels. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958.

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Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. New York: The New Press, 1999.

Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

McCloskey, Donald. The Economic History of Britain since 1700. Vol. 1, 1700-1860.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Mokyr, Joel, ed. The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective. Boulder,Co.: Westview Press, 1999.

Mokyr, Joel. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010.

Musson, A.E. The Growth of British Industry. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1978.

Taylor, Arthur J., ed. The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrial Revolution. London: Methuen & Co., 1975.

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.

Toynbee, Arnold. The Industrial Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

von Mises, Ludwig. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Edited by Bettina Bien Greaves. Vol. 1. Indianapolis, In.: Liberty Fund, 2007.

Articles:

Allen, R. C. “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention, and the Scientific Revolution.” Economic History Review 64, no. 2 (May 2011): 357–84.

Ashton, T.S. “The Standard of Life of the Workers in England, 1790-1830.” The Journal of Economic History 9 (Fall 1949): 19-38.

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Ashworth, William J. “The British industrial revolution and the ideological revolution: Science, Neoliberalism and History.” History of Science 52, no. 2 (June 2014): 178-199.

Berg, Maxine. “What Difference Did Women's Work Make to the IndustrialRevolution?” History Workshop, no. 35 (Spring 1993): 22-44

Broadberry, Stephen and Bishnupriya Gupta. “Lancashire, India, and Shifting Competitive Advantage in Cotton Textiles, 1700–1850: TheNeglected Role of Factor Prices.” Economic History Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 279–305.

Burnette, Joyce. “An Investigation of the Female-Male Wage Gap during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.” Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (May 1997): 257–81.

Cannadine, David. “The present and the past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880-1980.” Past and Present 103 (1984): 131-172.

Clapham, J.H. Review of The Village Labourer, 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill by J. L. and Barbara Hammond; Common Landand Inclosure, by E.C.K. Gonner. The Economic Journal 22, no. 86 (June 1912): 248-55.

Clark, Gregory. “A Review Essay on The Enlightened Economy: An Economic Historyof Britain 1700-1850 by Joel Mokyr.” Journal of Economic Literature 50, no. 1(2012): 85-95.

Feinstein, Charles. “Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution.” The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (September 1998):625-58.

Hammond, J.L. “The Industrial Revolution and discontent.” Economic History Review 2, no. 2 (January 1930): 215-228.

Hartwell, R.M. “Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in England: A Methodological Inquiry.” Journal of Economic History (June 1959): 229-249.

Hartwell, R.M. “The Rising Standard of Living in England, 1800-1850.” Economic History Review (April 1961): 397-416.

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Hartwell, R.M. “The Standard of Living.” The Economic History Review 2nd ser. 16, no. 1 (August 1963): 135-146.

Hobsbawm, E.J. “The British Standard of Living, 1790-1850.” Economic History Review 2nd ser., 10, no. 1 (August 1957): 46-68.

Hobsbawm, E.J. “The Standard of Living during the Industrial Revolution: A Discussion.” Economic History Review 2nd ser., 16, no. 1(August 1963): 119-134.

Horrell, Sara, and Deborah Oxley. “Bringing Home the Bacon? Regional Nutrition, Stature, and Gender in the Industrial Revolution.” Economic History Review 65, no. 4 (November 2012): 1354–79.

Humphries, Jane. “’Lurking in the wings . . .’: Women in the Historiography of the Industrial Revolution.” Business & Economic History 2nd ser. 20 (1991): 32-44.

Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. “English Workers’ Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look.” Economic History Review 2nd ser., 36 (February 1983): 1-25.

Mokyr, Joel. “Is There Still Life in the Pessimist Case? Consumption during the Industrial Revolution, 1790-1830.” The Journal of Economic History 48, no. 1 (Mach 1988): 69-92.

Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. Review of Capitalism and the Historians, edited by F.A. Hayek. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 293 (May 1954): 177-8.

Temin, Peter. “Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution.” The Journal of Economic History 27, no. 1 (March 1997): 63-82.

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