Industrialization and British Modernity - Essay Example

Industrialization and British Modernity: An Historical Perspective The concept of modernity is at the heart of any academic inquiry into contemporary society and its processes. Very often modernity is associated with the various social and economic transformations of the last two hundred years which came to so greatly impress themselves upon Western civilization. This so-called ‘solid modernity’, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman termed it, concerned the development of ‘hard’ industry, urbanization, social mobility, and altered social relations (2000, pp. 1-15). The new society was thus epitomized by industrialization, the birth of mass society, and the modern notion of the individual. From an historical perspective, the difference was fundamentally transformational. The changes wrought by industrialization have set human society on an arguably irreversible path. The country of origin of these changes and thus also the country wherein occurred much of the first research into them was Great Britain. There has been much debate as to the reasons for their onset, but as to the existence of the changes themselves, very little in the way of denial can be maintained. It was in Britain that the sparks of the Industrial Revolution were first lit and the appearance of ‘modern’ socio-economic phenomena began to be seen: urbanization and rationalization. As Eric Hobsbawm put it: ‘[t]he Industrial Revolution marks the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of the world recorded in written documents’ (Walton 1987, p. 89). In the case of Britain and the world then, the changes were both fundamental and prototypical. Britain was the first to undergo them. Volumes could be written about all these changes. Here we will seek to analyse some of them so as to get an idea of their effects. The case must be made that these changes stood as the most significant economic and social developments of the last three centuries. It must be recalled that the nature of socio-economic relations prior to industrialization were feudal. Here we must look at the Britain of the mid to late nineteenth century and in a way compare it the one which existed 100 to 150 years prior. This should not be allowed to foster an all too simplistic depiction of the industrialization/modernization process as being one which did not exist and then did exist ex nihilo. The modern era and industrialization, as the socio-economic stage after feudalism, came about gradually and not ‘all at once’. For the purposes here, these phenomena will be presented with attention paid to their effects and not their processes in all their varied minutiae. That said, the feudal economy of early to mid eighteenth century Britain still displayed many of the basic features of feudalism. Under feudalism and the guild system land and labour formed part of the social organization (money had yet hardly developed into a major element of industry). Land, the pivotal element in the feudal order, was the basis of the military, judicial, administrative, and political system; its status and function were determined by legal and customary rules...Under the guild system, as under every other economic system in previous history, the motives and circumstances of productive activities were embedded in the general organization of society. (Polanyi 1957, pp. 72-73) The fact that industrialization touched upon all these features makes it the world-changing event that it was. In industrial society wealth is not uniquely tied to control and possession of land as it was in the feudal economy. As Marx formulated it, ‘[t]he Wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities’ (1952, p. 13). In place of land, order, and status, consumption and the accumulation of material goods became the new societal modus operandi. It may be difficult for a person today to have an idea how much this altered the basic fabric of society. From a rural and aristocratic nation of landlords and tenants, Britain became a country of large urban centres, industrial combines furnishing enormous amounts of goods for a fast growing populace, and the commoditization of nearly everything. That last phenomenon provides an excellent point for discussion. The famed economist Karl Polanyi, in his work The Great Transformation, pointed to the designation of labour, land, and money as commodities in Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as being a fundamentally different trait of industrial society. For Polanyi, the attempt to decouple the economic sphere from the rest of society was one of the more socially destructive features of laissez-faire Britain of the early to mid Victorian era. He lamented this transition as being ‘unnatural’ because economic relations were very much visceral to and not separate from society. Labour is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man. (1957, p. 75) This was what demarcated industrial man from his predecessors. For Polanyi, all of human existence became ‘One Big Market’ (1957, p. 75). The implications for the future of Britain, and the world for that matter, were too numerous to quantify. An obvious one was that through the commoditization of everything, the foundation for twentieth century consumer society was laid. The mentality of people began to change, albeit slowly, to view everything as something to potentially buy and/or sell in the market of the world. The onset of industrialization in Britain cannot easily be separated from the historically parallel events related to the mechanization of agriculture. The rural and mainly agricultural society of aristocratic Britain itself underwent changes which contributed to and reflected the changes later associated with industry. Many scholars have long pointed to the notorious parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth century (and before) as having greatly contributed to the advent of industrial society. ‘Eighteenth-century commentators such as Arthur Young believed that agricultural improvement depended on enclosures and the shift to large-scale farms, and this remains a serious...claim’ (Allen 1999, p. 209). Agriculture at that time had already begun to mechanize. The enclosures of the Commons had the structural effect of dispossessing and uprooting much of the rural, poorer classes. The role of the aristocracy should not be understated. The tenured classes benefitted from the enclosures and were the principal advocates for them (Brown 2006, p. 2). The dispossessed became the proletariat made famous by the later writings of Marx and Engels. The whole of society was affected. Long before the period of modern industry, cooperation and the concentration of the instruments of labour in the hands of a few gave rise, in numerous countries where these methods were applies in agriculture, to great, sudden, and forcible revolutions in the modes of production, and, consequently, in the conditions of existence and the means of employment of the rural populations. (Marx 1952, p. 211). Thus the uprooting of traditional British society must be seen as central to the onset of industrialization. This does, however, pose the question as to where all these people went. The mechanization of agriculture and the rationalization of industry formed a sort of socio-economic symbiosis. But the horse should not be placed before the cart. ‘The Revolution in Agriculture definitely antedated the Industrial Revolution.’ Thus the changes in agriculture began to take effect prior to industry but in the end fed into the latter. It was in 1795 that the labour market in Britain was made ‘free’ (Polanyi 1957, pp. 93-96). By that is meant that labourers were no longer hindered in any way from freely moving about the country in search of work. This social development largely presaged one of the features that are a sine qua non of modern society: the mobility of labour. Today the significance of this development may be lost to some. It cannot here be ignored. With the end of feudal economic and social relations came the ability of people to be geographically and socially mobile. One could go where there was work and one could materially improve one’s plight in life. This is not to say that the plight of everyone improved, far from it. But it does mean that the modern ability of Britons to, seemingly at random, change and switch their profession and residence originated in the enclosures of the eighteenth century, the uprooting of much of the rural population, and the appearance of industry. For it was industry that brought people to the cities. Factories, mills, and plants of all sorts typically had to be near a major commercial centre where there existed the infrastructure and means to bring their goods to market. As such, with labour mobility came urbanization. The concentration of much of the population in cities had a profound effect on nearly every feature of society. By randomly listing some of them here, there historical manifestation seems abrupt. It must then be iterated that these phenomena were gradual and not instantaneously conjured out of space and time. The American economist W.W. Rostow described the features of industrial growth as ‘the propensity to develop fundamental science,...the propensity to apply science to economic ends,...and the propensity to accept innovations’ (Ashworth 2008, p. 251). In his estimation, industrial society, being largely concentrated in major urban centres, could also be termed a ‘knowledge society’. This meant, among other things, that one’s ability to function and succeed in it was tied to his/her ability to ‘know’ things; that is to have the requisite knowledge to perform a certain task. Thus learning and the education of the masses, the great project of the Enlightenment, became important features of the new industrial society. Even if in Britain of the early to mid nineteenth century this was still in its infancy, the change in the knowledge people held began to be noticed. The initial effects on the poorer class of Britain should not allow one to disregard some of the social improvements which occurred as a result of industrialization. These too were not instantaneous but rather gradual. ‘Furthermore, increased agricultural productivity, cheaper labour arising from increased population, and redistribution of income towards property owners increased middle and upper class incomes and...increased demand for manufactured goods’ (Horrell 1996, p. 563). The aforementioned material accumulation began to take hold as the industrial and middle classes, now socially mobile and with some disposable income, stood as the forebears to the twentieth century consumer. For Britain, an historically significant effect associated with the birth of the consumer involved the changing role of women. Women began, albeit slowly, to have a new socio-economic role which was not limited to the cult of domesticity. New employment forms meant new opportunities. ‘Innovation expanded employment opportunities and the productivity of labour, particularly enhancing the employment and earnings potential of women and children and increasingly family incomes for those employed in the new occupations’ (Horrell 1996, p. 563). Prosperity was not uniform but rather disparately apportioned among the peoples of nineteenth century Britain. But for women the change was dramatic. Women of all classes began to be more ‘public,’ that is they more often left the house to perform socio-economic functions which they could not have done when society was fixed and rigidly segmented (Davidoff 2003, p. 15). Not only for women, but also for men, wages too began to improve. ‘Longstanding wage differentials were swept aside and living standards changed in a variety of ways...’ (Hunt 1986, p. 935) The debate regarding the living standards of the working classes in early Industrial Britain has ever been polemical. For some they were atrocious, for others they were markedly better than those of the peasantry. Whatever the case may be, the change in society cannot be denied. People were now living in cities and learning and becoming literate. Factories were being built, space between places was ‘shortened’, the masses emerged, and modern society was born. The modernization of Britain, and thus the birth of British modernity, is rooted in the beginnings of industrialization in the eighteenth century. A big transition began to occur. Population growth exploded, greater and greater proportions of the population moved and lived in the cities, and the basis upon which the entire socio-economic system rested was markedly altered. Our discussion was aimed at highlighting some of these changes, the consequences of which ultimately affected every person alive today. Reference List Allen, Robert C. 1982, ‘The Efficiency and Distributional Consequences of Eighteenth Century Enclosures’, The Economic Journal, 92:36, pp. 937-953. Allen, Robert C. 1999, ‘Tracking the Agricultural Revolution in England’, Economic History Review, 52:2, pp. 209-235. Ashworth, William J. 2008, ‘The Ghost of Rostow: Science, Culture and the British Industrial Revolution’, History of Science, 46:3, pp. 249-274. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, Boston. Brown, David. 2006, ‘The Industrial revolution, political economy and the British aristocracy: The second Viscount Dudley and Ward as an eighteenth-century canal promoter’, Journal of Transport History, 27:1, pp. 1-24. Davidoff, Leonore. 2003, ‘Gender and the ‘Great Divide’: Public and Private in British Gender History’, Journal of Women’s History, 15:1, pp. 11-27. Horrell, Sara. 1996, ‘Home Demand and British Industrialization’, The Journal of Economic History, 56:3, pp. 561-604. Hunt, E.H. 1986, ‘Industrialization and Regional Inequality: Wages in Britain, 1760-1914’, The Journal of Economic History, 46:4, pp. 935-966. Marx, Karl. 1952, Capital, Great Books of the Western World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Polanyi, Karl. 1957, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press, Boston. Walton, John. 1987, ‘Theory and Research on Industrialization’, Annual Review of Sociology, 13, pp. 89-108. Read More