4 - Emergence of gas and water monopolies in nineteenth-century Britain: contested markets and public control

Summary

Introduction

The economic organisation of the local utilities in gas, water, tramways and electricity which emerged in the nineteenth century involves issues of natural monopoly as well as of public health and safety. They provoked a stream of outstanding reports by Royal Commissions and Select Committees. There has however been only a small academic literature addressed to questions of economic organisation and two central issues which have, as yet, only been briefly addressed are analysed in this paper: one is the nature of the natural monopolies in gas and water, the other is the form which public control took.

There seems to be a broad consensus in the literature that the question of municipally provided services was one assessed in nineteenth-century Britain in pragmatic rather than political or ideological terms. Waller (1983, p. 300) called it municipal capitalism in contrast to municipal socialism which Kellett (1978) and others have associated more with the debate on London government and with the period from the turn of the century. There were specific problems arising in the provision of gas and water supplies in the mid nineteenth century by which time many areas had only one supplier. The monopoly issue was one source of concern, and the ‘adequacy’ of supplies was another. For Falkus (1977, pp. 145–6) and Robson (1935, pp. 309–10), authors of perhaps the best-known scholarly articles on the economic history of municipal trading, these were the key issues.