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Business Cycles, Harvests, and Politics: 1790–18501

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

W. W. Rostow
W. W. Rostow
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

You cannot get them to talk of politics when they are well employed.— William Mathews, 1833.

I have observed during the whole time I have been in Lanarkshire that any rise in the rate of discount at the Bank of England has been immediately, or at least shortly, followed by an increase both of crime and of civil suits, and if it continues long, of mortality and typhus fever. So much so, that, as I am an official member of the prison board and of most of the Charities, I have always made it a rule to say … “Gentlemen, the Bank of England have raised their discounts, you had better immediately take measures for enlarging the prison accommodations and for extending the infirmaries and Poor houses.”—A. Alison, Sheriff of Lanarkshire, 1848.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , November 1941 , pp. 206 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1941

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References

2 Of the studies covering the first half of the nineteenth century G. D. H. Cole's Short History of the British Working Class Movement, 1789–1927, makes perhaps the most consistent use of a framework of business fluctuations and price movements. See, for example, I, 79, 88, 105, 177–188. But in describing strikes, and even phases of political development, many opportunities for relating the data to short-period fluctuations are missed.

3 Tooke, T., A History of Prices (1838), I, 81Google Scholar. This act provided for a duty of 24s. 3d. if the price was under 50s.; 2s. 6d. at or above 50s. and under 54s.; 6d. at or above 54s., and a bounty of 5s. on exports at a price under 44s. See also Smart, W., Economic Annals of the Nineteenth Century (1917), I, 90–92Google Scholar; and Macpherson, D., Annals of Commerce (1805), IV, 219–220Google Scholar.

4 Tooke, T., A History of Prices (1838), I, 237–239Google Scholar.

5 Under the Corn Law of 1804 a duty of 24s. 3d. per quarter was imposed when the wheat price was under 63s.; and 2s. 6d. per quarter, when at or above that rate and under 66s.; and 6d. when above 66s. The lowest price reached between 1804 and 1815 was 66s., in November 1807.

6 Tooke, op. cit., I, 322–325; II, 2–4; also Annual Register, 1814, 219.

7 Doubleday, T., A Financial History of England (1859), 227Google Scholar, notes that the protection of soldiers was required for members of the House of Commons, on the passage of the 1815 Corn Law, such was “the fury of the people.”

8 Tooke, op. cit., II, 16–18.

9 For a modification of the traditional view of unrelieved depression, see Fussell, G. E. and Compton, M., “Agricultural Adjustments after the Napoleonic Wars,” Economic History, February 1939Google Scholar.

10 See Smart, II, 117–118, for a detailed account of this bill which, like those of 1791 and 1804, was never really operative. A feature of its terms was the application of a sliding scale of duties when the price rose above 70s.

11 Smart, op. cit., II, 439. The sliding scale introduced in 1828, after two years of controversy, ranged from a duty of 34s. 8d. when the home price was 52s., to 1s., when the home price was 73s. In fact this amounted to only a very slight modification on the preceding bill, although the trend against agricultural protection had clearly set in.

12 Their long-term pressures were symbolized, perhaps, in the person of William Huskisson.

13 Nonagricultural domestic commodities show, on the whole, a greater net decline than the domestic index, which includes wheat and a variety of other agricultural commodities heavily weighted.

14 See Tooke, op. cit., II, 136, on food prices (1826–1827), relatively high “in the distressed state of the manufacturing population.”

15 The Poor Law of 1834, however, may be considered, in part, as a concession to the hard-pressed land owners. It was in the agricultural districts that the burden of poor rates, under the old system, was most severely felt.

16 Tooke, op. cit., II, 157–158.

17 Clapham, J. H., An Economic History of Modern Britain (1926), I, 497Google Scholar. The Whigs went out of office in 1841, to be succeeded by Peel and the Tories, until 1846.

18 W. Page, Commerce and Industry, I, 128–130. The new scale started with wheat at 50s. paying 20s. duty, diminished to 1s., when the price was 73s. (as in the scale of 1828). There were two “rests” in the scale, wheat from 52s. to 54s. paying a duty of 18s. a quarter and wheat between 66s. and 68s. paying duty of 8s. This, it was hoped, would check the speculations of corn dealers, who had been tempted, by the steepness of the scale of 1828, to hold back corn in the hope of getting higher prices.

19 Tooke, op. cit., I, 181–183, and 187.

20 Tooke, op. cit., I, 185–186.

21 Tooke, op. cit., I, 225–226. It is perhaps worth noting that the situation in 1795–1796 had direct and immediate influence on the ideas of Thomas Malthus, Frederick Eden, and Thomas Paine, as well as many others.

22 Willard Thorp's Business Annals (1926), 152, seriously misrepresents the position of British industry from 1798 to 1801. Each of those years is headed “depression,” although output was almost certainly increasing and unemployment was low. This is not meant, of course, to deny the reality of the difficulties due to high living costs, from 1799 to 1801.

23 For the role of a prosperity demand for labor in the unrest of these years see Macpherson, op. cit., IV, 475 and 500. Strikes for higher wages were, in this as in later periods, a familiar characteristic of the latter stages of business expansion.

24 For the position of the Combination Acts of 1799–1800, as part of a long tradition of limitation, see George, D., “The Combination Acts Reconsidered,” Economic History, 1926.Google Scholar

25 Cole, op. cit., I, 88.

26 For an account of the inadequate harvest which largely explains this rise, see Tooke, op. cit., II, 132–135.

27 For a detailed account, from contemporary sources of strikes in 1824–1825, see Smart, op. cit., II, 232–233, and 306–313.

28 Smart, op. cit., II, 312–313.

29 See Annual Register, 1826, Chronicle, 67, 109–112, 115, 149–151.

30 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Laborer, 134–136; Page, op. cit., I, 77, quotes Place as follows: “combinations will soon cease to exist. Men have been kept together for long periods only by the oppression of the laws; these being repealed, combinations will lose the matter which cements them into masses and they will fall to pieces.”

31 The Factory Act of 1802, which dealt only with the pauper children, was probably inspired almost exclusively by religious and humanitarian motives.

32 Quoted by Clapham, op. cit., I, 573–574, from First Report of the Factory Commissioners (1833), XX, 849. See also Engels, Frederick, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1892), 134–148Google Scholar, on the competition between the men and their wives and children.

33 See Hutchins, B. L. and Harrison, A., A History of Factory Legislation (1903), 70Google Scholar, with reference to the Times, May 4, 1847.

34 Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit., 63–64n.

35 Hutchins and Harrison, op. cit., 61–62, quoting Morley's Life of Cobden, II, 300.

36 This relationship has been traced in detail by Slosson, Preston W., The Decline of the Chartist Movement (1916), 115–137Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 60.

38 Ibid., 61.

39 Ibid., 78 and 94.

40 On close examination it was later estimated that about two million bona fide signatures were attached to this final petition.