INDUSTRIALISM, POVERTY AND THE WORKING CLASSES

INDUSTRIALISM, POVERTY AND THE WORKING CLASSES

The nature of the inter-relationship between industrialization and the material well-being of the working class has been and remains a matter of considerable controversy. This has been particularly so in Britain where a so-called ‘standard of living’ debate originated with the onset of industrialization itself and has continued to the present day. Thus for nineteenth-century social commentators such as CARLYLE, SOUTHEY, RUSKIN and others, industrialization impoverished materially, socially, culturally, spiritually and morally. In particular, it ruptured paternalistic and harmonious social relationships, it debased taste, it destroyed the possibility of artistic expression and it created an egotistical materialism that demoralized the population. Even where, as with Ruskin, critics accepted the material advances that industrialization had delivered, these were usually seen as outweighed by the social, psychological and ethical diseconomies that had eventuated. Thus while, for Ruskin, ‘it [was] a good and desirable thing truly to make many pins in a day’, he considered it was too often forgotten ‘with what crystal sand their points [were] polished, sand of human soul’ (Ruskin 1904:196). The early nineteenth- century socialists, and later Marx and Engels, also recognized the material triumphs of industrialism. ‘The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, [had] created more massive and more colossal productive forces than [had] all preceding generations together’ (Marx and Engels 1976:85). But for all that such achievements were both consequent upon, and offset by, the material impoverishment of the working class.

Yet, contemporaneously with such commentators, there were those such as Ure, Chadwick, MACAULAY and many others who celebrated the process of industrialization and who considered that it not only increased material prosperity but also, through mechanization, liberated the working class from the enervation and mental atrophy of physical drudgery. For such writers industrialization improved the economic condition and also the mental, moral and social tone of society.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 310 In the twentieth century the debate assumed a new vigour within academic circles,

becoming the most sustained single controversy in British economic history. This phase of the debate originated with Clapham’s Economic History of Modern Britain, which used real-wage data to construct an essentially optimistic view of the impact of industrialization on labour; a view that was challenged by J.L.Hammond in an essay on ‘The Industrial Revolution and Discontent’, which contended that quantitative gains in terms of increased consumption were more than outweighed by the quality-of-life losses that industrial capitalism inflicted on the working class. This division between the meliorists and the pessimists was to be further accentuated in the 1950s and 1960s by the Hartwell/Hobsbawm exchanges, with the debate assuming a more rigorously quantitative form relating to the impact of industrialization on the level of wages, patterns and levels of consumption and the size and distribution of the national income.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century there has been no diminution in its intensity with major contributions from a number of economists and economic historians. What emerged in this period was a more statistically sophisticated consideration of the evidence and also an attempt to factor into the equation a much wider range of quantitative evidence than previously—for example on unemployment, inequality, transportation, housing, recreation, mortality and longevity. In addition, there have been attempts to give quantitative expression to evidence of a qualitave nature, while there was also an increase in the number of studies making use of disaggregated data to consider standard-of-living issues in relation to the experience of particular regions and specific occupational groupings. This latter research was important given the regional concentration of industrial development. Yet, as regards this general proliferation of data, such a multiple-indicator approach to the issue of living standards was seen by some as, at best, conveying an essentially impressionistic sense of the standard of living while, at worst, involving poorly quantified series that generated conflicting perspectives on what is happening to living standards.

The last two decades have also seen a more systematic and sophisticated use being made of physiological evidence relating to stature and body/mass ratios. The use of anthropometric observations as the basis for assessments of the welfare of working populations has a long history. Auxology, the study of growth, can be traced back at least as far as French physiologists of the 1820s who commented on the impact of general environmental conditions on the health and stature of the French worker; while later, Marx, in the first volume of Capital, made reference to the auxological work of Liebig when explaining the factory acts as the product of a recognition that an unregulated labour market had precipitated a significant deterioration in physical condition of the British working population.

Most anthropometric data was, and is, gleaned from records on the physiological state of naval and military recruits and convicts, and it has allowed historians to draw conclusions about access to material sustenance and the physical and psychological environment that the working class confronted with the onset of industrialization. In effect, stature, in contrast to the multiple-indicator approach, represents a composite index reflecting, amongst other things, factors such as the availability and quality of foodstuffs, the prevalence of disease, the quality of housing, the intensity of labour and its working conditions. Such evidence on the physiological state of populations has been particularly abundant for European nations where compulsory military service required

Entries A-Z 311

the annual medical examination and measurement of the entire population of young male adults of conscription age. But it has also been amassed for military and naval recruits in Britain where a voluntary system prevailed. Such anthropometric material provides a useful summary of the outcome of a variety of environmental influences. However, it should be noted that even if we accept that there is a significant connection between stature and well-being, such evidence says something about welfare and welfare trends only over the period of physical growth.

There have also been attempts in the last two decades to construct other composite indices of well-being combining manifestly quantitative and more obviously qualitative data. In part this came out of a recognition of the deficiencies of simply using per capita national income, real wage and consumption data as the basis for statements about living standards. Thus it was increasingly recognized that even if such evidence was available and reliable, translating it into statements about human welfare was still highly problematic. In part too the search for composite indices that combined the quantitative and qualitative was also the product of an upsurge of interest in social accounting, in the 1960s and 1970s; a period when the positive and, more often, the negative externalities of economic growth were becoming matters of increasing concern. In this context use has been made by historians of the Human Development Index (HDI) that came out of a United Nations Human Development Report published in 1953; an index that understood underdevelopment in terms of lack of certain basic capabilities, rather than simply a lack of purchasing power, and that had three basic components—longevity, knowledge (measured by reference to adult literacy and years of schooling) and income.

Focusing on the notion of ‘capabilities’, some commentators also sought to construct an index of well-being that encompassed political rights and civil liberties. Others have suggested a physical-quality-of-life index compounded of infant mortality, life expectancy at year one and literacy rates, while still others have proposed the use of gender-related development indices. At times, indeed, it has almost seemed as if there has been in the late twentieth century a resumption of the nineteenth-century quest for the Holy Grail of a felicific calculus.

Much of the controversy surrounding the impact of industrialization on the working class has therefore inevitably revolved around the nature of the data deployed, its mathematical manipulation, the weight given to particular components of that evidence, the indices it has been used to construct and the weight given to the components of which those indices are comprised. However, underlying debate of this kind there has lurked even more fundamental differences of opinion that stem, in part, from divergent perceptions of what is of value and worth in human existence. For there are those who have seen in the demise of a pre-industrial society the loss of a system of values, a social ethos, a material environment, a pace and a rhythm of life, even an aesthetic; losses of inestimable worth that could not be compensated for by the industrial manufacture of material abundance. In this regard too late twentieth-century disillusionment with the consequences of the affluent society, the growth of environmentalism and the emergence of green politics have also all served to influence the nature and the intensity of the expression of this kind of view. By the same token many commentators, from Adam Smith onwards, have seen in the growth of a commercial and industrial society a transformation of the material possibilities available to mankind; the creation of a new world where the material dearth of the pre-industrial one has been eliminated and where

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 312

the material well-being of most has changed decidedly for the better. And when, like this, the relative merits of a world lost and a world gained are juxtaposed the problem of incommensurability is always likely to engender more heat than light.

However, leaving aside the difficulties involved in estimating well-being, what does the available evidence, with all its deficiencies and provisos, tell us about the impact of industrialization on the living standards of the working class. Here, to begin with, it is useful to consider the experience of some early industrializers, specifically, Britain, the USA and France.

In the case of Britain while, as noted above, there are clearly problems with simply considering data on real wages and per capita national income, it is nonetheless important to note that these measures of living standards do show an upward trend for the early phase of industrialization. Thus recent work points to an increase in real wages of 37.8 per cent for blue-collar workers in the period 1781–1827. Also, a personal consumption series suggests an increase of 1.51 per cent, per annum between 1819–51; figures that are consistent with the buoyancy of mass-production industries aimed at the working-class consumer market. And such evidence has led some to conclude that given that the average worker was better off in any decade from the 1830s onwards than he/she had been in any decade prior to 1820, the debate over real wages is effectively over. In addition, when efforts have been made to factor in other variables to a standard of living equation such as changes in the terms of trade, the diseconomies of urbanization and the incidence of unemployment, the results have suggested that the meliorist view still holds. Of course there remains the question of how these gains were distributed between regions, within classes, by gender and even within households, and it is important to distinguish between the mean labourer and the median labourer, but even so evidence of this kind certainly has provided grist for the mill of the optimists.

In addition, use of the HDI index points to a relatively favourable assessment of the trajectory of well-being during the Industrial Revolution period, as a consequence of improvements in literacy, schooling and life expectancy. More generally, quality-of-life measures of this kind, despite the foreboding of J.L.Hammond and subsequent writers, have furnished further evidence that can be used to substantiate the meliorists’ case.

Yet the mortality evidence points less obviously in an optimistic direction. Wrigley and Schofield estimated that while life expectancy in England improved from 35 to 40 years between 1781 and 1826, there was then little improvement for the next 50 years. In Scotland the second quarter of the nineteenth century was a period characterized by frequent mortality crises. There is also evidence that indicates a more rapid increase of infant than adult mortality rates in the second quarter of the nineteenth century in England. The evidence on mortality and morbidity therefore suggests that there was some deterioration in both the late eighteenth century and, in particular, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Further, comparative evidence suggests that in comparison with Europe, mid-century mortality in Britain was relatively high and life expectancy relatively low; something that was clearly related to the urbanization attendant upon the growth of industrial capitalism.

Also, and most significantly, the British population experienced a decline in height in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and one that persisted amongst those born in the 1850s and 1860s. Thus between 1820 and 1850 it has been estimated that the stature of the British population declined by 5.4cm. Indeed, on the basis of the available

Entries A-Z 313

evidence it has been concluded that it was not until ‘the cohort born just before the First World War’ that ‘it is likely that the mean heights had recovered and perhaps slightly surpassed the levels reached in the birth cohorts of the 1820s’ (Floud et al. 1990:306). For some, such evidence on stature, comprehending as it does a composite of factors relating to real income, diet, the incidence of disease, living and working conditions and intensity of labour, suggests that whatever gains in working-class real incomes or real wages occurred in the second quarter of the nineteenth century were more than outweighed by other adverse environmental conditions. So here we have significant evidence to support a pessimistic view of the impact of early industrialization on the working class. In this context it is also interesting to note that in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe in the eighteenth and throughout most of the nineteenth century, the stature of the population was greater in rural than in urban areas and that, for a large part of the nineteenth century in Britain, urban areas were actually characterized by falling stature in relation to rural areas.

Of course reasons other than the impact of industrialization can be given for this decline in stature: the pressure on resources created by a rapidly growing population, war, social conflict and unenlightened statesmanship and legislation may all have contributed to this trend. Nevertheless it would seem that an increased exposure to pathogens and pollution, a deterioration in housing conditions, an intensification of the labour process and the psychological and physiological diseconomies associated with this, the adverse dietary consequences of an increasing tendency to food adulteration and other factors, integrally connected to the interrelated processes of industrialization and urbanization, can all be regarded as having had deleterious consequences for stature.

As regards the experience of another early industrializer, the USA, the trajectories of health and economic growth seem, in many respects, to have paralleled those of Britain. Thus in the early industrial period the income gains that came from rising output were not matched by a comparable trend in health. On the contrary whether it is measured by stature, by mortality rates or by the body/mass index, health in this phase of industrialization seems to have deteriorated. As regards stature, for instance, the decline has been estimated at around 4.0cm in the period 1830–90.

As to the reasons for this, a number are certainly connected with the industrialization occurring in this period. Thus the growth of inter-regional trade, together with migration and immigration, meant that previously isolated populations were exposed to disease strains of a kind that they had not previously encountered. In addition the increase in the number of public schools concentrated juvenile populations in a way that facilitated the spread of disease, as did rapid urbanization for the population more generally. The economic difficulties caused by the Civil War may also have had an impact on the health of the US population but here, of course, we have a factor unrelated to industrialization. By the twentieth century, though, for the USA as for all other Western industrial nations, economic growth and health trends were moving in the same positive direction.

Finally, amongst the earlier industrializers, the French experience would seem to have been different from both that of either Britain or the USA. Thus, in France, the evidence suggests that physical indicators and the conventional economic indicators do not run in contrary directions. Here the evidence suggests that there was a slow and steady increase in height of the French population between 1820 and 1913, with a gain of 2.5cm over that

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 314

period; while between 1820–60 real wages increased rapidly. As regards the distribution of income there was, though, in this period, a shift away from the manual working class.

For the later industrializers it can be said that, in general, growth of per capita GDP and incomes tended to be more rapid than for those who experienced an early start. Further, in the case of countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan, these indicators also tended to move in the same direction as those measuring stature and health more generally. In effect, these countries experienced a sustained increase in a range of quality-of-life measures during their initial phases of industrialization. That said, in the case of Japan, while the height of Japanese military recruits from industrial areas grew by an average of 4.1cm, 1899–1937, and that of recruits from agricultural areas grew by only 2.8cm in the same period, industrial areas had higher rates of mortality than agricultural.

In contrast, in the case of Germany, we have a late industrializer that, although enjoying a rapid growth in per capita national income in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, together with a small increase in literacy rates and a fall in mortality rates, still experienced a decline in the stature of its population in the 1880s. And, indeed, in the period 1866/67–1892/3, it has been argued that, for the population as a whole, there was no significant improvement in net nutrition. It is true that if we take the period 1890– 1914, there was certainly a significant improvement in all indicators. Even so, it was the case that the profound macroeconomic difficulties of the 1870s and early 1880s, rising income inequality and rapid urbanization, seem to have produced, for a time, a stagnation and possibly even a decline in the health and living standards of the average German. On balance though it seems to have been the case that, as regards living standards, earlier industrializers suffered more negative repercussions than those industrializing later.

Nineteenth-century industrialization does not seem, therefore, to have produced a uniform impact on the working populations of Britain and other European countries. However, there were some common factors and developments that, to a greater or lesser extent, seem to have influenced the material outcomes of the process. Thus given the increased understanding of the role of germs in the spread of disease and the impact that had on public policy, later industrialization was attended by less adverse repercussions in terms of the increased exposure of working populations to pathogens. In this regard more efficient sewage disposal, the improved quality of the water supply and the improved housing that attended public investment and increased epidemiological knowledge in the late nineteenth century helped to mitigate those adverse consequences for longevity, mortality and stature that were apparent in countries such as Britain and the USA that had industrialized earlier and where, in relation to such public goods, investment as a proportion of national income was clearly at a sub-optimal level. It was also the case that, in general, later industrializers benefited from more rapid economic growth and more rapidly rising incomes, and were more likely to enjoy the benefits of some kind of social safety net, as was the case in Bismarckian Germany.

The extent and pace of urbanization also played a part in terms of the epidemiological environment. In Britain, where urbanization with the onset of industrialization was rapid (a rise in the urban population of over 25 per cent per decade, 1801–51), and encompassed a significant proportion of the population, there were major problems. Indeed this unusually rapid industrialization is considered one of the main reasons why mortality conditions in mid-century Britain compare unfavourably with those in Europe.

Entries A-Z 315

In contrast, in France, where urbanization was slower, and the greater part of the population remained rural throughout the nineteenth century, the impact on mortality and morbidity was considerably less; one reason certainly why there was no loss of stature amongst the French population during its early phase of industrialization.

The existence or non-existence of abundant land resources also affected the material consequences of industrialization. Lower population density diminished the spread of disease, while the size of the agricultural sector that land resources permitted influenced the availability and quality of food. For example, it has been argued that the high level of urban meat consumption in nineteenth-century France helped to mitigate the negative environmental consequences of industrialization and urbanization in that period. Also where, as in Sweden and the Netherlands, industrialization occurred in essentially rural areas, the adverse consequences for public health were considerably reduced. In this regard too the differential in stature of rural as against urban populations in nineteenth- century Europe is significant.

Limitations of family size, as in nineteenth-cen-tury France, also improved the health and physical growth of young children during the industrialization period. It did so first, because it reduced the pressure upon resources within the family unit, thereby affecting the level and quality of consumption; second, because smaller family size restricted the spread of communicable diseases; and, third, because low marital fertility may have permitted greater per capita investment in the health of children. In contrast to France’s low fertility and slow population growth, Britain was characterized by a rapid and accelerating growth of population in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and it has been suggested by some that this exerted considerable downwards pressure on living standards and was a major cause of poverty in this period. In general, therefore, it can be suggested that a rapidly growing population seems to have been a factor that exacerbated the adverse consequences of nineteenth-century industrialization

The character of industrialization also impacted on health. Thus the spread of disease was more likely and more rapid where industry was characterized by the emergence of large units of production, such as factories, rather than small workshops. In addition, the length and intensity of the working day also had a bearing on health and stature as did the nature of the working environment—humidity, ventilation, effluvia—which affected the prevalence of pathogens. Furthermore, where industrialization involved the expansion of inter-regional and international trade, opportunities were created for the more effective transmission of disease along trade routes, as was the case in the USA.

Clearly, then, in general terms the material experience of industrialization by the working class was determined by its character, pace and timing, by the nature of the migration and urbanization that it precipitated, and by the kind of industrial processes that attended it, i.e. by factors related to industrialization itself. But it was also determined in part too by other factors that can be seen as largely exogenous to it, for example the state of epidemiological knowledge, government policy, social attitudes to leisure and consumption and population growth. Of course, in practice, it is not always easy to distinguish the former from the latter.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 316