Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 207
transport was essential to the whole development, both for importing
raw materials like cotton from overseas and for distributing and redis
tributing commodities within and beyond the British isles. The duke
of Bridgewater’s canal (opened in 1761) that brought coal to the bur
geoning cotton mills of Manchester made that town’s spectacular de
velopment possible; and the canal’s no less spectacular financial suc
cess triggered a canal-building mania in Great Britain that lasted into
the 1790s. Together with improvements in existing riverbeds, the
result was to give England an effective system of inland waterways
that greatly cheapened the movement of heavy goods by reducing
overland haulage almost everywhere to a matter of a few miles at
most.^43
Yet, as in France, nothing assured satisfactory relationships between
population, food supply, and opportunities for gainful employment;
and in parts of the British Isles intense rural poverty failed to provoke
any sort of commercial and industrial growth. This was conspicuously
the case in Ireland and in the Scottish Highlands. Even London, for all
its exuberant commercial and industrial expansion, also housed a vol
atile, poverty-stricken multitude, some of whom scraped a living by
beggary and thievery even in good times. London’s potential for
crowd violence was equal to anything Paris had to offer; and leaders
like John Wilkes (1725–97) were in ready supply to provide an
aroused populace with political goals and causes to espouse, as hap
pened so spectacularly in Paris, 1789–94.
Nevertheless, the aristocratic-oligarchic leadership of England was
not seriously challenged within the country even in the first days of
the revolution when the French version of liberty gleamed most
brightly across the channel, as it did also among France’s other near
neighbors.^44 One reason was that challenge to the prevailing govern
mental regime became hard to distinguish from treason once war
against France had been joined. But in addition, the British govern
ment found effective ways of coping with a rapidly growing population
and therefore managed to keep discontent from assuming the explo
sive force that Louis XVI had encountered in Paris.
As in France, recruitment into the army and navy played a signifi
cant role. At the peak of mobilization in 1814, some half a million
- It is worth noting, perhaps, how closely this development, along with the simul
taneous rise of the coke and iron technology in Great Britain, paralleled the much
earlier Chinese developments discussed above in chapter 2.
- Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of
Europe and America. 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959, 1964).
