Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions^211emmental subsidies to continental allies, and without the transfer of
effective purchasing power to the half a million otherwise indigent and
underemployed men who wound up in the ranks of the army and
navy, it seems impossible to believe that British industrial production
would have increased at anything like the actual rate.^51
Not only that. Government intervention also altered the mix of
commodities coming from the expanding industrial plant of Great
Britain, mainly by putting a special premium on iron. Indigent and
underemployed men do not buy cannon and other expensive indus
trial products. But by putting indigent thousands into the army and
navy and then supplying them with the tools of their new trade, effec
tive demand was displaced from articles of personal consumption to
wards items useful to big organizations—armies and navies in the first
place, but factories, railroads, and other such enterprises in times to
come. Moreover, the men who built the new coke-fired blast furnaces
in previously desolate regions of Wales and Scotland would probably
not have undertaken such risky and expensive investments without an
assured market for cannon. At any rate, their initial markets were
largely military.^52
Thus both the absolute volume of production and the mix of prod
ucts that came from British factories and forges, 1793–1815, was
profoundly affected by government expenditures for war purposes. In
particular, government demand created a precocious iron industry,
with a capacity in excess of peacetime needs, as the postwar depres
sion 1816–20 showed. But it also created the condition for future
growth by giving British ironmasters extraordinary incentives for
finding new uses for the cheaper product their new, large-scale fur
naces were able to turn out. Military demands on the British economy
- This was not lost on contemporaries. Joseph Lowe, The Present State of England in
Regard to Agriculture, Trade and Finance (London, 1833), pp. 29 ff., attributes Britain’s
wartime prosperity to full employment resulting from taxation and government bor
rowing, whose tonic effect was “distributed over the country, for... our total expendi
ture.. .with trifling exception, was circulated at home” (p. 33). - J. L. Anderson, “Aspects of the Effects on the British Economy of the War against
France, 1793–1815,” Australian Economic History Review 12 (1972): 1–20. The short-
barreled, extra-large gun used with greater effect aboard Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar, the
carronade, was named for the Carron works in Scotland where it was first designed; and
the wharf in Cardiff where the products of the South Wales ironworks were loaded is still
known as Cannon Wharf. Popular speech in this fashion recorded the importance of
armaments for the new iron industry of Great Britain. Even the Quaker firm founded
by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale made cannon in the mid-eighteenth century, but
discontinued the practice before 1792. Cf. Arthur Raistrick, The Coalbrookdale Iron
works: A Short History (Telford, 1975), p. 5.