212 Chapter Six
thus went far to shape the subsequent phases of the industrial revolu
tion, allowing the improvement of steam engines^53 and making such
critical innovations as the iron railway and iron ships possible at a time
and under conditions which simply would not have existed without
the wartime impetus to iron production. To dismiss this feature of
British economic history as “abnormal”^54 surely betrays a remarkable
bias that seems to be widespread among economic historians.
On yet another front: enclosure acts peaked in Britain during the
first fifteen years of the nineteenth century when grain prices put a
premium on high farming. Parliament’s readiness to override the
interest of the poorer agricultural classes in passing enclosure acts is
well known; but even a Parliament of landlords and merchants would
probably not have passed so many acts with so little deliberation about
the social consequences of enclosure, had wartime conditions not pro
vided adequate alternatives to the dispossessed, who could join the
army, go on relief, or find employment in the booming civilian econ
omy, stimulated as it was by wartime demands. If enclosure acts had
instead provided recruits for angry city crowds of unemployed and
underemployed laborers, the enclosures would surely not have pro
ceeded as they did, and, once again, British economic history would
have taken a different path, rather more like that which France experi
enced in the nineteenth century.
Counterfactual history is useful only to stimulate the imagination;
what matters for the argument of this book is the assertion that mas
sive governmental intervention in the marketplace^55 had the effect,
only half recognized or intended at the time, of hurrying on the indus
trial revolution in Great Britain and helping to define its path. Thanks
to government expenditure, prosperity and full employment predom
inated during the wartime years even as the population of the United
- Wilkinson’s cannon-boring machine allowed Watt’s steam engine to become
efficient by making possible a close fit between piston and cylinder. Cf. Clive Trebil
cock, “Spin-off in British Economic History: Armaments and Industry, 1760–1914,”
Economic History Review 22 (1969): 477.
- As Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965), p. 110,
does. Cf. also the otherwise admirable work, Charles K. Hyde, Technological Change and
the British Iron Industry, 1700–1870 (Princeton, 1970), p. 129: “In the absence of
fighting, overall demand for iron might have been higher.” Hyde offers no explanation
for this surprising judgment; he just tosses it off as an aside. The most careful assess
ment of the impact of war on the British iron industry I have seen is Alan Birch, The
Economic History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, 1784–1879: Essays in Industrial
and Economic History with Special Reference to the Development of Technology (London,
1967), pp. 47–56.
- Public expenditure increased from £22 million in 1792 to £123 million in 1815,
or almost six times.
