362 GEOffREY KRON
wheat) had increased in size to an average of over 260 tons by the 1630s, with
Dutch East India merchant ships typically reaching as much as 900 tons,^58
British merchant shipping continued to rely on small ships of considerably less
than 120 tons through much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.^59
It is not until the end of the nineteenth century that ships of 1,000 tons or
more, often, but not exclusively, iron-hulled steamships, begin to be built in
quantity by British shipwrights,^60 but Casson is mistaken to claim that this was
the result of any technical limitation on the size of wooden hulls,^61 as Chinese
ships of over 4,000 tons can be documented.^62 Even the economic signifi-
cance of the transition from sail to steam can be exaggerated,^63 for, although
steel hulls with effective anti-fouling paint and steam would eventually cut the
length of trans-Atlantic sea voyages from five to six weeks to two,^64 which was
critical for the passenger trade, wooden sailing ships remained competitive for
the transport of bulk cargoes into the twentieth century,^65 with clipper ships
only being supplanted in the China tea trade with the re-opening of the Suez
canal.^66
What explains this gap between the relatively modest impact of shipping and
trade on the English population, despite her command of the seas and inter-
national colonial empire, and the heavy participation of the ancient Greeks,
or the Renaissance Venetians or Dutch, for example? Although English urban-
ization exploded in the mid-nineteenth century,^67 it had lagged well behind
Italy and the Low Countries until that time. Moreover, agrarian capitalism
and the proletarianization of the rural labor force meant that most consumer
demand was restricted to the gentry, landowners, and small urban middling
classes. Even for Northern Italy and Holland, however, urbanization rates seem
to have been significantly lower than those suggested for Greece by the survey
work of John Bintliff and by Mogens Hansen’s ‘Shotgun method.’^68 Very few
cities of significant size could be found in England before the nineteenth cen-
tury, and a massive gap remained between London and the rest, typically ports
or important market or university towns.^69 London’s merchants and crafts-
men, as Defoe describes in depth,^70 served the carriage trade, the rural gentry
and aristocracy, who flocked into London for the social season, engaging in
a flurry of conspicuous consumption,^71 powered by the rents extracted from
the landless laborers and tenant farmers who populated England’s villages and
produced her wheat and wool, but were too poor themselves to contribute
much in the way of demand to London’s burgeoning commerce,^72 as is appar-
ent from their low and stagnant real wages.^73
A true urban middle class culture – of the sort which developed in many
Greek poleis, Renaissance Italy, or the Netherlands – could exist, outside of
London at least, only in small pockets.^74 There was therefore little domestic
demand outside of the rural gentry and aristocracy and London’s bankers,
merchants, and middle classes until the 1860s or 1870s. Village England offered