A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Social Changes 375

Even in Western Europe, Britain’s South Sea Bubble (see Chapter 11) and
the collapse in 1720 of John Law’s bank in France scared off investors.
Capital remained for the most part in the hands of wealthy families and
small groups of associates who loaned money to states, pushing up the cost
of credit. The absence of investment capital led the Prussian and Austrian
monarchies to supply capital for some manufacturing enterprises. Guilds
held monopolies on the trade and production of certain products; interna­
tional tariffs and tolls complicated trade between the many small states in
Central Europe. Furthermore, as we have seen, relatively few nobles took
an active interest in manufacturing, although exceptions were to be found
in France, the Austrian Netherlands, and Russia, where some nobles devel­
oped coal mines and invested in the iron industry. Despite the development
of the copper and iron industry of the Ural Mountains, in the Russian
Empire the possibilities for increased manufacturing were limited by the
monumental distances between population centers and natural resources,
as well as an inadequate transportation network that had barely changed
since the time of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century.

Social Changes

Urban grow th, particularly after 1750, was one of the most visible changes
engendered by the rise in population and the expansion of trade and man­
ufacturing, as w'ell as the continuing centralization of state power. Other
changes included the rise of the “middling sort” and the greater vulnerabil­
ity of the laborer who was displaced by enclosure and forced to move from
place to place in search of work.

The Growth of Towns and Cities

Although Europe remained overwhelmingly rural, cities and towns grew
faster than the population as a whole, meaning that Europe, particularly
the West, slowly urbanized. Cities grew as people moved to areas where
there was work, or for the poorest of the poor, where they might find charity.
New manufacturing centers served as magnets to which those who had no
land or prospects were drawn. By the end of the century, Europe had
twenty-two cities with more than 100,000 people (see Table 10.2).
The British urban population (any settlement of more than 2,500 people
qualified as “urban”) grew from slightly less than 20 percent of the popula­
tion in 1700 to more than 30 percent in 1800, when London’s population
reached nearly a million people, nearly twice that of Paris. London was the
world’s largest port, the center of banking, finance, insurance, manufactur­
ing, exports, and empire. In the eighteenth century, a fifth of the British
population spent part of their lives in London. Two-thirds of the residents
of London had been bom outside of the city, migrants who had come to the