ChapTer five
The industrial revolution
Two ‘revolutions’?
The period between c.1750 and c.1860 saw, in many senses, the birth of
the modern world. The population of England began to grow rapidly from
around 1750, rising with unprecedented speed from around 5½ million to
some 9 million by 1800, and to nearly 19 million by 1861 (Figure 15).^1
This had a direct impact on agricultural profitability, especially for cereal
growers, reversing the sluggish prices of the previous century. High demand
from a burgeoning population was exacerbated by institutional and legal
structures – the infamous Corn Laws, brought in by a parliament dominated
by landowners, ensured that grain imports were kept to a minimum – and
also by political and military factors, principally the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars (1793–1815), when blockades, coinciding with a
series of poor harvests, led to acute food shortages and the rise of grain
prices to unprecedented levels. Perhaps not surprisingly, this was a period
of agricultural innovation – of the classic ‘agricultural revolution’, when
the widespread adoption of a range of new techniques boosted production.
Even in 1851 imports only accounted for some 16 per cent of foodstuffs
consumed in England and Wales. To feed an expanding population the
volume of wheat produced more than doubled, while that of barley may
have increased by over two thirds, in the course of the later eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries; increases in the production of other foodstuffs
were probably of a similar order.^2
There was, moreover, a dramatic improvement in what economic historians
call ‘labour productivity’, that is, the number of individuals required to
produce a given amount of food.^3 In 1760 the output of each agricultural
worker could feed around one other person, but by 1841 it could feed another
2.7. This was vital because it was in this period that England also crossed the