Chapter Ten
Compared to the electrifying pace with which Russia’s serf ownership and China’s Confucian family possession expanded in the course of the eighteenth century, the spread of private property was pedestrian. The Romanovs acquired perhaps one million square miles during that time, and the Qing Dynasty almost 1.5 million square miles, or, if the questionable claim to Tibet is accepted, 2.3 million square miles. In the same period, settlers who claimed land under common law took over fewer than two hundred square miles in North America, the Caribbean and, Bengal, or 450,000 square miles if all of the empty taiga of Quebec is included. Judged simply in terms of raw geography, private property could not compete with its two chief rivals.
Not until the nineteenth century would private ownership of land reveal a power that outweighed anything contained in the armies of either the Qing or Romanov Empires. Yet as early as the eighteenth century, there were clues to suggest how far a “natural” right to singular, exclusive possession might reach. The capacity of the common law to enclose more than the earth for an individual owner was made clear by its claim to create a quite new form of property in the amorphous realms of ideas.
In 1751, Walter Baker, a self-styled “professor of physic” in London who made a living from selling medicines, complained to the Privy Council that Dr. Robert James was marketing a patented powder guaranteed to cure fevers, catarrhs, coughs, and other respiratory maladies. The patent was invalid, Baker alleged, because the powder was no more than a copy of Baron Schwanberg’s Universal Powder for Fevers whose recipe he, Baker, had bought from the baron himself. Dr. James was a reputable chemist, and when his scientific colleagues testified to the originality of his fever powder, the Privy Council duly dismissed the complaint. That should have ended the matter. Patents were a royal privilege, supervised on the monarch’s behalf by the Privy Council, and there was no appeal from a royal decision. But with terrier-like obstinacy, Baker refused to let go, and the entire body of modern patent law depends upon his tenacity.
He went to court accusing Dr. James of perjury, and called the secretary of the Privy Council as a witness. Affronted by his temerity, the council loftily declined to let its secretary attend. But the refusal awoke the big beasts of the law, and in particular, England’s senior judge, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. After a detailed look at Dr. James’s specification of his powder—the ingredients had been left intentionally vague to prevent the recipe being copied—Mansfield decided privately that the patent should not have been given.
Until then, it had been accepted not just in Britain but throughout Europe that a patent could only be created by the crown. Giving a monopoly for a period of years to the inventor of a useful product or process served as a reward and an encouragement to others, but it necessarily prevented anyone else from using the invention to earn a living. That infringed the right to work, a right so fundamental that many jurists put it equal to life and liberty in importance. Both Sir Edward Coke, the preeminent spokesman for English common law, and the German jurist Samuel Pufendorf, chief exponent of a European theory of natural law, agreed that the word for monopolies was “odious.” In Pufendorf’s view, they offended “against the Law of Humanity” and in Coke’s “against the liberty and freedom of the subject and the law of the land.”
In 1623, the English Parliament had attempted to set bounds to the odious practice by passing the Statute of Monopolies. The statute emphasized the contractual nature of patents by limiting the length of time they could run, restricting them to new and useful inventions, and requiring a detailed description of the new idea so that society could benefit from it after the patent expired. Parliament’s bid to seize control from the king failed, and the royal prerogative continued to be exercised through the Privy Council. Following Baker’s appeal, however, Mansfield quickly persuaded the council that it was time the law assumed responsibility, and in 1753, the council formally relinquished the power of issuing and enforcing patents to the courts.
Through his own judgments in patent cases, Mansfield made it plain that he expected the courts to apply to a patent the sort of criteria that the crown ought to have applied under the Statute of Monopolies: the applicant for a patent had to show the invention to be new and useful and provide a specification so detailed that it would, in Mansfield’s words, “teach an artist, when your [the applicant’s] term is out, to make it—and to make it as well as you by your directions: for then at the end of the term [fourteen years], the public have the benefit of it.”
Very clearly, Mansfield understood the patent to be a contract, offering a private monopoly now in return for the public use later. That was certainly how patents were regarded in France. The Marquis de Condorcet, a friend of Thomas Jefferson and a progressive thinker steeped in Locke’s writing, declared roundly “there is no connection between ownership of an invention and that of a field which can only be cultivated by one person.” A patent was a social arrangement created by society for its own good, and thus, “It is not a true right, it’s a privilege.” Once an invention was approved by the Académie des Sciences as beneficial to society, as in the case of the flying shuttle invented by the Englishman John Kaye, a cash prize and a limited monopoly or privilège exclusif would be awarded in exchange for training others to manufacture it. This system of state-sponsored innovation was clear cut and successful. In 1747, the French paid Kaye for his invention and awarded him a salary to teach its use to Normandy woollen weavers, while allowing him to retain for a short time a monopoly on its construction. A similar principle was applied to the introduction of silk weaving, and before the end of the century French textile production exceeded Britain’s. Overall, the improvement in France’s industrial capacity enabled it to mass-produce the artillery, uniforms, and weaponry needed to equip Napoleon’s gigantic armies. Yet it was not in France that the Industrial Revolution began.
In the years immediately following Walter Baker’s momentous challenge, England experienced a rush to patent technical inventions and improvements of every kind with almost as many patents being issued in the 1760s alone as in all five previous decades before. It marked the start of what became known as the Age of Inventions. Between 1750 and 1800, four hundred patents were approved and put into practice, eight times as many as in the first half of the century.
At first glance it is difficult to see why. Each inventor had to pay up to £350 for his patent, a sum beyond the means of all but the well-to-do, only to discover that it offered flimsy protection against infringements. Attempts to sue competitors for infringing patents quickly revealed that the majority of judges remained hostile to monopolies not obviously for the public good. Indeed, without a watertight specification as backing, they were liable to strike down the original patent altogether rather than support its holder.
Their hostility was shared by Parliament when it passed the 1710 copyright law, the first to guarantee authors ownership in the books they had written. Terming it “an Act for the Encouragement of Learning,” the lawmakers argued a monopoly was justified only because it would encourage “learned men to compose and write useful books,” and in a patents case in 1769, Justice Joseph Yates applied the same reasoning, that public good was the payoff for private privilege, to inventions: “The whole claim that an author can really make, is on the public benevolence, by way of encouragement; but not as an absolute coercive right. His case is exactly similar to that of an inventor of a new mechanical machine.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Constitution of the United States would make a similar contractual obligation the basis for the establishment of copyright and patent laws “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” To ensure that the bargain of public usefulness was kept, American inventors were required to deposit a working model of their inventions before being issued with a patent.
This unfriendly atmosphere left inventors exposed to attack. The Reverend Edmund Cartwright shared the fate of many other inventors when he saw his 1790 patent for a wool-combing machine instantly stolen by textile operators, who tweaked it slightly so that they could escape being sued. Richard Arkwright, who in 1775 built and patented a water-powered frame for carding cotton and spinning it into long, tough thread, spent an estimated £2,200 in four years in unsuccessful attempts to defend his patent. Despite winning some cases, John Kaye found that every woollen manufacturer who pirated his patented flying shuttle had banded together to fight his claims for compensation, until the expense forced him to give up. Even James Watt, the canniest of patent holders, worried constantly about whether the risk of allowing competitors to build variants of his improved steam engine, outweighed the danger, if he went to court, of the judge removing his numerous patents altogether because of their inadequate specifications. “We had better bear with some inconvenience than lose all [in a lawsuit],” he told his partner, Matthew Boulton, “yet if we do not vindicate our rights we run a risk of losing all that way.”
As a result, many inventors, including Samuel Crompton, who improved Arkwright’s invention with his own machine or “mule” to make finer thread, did not bother to patent their innovations. By every rational standard, the French system of government direction and the American insistence on a working model to support patent applications were better ways of encouraging useful inventions.
Yet the messiness of the British process had one positive effect. The rampant piracy and furious lawsuits encouraged by British patent law helped spread information about new ideas. Every infringement generated paperwork that became available in court concerning the specification and potential applications. Reports of such cases and of the parliamentary debates they sometimes triggered were carried by the Annual Register, as well as by more practical periodicals such as The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, and even by general interest publications like The Gentleman’s Magazine, whose publisher, Edmund Cave, took so close an interest in inventions that he bought the license to a water-powered spinning machine. News of discoveries that elsewhere might have been confined to specialists were available to anyone who was able to read.
Nevertheless, what chiefly drove the spread of British inventions was the influence of land ownership. Whatever Mansfield might argue, the sort of people who were rich enough to afford a patent fee believed that a patent conferred some form of exclusive property. Locke’s thesis, that an individual established outright ownership of a parcel of ground by improving it, applied still more strongly to an invention that grew out of an individual’s mental and manual labor. Lawyers, long accustomed to pleading common law cases, repeatedly used this reasoning to claim for their clients a natural right to ownership of their invention that bypassed any need to prove some social benefit. And to a layman like Adam Smith, it seemed obvious that “the property one has in a book he has written or a machine he has invented, which continues by patent in this country for fourteen years, is actually a real right.”
In vain, Mansfield’s senior colleagues on the bench objected that an idea could not be equated with land because it lacked “corporeal substance” and so was not containable within a boundary. Fighting their way through the battleground of competing claims to ownership of a technical innovation, ordinary common law judges increasingly made it plain that they no longer regarded the specification of the invention to be a contribution to the public good, but as the very boundary that surrounded the inventor’s property. The law’s only role was to adjudicate between rival assertions of ownership.
This interpretation made it as imperative for an eighteenth-century inventor to register his claim to possession as it was for a sixteenth-century encloser. No one with a significant idea, such as James Hargreaves with his bank of mechanically operated spinning-wheels, his “spinning jenny,” could afford not to seek a patent. However fragile its protection, it provided legal evidence of a natural right to what both Boulton and Watt routinely called “our property.” Without a patent, that natural right might pass to anyone who claimed it. With it, the property might become more profitable than land, and allow its owner, as Watt would show, to extend its brief life much longer than fourteen years.
The shift from contractual ownership of an idea to outright intellectual property became apparent in 1785 when Arkwright at last won a case of infringement against his patent. “Nothing could be more essentially mischievous,” the judge, Lord Loughborough, declared in his summing up, “than that questions of property between A and B should ever be permitted to be decided upon considerations of public convenience or expediency.” As late as 1806, an unsuccessful plea was made in court to regard a patent “not in the light of monopoly . . . but as a bargain with the public,” but the argument no longer carried any weight. By the start of the nineteenth century, it was plain to lawyers and inventors, and even to pirates, that an idea detached from the uncharted wasteland of the mind belonged to the encloser, at least for a limited time, by the same natural right that made a plot of land the property of the improver. James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s partnership in the Soho Works in Birmingham was built on that insubstantial concept. What they sold for the most part was the blueprint for a steam engine, not the machine itself, and the price was simply a portion of the savings that it produced for its new owner.
The creation of this new kind of property was essential in determining the pattern of industrialization that began to transform the country during the eighteenth century. When it came later to other countries, industrialism was often imposed by government direction, as in Germany, or developed by bureaucratic intervention, as in France. But when it first appeared in Britain, the Industrial Revolution grew from the grassroots, driven by the ambitions of innumerable individuals who believed that by their own efforts they could own both the hardware of machinery and the software of ideas, and make money from them.
In 1701, Jethro Tull, a lawyer-turned-farmer and, evidently, an amateur musician, devised a machine for planting seed in rows based, as he explained, “upon a groove, tongue, and spring in the soundboard of the organ. With these a little altered and some parts of two other instruments, as foreign to the field as the organ is, added to them, I composed my machine.” His drill, as he called it, allowed him to grow his crop in rows, and, with the use of a new horse-drawn plow to break down weeds between the rows, he was able to produce wheat profitably on the shallow, chalky soil of his farm, misleadingly called Prosperous, where every farmer before him had “either gone broke or quitted it before the end of his term.” Although the laborers on his farm hated a machine that seemed to threaten their employment, and smashed up at least one early model, other landowners, keen to squeeze a better return from their investments, flocked to Prosperous to observe Tull’s experiment.
The seed drill transformed farming—but not until the very end of the eighteenth century. During the intervening seventy years, lack of skill and lack of funds prevented the development of robust models of Tull’s complicated device. When persistent farmers finally evolved a design tough enough for the job, they discovered that Tull had been right: sowing the seed in rows, rather than scattering them broadcast, and plowing the weeds in between, increased wheat yields by almost 25 percent, or four to five hushels per acre.
Tull’s invention remains famous as the first of a succession of eighteenth-century innovations in crop and livestock production that were sometimes dubbed the “Agricultural Revolution.” In reality, many supposed novelties, such as the selective breeding of livestock, four-year crop rotation, and the addition of lime or marl to increase wheat yields, had already been introduced in the sixteenth century. Mechanical developments like the horse-powered threshing machine that flailed and winnowed the ear from the wheat, suffered the same long development gap as the drill, with the first patent being issued in 1756, but no widespread use until the early nineteenth century.
This slow take-up of agricultural innovations and the need to return to old discoveries contradicts the conventional story that increased productivity on the land allowed the growth of an urban and industrial population, and thus provided the labor for the manufacturing revolution. In fact, agriculture, which had been the powerhouse of the British economy for almost two centuries, virtually ceased to expand during the eighteenth century. The reasons help to explain why industrial innovation was so eagerly embraced in Britain.
An explosive growth in the population, from about seven million inhabitants in 1700 to more than eleven million by the end of the century, should have pushed up agricultural prices and profits as the demand for food increased. Instead, prices for wheat and other cereals barely rose until the 1780s. Cheap food meant that Daniel Defoe did not exaggerate in 1726 when he claimed that “The working manufacturing people of England eat the fat, and drink the sweet, live better, and fare better, than the working poor of any other nation in Europe.” Much of the demand was in fact met by imports of wheat from northern France, and some from an increase in the acreage worked by British farmers. But in the first seventy years of the century, the rising productivity of farming that had doubled wheat yields since the early 16th century began to flatten and almost level off.
By rights the price of land should have fallen, but instead it increased from about five pounds an acre for enclosed land in the early 1700s to more than thirty pounds in the 1760s. In other words, the value of the land was no longer dictated by its yield of crops and animals. What counted were the laws of supply and demand. More people wanted to buy land than there were owners prepared to sell. Anxious to protect their property, the descendants of the land revolution had used their political and legal muscle to keep it from being dispersed. By 1750 perhaps half of England’s estates were protected from sale by entails and trusts of varying complexity set up to keep them within the family. And the widening application of the equity of redemption made it harder for lenders to foreclose on delinquent borrowers and force them to sell their land. Where sales did take place, almost half were between existing landowners anxious to increase or consolidate their holdings.
The rising price of land triggered a new surge in enclosure. Much of England’s farmland had continued to be cultivated as “open fields” with some common rights of pasturing livestock, and almost a quarter remained communally owned and used. It was a measure of the landowners’ influence in Parliament that more than four thousand “Inclosure Acts” were passed between 1700 and 1830, allowing their promoters to hedge and fence in most of this land as private, exclusive property. The legislation invariably extinguished other forms of property, such as traditional rights to grazing and use of the land, forcing their owners either to become paid workers or to leave the land.
By the end of the century, 40 percent of Britain’s population lived in towns, compared with barely 4 percent in Russia, 7 percent in China, and 15 percent in France. An anonymous verse popular at the time conveys the reality of what had happened to England’s well-managed, productive commons:
The law locks up the man or woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But lets the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
Altogether some seven million acres were transferred into private ownership through the enclosure orders, brutal testimony to the political power now wielded by landowners. In many cases compensation was paid, but the total value of enclosed land represented the transfer of about £175 million of assets from communal possession to the lawyers, merchants, and wealthy landowners who controlled Parliament.
It is impossible to avoid the contrast between the eighteenth-century enclosers and their sixteenth-century predecessors. No longer the underdogs fighting for political influence, the descendants of the land revolution exploited their dominance for economic gain. Few large owners were interested in working the soil themselves. For the first time since the fifteenth century, it no longer made economic sense to invest in improving land. The obligation on landowners to pay land tax and parish contributions for relief of the poor made it difficult to earn as much as 3 percent from the produce of high-priced land. The government’s Consolidated Fund, or Consols, paid the same interest for no effort, and the East India Company, twice as much with scarcely more risk. Even enclosure, sometimes thought to have been a surefire way of doubling profits, turned out to be so expensive that only the capital appreciation justified the cost.
Instead, property had become a source of political power, of capital, and, for some, of aesthetic enjoyment, enhanced by the deft touches of landscape artists like Capability Brown. Compared to Chinese or French peasant holdings, most farms were huge—two thirds were more than sixty acres in size—and their tenants unmistakably wealthy. Frequently, the largest estates consisted of little more than a small “home farm” surrounded by larger tenancies whose rents kept the owner’s family in comfort. Shortly before emigrating to Illinois in 1817, Morris Birkbeck, a tenant who rented a fifteen-hundred-acre farm in the south of England, estimated his assets in terms of crops and livestock to be worth more then £8,000, enough to buy twenty-six thousand acres in the New World. Very often, the home estates were heavily mortgaged, with interest payments amply covered by the rising value of land, but rarely producing enough income to pay off the loan. By 1800 more than 85 percent of agricultural land in Britain was farmed by tenants. The social chasms that divided the three classes, landlords, tenants, and laborers, would persist with little alteration in rural Britain into the second half of the twentieth century.
What this picture concealed, however, was the political and economic crisis that eighteenth-century landowners had created. By removing most of their land from the marketplace, they had attempted to insulate the source of their power with its attendant privileges against outside threat. But, like Poland’s sixteenth-century szlachta, they succeeded in creating an elite democracy, closed to all but the wealthiest or most determined newcomers. Politically, a once vigorous democracy had become aristocratic and corrupt. Not only did the landowners use their political dominance to loot communally owned land, but from the mid-eighteenth century they increasingly treated government posts as property that could be mortgaged and inherited: in 1762, the earl of Egmont secured the post of Registrar to the High Court of the Admiralty, a position that paid £12,000 a year and was later passed on to his elder son, Lord Arden. His younger and less fortunate son, the future prime minister Spencer Perceval, only got the job of Surveyor to the Meltings of the Mint, worth a paltry one hundred pounds a year.
Almost seamlessly, the three rural divisions passed into the classic structure of free-enterprise business—shareholders, managers, workers. The transition was made obvious in David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, his pioneering work in 1817 on the laws of profit and value in a free-enterprise economy. In it he equated the providers of the three basic elements of industrial production—capital, machinery, and labor—with “the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.” His equation made sense since it was out of Britain’s highly capitalized, stalled land market that the Industrial Revolution emerged.
* * *
Historians attempting to explain why the revolution should have happened in Britain rather than in China, the Netherlands, or France, all of which had access to cheap energy, inventive minds, and technical skills, have customarily picked one material ingredient, such as the availability of coal or the urbanization of society, and argued that it triggered a sequence of events that ended with industrialization. But neat cause-and-effect theories do not match the messy upsurge of development and experimentation in such vital but widely dispersed areas as the harnessing of steam power, the production of pig iron, and the mechanization of textile manufactures.
When the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce was set up in 1753 to promote useful inventions, its first seven hundred members included many of Britain’s largest landowners, as well as powerful government ministers with business addresses at the Treasury, the Admiralty, and the War Office. The majority of members were described as “not fashionable . . . with an income of under a thousand pounds a year,” but since a schoolteacher or government clerk was paid only fifty pounds a year, even the unfashionable were far from poor.
Significantly the society’s reports on its experiments and inventions were published initially in a magazine for landowners, the Museum Rusticum et Commerciale. The sheer range of subjects suggests the variety of opportunities that had opened up for those eager to find new ways of increasing the financial return from their properties. In the third issue of the Museum, the owner of “a small estate” described the geological conditions that convinced him to try mining it for coal. This prompted another correspondent, familiar with the availability of coal in northeast England, to claim, “I have known more than once, that from one single acre above thirty thousand pounds sterling, clear profit, has been made.” In the absence of coal, he added, it might be possible to extract clay and start a pottery, as had been done in central England where Josiah Wedgwood would shortly establish his chinaware empire. Although the Museum liked to pretend that its readers were “plain, honest, well-meaning farmers,” it also offered them papers on the production of chemicals for dyeing and bleaching, on experiments with making artificial fertilizer, on the construction of a hydrometer, and on the design of rails for “cast-iron railroads” in order to transport heavy loads of coal or iron ore.
Many disparate elements had to crystallize to produce the Industrial Revolution. It is easy to find most floating in solution in other economies. China especially had a market economy on the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas, a tradition of inventiveness, an efficient transport system using canals and rivers, and abundant energy in the form of waterwheels, windmills, and, above all, human labor. Since water remained more important than coal as a source of nonhuman energy in British industry until the 1820s, the inaccessibility of China’s inland coalfields is not relevant to its failure to industrialize. But two obstacles did make an industrial revolution there impossible. Ideas could only be communicated nationally through the medium of Mandarin, a language restricted to higher officials; and the land’s value was measured not by its produce but by the population it could support.
The catalyst that crystallized all these elements in Britain was the nature of ownership. It had brought into existence a widely dispersed, politically powerful, highly capitalized class of property owners. It offered an incentive to obtain profit from the land and from innovation. And most amorphously but recognizably, it fostered a highly personalized, self-motivated outlook on the use to which possessions might be put.
When Samuel Garbett, cofounder of the Carron Ironworks, Britain’s first mass-production armaments factory, wrote in 1782 to Matthew Boulton, partner of the inventor James Watt and owner of the Soho manufactory, about founding a bank to invest in new industrial ventures, he picked out two vital ingredients that only the descendants of the land revolution could supply. “Nothing but real and well known landed property joined with ministerial connections,” he said, “can make a bank at Birmingham so lucrative as to be worth your or my notice as principals.” Land represented capital, and influence with government ministers provided the political protection that every new property required.
The Duke of Bridgewater employed both in 1763 to build a canal, Britain’s first entirely artificial waterway, so that he could transport coal from his huge estates to the city of Manchester forty miles away. He pledged part of his landed property to borrow £25,000, and used his political connections to have no fewer than four Acts of Parliament passed allowing the compulsory purchase of land along the canal’s proposed route. The commercial success of the duke’s enterprise unlocked a flood of capital for other canals, eventually creating a transport system that would allow manufacturers and miners to reach their markets cheaply.
Some of the investment needed for the myriad of early start-up industries came from the profits of Britain’s mercantile trade with the colonies, and particularly the linked commerce in sugar and slaves, but recent research suggests that this amounted to less than 15 percent of what must have been needed. By one nineteenth-century economist’s computation, two thirds of the capital available during this period before the spread of large private banks existed in the form of real estate rather than financial securities. As late as 1832, land still represented half of all the wealth in Britain, including stocks, cash, overseas earnings, buildings, and manufacturing stock. It was not just the wealthy Duke of Bridgewater who used his acres as security for capital investment.
Land was used by Thomas Baylies to finance the expansion of the pioneer ironworks, the Coalbrookdale Company; by landowner George Bowes, to develop his lead-mining and smelting works in the northeast of England; by textile manufacturer Robert Peel to construct his factories, and by innumerable textile machinery inventors, among them Jedediah Strutt, who raised loans against his farm to develop his own stocking-frame machine, the profits of which later helped finance the creation of Richard Arkwright’s empire of water- and steam-powered textile factories. Matthew Boulton sold and mortgaged most of his land, then raised £28,000 from pledging his wife’s property to finance his first large factory in Birmingham. Across Britain, property owners not only had the means but, as the eighteenth century progressed, the increasingly sharp incentive to find nonagricultural ways of exploiting both their old property in land and the new property in ideas.
A fully equipped textile factory capable of carding wool, spinning thread, and weaving cloth might cost as much as £50,000, but a basic spinning factory with fifty machines could be built and equipped for less than £3,000. The cost was far less than the price of an estate. The building was made from easily accessible wood, and, as John Fielden, himself an early industrialist, recorded, water costing nothing provided the power, so that most of the new factories were sited “on the sides of streams capable of turning the water-wheel.”
Labor was cheaper still, if the human costs were overlooked. As Fielden confessed, the workers recruited to feed wool to the whirring spindles and thread to the flying looms were poorly paid children supplied by the workhouses of big cities, and required to work in alternating twelve-hours shifts. “In many of the manufacturing districts, but particularly, I am afraid, in the guilty county to which I belong [Lancashire],” he wrote, “cruelties the most heart-rending were practised upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the charge of master-manufacturers; they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour . . . [and] flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty.”
Unlike Fielden, however, most property owners were prepared to turn a blind eye to conditions in their rural factories for the sake of the phenomenal returns they could earn: in the late eighteenth century, a wool-to-cloth manufacturer could expect to return profits of 20 to 35 percent on the money invested, paying off the capital cost of its building and equipment in four to five years. In Nottinghamshire, George Robinson built no fewer than six mills on the river Leen in the 1790s and paid off the full cost from his profits in one year. By the early 1800s he had earned enough money to set up the Moore and Robinson’s Bank that financed the textile industry in the area until the late nineteenth century.
Robinson’s transformation into a financier was unusual only in being so successful. Until banks became commonplace in the mid-nineteenth century, manufacturers generally created the credit for their business by pledging the value of their property to their suppliers, and in turn would provide credit by carrying the debts of their customers. They became in effect their own bankers. But the basic foundation for their businesses was remorselessly laid bare in hard times when their profits could no longer meet the cost of their borrowing or of their lending. In the close-printed columns of the London Gazette and other authoritative newspapers where bankruptcies were announced, there was also a melancholy list of properties for sale: “a delightful villa,” “a capital, large dwelling-house, pleasantly situated with extensive plantations, pleasure grounds and gardens,” “a well-furnished gentleman’s house of the first respectability.”
Within a generation, the landed industrialists looking for extra income had either been transformed into businessmen or were displaced by practical, commercially minded manufacturers who were accustomed to handling the wool, cotton, or iron that was their raw material, who were ruthless in driving their child laborers harder, and who were ready to plow back their profits into this new kind of property.
The era of land as the prime source of wealth and income was ending, but the way the earth was owned had not only brought the industrial age into being, it had left an indelible mark on the way it would develop.