i CHARLES F. FOSTER and ERIC L. JONES The Fabric of Society and how it creates wealth Wealth distribution and wealth creation in Europe 1000 - 1800 ARLEY HALL PRESS ii C 2013 Charles F. Foster and Eric L. Jones Published 2013 by Arley Hall Press Northwich Cheshire CW9 6NA ISBN 978-0-9518382-5-9 This is the fifth book by Charles F Foster published by the Arley Hall Press. This book, and the previous four (1992-2004) can be bought directly from Arley Hall Press, Northwich, Cheshire CW9 6NA by sending a cheque or by phone 01565 777231 with a card, or on www.arleyhallarchives.co.uk by Pay Pal. This website features over 6000 scans of original receipted invoices 1750-90 from a wide variety of businesses which supplied Arley – the family, the house, the farms, the mills etc. These are all fully indexed and searchable. Europe Rest of airmail UK world rest of world airmail surface £ £ £ Four Cheshire Townships in the 18th Century 3.00 5.00 8.00 Cheshire Cheese & Farming in the North West in the 17th & 18th Centuries 3.00 5.00 8.00 Seven Households: Life in Cheshire and Lancashire 5.00 7.50 13.00 1582-1774 Capital and Innovation 5.00 9.00 16.00 The Fabric of Society and how it creates wealth 7.00 10.00 13.00 All prices include postage. E book ISBN 978-0-9518382-6-6 The Fabric of Society also appears on the above website as a pdf and can be read or downloaded from there for free. I'm most grateful to my wife, Jane, for her assistance in producing this book. Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY iii Contents List of figures, maps and tables iv Author's acknowledgements iv General Introduction Charles F. Foster 1 Part I. North and South: the build-up to the Industrial Revolution in England Eric L. Jones and Charles F. Foster 1. Introduction 3 2. Rents, prices and locations 5 3. The concentration of industry in the north-west 12 4. Why did these developments, or their equivalents, not 17 happen elsewhere? 5. Why not a southern location? 20 6. Landed investment 25 7. Technology and specialization 30 8. Conclusions 33 Part II. Wealth distribution and wealth creation in societies manufacturing cotton in Europe - Italy, Germany, Lancashire and Holland 1100 - 1780 Charles F. Foster 1. Introduction 37 2. North Italian cities 1000 - 1500 42 3. South Germany 1300 - 1600 55 4. European wealth creation reviewed 1000 - 1600 61 5. Lancashire 1600 - 1700 65 6. The mechanization of cotton spinning 80 7. The growth of European wealth creation to 1820 109 Bibliography 116 iv List of Figures 1. The distribution of wealth in nine Ottobeuren villages, 60 1525 and 1620 List of Maps 1. The woollen and linen areas in Lancashire in 1600 67 List of Tables 1. Per capita GDP 1 AD - 2003 AD (in 1990 International 40 Dollars) 2. The distribution of wealth in the Commune of Piuvica in 47 1243 3. Approximate wealth of householders in Orvieto in 1292 49 4. Wealth distribution in the City of Florence and the 53-4 Florentine State in 1427 5. Augsburg 1475 Tax Return 57 6. Blackburn and Bucklow Hundreds 1543 - 5 70 7. The wealth of Blackburn Hundred 1660 - 64 73 8. Raw cotton imported and retained in Britain 1740 - 1785 84 9. Metal-working firms invoicing the Arley Estate 1750 - 90 98 10. The growth rates of per capita GDP in 5 areas 113 Author's acknowledgements and thanks Many people have helped me create the essay in Part II and the main argument in it over the last seven or eight years and I would like to thank them all. The knowledge and skills of the following people have been particularly important: A. Antonovics, F. Crouzet, R. Hudson, E.L Jones, C.B. Phillips, B. Pullan and T. Scott. B. and P. Diaz kindly decoded the 'Wisconsin' Florentine Catasto of 1427. Eric Jones has summarised many of the results of his work in Locating the Industrial Revolution, 2010 (Singapore). 1 General Introduction This book primarily expands Charles Foster's four earlier books. Those books provided a fairly complete picture of the social and economic development between 1500 and 1780 of an area of north Cheshire. The significance of this was that this area, just south of the River Mersey connecting Manchester to Liverpool, was approximately in the centre of the area in north-west England where the Industrial Revolution began in the 1770s. Those books all depended heavily on the marvellously detailed archives left by Sir Peter Warburton, 4th Baronet, who owned the Arley Estate from 1743 to 1774. Many of these archives have been published for the first time on the Arley Hall Archives website. The adjoining Tabley Estate, owned by Cheshire's first great historian Sir Peter Leicester (1613 - 78), provided outstanding archives for the earlier periods. The purpose of the present book is to compare the north-west of England with other areas in England and around Europe. In the first half Eric L. Jones has kindly co-operated with me to contrast the north-west with the south of England. He has been able to fuse his knowledge of the archives of southern agriculture and business acquired over the last fifty years with the results of my north- western studies. A working life of teaching and writing about the significance of the Industrial Revolution has enabled him to set the whole analysis in the context of the evolving academic view of the phenomenon. In the second half I have traced the social and economic conditions in four societies which manufactured cotton cloth between 1100 and 1780 - N. Italy, Germany, Lancashire and Holland. Figures produced by Angus Maddison in 2007 estimating the GDP per capita of countries between 1 AD and 2003 suggest that Italy, Holland and England were, in turn, the countries most successful at generating increased wealth for their populations between 1000 and 1820. From my analysis of conditions in these countries it would appear that the ability to generate increasing wealth depended on three interlinked features. In each country a society emerged where 2 wealth was fairly widely distributed. The reasons for this were different in each country. Perhaps the absence of a strong central political authority was one common factor. Certainly in each society plural political institutions became established and these strengthened the wider distribution of wealth. Vigorous technical and commercial innovation then occurred which created rising wealth. This probably happened because many families had enough wealth to permit the innovators among them to experiment and establish their new ideas. But over the centuries some families were economically and politically more successful than others and the fortunes they made had the effect of concentrating the society's wealth in fewer hands. Some of the rich manipulated the political institutions so that they enjoyed both wealth and power and became oligarchs or magnates. The amount of innovation in the society declined and these societies ceased to be able to generate increasing wealth for their citizens - first in north Italy in the 15th century, then in Holland in the 18th century and finally in England in the late 19th century. Charles F. Foster 3 Part I North and South: the build-up to the Industrial Revolution in England Eric L. Jones & Charles F. Foster 1 Introduction This essay contends that it is more illuminating to look at the history of industrialization in England regionally rather than as a uniform national process.1 This approach is employed not merely to justify presenting local detail but in order to use different regional experiences for understanding change in ways that blanket national treatment fails to reveal. Our study investigates two large areas, one north, one south, and highlights the way they diverged before and during the industrial period. We demonstrate that juxtaposing them shows larger and more prolonged forces at work than do standard histories of the industrial revolution, which truncate the past by neglecting to start before the mid- or late eighteenth century, ignoring the south, and placing most explanatory weight on the adoption of coal and steam power. We challenge this emphasis: the cascade of technological advances at the heart of exceptional productivity growth cannot be understood if it neglects the preceding intensity of market competition. Our study rests first on archival research into north-west England, particularly the Mersey basin in Lancashire and Cheshire.2 Secondly, we present a southern counterpoint that refers to a dozen counties in south-central England, half of which have been considered in some depth. 3 Envisaging England as a single unit is understandable since there were after all common elements at the national level, such as the legal system and economic policy. Single themes supposedly 1 We are grateful to John Anderson, Tom Arkell, John Hartwick and Jeremy Morse for comments. 2 Foster, 2002, and others referenced below. 3 Jones, 2010. 4 referring to the whole country are often all that can be shoe-horned into university courses; geographical disaggregation is especially difficult when teaching non-native students who have not internalized the geographical peculiarities of England in their earlier years. Yet there is a cost: national averages cloud the bifurcation of north and south and overlook the market integration that permitted their emerging and complementary specializations. Even a two-fold analysis simplifies because intermediate patterns were produced by the successive stages of market growth: a more extended treatment might see each of our two regions as a bundle of subordinate districts, all evolving over time.