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Arnold Toynbee's Industrial Revolution

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Arnold Toynbee's Industrial Revolution Donald Winch Arnold Toynbee’s Industrial Revolution1 I When Arnold Toynbee chose to make ‘Industrial Revolution’ the main theme of the book he intended to write on the basis of lectures he gave in Oxford in the early 1880s, he was promoting a figure of speech that had been in occasional use since the beginning of the century. Promotion took the form of adding capital letters and a judicious mixture of moral appraisal and historical explanation to what had largely been descriptive accounts of the pace at which machine and factory production had progressed in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Toynbee’s case, however, the moral and historical components differed from those associated with the more thorough-going catastrophist interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in circulation before and after his lectures were published. The idea that the modern system of industry which had increased national wealth in England had been achieved at the expense of the material and moral well-being of many was accepted by Toynbee as an accurate account of what had happened during the early decades of the nineteenth century. This was ‘a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed’, a period in which there had been an increase in pauperism and when free competition had ‘led to a rapid alienation of classes and the degradation of a large body of producers’ (IR, 64). This diagnosis already had several foreign exponents, two of whom are mentioned by Toynbee – Simonde de Sismondi and Ferdinand Lassalle (IR, 33) – to which the names of other foreign observers who regarded England as a society rapidly approaching ruin as 1 This article is based on a reading of the two posthumous texts on which Toynbee’s reputation as an author rests: The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England; Popular Addresses, Notes, and Other Fragments by the late Arnold Toynbee, together with a reminiscence by Lord Milner, (London: Longmans Green, [1st edn., 1884], 7th impression, 1923); and Progress and Poverty; A Criticism of Mr Henry George being Two Lectures delivered in St Andrew’s Hall, Newman Street , (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co, 1883). References to these works in the text will be given as IR and PP respectively, followed by page numbers. 1 a result of political and economic instability could be added.2 But linkage of the rise of manufacturing with moral decay and social disruption also had domestic exponents who can be traced back to Robert Malthus and his critics at the turn of the century. In his first Essay on Population, published in 1798, Malthus had posed the possibility of what would in later Marxian parlance be called ‘immiseration’ – the progressive erosion of living standards – as part of a critique of what he regarded as Adam Smith’s over-sanguine views on capital accumulation and economic growth. As a political economist who combined this with being an Anglican clergyman, he also voiced serious doubts about the effect on morals and happiness of the increasing proportion of the working population that was becoming dependent on urban manufacturing employments under the hot-house conditions of war and economic blockade.3 During and after the Napoleonic wars Malthus’s Tory and romantic opponents, led by Robert Southey, expanded on some of these arguments by adding a ‘feudal’ or golden age contrast to their hostile evaluation of England’s burgeoning ‘manufacturing system’.4 In the 1830s and 40s Thomas Carlyle further embellished the romantic position in his attack on the ‘machine age’ and in his scornful dismissal of a society based on the ‘cash nexus’ in Past and Present. Together with his earlier pamphlet on Chartism, this impressed Friedrich Engels when writing from his Manchester base The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 – a work that was to become the best-known foreign exposition of the catastrophe thesis. Engels’s account of the Industrial Revolution, according to which the steam engine and machinery used in cotton manufacture had endowed England with an industrial proletariat 2 See Anna Bezanson, ‘The Early Use of the Term Industrial Revolution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, XXXVI, 2, (1922), 343-9. Toynbee’s sources when writing the lectures are examined in Alon Kadish, Apostle Arnold; the Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee, 1852-1883,( Duke, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), p.98-155. Donald Coleman drew attention to foreign use of ‘industrial revolution’ in Myth, History and the Industrial Revolution, (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), 1-42. Gareth Stedman Jones extended the search into a wider range of foreign observers and concerns in ‘National Bankruptcy and Social Revolution: European Observers on Britain, 1813-1844’ in Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688-1914, ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 61-92. Stedman Jones has dealt more fully with Toynbee in a later work; see An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)218-235. 3 See chapter 16 of the first Essay on Population, 1798. For commentary on the development of this line of thought by Malthus see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 246, 266-8, 271-3, 325, 332-8. 4 For Southey’s role in articulating ‘romantic conservatism’ see David Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, English Historical Review, 104, 411,(1989), 308-31; and Winch, ‘A Manufacturing Animal; Things not Persons?’ in Riches and Poverty, 323-348. 2 destined to play a role of world-historical significance, was to become an integral part of the argument for a revolutionary version of state socialism. While Engels’s work seems not to have featured in Toynbee’s reading, its place was amply filled by the writings of Marx and Lassalle, probably because these were translated into French earlier than Engels’s work. Indeed, Toynbee regarded the Industrial Revolution as the origin of every kind of socialism from the ‘Tory’ or paternalistic type he associated with Carlyle to its latest ‘German’ or revolutionary alternatives at the other end of the spectrum. The material developments which had ‘silenced the spinning-wheel and hand-loom, and dragged men and women into the great cities and huge factories’ (PP, 6) had created the problems associated with the distribution of wealth to which socialism in its various forms was the response. One of the principal goals of Toynbee’s foreshortened career could be described as that of articulating a brand of radical liberalism which could address the problem of distribution in a manner suited to the progressive continuities of English history and the emerging aspirations to democratic citizenship that came with extension of the suffrage in 1832 and 1867. In urging his student audience to take up the new sub-discipline of economic history he was urging them to tackle the most important problems facing British society in the 1880s and beyond. II This opening roll-call flags some of the issues that need to be addressed in any treatment of the state of the interpretative art before and after Toynbee mounted his lectures. It recalls some of the intellectual developments that form the background against which Toynbee sought to place his own work, and about which more can be said in a moment. What it does not recall are other features of his intellectual biography connected with the Oxford of Thomas Henry Green, the religious and philosophical mentor with whom, in the words of Alfred Milner, another member of the same circle centred on Balliol College, Toynbee had ‘a strong spiritual affinity’ (Milner in IR, xviii). 3 A distinguished literature on this subject allows me to confine myself to a few headline statements.5 Green’s teaching and personal example provided his pupils with a way of re-inscribing English liberalism in the language of philosophical idealism mixed with evangelical Christianity. It equipped them to play a part in making the transition to what became known as ‘New Liberalism’ in the 1880s, 90s, and early 1900s. The part they played was made interesting chiefly by virtue of the fact that Green and Toynbee, as teachers attached to Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol during the revival of Oxford as a would-be national institution of higher learning, were in the self-conscious business of preparing an élite for its future political and administrative role. Toynbee outlived his mentor by only one year, but he proved to be an outstanding practical exponent of Green’s position, supplying some economic backbone that could not be found in the original, thereby reinforcing its reformist purchase on contemporary politics. Milner summarized this as follows: ‘For the sake of religion he had become a social reformer; for the sake of social reform he became an economist’ (Milner in IR, xxi). Hence, in addition to being a disciple of Green, Toynbee saw himself as a member of the latest generation of disinterested students of British economic life, part of the native tradition of political economy and economic history that began with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The appearance of this work in 1776 provided Toynbee with the first of the four literary and chronological pegs on which he hung his account of successive phases of the Industrial Revolution. Smith represented the immediate pre-industrial phase, marked by the replacement of medieval and mercantile regulation of domestic and international commerce by competition and free trade. The twin philosophical conceptions of economic liberty and the providential or harmonious properties of the pursuit of individual self-interest had been woven into the intellectual fabric of political economy by Smith; but it was what Toynbee described as the ‘force of necessity’ embodied in the inventions of Arkwright, Watt, Cartwright, and Crompton patented a few years after the Wealth of Nations first appeared 5 See Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T.
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