Plague Rats For a Better World
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.
Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past.
Other countries are still working on this transition. It takes a lot of social capital, I guess.
It takes a plague, is what it takes. Simon Schama goes over it in his A History of Britain
(Isn’t my new double-quote box cool?!)
August 8th, 2007 at 12:36 am
(It’s super cool!)
Around 1800, eh? Whom do we know that was writing in that era?
August 8th, 2007 at 1:49 am
I reckon this Clark chap should go back a bit earlier, to the Netherlands of the 17th century, to see the middle class northern protestant culture in its initial glory. Of course that was a commercial, not an industrial revolution, but one would argue that the “culture” he talks about was every bit as present there as it was in England a century or so later. All that happened in England was that a combination of agricultural and industrial advance freed up vast numbers of people to be hugely more productive - I’m not at all sure that it was the result of a new “culture”.
I’ve found Schama irritating for over 30 years now - basically for as long as I’ve known him - and while one can applaud his ambition to write accessible narrative history, I’m afraid the execution just isn’t quite there. He came a bit of a cropper in his account of the English Civil War (even I knew he hadn’t kept up with the research)as Blair Worden, a top class 17thC specialist, pointed out in his review in “The Spectator”. He also did a thorough demolition job on the Schama prose style, of which Schama’s proud but which I find, like the rest of Schama, quite irritating at times. Here’s Worden on the subject:
“Schama has a fatal taste for the insubstantialities of cliche, of colloquialism, of overstatement. James I
was, when all was said and done, his mother's son'. Theentire court culture’ of his reignwas drunk on spending';Jacobean culture’ was ‘haunted’ bymisogynist nightmares'; the Overbury scandalmade the most lurid productions of John Webster seem understated by comparison’. In the revolution of 1649the monarchy itself followed the peerage into the trash'; Oliver Cromwell, tired ofgungho republicans’, dissolved the Long Parliamentin full exterminating angel mode'; James IIhad obviously not graduated from the same charm school as his brother’; and so on. Schama on Charles I’s attempt to arrest the five members reads like a failed attempt to parody Carlyle and Macaulay in one go: ‘A huge caesura, full of silent rage, foolishness and foreboding, hung over the house. The embarrassed king, roiling [sic] in chagrin, departed whence he came.’History can be a heart-breaker,' Schama sighs, and there are bien pensant rebukes for Cromwell's treatment of the Irish (though the Protector earns good marks for his proposal to readmit the Jews to England) and, at considerable length, for the exploitation of African slaves, a process launched in 'a truly Faustian moment'. Reflecting on the deaths and sufferings of the civil wars, he rules thatwe owe it to the casualties to ask if their misery had meaning’. Perhaps we should be thankful that he does not apologise for it.”I like that.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:10 am
That does seem to be the sort of history that is made into epic TV series, though. Like that wretched American Civil War documentary on PBS, back in the 90s. What a crock!
August 8th, 2007 at 3:32 am
I’ve got the music soundtrack from that, complete with opening quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes and the heart-rending letter from a bloke called Sullivan Ballou who got killed. The lead historian on that was a bloke called Shelby Foote who wasn’t an historian at all, which explained a lot about it. Have you seen that movie “Gettysburg - Men in Beards”?
August 8th, 2007 at 3:42 am
That is a very interesting article. The application of economics to history is very much over-due. (Something Ludwig von Mises wrote a lot about early last century).
The author talks about the progeny of the upper middle classes taking over. Well, I think we are seeing that happening again. After a relatively short respite where wealth was becoming more general, the reverse trend - driven by government - is starting to bite.
Those from stable homes, with good education and ethics are prospering, while those of the lower classes, where broken homes, loose ethics and no real education are the common lot are going backwards. But unlike earlier, when poor people were rising out of the swamp, government welfare is now holding (the bulk of) them back.
In this light, the destruction of the welfare state is seen as a moral imperative. Quite the opposite of how it is portrayed.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:46 am
(Looks like we cross-posted, Red). No, I haven’t see that one. Not very convincing, eh? Is that a beard, or did a beaver attack his face?
August 8th, 2007 at 5:51 am
I can’t believe you fellers mock the work of America’s most eminent historian!
Red, I thought Shelby Foote was the thing’s saving grace (He was primarily a novelist, but he did spend 20 years churning out a 3-volume history of the civil war.) The other “experts” were all Professors of Conventional Opinion as I recall.
Burns is treating us all to WWII this fall. I’ll watch, but I know I am going to shudder.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Hey, at least Schama has a voice. That bit you quoted, he positively echoed from it. I knew I’d get you going, bringing him up. I also only mentioned him in case what I was about to say was totally full of it and then I could say “Well there’s a reason you don’t like him.”
Except, given his luridness, I’ve tried three or four times now to get through that bloody French Revolution tract of his and I can’t get past the first hundred pages.
Ken Burns? iPhoto does a “Ken Burns Effect”. I asked Peter when it came out, “Who’s Ken Burns?” and he said “You know, that guy!” then I remembered. We watched a documentary on him (funny) in my photojournalism class, how he revolutionised the way we look at pictures. And you have to admit, it’s a precious contribution to the history of mankind to make documentary reenactments obsolete.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
You’ve already watched it, see it again to maximize your Burns Experience.
August 8th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Oh lord.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:51 am
That Burns parody is too funny for words. Even funnier to someone who’d just read a new book about WW2 negro fighter pilots which is written entirely in Burns-ese. I wonder what’s next? Black female naval officers in the Revolutionary War?
Well, yes, Shelby Foote was certainly the most memorable person on the programme and I enjoyed reading his three-decker even though I still don’t know what the word “lagnappe” means. But I read it primarily as a novel, for the characterisations - not just the obvious ones but also the secondary types like Longstreet and all those guys called Johnson. The result was something which lent itself to the Burns treatment rather more than a straight work of history.
Brett’s right about the welfare state of course. If you subsidise something you get more of it and over the past 30 years we’ve been subsidising social breakdown. The demoralisation of the working classes is now pretty much complete, and the public sector middle-class has got itself a long-term underclass to look after. It was only possible of course after the Labour Party abandoned the ancient strand of Methodism in its heritage and replaced it with toxic gliberalism.
Best comment on Schama’s telly series came from the chap who I went to for modern European history who is a pretty serious historian indeed (I used to be fairly intelligent). He’d caught a quarter of an hour of it while at the bedside of a dying relative, and had been greatly taken by the sight of Shama silhouetted against the sky, with the camera filming him from ground level. “What Simon didn’t realise” observed the revered professor “was that even the f*ing cameraman was bored shless”.
August 9th, 2007 at 6:13 am
Haha! I’ve heard that watching TV takes less energy than sleeping. Haven’t got any reference, but it feels true.
August 9th, 2007 at 6:16 am
Lagniappe! My grandfather used that word all the time. Picked it up on an oil field somewhere, no doubt, since it’s unique to Louisiana and he was from Michigan. It originally meant the gift with purchase a shop-keeper sometimes tossed in, and came to mean an unexpected benefit. Yankees never use the word, and even for Southerners it’s somewhat archaic. Must try to work it into conversation now, just to keep it alive.
August 9th, 2007 at 6:18 am
P.S. Since oddities of French-to-English pronunciation are being discussed on another thread, the word is pronounced: lan-yap.
August 9th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Blackstronauts!
August 9th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Lagniappe sounds like what Scottish farmers call the “luck-penny”, a modest sum of money added onto the sale price, presumably so that the chap can buy a meal/drink on the way home. The way Shelby Foote uses it I assumed it meant something like “dessert”.
Looking at Schama’s script, I’d say that appearing on TV takes even less energy than watching it. Golly that chap likes himself. An enduring passion, as it were.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Youbetyoursweetasstronauts!
August 9th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I think the point wasn’t about television but about sleeping. You actually use a fair amount of energy when you sleep. Whereas people might assume that being awake, even if you’re awake on the couch vegging in front of the TV, would use more.
August 13th, 2007 at 2:33 am
On the actual article, which also got published in The Scotsman this weekend, there’d seem to be three areas for specific questioning:
1) Timescale: can there be evolutionary changes in just a few hundred years? I really doubt it.
2) Timing: the date of the start of the industrial revolution has been getting earlier and earlier. This guy has it at about 1800, which is very late. Agricultural improvement, which generated the 8 per cent rate of capital formation identified by Rostow as a precondition for take-off into sustained growth, had been in train for nearly a century by then, as had modern ironworking (Darby at Coalbrookdale 1709). Mining had been improved enormously by steam powered pumps in the early18thC, and some would make a case for there having been a “mini industrial revolution” under Elizabeth. Like the Renaissance, it just keeps getting earlier. All of which goes to show that the term “industrial revolution”, itself an invention of the early 20th century, is of less use when describing late 18thC advances in productivity in the textile, metalworking and ceramics industries than the more accurate term people used at the time, “the machine system”.
3) Culture: difficult to believe that England lacked a culture of saving until 1800. There’s lots of evidence to the contrary. In the middle ages people endowed chantries and (idiots) Oxford colleges in the perfectly rational belief that they were laying up their treasure in Heaven. Not what our contemporary academic would call saving, but perfectly rational to them at the time. Incidentally, the evidence on how people reacted to having been thinned out by the Black Death varies. There was some increase in productivity per head as marginal land was taken out of production, but the people who were left weren’t significantly more productive than they’d been before. There was some downward pressure on land rents, which acted as an incentive to landlords to enclose the land, get rid of the tenants and put it all out to less labour-intensive sheep – which didn’t improve the lot of the tenants one bit. Those who could, saved or spent, but there were two major longstanding difficulties, shortage of things to save and shortages of media through which to save. These shortages were addressed in two ways a) The amount of capital in private hands was greatly increased by the privatisation of Church lands during the Reformation. This more or less coincided with the first sustained period of price inflation anyone had ever seen as large amounts of silver entered the European economy from Peru and as government expanded its operations and as ever caused inflation. The effect was to accelerate investment in agriculture, with more enclosures and more sheep, (now the Church had lost its wealth the landless former tenants really were on their own – see Elizabethan Poor Laws). They also did what the English have done ever since, the period 1575-1625 being identified by WG Hoskins as a golden age of home improvement. While the 17thC wasn’t the best century for economic growth – Charles I was a terrible dirigiste, the Civil War just destroyed capital – by its end investment was beginning to find its way into the transport infrastructure and new ways of farming. As these took hold over following century, with canals in the latter half creating national markets for bulk goods, capital formation had reached the necessary level – a long time before this historian chap detects any change in “culture”.
b) The ways in which people could save changed too during the 18thC. With government needing to finance wars and the construction of the Royal Navy, government loans offered a new way to make money by shifting paper, as did the new marine insurance industry. Commercial investment through joint stock companies became possible, and for those who enjoyed a gamble were always the money-pits of the North American colonies in which to invest. Poor people could save too - agricultural improvement gradually generated enough of a surplus to permit, not just the purchase of modest luxuries, but also the formation of new fortunes as new fodder crops enabled farmers to over-winter far more livestock.
I really don’t see what evolution’s got to do with the industrial revolution, and the cultural argument’s pretty thin – fortunes have always been built up and then dissipated, it’s a staple tale from the Prodigal Son through to Thomas Mann. The rise of Methodism – the first sect to allow people to choose just how much religion they were willing to pay for – could be said to have been part of a change of culture, but you didn’t have to be a Methodist to be careful with money.
I’ve only written at this length because the poor bloke who’s written this book must be squirming at the way it’s been misreported. That’s what happens when colleges hire PR people to “raise their profile”. Poor sod.
August 13th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Hmm.
That reminds me, when I was in London the BM did an exhibit, in honour of the debate over the coming Euro (the death of the European currencies was the turn of the year a few weeks later), on the history of currency. How it went from personal notes written to bankers to pay such and such to so and so, to individual banks issuing their own (they had examples with all the sweet little pictures they all used to make theirs distinctive) to putting the Queen on her first notes. Anyway, there was a bit of overlap with some of that in that exhibition. It was really interesting. I kept all my flyers.
August 14th, 2007 at 3:22 am
Those notes were the first documentary proof that the English had faith in the system. Hence the use of the word “fiduciary” in this context. Cobbett, who of course trusted nobody (not without reason), was agin’ it.
August 15th, 2007 at 9:22 am
ORIGIN late 16th cent.(in the sense [something inspiring trust; credentials] ): from Latin fiduciarius, from fiducia ‘trust,’ from fidere ‘to trust.’
Indeed you are right!
August 15th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Damn! Ima didn’t see Mr. Red’s comment until Ninme went GraveDigging.
Huge! I even understands parts of it!
In the middle ages people endowed chantries and (idiots) Oxford colleges in the perfectly rational belief that they were laying up their treasure in Heaven
Cathedrals as Banks?
August 16th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Very much so, Half! And thanks for the kind words!
February 25th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
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