238. Survey of topics to be considered in studying the development of English commerce.—Such is the bare outline of the development of English commerce in the period preceding 1800. Two chapters will now be devoted to the discussion of facts which will fill in the outline and will explain the development. That the reader may follow more intelligently a survey will be given in this place of the topics to be considered, and their bearing on the general question.

We must know (1) the character of English exports. The exports of a country show in what lines it is strong enough to compete with foreign producers, and are the means by which it buys commodities produced abroad. We shall then consider (2) the advantages which enabled England to produce these wares so efficiently that other countries were glad to buy of her, and (3) the countries in which these wares found a market. On the other side we want to know (4) the imports, the wares which England wanted but could not herself produce to advantage, and (5) the countries from which the imports came. Another factor of importance will be (6) the development of English shipping. Finally we have to consider (7) the government policy by which statesmen sought to further and regulate the development, as manifested in foreign policy and wars, in the customs tariff, and in the colonial system.

239. (1) Analysis of exports.—The total export to foreign countries of merchandise of English origin (i.e., not including goods from other countries transshipped in England) amounted about 1800 to a little over £29,000,000. The most important items were as follows, in millions of pounds: manufactures of wool, 7.7, or over one fourth of the whole; manufactures of cotton, 4.1; manufactures of iron and steel, 2.0; haberdashery, 1.5; linens, 1. These five items include over one half of the total, and no other item amounted to as much as one million. It is noteworthy that all the raw materials together scarcely exceeded one million. When we come to study the internal development of England we must look, evidently, for a great expansion in certain manufacturing industries to explain the position which their products now took in trade.

240. (2) Development of production, explaining the growth of the export trade. Agriculture.—Turning our attention now, not to the foreign commerce of England but to the conditions at home which made this commerce possible, we find that during the two centuries following 1600 there was a steady development of internal resources. The growth of population stimulated improvement in agriculture; and cultivators managed, by new crops and methods, to increase largely the output in spite of the disadvantages of soil and climate. Root crops (turnips and carrots) and clover were grown on fields which before had been allowed to lie fallow, and the produce, converted into meat and manure, was almost pure gain. By better feeding and breeding the weight of a head of stock was increased twofold or even more. Potatoes and other vegetables were introduced from America and the Continent. Capitalist farmers effected such a revolution in the methods of agriculture, that pasture farming became relatively much less important, and the production of cereals increased so that there was a food supply to maintain a manufacturing population, and sometimes a surplus for export.

241. Internal commerce and means of transportation.—The conditions of internal commerce, measured by the difficulties and dangers of road transportation, were still bad at the beginning of this period, but improved rapidly in the eighteenth century. A writer said in 1767: “There never was a more astonishing Revolution accomplished in the internal system of any country than has been within the compass of a few years in that of England. The Carriage of Grain, Coals, Merchandize, etc., is in general conducted with little more than half the Number of Horses with which it formerly was. Journies of Business are performed with more than double Expedition. Improvements in Agriculture keep pace with those of Trade.” The canals, which were extended rapidly after the success of the Bridgewater Canal, constructed in 1758 to connect Manchester with coal mines seven miles distant, lowered the cost of transportation to one quarter or less, in the districts which they served. As a result manufacturers could rely on a steady supply of raw material for their works, and of food for their employees, and had also a chance to put their finished goods on the market. The eighteenth century, moreover, was a period of great development in English banking, and the extension of credit operations was at the same time an effect and a cause of the growth of trade.

242. Manufactures; advance from the gild to the domestic system and its significance.—We turn now to the history of English manufactures, a topic which is not only, as we have intimated, of great importance for the growth of English commerce, but which is of general interest as showing the stages of development through which other countries passed later.

Gilds still persisted in England, but they had lost the power of control which they had formerly had and which they still maintained on the Continent. The more important industries had passed into the stage known as the “domestic system.” The change, at first view, is not striking, for the manufacturing was still done by petty artisans working at home with their own tools. The ownership of the raw material, however, had passed from the artisans to an employer, who took the risk of the manufacture and reaped profits corresponding to his success in conducting it.

Brain power now took a place in manufactures above hand power. The new class of employers were men who could devote their energy entirely to studying the larger questions of production. They had the chance to look away from the petty details of work, which had for centuries absorbed men’s attention, and to become both broad-sighted and far-sighted. They studied the needs of the market, at home and abroad; they bought the raw material wherever it could be had best and cheapest; and then marketed the product, wherever it would bring them the best returns.

243. The new employers aided by the immigration of foreign laborers.—Success in manufacture still depended largely on the quality of labor, and one great advantage which England owed to her political and religious freedom was the immigration of skilled laborers seeking refuge from the persecutions of the Continent. Refugees, of whom the Huguenots from France were the most important, brought with them improvements in the woolen manufacture and stimulated the development of other industries: silk, linen, cotton, calico, paper, etc. It is, however, hard to see how the labor of these people could have had a great effect in extending foreign trade if they had not been guided by their employers, who were men of considerable capital, with broad views and wide acquaintance, willing to take large contracts and eager to extend the market for their goods. An English pamphlet of the period says that the towns in which the silk and cotton manufactures developed owed their industries “to the public spirit of two or three men in each.” The development of this process, by which artisans lost their former independence and came to work for an employer, can be seen from a statement of the economist Adam Smith, who wrote in 1776. “In every part of Europe,” he said, “twenty workmen serve under a master for one that is independent.” This was not yet true of “every part” of Europe, and even in the western states of the Continent the process had not advanced so far as in England, where the author had made most of his observations.

244. Dependence of technical progress on the new class of employers.—It is noteworthy that the great inventions to which the modern development of manufactures has often been ascribed could not have been made of practical importance unless this system of organization had developed previously. The gilds were bitterly opposed to any changes in their system of routine, and independent artisans would not find it worth their while to introduce costly improvements. Many inventions had been made before the eighteenth century which would have been of the greatest importance in manufacture if there had been any one to take them up and put them through; they fell dead, however, on the world of their time, or were killed by the opposition of petty producers. An illustration of the way in which premature inventions disappeared can be given from the experience of a man who, to all appearances, had devised a repeating firearm before the end of the sixteenth century. A German recommended to an English statesman “one of his countrymen, who had invented a harquebuse, that shall containe ten balls or pelletes of lead, all the which shall goe off, one after another, having once given fire, so that with one harquebuse one may kill ten theeves or other enemies without recharging.” The importance of such an invention needs only to be suggested, but, so far as the writer knows, nothing further was heard of it.

245. The domestic system preparatory to the great revolution in manufactures in the eighteenth century.—Not until the latter part of the eighteenth century were the times ripe for the great technical changes in manufacture, which the introduction of machinery implied. Then the advance came with the speed of revolution. In the lifetime of an ordinary man (1770-1840) the whole face of England changed; the great textile towns and the “black country” of the coal and iron industry grew up; canals and railroads cut through the agricultural districts to connect the industries with each other and with the outside world; a social and political revolution accompanied the economic. No attempt can here be made to describe the changes in detail, and the discussion of the factory system and other features of the present organization to which they gave rise can better be postponed. The following paragraphs will suggest the development in some of England’s chief export industries.

246. Progress of the cotton manufacture.—The cotton manufacture was the first to show the possibilities of the application of machinery. Two main processes are to be distinguished in the manufacture of cotton, as in that of other textiles; first, the spinning of the yarn from the fiber, and second, the weaving of the yarn into cloth. The first great improvement was the invention by Kay in 1738 of the fly-shuttle, which saved the time and energy of the weaver and enabled him to double his output of cloth. Still, the industry was small and grew slowly. The amount of raw cotton imported from Turkey and the West Indies would seem now perfectly insignificant, and was exceeded by the amount of linen yarn imported from Ireland alone. The cotton manufacture was hampered especially by the slowness of cotton spinning (six spinners working with the old-fashioned wheel were needed to supply yarn to one weaver); and by the weakness of the yarn, which required linen to be used for the warp of cloth. Inventions which met these difficulties were the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, patented 1770, which enabled a spinner to make eight threads at once instead of one (later, twenty, thirty, even one hundred and twenty); and Arkwright’s roller spinning frame, patented 1769, which made cotton yarn strong enough for warp, by stretching the strand before it was twisted. Improvements followed in other processes (carding, printing, etc.); water-power was used more generally, and a mere beginning made with the application of steam. A Kentish clergyman, Cartwright, invented a power loom which greatly increased the possibilities of weaving but which did not become a practical success until the nineteenth century; long after 1800 the hand-loom weavers kept up a hopeless struggle in competition with it.

The full effect of all these changes was not felt until the nineteenth century, but their importance in this period can be measured by the imports of raw cotton. In the forty-three years, 1741-1784, the annual imports rose from 4,000 to 28,000 bales, while in the sixteen years following they increased to 150,000 bales (1800).

247. Slower development of the woolen manufacture.—No such rapidity of development as this can be traced in the woolen manufacture, for it had long been England’s mainstay, and changed more slowly partly because it was so firmly established. Little by little, however, the spinning-wheel was displaced by the jenny, and other sources of power than the human body were utilized. As in the case of cotton, power weaving was not important until after 1800; but the manufacture of worsteds (in which the fibers are longer than in woolens, and are kept parallel) was greatly helped by a second invention of Cartwright, for wool-combing by machinery.

248. Development of the iron industry with the use of pit-coal.—The only other industry of this period which our space allows us to treat is that of iron. Until the eighteenth century iron was made almost entirely by smelting with charcoal, the primitive process which can be traced back to prehistoric times. A ton of iron required two loads of charcoal, and a load of charcoal two loads of wood, so that the industry depended largely on the wood supply, and was carried on at petty forges scattered through England, but established mainly in the South. A large proportion of the English iron supply was imported from Sweden. Coal, as we use the word, called then pit-coal or sea-coal, had for centuries been mined for domestic use, but had no importance in manufacture. Various men tried to smelt iron by coal or coke, but their experiments had no practical result till about 1760, when blast furnaces using coal were successfully established, and the industry began a period of rapid development, furthered about 1790 by the application of steam-power to the blast. Henry Cort invented in this period the processes by which pig was changed to malleable iron in a coal-puddling furnace, and the malleable iron was worked into bars by rollers instead of by the slow action of forge hammers. The production of iron had increased fourfold (17,000 to 68,000 tons) in the period 1740-1788, and in the period of eight years following nearly as much again was produced (125,000 tons in 1796). The industries depending on iron passed into a new stage, and the large export of iron and steel in 1800 is explained.

249. (3) The chief markets for England’s exports.—The market for English wares varied, of course, according to the country to which they were sent. The most favorable market for manufactures was afforded by the colonies in America, until the outbreak of the war of independence. The colonists were a high grade of customers; they had cultivated tastes and were willing to work hard to gratify them. By reason of natural conditions even more than by legislation they found it difficult to establish manufactures, and bought manufactured wares of England with the raw products which their environment afforded in abundance. A book published just before the revolution says that the “colonies are furnished from England with materials for wearing apparel, household furniture, silk, woolen, and linen manufactures, iron, cordage, and sails, great guns, small arms, ammunition, lead, brass, iron, and steel, whether wrought or unwrought; in a word England furnishes them with almost everything needful for the luxuries, as well as conveniences of life, except provisions.”

In European countries English manufactures did not find such a clear field. There were some branches (silk, linen, lace, paper, tin-plate, etc.) in which other countries were distinctly superior, and no European country depended on England as did the colonies. English woolens, however, went practically everywhere, and other products of the textile and metal industries were sure of a ready market in most countries.

For exports to other continents the English had to choose articles which would stimulate less civilized people to production and exchange. Very considerable sums in gold and silver were sent to Asia, and the half-savage Africans were tempted with gunpowder, iron, rum, spirits, beads, etc.

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