Labor Supply for British Industrialization

The Industrial Revolution, which transformed world history, began in Britain in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Entire industries, most notably cotton spinning, were converted to factory production, and a wave of people moved to the cities for work opportunities. By around 1850, half the population of Britain was urban, and the factory working class had become as large as the craft worker population. Bleak working conditions prevailed in early factories. Employers worked actively to keep labor costs down. Machines raised productivity, simplifying work for many employees and reducing strength and skill requirements, but the gains could be wiped away if other costs rose too rapidly. The machines cost substantial amounts of money for manufacturers, who did not usually come from highly wealthy backgrounds; there was pressure to make sure the investments paid off quickly. This meant, typically, not only relatively low pay for workers but also long hours at work (most factories assumed twelve-to-fourteen-hour work days). Other work conditions-more intensive control by sometimes harsh supervisors, a machine-driven pace on the job-were often unfavorable as well. The question that often arises is why so many laborers were attracted to industrial jobs. Historians also ask why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain first, and not, for example, in another place such as Germany or France.

Historians quickly uncovered a plausible new eighteenth-century element, fairly distinctive to Britain: the growing enclosure movement. During the middle decades of the century, many landowners, seeking to develop larger holdings for exploitation in commercial agriculture, persuaded the British parliament to pass acts (laws) of enclosure, requiring that owners in a particular area enclose their property with hedges (rows of bushes or trees). Small-property owners could not usually afford this expense, which would additionally cut into the land available for agriculture. Many were forced to sell out to larger estates in the region. The results were obvious consolidation (merging) of landholdings in many regions; new opportunities to grow crops or raise livestock for sale in urban markets (itself a crucial backdrop to industrialization, which required an expanding food supply); and new limits on opportunities for work in the countryside. Former peasant farmers, the argument went, were no longer needed in traditional numbers because the new estates were more efficient. Thus, they had no choice but to seek alternative support, mainly by flocking to early industrial cities and hoping they could find work, however unpleasant, in the pioneering factories.

New questions about the sources of early factory labor arose in part because of more detailed research on the British enclosure movement. There was no doubt that considerable British land was enclosed into large estates during the eighteenth century (after a previous round 200 years before), and the result surely encouraged agricultural innovation. But enclosure did not, the new research demonstrated, reduce the need for agricultural workers, whose numbers did not decline. Only much later would new agricultural machinery achieve that result. These findings also reduced the force of this aspect of the conventional discussion of Britain's industrial lead; British labor supply conditions were less distinctive than had been imagined.

This turned attention to several related factors. Basic population growth was more important than land redistribution in explaining the availability of labor. British growth levels after 1730 were quite high for several reasons, including the widespread adoption of the potato as an unusually efficient source of food. Enclosure, while it did not reduce agricultural numbers, did limit the ability of farming to absorb more people. But British labor supply (supplemented by Irish immigration) was not particularly unusual at this time-Germany, for example, featured similar growth rates-and there were parts of this region as well where large estates predominated. New population pressures pushed workers off the land in much of Western Europe, creating part of the context for industrialization, with Britain in this regard simply the first of many instances.