The Industrial Revolution A Compendium

The quality of British entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century is continually being reassessed. Until the mid 1960s a major leitmotiv in accounts of British economic development from the heroic days of the Industrial Revolution to the eve of the First World War was the steady dissipation of a fund of entrepreneurship which, it has been implied, reached its greatest abundance during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. From being organisers of change who were ‘instrumental in delivering society from the fate predicted for it by Malthus’ [254: 129] by having the ‘wit and resource to devise new instruments of production and new methods of administering industry’ [172: 161], British entrepreneurs had, by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, come to be responsible for Britain’s failure to retain its role as workshop of the world. Britain’s international economic dominance, once so obvious, had been yielded to indefatigable and enterprising American manufacturers and their ‘drummers’ (commercial travellers), and to persevering, multi-lingual, scientifically-trained Germans.

In the early 1970s an ugly new word — ‘proto-industrialization’ — entered the literature of economic history and since then has rapidly colonized books, articles and even undergraduate essays, spawning additional abstractions as it goes along. A new historical generalization had arrived, chiefly through the efforts of Franklin Mendels [64].

THE term enclosure mainly refers to that land reform which transformed a traditional method of agriculture under systems of co-operation and communality in communally administered holdings, usually in large fields which were devoid of physical territorial boundaries, into a system of agricultural holding in severalty by separating with physical boundaries one person’s land from that of his neighbours. This was, then, the disintegration and reformation of the open fields into individual ownership. Inter alia enclosure registered specific ownership, adjudicated on shared ownership (for example by identifying and separating common rights), and declared void for all time communal obligations, privileges and rights. Enclosure also meant the subdivision of areas of commons, heaths, moors, fens and wastes into separate landholdings and again involved the abandonment of obligations, privileges and rights.