From Coal to Class: How Industry Remade Britain First

The idea

The exam's sixth band asks what the agricultural and industrial revolutions were, what caused them, what they did to the working and middle classes, and how Britain reformed, and the anchor's answer runs from a fuel to a franchise. The fuel came first. Britain burned coal because it had burned its forests, and by eighteen fifteen its mines yielded the energy of a forest the size of the island, by the anchor's reckoning. Watt's condenser, seventeen seventy-four on the witness, turned that heat into motion, and the power loom and the mule turned motion into cloth, two hundred times the cotton of seventeen eighty by eighteen fifty, spun from the slave South. Behind the engine stood the farm the anchor omits and the witness supplies, rotation, breeding and enclosure feeding more people with fewer hands, and behind the farm stood Britain's banks, its free-trade parliament, its moderate taxes and its elites who did not despise trade. The continent, short of one or more of these, lagged: Belgium by the thirties, Germany after the Zollverein of thirty-four, France slowly, Spain not at all. Railways from eighteen thirty and the telegraph made the island one market and the world one larder. The cost was paid in Manchester, which grew from twenty thousand to four hundred thousand in a century by the anchor's count: cellars, soot, slag, dear bread under the Corn Laws, wages at subsistence until mid-century, artisans deskilled, women paid less and working twice, children in the mills, a miner dead by forty. Out of that condition came class, identity by circumstance rather than legal estate, a proud middle class and a working class that struggled before it organized: Luddites, Peterloo in eighteen nineteen, and then the reforms. Parliament limited children's hours in thirty-three and forty-seven and cleared the mines of women and boys in forty-two, gave the urban middle class the vote in thirty-two, refused the Chartists, repealed the Corn Laws in forty-six, and legalized unions in seventy-one, on the witness. Slow, steady liberalization, the anchor calls it, the reason Britain had no eighteen forty-eight. Coal made the mill, the mill made the city, the city made the classes, and the classes made the reforms.