Floud R., Johnson P. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Government and the economy 231
rights encroached were redundant. But most economic historians today
dismiss this argument and claim that the slave-based plantation econ-
omy was doing well, and even strengthening, up to its abolition (Solow
and Engerman 1987; Heuman 1999). It is clear today that parliament did
expropriate valuable property rights. Nevertheless, there was nothing in
the English constitution to protect slave owners from expropriation.
To be fair, it is important to mention that compensation of £20 million
was granted to slave owners in the 1833 Emancipation Act. But this was
not required by the English constitution. It was paid as part of a political
compromise whose aim was to lessen the opposition of the West India
lobby, which was still quite strong in parliament. But unlike the deals
regarding expropriation of land for the construction of transportation
networks, discussed above, here the deal was not between two economic
interest groups. The anti-slavery movement was a popular movement, mo-
tivated by religious, moral and national sentiments (Colley 1992: 350–60).
The pro-slavery lobby was outnumbered in parliament by the abolition-
ists and did not have equal bargaining power. It could not buy out the
abolitionists even though its aim was pursuing a profitable business. The
price paid for securing the legislation did not reflect the economic value
of the property rights expropriated.
Comparison with the USA is again illuminating at this point. The
import of slaves into the USA could be stopped only after the origi-
nal settlement entrenched in the Constitution, which prohibited fed-
eral intervention in the slave trade, expired in 1808. As late as 1857, the
US Supreme Court, resting on the protection of property rights in the
Bill of Rights, invalidated an Act of Congress that prohibited slavery in
some federal territories. As is well known, it took a Civil War and coer-
cion by the North to amend the Constitution and abolish slavery in the
USA.
A new type of property, defined and expanded during the industrial
revolution, was intellectual property, in the form of patents. I would like
to demonstrate the advantages of mid-level protection of property rights
using the case of intellectual property rights and the history of patent
law. Long before the industrial revolution, the English crown granted
monopolies of various sorts. The later Tudors used grants of monopoly,
among other things, to encourage foreign craftsmen and innovators to
settle in England and make use of their skills and knowledge in the
country. Elizabeth and the early Stuarts extended the use of monopoly
to inventions by Englishmen. The crown viewed the grant of monopo-
lies for inventions as part of its discretionary prerogative. The hostility
of parliament and of the common law judges to the use of monopolies
by the crown, as a means of extracting independent income and increas-
ing political power, led to the enactment of the Statute of Monopolies
in 1624. The statute prohibited the grant of monopolies by the crown
without parliamentary authorisation. However, as part of a compromise,
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
232 Ron Harris
a number of exceptions were made to this rule. Section 6 of the Statute
of Monopolies exempts the grant of monopoly by way of letters patent for
‘the true and first inventor’ of ‘new manufactures’ for ‘the term of four-
teen years or under’. This section created the statutory basis of English
patent law for the entire span of the first industrial revolution. It meant
that the crown could continue the practice of granting monopolies on
inventions at the crown’s discretion. Such grants were not subject to any
criteria or procedures. These monopolies were enforceable as any other
crown patent, charter or franchise. Only in 1852 did a new patent law,
establishing a patent office, replace it.
Does this mean that the English state had sufficiently defined intel-
lectual property rights long before the industrial revolution? Or that it
did not define them efficiently until after the revolution? Can patent law
have explanatory power for the outburst of inventive activity specifically
in England? In the second half of the eighteenth century, but not ear-
lier? These questions cannot be answered on the basis of the Statute of
Monopolies alone. As with regulation, here too, in order to advance our
understanding, we need to encompass private and specific legislation;
the practices of the administration with respect to granting and enforc-
ing patents; and the role of common law and the judiciary with respect
to interpreting the statute, expanding rules beyond it and handing down
remedies for infringement.
Until the early eighteenth century, the crown manipulated the grant
of patents for its own ends. Thereafter, the system was one of registration,
involving time and money, but without an examination of the content of
the patent or its value. After 1711, it became more common to ask inven-
tors to append details of the method of their invention to their petitions.
In some instances, the officers insisted on the inclusion of detailed draw-
ings. By 1734, the request for specification became the standard practice,
but it was only forty-four years later that this practice was embodied in
the laws of England, not via legislation but as a result of Lord Mansfield’s
1778 Liardet v. Johnson decision. The reports on this case are incomplete.
They are based less on law reports than on newspapers and pamphlets
and a brief mention in Mansfield’s notebooks. Nevertheless, it is assumed
that in this case Mansfield ruled that specification should be sufficiently
full and detailed to enable anyone skilled in the general field to under-
stand and apply the invention without further experiment (Adams and
Averley 1986; Adams 1987).
Did the emergence of the new requirement for specification represent
progress in the direction of creating more defined and enforceable in-
tellectual property rights? A plausible explanation for the emergence of
the practice is that as patents accumulated – many of them centred on
a limited number of fields such as carriages, bleaching, oil and spinning
– the task of the law officers of the crown became more complicated.
They were obliged to grant patents only within the powers conferred to
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Government and the economy 233
them by the Statute of Monopolies, that is, only to new manufacture.
They found it more and more difficult to determine whether a petition
submitted to them was indeed for a novel method or machine. By asking
for specification, they did not intend to put the petitions under their own
careful professional scrutiny. They continued to register them as before.
The idea was to transfer the burden from themselves to other interested
parties (MacLeod 1988). In some circumstances, this also meant that the
state was no longer a party to the ensuing litigation. An important im-
plication of this shift was that the definition of the property rights of
inventors was done ex-post and not ex-ante. Neither the crown officers
nor the courts provided inventors with detailed rules regarding the sub-
mission of specifications. Inventors could go to the trouble of investing
in experiments, specification, patenting, production and marketing, only
later to face a court suit that would void their patent.
This indeed happened to some of the most notable inventors. Ark-
wright lost his 1775 carding machine patent in 1785 mainly on the
grounds of unsatisfactory specification. In the process, he was involved in
three trials over four years, losing not only the patent but also a great deal
of time and money. Boulton and Watt were occupied for more than two
decades with the validity of their 1769 fire engine patent. They realised
at some point that it was not well specified, and their concern grew after
Mansfield’s 1778 decision in Liardet v. Johnson. They became involved in
the litigation of other inventors, including Arkwright, in an attempt to
achieve advantageous court decisions. They considered petitioning for a
new patent. They lobbied parliament for an act that would prolong their
patent, hoping that this would also protect it from invalidation. Finally,
they reached a conscious decision to put up with a bearable level of in-
fringements rather than risk losing a claim in court which would mean
invalidation of the patent altogether. Only in 1794 did they dare to go to
court, employing the leading lawyer of the time.
The problem of patent law was wider and graver than the question of
specification. It resulted from the fact that the statutory basis of intellec-
tual property rights in inventions throughout the industrial revolution
was one old clause, Clause 6 of the 1624 Statute of Monopolies. The rest
had to be created by judges who could not do much to expound the law
when hearing only one case in the period 1750–69 and twenty-one cases
between 1770 and 1799 (Dutton 1984: 69–85).
Since judges, unlike legislators, cannot set their own agenda, they de-
pend on the flow of cases into their courtroom. In this case, the flow
was less than one case per year, and many of these cases were decided
on evidence or on minor points of law. To this, one should add the fact
that creating detailed rules in this field of law was exceptionally com-
plicated, because judges could not apply legal doctrines borrowed from
other fields of law since they had to deal with technical issues unfamiliar
to lawyers, and because the nature of innovations was changing rapidly. A
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
234 Ron Harris
Table 8.2 The number of patent law cases, 1750–1849
1 2 3 4 5
Patents granted Cases Patents disputed 2 as % 1 3 as % 1
1750–69 297 1 1 0.3 0.3
1770–99 1,418 21 16 1.5 1.1
1800–29 3,510 61 50 1.7 1.4
1830–9 2,453 47 38 1.9 1.5
1840–9 4,581 128 104 2.8 2.3
Source: Dutton 1984: Table 8.2.
manifestation of the unsettled state of patent law can be found as late as
1795 in a note written by Watt himself listing ‘Doubts and Queries upon
Patents’. The eight queries on Watt’s list can be classified into four main
issues. What is patentable? What should be included in specifications?
What is the relationship between newer and older patents? What kind
of use of monopoly power will be considered illegal? Only well into the
nineteenth century, with the increase in litigation and the formation of
a series of parliamentary committees leading to the 1852 act, did more
detailed and settled rules begin to emerge.
But was the unsettled nature of patent law detrimental to the rate
of inventions and to economic growth? Khan and Sokoloff (1998) argue
that property rights in technological innovations were broader and better
defined in the USA than in Britain. In the USA, eight federal patent acts
were passed between 1790 and 1842 while in Britain the first act to be
passed after 1624 was the 1852 act. As a result, US patent law encouraged a
higher level of inventive activity among more varied social groups and in
a wider array of industries. This claim is not unquestionable. Measuring
inventive activity and its impact on economic growth is a tricky business.
Britain seems to have done quite well in terms of inventions and growth
in the period discussed here. It is not clear that the USA did better. Many
contemporary Europeans envied the British spirit of invention and patent
system.
Furthermore, a patent law that would better define and more strictly
protect property rights would have social costs. It could provide more
incentives to inventors but it would also slow the rate of diffusion and
increase the monopoly rent of inventors at the expense of manufactur-
ers and consumers. It would result in the allocation of more resources
to research that could potentially lead to patentable inventions at the
expense of other inventions. What the English system offered was ex-
ante incentives that sometimes only partly materialised ex-post (Mokyr
1990: 247–52). Some patents were invalidated by the courts, others were
not strictly enforced. Infringement was quite common. Though inventors
did not always extract in full the profits they initially expected to gain
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Government and the economy 235
from their monopolies, the incentives were sufficient for inventors to
remain in business and to do well. The state was there to play around
with the patent system when it led to undesirable results or when the
inventor’s lobby was strong enough. Parliament prolonged the duration
of Boulton and Watt’s patent from fourteen to thirty-one years. It made
special grants to Lombe (when denying the renewal of his silk throwing
patent), Crompton (who never took a patent on his mule) and Cartwright
(who lost his patent to creditors). It granted small pensions to other in-
ventors. But it granted no money to inventors such as Arkwright and Ten-
nant, who prospered despite losing their patents. Not least in importance
were the non-monetary benefits, in the form of prestige, ceremonies and
patronage, granted by the state to its privileged inventors. When the state
had a strong or symbolic interest in an invention, as was the case with
the water chronometer (from which accurate longitude at sea could be
calculated for the benefit of the navy and of merchant shipping), a special
prize was offered in advance to increase incentives. It seems as though
clearly defining property rights in advance was not necessarily the opti-
mal contribution that the state could offer to economic growth. Other
sorts of ex-post interventions, in the form of court decisions and private
acts of parliament, had considerable impact on technological innovation
and diffusion.
C O N C L U S I O N
It used to be possible for scholars to conduct their discussion of the role of
government in the British economy between 1700 and 1850 on the basic
assumption of the existence of two distinct spheres: the market and the
state. The questions they asked concerned how the first expanded at the
expense of the second, or how the second interfered with the first. Theo-
retical and historiographical trends of the last few decades have blurred
this clear-cut distinction between the state and the market. The state
seems to have surfaced almost everywhere in the economy. It not only
regulated markets but also created them. It not only protected property
rights but also defined them. It did not either own enterprises or leave
them to be owned by private individuals, but was also a partner in joint
public–private undertakings, be they new modes of transportation or new
imperial conquests. It seems more appropriate to speak now of the state
within the economy rather than of the state and the economy.
It was not only the relationship between the state and the economy
that was problematised. The state itself is viewed today as a less homo-
geneous entity. The early focus on central government policy or parlia-
mentary regulation turned out not to be sufficient. We now devote more
attention to private acts, to bureaucrats, to the judiciary and to local
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
236 Ron Harris
government. The private bill procedure served as a venue through which
conflicting interest groups could clash and negotiate. The state served as
a mediator or a meeting place. Private acts reflected agreements between
interest groups and forced resolution in disputes. They created and abol-
ished monopolies; created regulations and exempted from regulations;
defined property rights and expropriated property. Bureaucrats collected
taxes, authorised expenditures, inspected compliance to regulations and
registered property rights. The judiciary not only handled litigation but
also interpreted parliamentary regulation and declared common law reg-
ulation. The judiciary itself was not uniform. It accommodated competing
sets of doctrines and norms and competing courts and judges. Local gov-
ernment, from the county level down to the parish level, was involved in
the economy in various ways through various bodies and office holders.
Its activities were financed at times by the central government, at times by
local taxes, at times by consumers and at times by private entrepreneurs.
The central direction and supervision of these activities varied in degree.
Often central and local functions intermingled.
The ever-important question, what was the contribution of the state to
the first industrial revolution, has not been satisfactorily answered in this
chapter. Was the British advantage over other European countries in hav-
ing a representative and constitutional government? Such an advantage
enabled the collection of more taxes and the borrowing of more funds.
But this money was used for fighting wars and bringing about destruction
to the benefit of the few, not for investment in infrastructure and welfare
to the benefit of all. Did the English advantage over continental systems
lie in the fact that the English had a common law and not a Roman-based
legal system? Weber (1954) ascribed explanatory power in Europe’s eco-
nomic rise to the rationality of European law. Posner (1998) argued that
the common law’s logic drives it towards efficiency, and implied that
it was a more efficient form of law than continental codification and
legislation. But for Weber, England created a problem; its law was less
rational and less systematic than continental legal systems and he found
it difficult to explain why it was that the English, of all European legal
systems, industrialised first. As we have seen in this chapter, English law
did not seem to be particularly instrumental to business needs and did
not define, transfer or protect property rights in a very efficient way. We
are still left with the puzzle as to whether the peculiarity of the English
common law encouraged or hindered economic growth.
The British way seems to have been the middle road: not an entrenched
constitution but not royal despotism, not super-rational and organised
Roman law but not total identity of law with politics, not completely
centralised but not overly decentralised, not a state taken over by big
business and robber barons but not a planned-from-above economy. Hind-
sight shows us that something in this mix did the trick, since Britain
experienced unprecedented economic growth, by both comparative and
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Government and the economy 237
inter-temporal standards, during the 150 years discussed here. But which
elements of the mix contributed more to growth, which contributed less
and which hindered it? More research by economic, political and legal his-
torians, pragmatically employing the theoretical tools of the various dis-
ciplines and better utilising some of the less-explored historical sources,
will be needed before a new synthesis can emerge.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
9
Household economy
JANE HUMPHRIES
Contents
Introduction 238
Evolutionary and structuralist–functionalist theories of
the household and the economy 239
The size and composition of the pre-industrial household 241
The size and composition of the household in the
industrial revolution 244
Self-interested individuals and households of mutual
advantage 246
Continuity as well as change: live-in service and
domestic enterprise 250
Wage earning households in the industrial revolution 257
The household economy, the standard of living and
consumption 263
Conclusions 266
INTRODUCTION
In many times and places, household and economy were overlapping in-
stitutions. Indeed, the word economics comes from the Greek oeconomica,
meaning the science or art of managing a household. The traditional
household brimmed with economic activities. Based on kin but extended
to include living-in servants, apprentices and lodgers, it was the scene
of production as well as consumption and reproduction. Allocation of
labour and resources was not egalitarian, but all members participated.
In contrast its modern counterpart has suffered a dramatic ‘loss of func-
tion’. Needs that were formerly met by family members working within
the home are now met by outside agencies, and individuals interact with
thewider economy and society not through their households but inde-
pendently. The household has wasted economically, shrunk in apparent
size and become dependent on the earnings of its male head, or very
recently its two adult earners (Parsons 1959).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Household economy 239
The contrast between pre-industrial and modern families implicates
economic change in the household’s loss of function. Urban industrial
life not only involved significant changes in how goods and services
were produced but also reallocated the transformed activities between
the household and the market economy. This chapter is about these
processes as they occurred for the first time in the context of another
pioneer experience, industrialisation in Britain in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries: ‘ours was the society which first ventured into the
industrial era, and English men and women were the first who had to
try to find a home for themselves in a world where the working fam-
ily, the producing household, seemed to have no place’ (Laslett 1965: 18).
Questions are raised about the timing, conceptualisation, explanation
and implications of the changes in the household economy, particularly
theimplications of the changes for well-being and for understanding in-
dustrialisation itself. Answers involve establishing what the households
of the past looked like, how they behaved and why they behaved as they
did.
The recent recognition of the household as a respectable topic of re-
search means that theorising has often run ahead of empirical evidence
(Laslett 1972a). Thus the chapter begins with the shock caused when em-
pirical findings on the size and structure of pre-industrial households
caught up with established evolutionary and structuralist–functionalist
theories of the household. Next it summarises the evidence on house-
holds’ measurable characteristics during industrialisation and the search
forexplanation in a theory of mutual advantage. The chapter notes
thesurvival of features of the pre-industrial household such as live-in
service and domestic production and describes the heterogeneous his-
torical experiences of wage earning households. Finally the household
economy provides a fresh perspective on ongoing mainstream debates
about the standard of living and consumption during the industrial
revolution.
The chapter disputes grand theories of structural differentiation,
which polarise the pre-industrial and post-industrial household. But it
also rejects excessive emphasis on continuity, which presents the house-
hold as independent of economic change. Instead the households of the
industrial revolution emerge as relatively autonomous. They and their
members adapted to, resisted and created economic change.
EVOLUTIONARY AND
S TRUCTURALIST–FUNCTIONALIST THEORIES
OF THE HOUSEHOLD AND THE ECONOMY
Evolutionary theories explained the historical development of the house-
hold as a process of differentiation (Parsons and Bales 1965). A society
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
240 Jane Humphries
undergoing economic change necessarily differentiates its household-
based social structure. New institutions like firms, schools, trade unions
and the welfare state met functions that previously had been undertaken
by the household. Kinship relations also underwent functional specialisa-
tion, becoming dominated by a system of small nuclear family units. The
modern ‘thin’ family was adapted to the need for social and geographical
mobility. The primary responsibility for household support rested on the
male head, the breadwinner, whose ‘job’ linked the family to the econ-
omy. The division of activities between the family and the market allowed
values essential to the success of the modern economy to prevail in the
marketplace while others more relevant to reproduction and caring could
survive in the home. The economic transition was paralleled by a change
in values. The increasing dominance of small nuclear affective families
wasboth the result and the reflection of ‘the rise of individualism’.
Identifying the industrial revolution as the crucible of change allowed
historians to link evolutionary models of the household to economic
development and so piggyback on standard periodisation. Traditional in-
terpretations of industrialisation emphasised the importance of mech-
anisation and economies of scale in promoting the transition to the
factory system. Household-based production units could no longer com-
pete and gave way to households as collections of waged workers, the
‘family wage economy’, a stage in the evolution towards the modern
‘male-breadwinner family system’ (Clark 1968; Tilly and Scott 1978).
Structuralist–functionalist and evolutionary accounts of the house-
hold were essentially teleological, arguing back from a known present
toagenerally agreed upon but imprecisely described and dated past. The
elegance of the model of structural differentiation alongside the attrac-
tion of what William Goode has called the ‘classical family of Western
nostalgia’ promoted a superficial comparison of ‘pre-industrial’ and ‘post-
industrial’ households consistent with the inevitable triumph of individ-
ualism. In depicting the changes in the household as successful adapta-
tions to economic growth and development, sociologists, historians and
economists were in danger of reading historical change as linear and
seeing pre-industrial households as homogeneous, static and traditional.
Support for evolutionary accounts came from the long line of social
commentators, beginning with first-hand observers, who perceived in-
dustrialisation, particularly factory labour, as undermining family life by
providing individual economic independence (Gaskell 1833; Engels 1845).
Historians contrasted the free-standing family farms and artisan house-
holds of the seventeenth century, which produced for sale and subsis-
tence, with the wage earning households of the nineteenth century. But
while rich in detail and varied in chronological and geographical loca-
tion, such studies could not provide the basis for a quantitative analysis
of the dimensions of change. Major suppositions were left unchallenged,
including the belief that, before the industrial revolution, producing
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008