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Living standards and the urban environment 291
the utility of heights can be established more directly, the weight of the
evidence from HDI and the DW-indices suggests that Britain was ahead
of its peers by the middle of the eighteenth century. The extent to which
theearly phases of the industrial revolution saw a decline in overall
living standards is still open to debate. The composite indices cannot
answer this question conclusively, since results are sensitive to the set
of indicators included in the calculations. If additional measures such as
working hours are used, the steady march of progress apparent in Crafts’s
calculations no longer exists. Instead, it appears that no turning point
wasreached until the 1820s or 1830s.
THE STANDARD OF LIVING AND
MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE
Foralongtime,thestandard-of-living debate has been strangely divorced
from research on macroeconomic performance as a whole. Yet what out-
put the economy generated ended up in the pockets of one group or
another; abstracting from terms-of-trade effects and taxes, high rates of
output growth would have had to drive up the remuneration of the fac-
tors of production (or at least one of them). And if growth was slow, and
inequality changed little, then the standard of living for the bulk of the
population cannot have increased rapidly. The substantive downward re-
visions of growth rates introduced by Crafts and Harley have largely with-
stood a wide range of criticism (Crafts and Harley 1992; Jackson 1992; Berg
and Hudson 1994; Cuenca Esteban 1994), even if some of the implications
forproductivity growth remain puzzling (Temin 1997, 2000). Output per
capita growth was modest at best for most of the first hundred years of
theindustrial revolution, ranging from 0.2 per cent to 0.5 per cent per
year from 1760 to 1830, before accelerating to a still modest 1.1 per cent
forthe period 1830–60 (Harley 1999).
Some critics of the current ‘slow growth’ orthodoxy combine a belief in
rapid technological change and productivity advances with a pessimistic
view of changes in living standards (Berg and Hudson 1994). These are
contradictory positions. What the last twenty years of vigorous debate
have shown is that the ‘slow growth’ view and the pessimist case for only
gradual and tentative increases in living standards reinforce each other.
Productivity growth cannot be higher than the weighted average of
ratesofincrease in the real remuneration of factors of production
(McCloskey 1985; Antràs and Voth 2001). A doubling of the real rate of
return on capital and of real wages at the level of the economy as a
whole implies that productivity doubled, too: each factor of production
must be generating output at twice the rate attained before. To use such
logic, we need standard assumptions such as that factors of production
receive the value of their marginal product. Daunting as these seem, they
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292 Hans-Joachim Voth
Table 10.4 Estimates of productivity growth in England, 1770–1860
change in % p.a.
Antràs and Voth (2003) r w q gov TFP
1770–1801 −0.4 0.35 0.26 2.60 0.27
1801–1831 0.71 0.25 0.76 1.11 0.54
1831–1860 −0.21 0.68 0.48 0.31 0.33
Harley (1999) Y K L T TFP
1760–1800 1 1 0.8 0.2 0.19
1801–1831 1.9 1.7 1.4 0.4 0.50
1831–1860* 2.5 2.0 1.4 0.6 1.0
Notes:r–rental rate of capital, w – real wage,q–rental cost of land, gov – government sector (taxes), Y – output
growth, K – capital, L – labour,T–land. Antràs and Voth 2003 use an elasticity of 0.32 for capital, 0.14 for land,
0.08 for government and 0.46 for labour.
Sources: Harley 1999: 183; Antràs and Voth 2003.
are no different from the assumptions necessary to derive productivity
estimates from quantity data (Hsieh 1999).
Estimates of slow TFP (total factor productivity) growth, derived from
quantity-based productivity measures, broadly provide support for the
‘slow growth’ view. Table 10.4 compares the productivity growth estimates
from both sources. The upper half of the table shows the growth in the
real return to each factor. Neither land nor labour nor capital became
vastly more valuable during the industrial revolution. Output-based TFP
estimates coincide almost exactly with the factor price evidence for the
second period, 1801–31. For the first and the third periods, there is a some-
what larger difference; for the first century of the industrial revolution as
a whole, both methods strongly suggest that productivity growth was not
rapid. To restore credibility to the optimist case, either real wages would
need to be revised upwards very substantially or we would need clear ev-
idence that inequality increased markedly. Thus, the quantity-based pro-
ductivity estimates derived from national accounting exercises, and the
standard-of-living evidence on real wages, mutually reinforce each other.
The accumulating evidence that output growth was slow implies that pro-
ductivity increased only marginally. And the failure of real wages, rental
ratesofcapital and land rents to rise markedly supports this view. Alter-
native estimates using the same approach arrive at even smaller numbers
(Clark 2001b). Slow growth and a relatively pessimistic view of the course
of living standards during the industrial revolution are simply two sides
of the same coin, as dual productivity measurements make clear. The
same logic also suggests that, to the extent that real wages actually grew
even more slowly than output per capita, inequality may have become
worse over time (Feinstein 1998b).
O’Brien and Engerman (1981) pointed out that demographic change
may also provide important clues about the course of living standards.
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Living standards and the urban environment 293
The number of Britons surged from the middle of the eighteenth century
onwards, largely as a result of increased fertility (Wrigley 1983; Wrigley
et al.1997). If this was a response to better living conditions, it would
represent a powerful ‘smoking gun’ in favour of increasing well-being.
However, fertility apparently responded only weakly (and belatedly) to
changes in wages (Wrigley and Schofield 1981). According to more re-
cent work, the relationship may be even weaker than originally thought
(Lee and Anderson 1999). Also, temporary shocks to the demographic-
economic system (such as a sudden drop in mortality because of mild
winters, etc.) took a long time to ‘die out’, reverberating in the system for
up to a century. Under conditions such as these, it is hard to infer much
about the course of living standards from changes in fertility.
CONCLUSIONS
The standard-of-living debate has remained active for so long because
neither side could marshal evidence of a marked and important shift
(Feinstein 1998a). Since the 1980s, most new research findings have lent
increasing but not unambiguous support to pessimistic views. Crucially,
real wages did not increase at anywhere near the rate suggested by ear-
lier estimates. Overall gains between 1760 and 1830 were modest, and
included periods of decline. Even by 1850, real wages had only risen by
small amounts. What gains there were probably had been bought by
longer hours of more intensive work, performed in more dangerous and
unhealthy workplaces, by Englishmen and women many of whom lived
in the unhygienic, disease-ridden, dark, damp and crowded conditions of
British cities during the middle of the nineteenth century. The horrors
portrayed by Dickens and his contemporaries were not figments of the
imagination; they were real enough. The consequences of these desper-
ate conditions were that infant mortality remained stubbornly high, and
even increased in some places; that life expectancy in the industrialising
cities of the north was very low, and falling; and that heights probably
stagnated or declined as the industrial revolution wore on.
That life was markedly better for the working classes by the 1820s and
1830s than it had been in the 1760s is hard to argue. Wage increases
were probably insufficient to compensate for urban disamenities, addi-
tional workloads, and the rise in infant and child mortality (Feinstein
1998a). From the 1850s onwards, however, real wages were beginning to
pull ahead of prices substantially, and life expectancy was marginally
higher than in the 1750s (but not than in the 1570s and 1580s). Work-
ing hours may have been somewhat shorter than they had been in the
1830s; child labour was on the wane; and heights began their long-term
increase. In the very long run, it is difficult not to be an optimist in the
standard-of-living debate: the years 1750–1850 allowed Britain to escape
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294 Hans-Joachim Voth
Malthusian constraints, and to make the transition to modern economic
growth.
None of this answers the question as to what would have happened to
living standards without an industrial revolution (O’Brien and Engerman
1981). Population growth surged after 1750, and it is hard to imagine
that, in the absence of fast structural change, England’s economy could
have avoided rapidly declining marginal returns to labour (Mokyr 1999:
115). Under plausible assumptions, per capita income might well have
fallen by 8 to 18 per cent without an industrial revolution. The principal
effect of the mass migration from the countryside to the cities, and from
agriculture to industry, was therefore to allow the great demographic
expansion to continue unchecked. What actual gains in terms of living
standards there were appear small, tenuous, and often interspersed with
extended periods of stagnation or decline. Yet compared to what might
have happened, living conditions held up remarkably well. As Ashton
(1996 [1948]: 129) put it:
The central problem of the age was how to feed and clothe and employ gen-
erations of children that outnumbered by far those of any earlier time. There
are to-day, on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden
and hungry, living lives little better . . . than those of the cattle that toil with
them . . . Such Asiatic standards, and such unmechanized horrors, are the lot of
those who increase their numbers without first passing through an industrial
revolution.
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11
Transport
SIMON VILLE
Contents
Introduction 295
Patterns of transport development 296
Roads 296
Inland waterways 299
Shipping 301
Railways 305
Urban transport 307
Competition and industry policy 308
New organisational challenges 314
Assessment of economic impact 319
Rostow and Szostak as transport advocates 319
Capital formation 320
Productivity 322
Earnings 323
Social overhead capital 324
Linkages and spillovers 325
Market integration 326
Social savings 328
Conclusion 330
INTRODUCTION
Transport has long been viewed as of central importance to modern
British economic history.
1
More than forty years ago, Rostow (1960: 302)
viewed the railway as the ‘leading sector’ of the British economy of
themid-nineteenth century, driving broader economic modernisation
through its strong intersectoral linkages. This early interest in the de-
velopmental role of transport has given way more recently to a closer
1
This chapter has benefited from feedback provided by Joel Mokyr, Paul Johnson, Martin
Daunton, Peter Wardley, Knick Harley and other participants at the 2001 London conference
that discussed chapter drafts. Paola Crinnion provided valuable research assistance.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
296 Simon Ville
understanding and recognition of its pioneering contribution to be-
havioural and structural elements of economic change, particularly in
terms of government intervention and corporate innovation.
This chapter will describe the process of transport growth in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, and then focus more closely on its polit-
ical, organisational and developmental impact. Transport systems (includ-
ing communications) move people, goods and information. This chapter
will look at each of these functions in order to reveal the pervasive role
of the transport industry in modern British history. The tendencies for
transport infrastructure to take the form of a public good, open to all
users, and for some transport services to operate in a manner similar to
amonopoly explain the interest shown in the industry by governments
seeking to assess the private and public costs and benefits involved. The
large size and capital-intensive nature of many operating units caused
unprecedented organisational challenges for transport companies. The
identification of transport as a form of social overhead capital, support-
ing production across the economy, helps account for its broad-ranging
impact on economic development that has been the focus of much of
thehistoriography. In this role transport contributed to the efficient allo-
cation of resources over space, thereby promoting competition between
producers, and providing information about alternative consumption pos-
sibilities to consumers.
PATTERNS OF TRANSPORT DEVELOPMENT
Roads
Concerted efforts were made to improve the quality of the road system in
theeighteenth century. Levels of maintenance had not been commensu-
rate with actual or potential demand from road users. Parishes previously
provided road maintenance in their vicinity but the neglect of such du-
ties led to the transfer of responsibility to ‘turnpike trusts’, beginning in
themid-seventeenth century. Access to these roads was through a turn-
pike, and users had to pay a toll towards the upkeep of the road. The
trusts consisted largely of local entrepreneurs with a strong private in-
terest in road maintenance. The first turnpike trust was established by
act of parliament in 1663. After a slow start, the number of turnpikes
increased rapidly with the economic expansion of the 1750s and 1760s.
Further booms occurred in the early 1790s, 1809–12 and the mid-1820s.
In the first of these booms turnpike trusts were established across many
areas of Britain; in the second and third phases expansion was partic-
ularly linked with the port and dock activities of wartime; and in the
final period the industrial expansion of Lancashire and Yorkshire pro-
vided a strong incentive. By the mid-1830s around 22,000 miles of roads
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Transport 297
had been turnpiked or entrusted to Improvement Commissioners, repre-
senting about one-fifth of all roads (Barker and Gerhold 1993: 37–8). In
asimilar fashion, bridge trusts often bore responsibility for the mainte-
nance of bridges and the rapid growth in their construction from the late
eighteenth century through to 1830 (Ginarlis and Pollard 1988: 208–12;
Harrison 1992: 246, 259–60).
Accompanying these improved institutional arrangements were im-
portant developments in road building and haulage technology. John
Metcalfe, Thomas Telford and John McAdam have been given much of
thecredit for the improved quality of roads from the later eighteenth
century. Roads were strengthened by packing broken stones into them,
and drainage was improved by developing convex surfaces. By 1829 con-
crete was also being used in roads. Many more tunnels and bridges were
constructed in order to avoid steep gradients and long contours, which
helped roads to handle heavier traffic and to be passable in inclement
conditions. Gerhold (1996) has recently argued that road haulage tech-
nology, not road systems, was the key explanation of the growth of
road transport services. Improved breeds of sturdier horses ate less and
worked harder, and some improvements in wagon design predated the
turnpike trusts. Of course, better roads and vehicles went hand in hand:
better roads facilitated the shift to lighter more capacious wagons by
providing harder, smoother, dryer surfaces with less steep inclines. The
consequence of these combined improvements was larger loads, higher
speeds, and longer continuous periods of travel, including more overnight
movements.
How rapidly did road transport grow? Road transport took many forms,
most obviously passenger conveyance and goods shipment including the
mail, but a distinction is also drawn between London, provincial, local
and private carriers of goods (Barker and Gerhold 1993: 19–33). Several
estimates have been made of the growth of the London cargo carriers
travelling to the provinces, for whom a variety of evidence survives from
directories, advertisements, legal proceedings and business records. Es-
timates of the growth of capacity (number of weekly services) and out-
put (ton-miles) both show a substantial annual compound growth rate:
0.7 to 1.8 per cent in the former and 1.0 to 2.8 per cent in the latter
for1681–1840 (Table 11.1). For passenger services from London to the
provinces, growth rates of weekly services and passenger miles come to
1.9per cent and 2.8 per cent respectively for 1715–1840 (Table 11.2). It
is more difficult to estimate the growth of local and private carriers,
for whom little evidence survives. Services were often irregular and un-
dertaken by small carriers, who sometimes combined this with cartage
work on farms at harvest and other busy seasons. Distances covered were
mostly as little as 25 or 30 miles, and carriers rarely required specialist
premises because of the smallness of their operations (normally one or
two carts) and their ability to complete most tasks on the same day.
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298 Simon Ville
Table 11.1 Growth of the London carrying trade, 1681–1840
Index of ton-miles per week
Services per week (1765 = 100) Ton-miles
Chartres and Turnbull Gerhold Chartres and Turnbull Gerhold Gerhold
1681 372 346
1690 348 31 74,700
1705 453
1715 611 17
1738 422
1765 990 493 100 100 243,500
1796–8 1,662 565 169 111 269,800
1808 608 113 274,300
1816–18 3,246 823 344 140 340,700
1826 1,025 152 369,800
1838–40 6,113 1,093 571 149 362,200
Annual compound 1.8 0.7 2.8 1.0 1.1
growth (%)
Notes: Figures from Chartres (1977), Chartres and Turnbull (1983), and Gerhold (1988). Chartres and Turnbull’s index of services per week,
1715–1840, has been converted to actual services on the basis of Chartres’s figure for 1715. Gerhold’s figures exclude services covering less than
20 miles to London.
Source: Barker and Gerhold 1993: 22, Table 2.
Table 11.2 Growth in passenger services to selected provincial centres, 1715–1840
Service Index Passenger Index
Year quotient (1796 = 100) miles (000) (1796 = 100)
1715 158 10 67 7
1765 279 18 123 12
1773 376 24 183 18
1796 1,596 100 1,040 100
1816 2,060 129 2,043 197
1840 1,765 111 2,369 228
Annual compound 1.9 2.8
growth (%)
Note: Service quotient refers to a quantum of the weekly frequency of coach departures from London to
thirty-eight major provincial cities.
Source: Chartres and Turnbull 1983: 69.
Better roads and road transport substantially improved the operation
of services: average travel times declined by 20 to 30 per cent over the pe-
riod 1750–1830 (Jackman 1916: 335–6) and carriers could offer a greater
range of service types, from slow coaches to flying wagons (faster but
higher price), depending upon whether speed or cost was more impor-
tant. Regularity was enhanced by less seasonal laying up, as only the most
severe winter weather made the new roads impassable. These changes un-
doubtedly reduced the input costs of transport, and the increased com-
petition associated with the extension of services led to these lower costs
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Transport 299
being passed on in the form of lower freight rates (Pawson 1977: 297;
Barker and Gerhold 1993: 40–3). Contemporaries noted that road trans-
port charges were falling, perhaps by as much as a third (Albert 1983:
55–6). None the less, road carriage remained more expensive than by in-
land waterway or coastal shipping, particularly for long hauls of bulky
materials.
Inland waterways
In the half century or so before 1750, navigational improvements had
been made to a number of rivers in response to expanding internal trade.
Channels had been cut across winding bends and shallow areas deep-
ened. However, from the second half of the eighteenth century there was
heightened interest in the construction of canals, which are defined as
deadwater navigations, built as directly as possible, avoiding obstructions
such as weirs, and incorporating an adjacent towpath for haulage and
locks to adjust to altitude changes. The Sankey Brook Navigation, which
waspartly opened in 1757, connected the coal mines of St Helens with the
river Mersey. The Bridgewater Canal, which was opened in 1761, joined
the coal mines of the duke of Bridgewater at Worsley with Manchester.
Although the change from river improvement to canal was gradual, these
two waterways are often viewed as symbolising the beginning of a period
of intensive canal construction that lasted until at least the end of the
French Wars in 1815. The demand for transporting bulky raw materials
that lay behind their construction reflected the type of service to which
canals were best suited. Although the Bridgewater was a short local canal
it was soon followed by longer trunk canals connecting different regions,
including the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1790, which gave Edinburgh access
to the commercial waterway of the Clyde, and the Leeds and Liverpool
Canal in 1816, which crossed the Pennines.
In a similar fashion to the turnpike trusts, canal construction required
the authority of a private Act of Parliament, and these acts provide a proxy
for the intensity of waterway expansion. Table 11.3 shows that in the
decade and a half from 1760 canal construction proceeded rapidly. This
wasthen followed by a slowdown for about a decade until expansion rose
toapeak in the first half of the 1790s. High levels of construction contin-
ued through the first three decades of the nineteenth century, by which
time the British canal network was all but completed, with the major
exception of the Manchester Ship Canal, which was finished in 1894. The
mileage of all inland waterways in England and Wales grew from 1399
in 1760 to 3876 in 1830, a growth rate of 1.4 per cent per annum, with
most of this growth attributable to canal construction (Duckham 1983:
109).
Although we lack reliable data on the growth of waterway traffic, ex-
pansion was heavily orientated towards freight traffic, especially in bulky
goods, such as coal and other minerals, and where only a low rate of
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300 Simon Ville
Table 11.3 Growth of inland waterways, 1760–1830
Years Mileage New acts All acts total
1760 1,399 –
1760–4 – 6 6
1765–9 – 23 29
1770–4 – 2352
1775–9 – 1365
1780–4 – 11 76
1785–9 – 11 87
1790–4 – 82 169
1795–9 – 44 213
1800–4 – 47 260
1805–9 – 44 304
1810–14 – 37 341
1815–19 – 30 371
1820–4 – 21 392
1825–9 – 35 427
1830 3,876 –
Annual compound 1.4
growth (%)
Note:Inmost of these years the vast majority of acts were for extending the powers of existing companies or
navigation undertakers.
Source: Duckham 1983: 106.
dispersion in their delivery was required. Many of the earliest canals
were promoted and financed by individual entrepreneurs for the bene-
fit of their firms. They were mostly connected with the industrialising
regions of Lancashire, the West Midlands and South Wales. The Trent
and Mersey (‘Grand Trunk’) Canal, which formed a link between the west
and east coasts of England, was completed in 1777. Its promoter, Josiah
Wedgwood, used the canal to ship his pottery to the ports of Hull and
Liverpool and receive the raw materials of coal and clay. By the 1790s,
canal construction had become more widely spread in terms of geograph-
ical location, goods carried and numbers of investors, the latter often as
part of joint-stock companies. As such, the canals played their part in
weaning investors away from government bonds towards a capital mar-
ket in industrial finance.
The leading canal engineers, men such as Thomas Telford, John
Smeaton, the Whitworths and the Rennies, faced enormous natural obsta-
cles, which required the construction of tunnels, cuttings, embankments,
bridges and aqueducts. Such works took many years, as can be seen from
the long lag in completing the trunk canals: the Forth and Clyde was
completed in 1790, twenty-two years after its act was passed, while the
construction of the Leeds and Liverpool took from 1770 to 1816. Waterway
transport was largely undertaken in narrow boats pulled by horses from
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