Floud R., Johnson P. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860

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Education and skill of the British labour force 351

Table 12.5A Male illiteracy in Europe and North America c.1860

Country Percentage illiterate

Austro-Hungarian Empire 85

Spain 70

Belgium 40

France 35

England 30

Netherlands 18

United States (white males) 6.6

Prussia 5

Source: Graff 1987; Vincent 2000.

Table 12.5B Female illiteracy in Europe c.1860

Country Percentage illiterate

Spain 90

Belgium 55

France 45

England 37

Netherlands 27

United States (white females) 10.1

Prussia 5

Source: Graff 1987; Vincent 2000.

Table 12.5C Male school enrolments in several European

countries c.1850: percentage of male children aged 6–14 enrolled

in primary schools

Country Percentage enrolled

Prussia 81

Bavaria 83

France 60

England and Wales 66

Sweden 59

Source: Maynes 1985.

in schools receiving subsidies. And in a

sample of the eight counties of Durham,

Gloucester, Hereford, Lancashire, Lin-

colnshire, Middlesex, Nottingham and

Stafford taken from this survey, some 30

per cent of the population resided in

parishes clearly identiﬁed as having at

least one subsidised school and in which

comments for the parish indicated that

‘the poor are sufﬁciently provided with

education’. An 1833 national parochial

survey indicated that only 14 per cent of

thepopulation in these eight counties

resided in parishes in which no mention

wasmade of subsidised schools (Mitch

1982).

Schools were subsidised in part to re-

distribute wealth by lowering the fees

charged to working-class parents for

their children to attend school. Pri-

vate, unsubsidised fees for working-class

schools were typically in the range of 6

to 9 pence a week. Subsidies commonly

lowered fees to only 1 or 2 pence a week.

With an unskilled labourer or agricul-

tural labourer earning in the range of 10

shillings a week, this subsidy of 4 to 8

pence could amount to 5 to 7 per cent

of an adult male head of household’s

income, thus having a sizeable impact

on lowering the direct cost of school-

ing. Nevertheless, the motive for subsi-

dies was as much to control what was

taught and how the schools were run as

directly to lower fees. In part this was

due to religious, doctrinal considerations. Elites wanted to control the

religious and moral content of what was taught and instil habits of dis-

cipline in working-class children. Over the course of the nineteenth cen-

tury, efﬁcient instruction in literacy skills did assume increasing priority.

Indeed as parliamentary funds were increasingly directed towards educa-

tion, schools that were found to offer an appropriate curriculum, suitably

qualiﬁed instructors and adequate facilities were classiﬁed as ‘efﬁcient’,

as distinguished from inefﬁcient schools not meeting these standards.

Despite efforts to establish centralised educational standards, primary

schools between 1700 and 1860 were established and funded locally, a

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

352 David Mitch

characteristic that can be explained by the value of on-site supervision in

thepresence of a geographically dispersed population. This led to consid-

erable regional variation in the provision of schooling, depending on the

interests of the local elite in promoting mass education. As parliament

became increasingly involved in funding of primary schools in the ﬁrst

half of the nineteenth century this tendency was somewhat reversed.

Yetreceipt of parliamentary funding was made conditional on match-

ing local funding from sources other than student fees. This tension be-

tween the desire to redistribute funds to areas of greatest educational

deﬁciency and the desire to reward local efforts at provision persisted

until the landmark Education Act of 1870 ﬁlled in the gaps, though ear-

lier provision made partial correctives (see Mitch 1992: 120). John Stuart

Mill (1861) noted this tension in the provision of government services

between management by those familiar with local conditions and ex-

pert, national establishment of standards. While there was much sup-

port at the national government level for funding of schools out of local

property taxes, this was blocked by Church of England interests which

were concerned that such a move would facilitate the spread of secu-

lar and non-conformist schools in competition with Anglican-sponsored

schools.

Critics of the English educational system have argued that the absence

of universal provision for elementary schooling impeded its spread in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Smith (1976 [1776]: 785) claimed

that in Scotland provision from the late seventeenth century for every

parish to establish and support a school resulted in higher levels of edu-

cational attainment in the Scottish population than the English during

theeighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, when national

comparisons of signature rates at marriage becomes possible, the illiter-

acy rates for both Scottish brides and grooms were only half of English

levels (Cipolla 1969). However, historians have come to challenge the claim

of Scottish superiority in primary education (Smout 1969; West 1975).

Houston (1985) has concluded that no Scottish superiority over northern

England in literacy rates was evident in the early eighteenth century,

several decades after the statute establishing Scottish parochial schools

waspassed. And a number of historians have noted considerable varia-

tion across Scotland in levels of school enrolment and rates of literacy,

thus challenging the claim of universal access to schooling in all parishes

(Smout 1969; West 1975). Furthermore, the 1818 national parochial survey

of schools indicates that the majority of Scottish students were enrolled

in private not parochial schools. This suggests that parochial provision

from local taxes could not keep up with expanding population, espe-

cially in industrialising areas of Scotland. Centralised attempts to estab-

lish schools had little impact unless followed up with resources to support

them, and this entailed local support. The English choice of local and

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Education and skill of the British labour force 353

charitable support for education may have been an appropriate way to

develop a system of elementary schooling in its initial stages.

Thus the limited extent of subsidised schooling in England prior to

1870 can be attributed to the fact that primary schooling was supported

by elite interests and subject to considerable local variation in intensity

of support, in contrast with later secondary schooling in England and

theUnited States where democratic redistribution played a stronger role

(Lindert 2001; Mariscal and Sokoloff 2000).

THE CONTRIBUTION OF EDUCATION AND SKILL

FORMATION TO ECONOMIC GROWTH, 1700--1860

Studies of economic growth during the twentieth century have often

found increases in human capital to be a key contributing factor (see

Topel 1999 for a survey). However, in so far as the modest literacy in-

creases evident between 1750 and 1840 reﬂect trends in formal schooling

attainment of the English population during this period, this would im-

ply a small contribution to economic growth from this source. One can

put the change in adult male literacy rates as going from 62 per cent

in 1780 to 70 per cent in 1830 (Schoﬁeld 1973). A reasonably generous

allowance for the extent to which literacy raised earnings over that of an

otherwise illiterate person would be 20 per cent (see Mitch 1993b: 294).

Thus, the change in aggregate labour force earnings attributed to rising

male literacy can be put at 1.6 per cent (0.2 × 0.08) and setting labour’s

share in national income at 0.6 would put the contribution to increased

output over the full ﬁfty years at just 0.96 per cent, or 0.02 per cent per

year compounded over ﬁfty years. This is a small part of the perhaps 0.2 to

0.5 per cent per annum growth in per capita income during this period

(see chapter 1 above). In contrast, for the ﬁfty years between 1871 and

1921,the increase in average years of schooling has been estimated as

from 4.2 to 7.4, with a correspondingly larger contribution to economic

growth (Matthews et al. 1982).

As already noted, the basic factor limiting the contribution of literacy

or alternatively primary schooling to growth during this period was the

apparently limited increase in the extent of schooling or literacy. The ac-

tual levels of investment in schooling were non-trivial relative to national

income or physical capital investments. West (1970) has estimated that

direct expenditure on primary and related types of schooling in 1833

amounted to about £3 million or about 1 per cent of English national

income. This is based on making upward adjustments in reported school

enrolments to allow for likely undercounting. Even eliminating West’s

adjustments as overly generous would still leave an expenditure of £1.5

to £2 million, or at least 0.5 per cent of national income. This amounts to

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354 David Mitch

5to10percentofannual gross domestic physical capital formation dur-

ing the 1830s. When allowance is made for opportunity costs of school

attendance, which may well have at least equalled direct costs and could

have been double those costs, especially for children aged 10 and over,

then human capital investment ﬂows in schooling approach 25 per cent

of ﬁxed capital formation (Feinstein 1978: 76).

The English industrial revolution offers a number of challenges to

conventional views of the role of education in economic growth. First, it

offers the example of rapidly growing sectors, often classiﬁed as ‘leading’,

in which large segments of their labour forces had little formal educa-

tion, and in which formal education levels, as measured by literacy, may

indeed have actually declined for extended periods of time. Second, the

overall improvement in formal educational levels between 1750 and 1860

appears to have been quite modest, despite substantial growth in both

total and per capita income. It would thus appear that technological

and productivity advances do not always require improvements in edu-

cational levels. And it appears that the relationship between education

and technology as well as the incorporation of educational requirements

into work organisation have changed considerably since 1860.

Nevertheless it is also important to note more indirect contributions

made by skill and education during this period. First, as noted above,

there were the contributions made by skill acquisition on the job in

new industrial activities. Second, some modern studies of the role of

education in economic growth suggest that the level of educational at-

tainment may have more impact on growth rates than any changes (in-

creases) in this level (Benhabib and Spiegel 1994; Barro and Sala-I-Martin

1995). In this view, a labour force composed primarily of college gradu-

ates is more likely to grow in productivity than a labour force rapidly

moving from illiteracy to minimum literacy skills. The importance of ini-

tial levels of educational attainment is also implied in the inﬂuential

view, proposed by Bowman and Anderson (1963), that there is a literacy

threshold required for economic development. Whether such a threshold

was actually pertinent to England during the industrial revolution is ar-

guable. But, as Table 12.6B shows, English literacy levels were already high

enough by 1700 to ensure virtual universal literacy among those engaged

in high-level commercial occupations and close to it in other occupa-

tions for which literacy was likely to have been of considerable functional

value.

And whatever the degree of intellectual stagnation at Oxford and

Cambridge or of corruption in English grammar school foundations dur-

ing the eighteenth century, there is evidence of vibrant intellectual ac-

tivity elsewhere in English society, whether it be provincial agricultural

or literary societies or urban lecture series on scientiﬁc and philosophi-

cal topics. While one can argue whether England lagged in intellectual

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Education and skill of the British labour force 355

Table 12.6A Illiteracy by social structure in rural England,

1580–1700

Percentage illiterate Economic activity or social status

0–10 Clergy and gentry

Retailers

Distributors

14–33 Specialist crafts

27–73 Yeomen

37–52 Manufacturers

Processors

56–68 Village crafts

73–100 Heavy manual trades,

husbandmen, labourers

Source: Based on Cressy 1980: 136, Table 6.8.

Table 12.6B Illiteracy by occupation group, 1754–84

Occupation No. Percentage illiterate

Gentry and professional 68 0

Ofﬁcials etc. 20 0

Retail 19 5

Wood 137 16

Estate 29 17

Yeoman and farmers 97 19

Food and drink 57 19

Textile 41 20

Metal 60 22

Leather 78 23

Miscellaneous 81 30

Transport 154 31

Clothing 63 35

Armed forces (non-ofﬁcer) 180 41

Husbandmen 666 46

Construction and mining 146 51

Labourers and servants 192 59

Source: Schoﬁeld 1973: 450.

leadership behind Scotland or France

during the eighteenth century, the home

of Newton and Samuel Johnson can

hardly be regarded as an intellectual

backwater.

Chapters 1 and 5 above argue that

Britain’s intellectual vibrancy in the late

eighteenth century was not conﬁned to

literary or scientiﬁc spheres but was

particularly paramount in the develop-

ment of economically useful technolog-

ical innovations. One would expect that

such activity would be one of the major

losses from an Eskimo repopulation of

the British Isles as considered at the

beginning of this chapter. While vis-

ible institutions for skill transmission

and education such as apprenticeship,

schools and universities may have played

asupportingrole, they do not seem

to have been critical to developing Eng-

land’s edge in innovative activity at this

time; more amorphous factors such as

culture appear to havebeencentral.In

searching to explain the development

of human resources suitable for inno-

vation, one can turn to both supply-

and demand-side factors. On the sup-

ply side, there was the possibility of re-

cruiting talent suitable for innovative ac-

tivity from a variety of sources, rang-

ing from immigrants familiar with the

science and technology of continental

Europe to those trained in dissenting

academies or participants in provincial

literary and scientiﬁc societies. Such pluralistic opportunities for innova-

tive talent have sometimes been offered as an explanation for European

technological leadership over Asia and other regions of the world during

this period (Mokyr 1990). And arguably this talent was present in Eng-

land in greater degree than elsewhere at this time. On the demand side,

it has been suggested that in Europe generally, and in England in partic-

ular, talent faced a higher relative reward in productive rather than in

rent-seeking or outright destructive opportunities compared with other

regions (Mitch 1999: 273–5).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

356 David Mitch

Thus, assessing the role of skill and education in the British industrial

revolution requires distinguishing between levels of skill and education

and the changes in those levels. Whatever increases in skill and educa-

tional levels occurred appear to be modest, involving a relatively limited

share of the labour force. Nevertheless, a substantial share of the output

of the English economy in both 1700 and 1860 does appear to have come

from the skills and knowledge of its population. And the level of skill

and knowledge of its workforce made a substantial contribution to the

economic changes which occurred during the intervening century and a

half.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Consumption in

eighteenth- and early

nineteenth-century Britain

MAXINE BERG

Contents

Consumption, consumer revolutions and demand 357

Luxury and consumption 362

Addiction, consumerism and foreign trade 364

Consumption, class and gender 369

Gender and household division of consumption 379

Product innovation, fashion and taste 383

Selling, shopping and advertising 384

Consumer politics 385

Conclusion 386

CONSUMPTION, CONSUMER REVOLUTIONS

AND DEMAND

There is a paradox at the heart of recent research on the industrial rev-

olution. This is the juxtaposition of theories and evidence of slow eco-

nomic and industrial growth with alternative theories and evidence of

rapidly rising consumer expenditure. Earlier histories linked consump-

tion to elite expenditure on the one hand and rising standards of living

on the other. These are no longer considered to be valid. Few now believe

that elite expenditure was in itself sufﬁcient to fuel a major increase

in consumption, and elite consumer behaviour did not ‘trickle down’ to

sufﬁciently broad parts of the population. It is also now believed that the

living standards of the labouring classes either were static or improved

only slowly over the whole of the eighteenth century and much of the

ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. Yet despite these conventions, theo-

ries of a consumer revolution, or at least recognition of evidence of a rela-

tively widespread increase over the period in the possession of consumer

goods, have been difﬁcult to dislodge. Indeed they have gathered force

358 Maxine Berg

since the 1990s, shaping the grand narrative of the period, and replacing

theformer grand narrative of the industrial revolution. Consumption,

is now the major preoccupation of social and cultural historians of the

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as it is of the social sciences

more generally. Analysis of the broader aspects of consumer practices,

and an understanding of the growing diversity of consumption, were left

to social and cultural historians. Shifts in consumer behaviour depended

on changing tastes, on deploying underemployed resources, especially

within the household, and on that vocabulary which economic histori-

ans had carefully removed to the cultural sphere, that is, desire, attitude,

fashion and emulation (de Vries 1993).

Part of the problem of analysing consumption in the eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries lies in the questions being asked and the pe-

riod discussed. Much of the discussion of consumption has been directed

to thebroader concept of demand. Was demand an independent variable

in the process of economic growth? What was its place in the explana-

tions of the industrial revolution? Elizabeth Gilboy argued in 1932 that

demand should play an equal part in explanations of economic change in

theeighteenth century. Her point was revived for the century before this

when Joan Thirsk pointed out the signiﬁcance of consumer industries in

theearly modern period (Thirsk 1978). McKendrick’s large claims for an

independent role for consumption in the second half of the eighteenth

century, and indeed for a consumer revolution with a direct impact on

theindustrial revolution, challenged economic historians to clarify theo-

retical issues, and to reassess evidence on the sources of early economic

growth.The result was concentration on a narrowly deﬁned set of issues,

and conclusions which denied a signiﬁcant place to demand (McKendrick

1983). Consumption was framed within estimates of national economic

output, and estimates of standard of living. These estimates indicated

even slower growth than that of overall output; estimates of growth in

personal consumption per head were substantially deﬂated by issues of

‘quality of life’ (Crafts 1985, 1997). The case for a consumer revolution

was mosteffectively dismissed by Mokyr, who treated demand as a mere

response to supply-led events, arguing that the case had to be made for a

pre-existing rise in real incomes. His supply-led model, however, assumed

ﬁxed tastes and fully employed resources (Mokyr 1985).

Others denied the impact of foreign demand; there is little evidence

of export-led growth, and the bulk of foreign demand was colonial, de-

pendent on the British market’s ability to purchase colonial products

(Cole 1981; Engerman 1994; Thomas and McCloskey 1994). Domestic de-

mand might arise from population growth, from agricultural improve-

ment or from changes in the distribution of income in favour of those

with a larger propensity to consume the products of manufactured in-

dustry. Population growth would only shift demand if income rose, and

macroeconomic estimates gave little support to this (Crafts 1985). The

Consumption in Britain 359

case made for the expansion of domestic demand in classic accounts by

Eversley, Jones and John rested on assumptions about the expansion of

theagricultural sector. More recent research has credited little contribu-

tion to agriculture in widening the domestic market for industrial goods

(O’Brien 1985). There was also little evidence that increased agricultural

productivity raised real incomes of the labouring classes (Horrell 1996).

Shifts in the distribution of income provide another set of possibili-

ties for incentives for rising consumption. The impact of movements of

agricultural and industrial prices combined with rising rents may have

shifted income from the industrial sector to landowners and farmers

in the late eighteenth century. There are other arguments that income

shifts in the early nineteenth century in favour of the middle classes

arose from low-cost labour and industrial and commercial proﬁts. This

wasreinforced by regressive taxation and investment in the national debt.

But this trend towards rising inequality during industrialisation has been

disputed (Feinstein 1988; Hudson 1992), and there were no clear effects

on consumption, especially of domestically produced manufactures. Con-

sumption patterns have been assumed rather than investigated from con-

clusions reached on the standard of living (Horrell 1996; Feinstein 1998).

If the economic history of consumption has been too narrowly focused

on issues of economic growth, the timing of changes in consumption has

been only vaguely speciﬁed. Debate draws on evidence of probate invento-

ries from the seventeenth century, prices from the mid to later eighteenth

century, and budgets from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries, as if there was a single experience of consumption over the

whole period between the 1600s and 1850 (McKendrick 1983; Mokyr 1985;

Shammas 1993; Horrell 1996). Some of the dispute over the existence or

not of a ‘consumer revolution’ might be resolved with clearer speciﬁ-

cation of timing of key consumption trends, but important differences

would still remain. In the present context of the questions posed by eco-

nomic historians and the estimates they provide as evidence, we cannot

come to ﬁrm conclusions on the extent to which the industrial revolution

was demand led.Current estimates of macroeconomic trends in consump-

tion, of economic growth and of standards of living remain at odds with

the ﬁndings of social and cultural historians. It is likely they will continue

to do so if we maintain restrictive assumptions on tastes and household

resource allocations. We can only start to move beyond this stalemate by

seriously investigating the incentives for changing consumer behaviour.

The more recent economic analysis of consumer behaviour provides

some new directions for the history of consumption, directions which

lead into close connections with the cultural sphere. Economic analysis

of consumer behaviour has been based on a variety of models of price

and income elasticity, time use and household decision-making, habits

and social norms, and interactive consumer behaviour such as responses

to aspirational groups. The central concerns of consumer theory have

360 Maxine Berg

been with price and quantity, with technologies explaining the success

or failure of certain goods. However, the roles of taste and of product char-

acteristics have recently emerged as important determinants of consumer

decisions. This develops theories originally put forward in the 1970s ar-

guing that consumers selected among characteristics of goods, and en-

joyed accordingly. Preferences were not exogenous, but endogenous; there

wasaninterdependence between products and taste formation (Lancaster

1971;Ironmonger 1972). Economists now investigate the ‘active consumer’

who takes part in taste formation, responds to new goods, and combines

and recombines new and existing goods to create a social identity and a

lifestyle (Bianchi 1998).

Fewofthese theories have thus far been applied to the analysis of con-

sumption in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Economic his-

torians working on this period have, to a large degree, preferred supply-

side explanations, analysing changes in demand only as a function of

price and quality change provoked by changing technology. They have as-

sumed consumers to be price takers, and the goods they bought to have

no characteristics of their own. The growth of consumption was not con-

sidered to provide an important contribution to economic growth, and

wastherefore sidelined by economic historians. The study of the prolif-

eration of new commodities over the course of the eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries was left largely to social and cultural historians.

Application of an economics of consumer behaviour to other historical

periods does open questions that might be raised about consumption in

thelong eighteenth century. Macroanalysis of consumer demand, diffu-

sion models and time use models have been applied to the study of inter-

warand post-Second World War consumption of consumer durables and

household appliances in the USA and Britain (Bowden and Offer 1994).

An economics of product and quality innovation has been applied to con-

sumer and producer durables in the post-Second World War US economy

(Gordon 1993; Bresnahan and Gordon 1997). Points arising from these

analyses of use to the study of consumption in the early industrial pe-

riod emphasise the limited extent to which such consumer goods showed

up in standard economic indicators such as productivity estimates or pro-

portions of disposable income. The outlay on domestic appliances which

claimed only a small fraction of disposable income also profoundly af-

fected household experiences in the twentieth century (Bowden and Offer

1994). Productivity estimates set out in time series based on the national

accounts could not recognise a proliferation of product and quality vari-

ations in domestic appliances, automobiles, lighting, radios and televi-

sions, computers and photocopiers. The disjuncture between available

economic indicators and other narrative evidence of consumer practices

and product proliferation has recently led economists to investigate other

theories of consumer demand, and to seek out other price deﬂators to

incorporate quality and product differences (Gordon 1990).