Floud R., Johnson P. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860
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Scotland 411
Japan, having borrowed ideas from others on a grand scale, the country
soon moved rapidly to the cutting edge of the new technology. A whole
stream of key inventions started to emanate from Scotland, including
James Watt’s refinement of the separate condenser for the steam engine
(perhaps the fundamental technological breakthrough of the age), Neil
Snodgrass’s scutching machine, enabling wool to be processed effectively
before being spun, Archibald Buchanan’s construction of the first truly
integrated cotton mill in Britain in 1807, where all the key processes were
carried out by power within a single complex, Henry Bell’s Comet of 1812,
which pioneered steam propulsion for ships, J. B. Neilson’s invention in
1829 of the ‘hot-blast process’, which helped to transform iron manufac-
ture by radically reducing the costs of production, and a long series of
pathbreaking discoveries in marine engine design.
It is dangerous, however, to focus too much on technology when con-
sidering those distinctive advantages which gave the Scots a competitive
edge during the industrial revolution. Most tasks, in both agriculture
and industry, continued to be done by hand; even in cotton, the most
advanced manufacturing sector of all, two of the three core processes,
weaving and finishing, remained mainly labour intensive until the 1820s.
The cost of labour was therefore critical as was the way in which working
people reacted to the strange new manufacturing processes and environ-
ments. Undeniably, wages in certain trades were rising in the later eigh-
teenth century. Nevertheless, most Scottish wages remained below those
of England, and it was partly because of this attraction that English ty-
coons like Richard Arkwright were investing in Scottish factories in the
1780s. Arkwright boasted that the lower costs of production in Scotland
would enable him to take a razor to the throat of Lancashire. Almost a
century later, in the 1860s, when the first rigorous wage censuses became
available, Scotland was still unequivocally a low-wage economy in most
occupations compared to England. The key test of national differences in
this respect was the balance of migration. When good figures were first
produced in the 1840s, around 67,000 Scots and English had migrated
across the Border. But over three-quarters of this number were Scots,
who were plainly much keener to move to the greater opportunities in
the south than the English were to move north.
Asecond advantage for Scottish entrepreneurs was the mobility of
labour. Historically the Scots were a migratory people. But in the eigh-
teenth century internal migration became more common precisely at the
time when industry needed to attract more workers. Seasonal movement
for harvest work from the southern and central Highlands for work in the
Lowland harvests was more significant after c.1750. In the same region
the firstclearances for sheep, the transfer of people from inland straths to
the coastlands as the new crofting system was established, and the social
strains coming from rampant commercialisation, all led to more internal
migration as well as promoting a large-scale exodus of people across the
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412T.M.Devine
Atlantic after c.1760. In the Lowlands, agricultural improvement was rad-
ically altering the traditional social order and in the process drastically
cutting back the large numbers who had always had a legal or custom-
ary right to land. The tenant class contracted further and cottar fami-
lies with smallholdings possessing skills in spinning and weaving were
steadily replaced by landless servants and labourers. Those who have little
other than their labour power to sell are always more likely to be more
mobile than a landholding peasantry who, in the last resort, can rely on
their smallholdings as a source of subsistence. Lowland Scotland certainly
had larger numbers of people detached from land holding by c.1800
than ever before and the resulting rates of short-distance migration were
often remarkable. One case study shows that two-thirds of the families
listed for the village of Kippen in Stirlingshire in 1789 were no longer
resident there in 1793. In the household of the Earl of Leven and Melville
in Fife, 97 per cent of women servants and 90 per cent of men remained
foronly four years or less in the earl’s employment (Houston 1988a: 21).
Certainly by comparison with many rural parishes in parts of France and
Germany, where most lived and died in the parish of their birth, Scottish
internal mobility was a decided bonus for manufacturers keen to hire
more labour.
Nevertheless, acute difficulties remained. Skill shortages abounded in
coal and ironstone mining, pottery and glass making, bleaching and nail
making, and, as already noted, could often only be made good by relying
on English workers to hand on their expertise to the natives (Whatley
1997: 21). More seriously, there was the major problem of recruiting
labour to the new textile factories and large workshops. The mills crys-
tallised the conflict between the culture of work in the old order and the
new. Full-time work, though not unknown, was unusual outside the
towns, and the majority of people had little interest in labouring for
much longer than their basic needs required. But factory employment
was radically different. Costly machinery had to be employed on a con-
tinuous basis and that meant long hours, a disciplined workforce and
more rigorous supervision of labour. By the early nineteenth century, in
the cotton mills night working was not unknown when trade was brisk.
Workers normally laboured for six days a week, with Sundays off and
usually only a few further days annually. It was hardly an environment
likely to attract large numbers of male workers at a time, in the 1780s
and 1790s, when work in agriculture and handloom weaving was paying
better than ever before.
But this potential recruitment crisis in the early years of industrial-
isation was avoided. Scottish industry quickly developed a considerable
dependence on women and children as sources of low-cost labour. By
the1820s they formed over 60 per cent of the total workforce in man-
ufacturing industry and, in the cotton and flax mills, the proportion
of women employed was significantly higher in Scotland than in the
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Scotland 413
industrial areas of Lancashire (Bolin-Hart 1989). Women were also vital
as bearers in the collieries, in the preparation of flax and the manufacture
of woollen stockings, and in the bleachfields. Again, unlike the pattern
in Yorkshire and Lancashire, the immigrant Irish started to stream into
themills as early as the 1790s as both skilled and unskilled labour. It was
significant that when the powerful Glasgow Cotton Spinners Association
emerged in the early nineteenth century the leadership was dominated
by second-generation Irishmen whose families had earlier achieved a po-
sition in the industry in the late eighteenth century. In the early 1800s it
was reckoned that around half the mill workforce in the city were either
Irish-born or of Irish descent. By that time, national population growth
in Scotland was starting to accelerate and in the cities the swelling num-
ber of migrants was relieving any scarcities that had previously existed
in the industrial labour market. But for a period in the 1780s and 1790s,
only the recruitment to the mills of Irish immigrants, Scottish women
and pauper children prevented a slowing down in the momentum of
industrialisation.
INDUSTRIALISATION AND SCOTTISH SOCIETY
Over a mere few decades Scotland had become an industrial society and
aforce to be reckoned with in the world economy. How far the eco-
nomic miracle brought significant long-term benefits to the majority of
the Scottish people before 1860 is more debatable. The answer to this
key questionontherelationship between economic change and material
welfare is problematic in a Scottish context because the standard-of-living
controversy has never attracted the same sustained level of scholarly dis-
cussion as in England. As a result, no Scottish cost-of-living index ex-
ists for any extended period before 1860. Nevertheless, there are some
pointers. A rise in national income and employment opportunities in a
still labour-intensive economy allowed Scottish population to increase on
asustained basis from 1,265,000 in the 1750s to nearly 2.9 million by
1851. One estimate suggests that the urban mercantile and professional
classes were increasingly significant, comprising about 15 per cent of
town populations c.1750 and nearly 25 per cent by the 1830s (Nenadic
1988: 114–15). Material improvement also seems to have been widespread
in the Lowlands and southern and eastern Highlands between c.1760and
c.1793. For instance, male agricultural workers in the central belt experi-
enced a real wages increase of 40 to 50 per cent over this period (Morgan
1971:181–201). This was in contrast to some English regions, especially
those distant from the core areas of manufacturing. In Scotland, this ini-
tial cycle of improvement was conditioned by intensive agrarian change
and industrial/urban growth, a relatively slow rate of national population
increase (about half that of England at 0.6 per annum, c.1750–1801), a
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414T.M.Devine
significant increase in military employment during the war years and a
dramatic rise in the involvement of women and children in agriculture
and textile work. In addition, the Scots seem to have had a dietary ad-
vantage over other UK regions. The traditional diet of oatmeal and milk
may have been narrow and monotonous, but it was also very nutritious
and helps to explain why Scotsmen were apparently the tallest males in
Britain before c.1850 (Floud et al. 1990: 73).
Over the next phase, c.1793 to c.1812, the scattered data produce
conflicting and ambiguous results, although the most recent assessment
suggests that ‘Broadly speaking the period of the French and Napoleonic
Wars appears to have been one of stagnation [in real wages]’ (Whatley
1997: 83). Thereafter, however, the picture darkens somewhat. A survey of
average real wages for Glasgow workers in nineteen occupational groups
indicates a continuous decline between c.1816and1839 and one care-
ful calculation suggests that in 1834 about half of Scotland’s handloom
weavers, at that date the country’s largest group of industrial work-
ers, fell below the primary poverty line as defined by late nineteenth-
century social analysts (Treble 1988). Over these decades, too, the index
of mortality in the towns, which had fallen between 1790 and 1815, in-
creased dramatically from c.1816–17. Both contemporary comment and
theavailable statistical evidence suggest that mortality from typhus in
Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow between c.1820 and c.1850 was, in
Edwin Chadwick’s words, ‘greater ...thaninthemostcrowded towns
in England’ (Flinn 1965: 99). The harsher times were also punctuated by
aseries of bitter industrial disputes between capital and labour and acri-
monious popular disturbance which did not fade until the 1850s when an
uneasy calm started to prevail in the manufacturing districts. Moreover,
theimpact of economic advance was notably uneven across the country.
Nowhere in mainland Britain were the social costs of agrarian capital-
ism more apparent than in the crofting districts of the Highland, where
thepeople eked out a meagre existence on the margin of subsistence.
When the potatoes failed in 1846 whole areas were threatened with star-
vation, a threat allayed only by massive charitable intervention from the
Lowland cities which prevented a human tragedy of Irish proportions
(Devine 1988).
The reality was that the economic miracle was a mixed blessing. The
sheer speed of Scottish urbanisation for a time quickly overwhelmed ex-
isting systems of water supply, sanitation and waste disposal. The new
dominance of unfettered market relationships meant the speedy break-
down in some of the paternalistic practices of the eighteenth century.
By c.1825 controls over bread prices and legal regulation over work prac-
tices and tradesmen’s wages had both disappeared. At the same time,
the Scottish poor law, which had been remarkably flexible before 1800,
had become much more rigorous by c.1840, not least in its formal oppo-
sition to the right of the able-bodied unemployed to relief. For many
the new urbanworldwastherefore less secure and more vulnerable
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Scotland 415
Table 14.1 Occupational structure in Scottish cities, 1841
Percentage of Workforce in: Glasgow Edinburgh Dundee Aberdeen
Printing and publishing 1.12 3.88 0.56 0.91
Engineering, tool making and metals 7.7 6.07 5.59 6.32
Shipbuilding 0.35 0.17 1.14 1.24
Coachbuilding 0.40 0.92 0.21 0.34
Building 5.84 5.73 6.05 5.99
Furniture making and woodworking 1.06 2.73 0.77 0.87
Chemicals 1.22 0.24 0.19 0.37
Food, drink and tobacco 5.24 8.31 5.27 4.66
Textiles and clothing 37.56 13.04 50.54 34.68
Other manufacturing 2.90 3.02 1.29 3.18
General labouring 8.40 3.69 3.84 6.87
Note that occupational classifications in the 1841 Census are questionable and imprecise. The figures here provide
an impression of overall structures rather than an exact measurement of them.
Source: Census of 1841 (Parliamentary Papers, 1844, XXVII) and Rodger 1985.
Table 14.2 Occupational structure in Scottish cities, 1841, by sector (percentage of total workforce)
Agriculture and
Professional Domestic Commercial Industrial fishing
MFMF MFMF M F
Glasgow (and suburbs) 4.53 0.57 2.03 31.60 15.09 2.87 73.92 64.59 4.43 0.37
Edinburgh (and suburbs) 13.34 1.93 6.53 70.36 14.10 2.71 62.26 23.61 2.77 1.39
Dundee 4.98 0.88 1.95 27.30 13.70 2.79 76.57 68.65 2.80 0.38
Aberdeen 6.46 2.24 4.05 40.37 14.57 2.44 68.71 53.98 6.21 0.97
Source:Asfor Table 14.1.
to thecycle of international supply and demand. What compounded
theproblem in Scotland was the smaller middle class and the weak-
ness of the service sector (outside Edinburgh and its environs) compared
with England. As Tables 14.1 and 14.2 reveal, Dundee and Glasgow, the
very centres of the new urban industrialism, were alike by the 1840s in
their heavy dependency on textile employment, the relative weakness
of the professional sector (compared to Aberdeen and Edinburgh) and
thelarge numbers (especially in Dundee) of low-paid female workers.
These urban occupational structures were not conducive to long-term
stable levels of employment, especially in the difficult trading conditions
fortextile producers during several years in the 1820s, 1830s and early
1840s.
The broader demographic context should also be borne in mind. The
tight labour market of the last quarter of the eighteenth century was
moulded in large part by the slow population increase of the period. By
theearly nineteenth century this pattern had changed to one of more
rapid growth: 1.6 per annum between 1811 and 1821 (more than double
therate between the 1750s and 1801) and 2.1 per annum between 1801
and 1851. It was a new demographic scenario of a sustained increase
in numbers which may well have swamped rural labour markets, espe-
cially after the great demobilisation of soldiers and sailors at the end
of the Napoleonic Wars. Though farmers had a need for more hands,
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416T.M.Devine
the demand for labour was not increasing at anything like the pace of
population growth, especially as agricultural income and hence employ-
ment opportunities contracted with the slump in grain prices after 1816.
One might realistically have anticipated an expansion in structural un-
employment in rural districts. This was the experience in the western
Highlands – but not in the Lowlands – partly because of the expulsive
force of the Scottish structure of engagement for farm service. In the later
eighteenth century, it became a major principle of Scottish improving
policy that only the population essential for proper cultivation should be
retained permanently on the land. Accommodation in and around the
farm was strictly limited thereafter to the specific labour needs of the
farmer. Cottages surplus to these requirements were pulled down and
thebuilding of new accommodation strictly controlled. This inevitably
became a mechanism for channelling excess labour off the land, espe-
cially when it is remembered that the able-bodied unemployed had no
legal right to be relieved under the Scottish poor law, even if occasional
assistance was sometimes provided at times of acute difficulty. The com-
bination of this system, a natural and accelerating rise in population
and only slowly growing or stagnant employment opportunities in agri-
culture after 1812–13 helped to impel an increasing movement of people
from country to town (Devine 1978: 331–46). In the period c.1816/17 to
the1840s, parts of Scotland had a growing problem of structural un-
employment. But it did not concentrate in the Lowland rural areas and
wasinstead mainly confined to the large towns, the western Highlands
and the smaller industrial centres (especially of handloom weavers) in
the countryside. This was where the growing pains of the new industrial
society were most apparent.
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15
The extractive industries
ROGER BURT
Contents
Introduction 417
Location and structure 419
Distinguishing characteristics 423
Markets and prices 427
Institutional development 432
Technological change 436
Conclusion 448
INTRODUCTION
The story of the industrial revolution is usually told in terms of cotton
and the textile industry. But men and women did not live by cloth alone.
The houses and factories that they lived and worked in were built with
brick and roofed with slate; they were heated, powered and lit by coal
and its products; their sanitation and water supply were serviced with
lead and copper pipes and cisterns; their tools and machinery were of
iron and steel; and their household utensils and facilities were of pottery
and ceramics. Whereas in the early 1860s the average annual per capita
consumption of raw cotton in mainland Britain was around 30 lb., every
man, woman and child in mainland Britain could consume something
like 10 oz. of tin, 2 lb. of copper, 6 lb. of lead, over 220 lb. of iron and
steel, more than 3 tons of coal, and a similar quantity of clays, sand,
stone and gravel. The extractive industries were widely dispersed across
the country and dominated a number of regional economies, not just in
the north of England. The material culture of everyday life was firmly
rooted in the products of the nether world and became ever more depen-
dent on it. No matter how the textile sector grew and expanded, it was the
domestic extractive industries, and those that processed their products,
that dominated the industrial landscape. Overall, Britain’s mineralogical
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418 Roger Burt
factor endowment created the defining context for the whole process
of its industrialisation. By facilitating and encouraging the substitution
of mineral for organic resources it guided technology in new directions
that were particularly rich in innovative possibilities. In metallurgy this
led to the final fulfilment of the promise of the Iron Age, initiated mil-
lennia before, by making ferrous metals sufficiently cheap and available
to become the common material of construction. In the exploitation of
heat energy, one of the basic building blocks of all economic activity,
thelarge-scale working of Britain’s extensive coal deposits and the in-
vention of machinery to realise their energy, set in train a process that
led to a continuous increase in the productivity of capital and labour.
As Wrigley has explained, this made it possible ‘to construct an indus-
trial society with a capacity to produce material goods of use to man
on a scale that dwarfed such production in any earlier period’ (Wrigley
1988: 73).
At thebase of the ‘mineral economy’ lay the extractive industries –
those that mined and quarried the raw material from its native rock.
Forall their strategic significance, however, their story remains a shad-
owy one. Unlike most other topics discussed in these volumes, there is
avery limited literature from which to draw an overview of the long-
term development of the extractive industries, and there are few debates
and reinterpretations to review. The coal industry and its labour force
used to attract considerable attention but relatively little has emerged
since the 1980s. The non-ferrous mining industries have continued to
support widespread research and publication, but most of this work has
been antiquarian and provides little academic analysis of the industries’
overall economic and social development. Much the same can be said
of the whole construction and industrial materials sector, but with an
even lower level of academic interest. In the iron industry, smelting has
seen exhaustive analysis, but mining has been almost entirely ignored
(Willies 1997). Even where studies have been conducted, they are usually
more concerned with the markets for final products rather than the eco-
nomics of the extractive process itself. Thus the detailed volumes on the
coal industry pay little attention to the income derived by mines from
thefrequent joint production of iron ore and clay. Similarly, separate
volumes on the history of copper mining and tin mining largely ignore
thefact that these products were largely derived from the same work-
ings by the same miners using the same capital equipment (see Burt and
Timbrell 1991; Brown 1998). Overall, there has been far greater interest in
therole of British capital, entrepreneurs and labour in developing over-
seas mining in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than has
ever been shown in the earlier history of the domestic industry. In many
respects it remains the least well-known, and least understood, aspect of
modern British industrial history.
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The extractive industries 419
LOCATION AND STRUCTURE
Mainland Britain was, and still is, richly endowed with a wide range of
minerals, dispersed widely across the country. The principal commercial
products may be broadly grouped into four categories: fossil fuels, fer-
rous ores, non-ferrous ores and what, in the nineteenth century, were
known as ‘earthy minerals’, such as stone, clay and salt. This large and
miscellaneous latter group is now known as ‘construction and indus-
trial minerals’ and that term will be employed here. The only fossil fuel
of significant commercial value to be worked during this period was
coal, though some small quantities of heavy oil and lignite also found
limited local use. Coal was produced in many parts of the country but
most came from the north-east, the West Midlands, Lowland Scotland
and Yorkshire, in that order, with rapidly emerging mines in Lancashire
and South Wales. Iron ore mineralisation was even more geographically
dispersed, but again output was dominated by the production of a few
leading areas. Unlike coal, however, these changed dramatically during
theperiod, largely because of local problems with the exhaustion of de-
posits and an evolving interdependent relationship with the coal industry
as smelting and refining methods changed. Thus in the early eighteenth
century, long-established mining centres in the Forest of Dean and the
Weald of Sussex and Kent probably still contributed over a third of total
output, with the remainder being drawn from the West Midlands and
southern Yorkshire. A hundred years later, however, the Forest of Dean
and the Weald had ceased to be of significance (Hart 1971; Cleere and
Crossley 1985), Staffordshire and Shropshire had increased their share of
amuch expanded total to well over a third, and South Wales had emerged
as probably the largest single producer. Evolution continued during the
nineteenth century as South Wales and the Midlands began to be over-
hauled, first by mines in Lowland Scotland, and later the north-east and
theFurness district of Lancashire/Cumberland (John 1950; Marshall 1958;
Harris 1970; Hyde 1977: 12, 123, 181; Warren 1990).
Non-ferrous metal mineralisation was far more confined than iron,
and the economics of mining less affected by the local availability of
coal supplies. The ores were generally more valuable and able to sustain
high reduction costs; the technical problems involved in reducing them
were not so great; and cheaply available alternative fuels, such as peat,
could often be used (Gill 2001). Thus tin was found and mined only in
thesouth-western counties of Cornwall and Devon (Barton 1967); cop-
per also in the south-west (Barton 1961) as well as north-western Wales
(Rowlands 1981), Staffordshire (Robey and Porter 1972) and the southern
Lake District (Holland 1986); and lead mainly in the Pennines, north and
central Wales, the south-west, and southern Scotland. Silver and zinc were
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420 Roger Burt
derived from the same mines as lead (Raistrick and Jennings 1965; Lewis
1967; Rowe 1993). Manganese was mined in Devon and central Wales and
gold was worked in small quantities in Carmarthen and Merioneth (Rees
1969; Burt and Wilkie 1984; Hall 1988).
Construction and industrial minerals were widely distributed across
the country and their production was usually linked to local demand in
building, manufacturing and agriculture. Thus limestone was quarried
almost everywhere it was found for building stone, furnace fluxes and
fertiliser, and low-quality clays were extracted for brick and tile manu-
facture. Nevertheless, there were some products that were particularly
associated with certain localities, and which were distributed to national
and international markets. Thus salt was produced in large quantities in
Cheshire, with over a third of its total output being exported in 1858.
Similarly, china clay production was mainly, but not exclusively, associ-
ated with Devon and Cornwall, slate with north-west Wales, gypsum with
Derbyshire, fuller’s earth with Kent and Gloucestershire, and barytes and
fluorspar with the Pennine lead mining districts. The production of these
and other materials was a large and highly diversified industry that grew
rapidly during the period and has continued to do so ever since. As early
as the 1880s, slate was estimated to be the third most valuable mineral in
production in England and Wales, behind only coal and iron, and today
the construction and industrial minerals comprise by far the largest part
of the surviving British extractive sector.
The different industries within the extractive sector varied consider-
ably in their size and value of output. It is not possible to deconstruct
thechanging relative importance of all parts of the sector – the output
of construction and industrial minerals is particularly obscure – but a
fairly clear general picture can be compiled for coal and the principal
metals. Throughout the period, the coal industry was undoubtedly the
largest and most important part of the sector (Pollard 1980). This is usu-
ally explained in terms of the transition of Britain from a wood-based
to amineral-based energy economy (Wrigley 1988). It is argued that a
widening range of industrial and domestic consumers of timber caused
an increasing ‘fuel crisis’ in Britain from the early sixteenth century
and that coal production expanded as a direct response to it (Thomas
1986). Thus Nef estimated a fourteenfold increase in coal output between
1550 and the 1680s (Nef 1932) and by the 1720s it probably already stood
around 3.5 million tons annually. This compares with a probable pro-
duction of around 100,000 tons of non-ferrous ore concentrates at that
date and 75,000 tons of iron ore. The value of output is impossible to
calculate with any accuracy but again it is likely that the coal industry
wasaclear leader, followed by non-ferrous metals, because of the rel-
atively high value of their ores. It should be remembered that at this
stage the output of iron was still constrained by a dependence on char-
coal fuel, notwithstanding the successes of Abraham Darby with coke
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