Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

other regions, for instance Manchester and ‘the North’, and Bristol, that dynamic gateway
to overseas markets.
Daunton states: ‘The emergence of an integrated national economy meant that
signals were transmitted to all regions, but their response differed.’ 106
As Smith noted, a
larger market and better communications enabled people and places to specialise in what
they produced, increasing efficiency. ‘In every improved society the farmer is generally
nothing but a farmer; and the manufacturer nothing but a manufacturer.’ 107
Many
specialised in agriculture, perhaps concentrating on corn, meat or dairy products.
Daunton feels that agriculture made its greatest gains in efficiency before 1750, but there
were continued developments in this period such as parliamentary enclosure, changes in
land-holding and other ‘improvements’, such as selective breeding of animals and more
emphasis on crop rotation. 108
If Britain’s economic growth and the march towards industrialisation were not
evenly spread in geographic terms, neither was this progress even in chronological terms.
The growth is all the more remarkable in that it was checked by wars, extreme weather
conditions and many poor harvests. 109
The west midlands was indeed affected by such
problems. Cattle distemper was still prevalent in the early 1750s, 110 and protests about
rising prices of grain and butter were a recurring theme in local newspapers, as in autumn
1756. 111 Ten years later a crowd of a thousand men gathered in Coughton. They
106 M. Daunton, Progress and Poverty, (Oxford, OUP, 1995), p. 16.
107 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, (London, Penguin, 1982), pp. 111, 121-3.
108 Daunton, Progress and Poverty, pp. 25-57.
109 For example, poor weather in 1783 after a volcanic eruption. Habakkuk, ‘English population in the
eighteenth century’, highlights poor harvests in 1793-5 and 1798-1801. Hoskins, ‘Harvest fluctuations and
English economic history, 1620-1759’, p. 15, suggests that 12 harvests out of 41 were deficient in the years
1760-1800.
110 Mentioned for example in Berrow’s Worcester Journal 24 Jan. 1750/1 and 29 March 1753.
111 For instance, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 15 Nov. 1756 and Berrows Worcester Journal 18 and 25 Nov.
1756.
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