London in the Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions, 1700-1850.

London lay downstream from industrialization, but the flow of new technology an higher rates of production did not by-pass the capital, as was once assumed. In a much needed re-evaluation that challenges, synthesizes and extends analysis o the metropolis, L. D. Schwarz examines London and its response to the patterns of change usually associated with regions distant from the capital. Its economi and social might was singular in England and, indeed, in Europe. As a city London was unique. The dominance of service industries, for example, is of significance not only in understanding the economic structure of this city, but also in coming to terms with England's true economic strength over this period. If, as W. D. Rubinstein submits, British pre-eminence arising in this age was rounded more on commercial, financial and service industries than manufacturing then London's role in the industrializing economy is of even greater importance than has been realized to date.(1)

This volume is divided into three parts: wealth and occupations; fluctuations and mortality; and standard of living and trades. In the first, Schwarz traces patterns of employment from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, making clear the distinction between the experiences of men and women. The author concurs with historians who see women's working options as essentially limited to ghettos of domestic service and needle trades--unlike historians suc as K. D. M. Snell who suggest a period of greater access was followed by a marked decline in opportunity from about the late 1700s. Offering alternative sources, Schwarz finds only rare exceptions to the segregation of trades by gender. Among the female "army of casual labour" living in London, employment choices were "narrow and remained narrow" over the century and a half under study--a conclusion of considerable significance in the national profile of women's work history.

The bulk of male employment in London depended fundamentally on the size and structure of the city, its relationship to competing provincial centres and the physical growth of the capital. Employment options differed between genders. Bu London itself placed its imprimatur on the work available. Manufacturing declined in importance over a century and a half. London, once the sole site of trades like silk, became one of several centres of production by 1800, thereafter eclipsed. However, Schwarz reminds readers that with one-third of inhabitants involved in manufacture in 1851, "London was the largest manufacturing town in the country and in Europe." London manufacturers responde to the fall-out of industrialization by reorganizing production to take advantage of an extraordinary market position. The migration of ancient trades to the provinces gradually eroded some trades and introduced new practices in others. Varied and largely small scale, London manufacturers reacted by reorganizing labour--their single most abundant resource. Manufacturing would remain within the capital as long as value continued to be added to high qualit goods and the mass market could be reached with cheap local products.

Service dominated as a source of work and opportunity. Employment patterns and social structure reveal, however imperfectly, the range of activities in the service sector which characterized the London population. "Within the capital's middling classes, and these formed about a fifth of the population at the end o the eighteenth century, it was the service sector that was the wealthiest--bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors and the more select among the retailers." This was an enduring feature of London. But the best jobs employed few people; those without skills or access, the majority of the population, would be relegated to impermanent work and chronic underemployment. That too wa an enduring feature of London life.

Schwarz devotes the central portion of this volume to an assessment of the fluctuating pressures on the population of London. War, weather and the seasons have long been recognized as inescapable constraints. Wars mitigated business slumps and brought abnormally high levels of employment; demobilization unloose a different kind of havoc on England's largest community. The seasons offered different kinds of challenges, with short flurries of seasonal employment and a equivalent market demand which rippled throughout the nation. Increasingly, however, London's dominance waned from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century as provincial centres developed a greater measure of strength. London's slump in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, possibly brought on by a stagnant population, was London's alone and did not subsume the nation.

One of the most intriguing fluctuations tackled by Schwarz relates to the decline in the crude death rate over the hundred and fifty years studied. The metropolis devoured men, women and children in the late seventeenth century at rates much higher than the national average and yet by the end of the study London's death rates approximated national averages. Acknowledging that more precise estimates of mortality will only come with family reconstitutions, Schwarz concludes that declining infant mortality was a main contributor to the lower death rates, along with a lower incidence of smallpox, fever and consumption. Definitive explanations are elusive. The repercussions, however, were evident in the more vigorous population growth from the second half of the eighteenth century onward.

As the nineteenth century began, the mass of London's population struggled to get by in circumstances of relatively lower wage rates compared to the region north of the Severn-Wash line. Schwarz handles general wage rates with care, critiquing the concept of the money wage as a corrective to exclusively statistical studies of the topic which overlook extensive non-money payments. Next follows an assessment of the timing and repercussions on the waged of the reorganization of labour in the production of basic commodities. Mass productio of clothing by sweating is dated from about 1815-36, the period of trade union defeat, labour dilution by female and unskilled workers and labour reorganization. "As soon as a product came to made for a mass market, its manufacture was liable to become sweated." However, Schwarz does not recognize adequately that industrialization of trades like cotton reflected a mass market in the eighteenth century, when ready-made clothing production also emerged as significant market phenomenon.

Throughout, Schwarz emphasizes continuities, as well as disjunctures. The metropolis has an expositor who gives due weight and convincing insights into the forces which transfigured London. The author is favoured as well by a publisher who produced, physically and stylistically, a first rate book.

Beverly Lemire University of New Brunswick 

ENDNOTE 

1. W.D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750-1990 (London, 1992).