Capital and Innovation--How Britain Became the First Industrial Nation: A Study of the Warrington, Knutsford, Northwich and Frodsham Area, 1500-1780 (review)
This splendid sequel to the author's earlier studies of Cheshire is solidly based on an impressive variety and volume of sources—family and estate records, tax returns, wills, inventories, and genealogies, many of them tabulated and printed in the text. What emerges is a detailed history of individuals and families over three centuries and a useful account of how the local economy functioned, including authoritative descriptions of sailclothmaking, linen manufacture, and salt production. A chapter on Quaker families confirms the value of their kinship links and personal integrity for business.
Two main arguments are advanced in the book. First, in the dairy economy of the Northwest between 1500 and 1750 most farmers were customary or leasehold tenants who held their land at fixed rents during an inflationary period and thereby built up equity at the expense of the Crown, the Church, and some landed families. Since they practiced partible inheritance, their children acquired capital to start the small local businesses that were the bedrock of the Industrial Revolution. Second, this diffusion of capital created an independent, regional business community, often Non-Conformist in religion and linked to the Atlantic economy. Its "business culture" (entrepreneurial would have been a better term) was able to resist the rentier and professional "gentry culture" that dominated the South. The Industrial Revolution was driven by innovating and risk-taking businessmen, not by technology.
This book exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of local history. It mines rich sources, raises important questions, and advances a plausible case. But there is a yawning gap between the particular and the general. National trends are discussed in a simplistic terminology with too many important issues, such as banking and credit, omitted. The crucial question of the extent to which entry fines compensated landowners for fixed rents is also left in limbo. The arguments are not systematically developed or weighed against alternatives; they are presented as assertions without an adequate demonstration of their mechanism or relative importance.
