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1. Theorizing Class in Glasgow and the Atlantic World
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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1 Theorizing Class in Glasgow and the Atlantic World Simon P. Newman By 1850 Glasgow was rapidly emerging as one of Britain’s greatest industrial cities, the Second City of the empire. It was the year that the Factory Act restricted women and children to workdays of no more than ten and a half hours, but in the pages of the Glasgow Herald seventy-seven-year-old Robert Reid evoked images of Glasgow’s bucolic past. During his childhood Reid’s “grandmother, who was born in the year 1715,” had recalled a time when such city-center streets as Candleriggs, King Street, and Princes Street were “open fields, which were occasionally sown with corn.” Reid contextualized these distant memories, recalling that “it was during this year (1715) that the first newspaper was published in Glasgow, price one penny. Three years later (1718) the first Glasgow ship crossed the Atlantic.”1 In reminiscing that Glasgow’s Merchant City neighborhood had recently been farmland on the edge of a royal burgh no larger than a medieval market town, Reid ended his recollection with an observation about the first Glaswegian ship to cross the Atlantic, which was fitting since Atlantic trade and commerce fueled the city’s meteoric rise. Following the Act of Union, Glaswegians took full advantage of their integration into Britain’s infant empire , as vast quantities of American tobacco and sugar arrived in Glasgow and its outlying ports of Port Glasgow and Greenock. The Atlantic trade helped trigger significant expansion of local manufacturing, as Glaswegians produced items from coal to linen to shoes for export to Britain’s mainland and Caribbean colonies.2 The enormous profits generated by the tobacco trade, together with Glasgow’s increasing economic diversification, were what saved the city during the American Revolution. Merchants who held on to their extensive stocks of tobacco saw prices rise so high during the War for Independence that they were able to realize huge profits. Moreover, the loss of much of the tobacco trade was “amply compensated by the great increase in manufactures; the merchants having, of late, turned their attention more to improve the manufactures, which had been begun among them, and to establish new ones, which promise to be a much more permanent source of wealth.”3 Thereafter the city focused more than ever before on the production of commodities, especially fabric, for an expanding British Empire and beyond. The people and the city of early modern Glasgow demonstrate the utility of the Atlantic World in providing both a narrative framework and an analytical focus for the study of those whose lives were transformed by the dramatic expansion in the movement of people and goods within and between the communities surrounding the ocean. Change came in different ways and with very different effects to these communities, and changes in ownership and modes of production transformed class relationships and political and economic power among people as distant and diverse as the indigenous peoples of mainland North America, the communities on the western coast of Africa, and the urban populations of the British Isles. Local circumstances conditioned the effects of this new Atlantic World, but the working lives and the developing class experiences and identities of all were touched by it. The working population of Glasgow, which was destined to become the Second City of Britain’s developing empire, was among those who in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries experienced the greatest transformation of their class status and identity. Beginning with the great “tobacco lords” of the eighteenth century, Glasgow’s mercantile and financial leaders accrued such extensive financial, political, and legal power that they were able to mold the nature and the conditions of employment—and thus the conditions of life—for the fast-growing working class. The consolidation of elite power came at a time when the rights and liberties of the lower sort were at their lowest ebb, as more and more rural folk were cleared from the land, a process that was politicized and expanded in the wake of the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–46 and the beginning of the Highland Clearances in earnest. The displaced Highlanders who flooded into Glasgow or who traveled across the Atlantic as indentured servants had been “greatly oppressed and reduced to Indigent and necessitous Circumstances,” and they regarded their debased condition as “but one degree removed from slavery.”4 With no money or power, those who sought work in Glasgow were at the mercy of powerful mercantile and...