The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750–1850 (review)

In The Archaeology of Improvement, Tarlow outlines changes in British material life, describing how “change” itself became the modus operandi of Britain’s educated classes. For Tarlow, it was achieved through a cross-cutting ethic of “improvement” that is evident in literature and material culture associated with a vast array of practices, such as agriculture, landscape, town planning, social engineering, and industrial production. Tracking how nature, the built environment, and the British working population were the targets of improvement, Tarlow sets a stage for future historical archaeologies by presenting a materialized and active process that allowed change in the guise of reform, development, and progress to serve as the root of British culture in modernity.

The bulk of the book considers various improvement discourses in British culture from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Tarlow outlines the general processes and effects of improvement and details the material efforts of the planning, technology, and labor involved. She begins with the most well-known arena of improvement, agriculture and the enclosure of common fields. According to Tarlow, enclosure may be tied simultaneously to technological, economic, and social interests. Enclosure was intended to increase productivity through such rational landownership and land maintenance strategies as field drainage and fertility and the development of new technologies. Enclosure also applied to social and personal improvement: For example, “forcing Scottish Peasants into modern agriculture was thus bringing them into the present and, as reformers saw it, into civilisation” (87), or, more powerfully, “being an agricultural improver … made one a qualitatively different sort of person—a fully modern man” (88).

Tarlow traces this sweeping ethic of improvement in several other pursuits, including town planning, street lighting, sewerage, street cleaning, suburban cemeteries, and several attempts at reforming workhouses, prisons, and mechanics’ institutes. Archaeologists and historians will appreciate her encyclopedic approach that treats each improvement through the lenses of its historical and social impact and material form sequentially. Archaeologists will especially enjoy her final substantive chapter, which engages specific forms of material culture that both relate the technologies and impacts of improvement and show how this ethic may be discovered in even the most “common and mundane types of artefact” (164). For example, Tarlow identifies how developments in bleachworks, window glass, ceramics, and rubbish pits connect visibility, cleanliness, and taste to the presentation of an improved British body distinguished through consumer choices. Tarlow concludes with a review of the main points, findings, and unanswered questions of the book.

Tarlow is adamant throughout the study that improvement was an empowering moral ideology, an end unto itself rather than evidence of latent economic motivations or a desire for power. She is also frustrated by the lack of evidence that speaks directly about improvement across class lines in modern Britain. Although plenty of evidence suggests that poorer people were the subject of improvement, the reaction of these people to being improved is hard to determine.

These issues of ideology and class relate in a way that allows for a productive critique. Tarlow effectively shows that cost outlays for improvement were not necessarily recouped; improved lands, industries, and populations were more symbols of possibility than effective profit-producing forces. However, the basis of this argument places motivation in a simplistic and abstract economic model of outlay and return that misses an important theoretical condition for understanding improvement—competition. As radical social forces undermined traditional church and royal authority, modern society created new opportunities for advancement that re-situated authority in those people with the capacity to combine a control of resources with an ability to contribute to the larger national good; modernity, largely through capitalism, shifted the burden of national and personal well-being increasingly to individuals.

Tarlow could have showed the ideology of improvement to have been widely embraced. Members of British society competed with one another to be regarded as most improved—in other words, those best suited to earn both profits and social distinction, regardless of which came first. Tarlow’s difficulty in...