Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (review)

Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain. By G. R. Searle (New York, Oxford University Press, 1998) 300 pp. $85.00

The Victorian Age in Britain was the high point of laissez-faire economics, but it was also a period when people were obsessively concerned with morality. The crux of this book is the problematic intersection of these phenomena. Was the state ever morally justified in intervening in the free market? Searle explores this question through a series of chapters devoted to such topics as slavery, business fraud, and poor relief. The result is a fascinating and readable history that will be of interest to historians, economists, political scientists, and anyone interested in questions of business ethics and government regulation. In addition, the revival of free-market ideology as a social and economic panacea in our own day underscores the continuing relevance of this history.

In seeking to win a wider audience for political economy during the early nineteenth century, its propagandists argued that the free market ultimately rewarded the good and punished the wicked. The debate over slavery was indicative. Political economists criticized slavery not for moral reasons, but because they believed it to be economically wasteful. Abolitionists found this argument offensive, but it was also ineffective, since there were clearly locales where slavery was profitable. Such attempts at moralizing commerce proved increasingly difficult as the century continued, and a joint-stock economy developed that rested on the investments of shareholders who had no personal responsibility for the uses to which their capital was put. Indeed, a whole series of mid-Victorian financial crises and business frauds suggested an economy that was actively immoral.

Searle demonstrates that even during the mid-century highwater mark of laissez-faire economics, there was widespread agreement that market forces should be excluded from certain areas of life. For example, no one seriously challenged the self-regulating monopolies of lawyers, doctors, and ministers who promoted a professional ethos that was actively hostile to both entrepreneurial values and the ideals of political economy. The family could also be held up as the antithesis of competitive individualism. Indeed, Searle argues, domestic ideology provided the harshest criticism of market forces; the family and home were eulogized as a refuge from the cutthroat world of business. To many in the Victorian middle class, "capitalism only seemed tolerable if certain areas of human life could be insulated from the materialism . . . which lay at its heart" (166). Thus, few questioned the government's right to regulate or suppress "free trade in vice," such as prostitution, gambling, or Sunday trading.

Although this book is wide ranging and comprehensive in its coverage, it unaccountably neglects the greatest moral crisis of the new economic ideas, the Irish potato famine of the 1840s in which a million poor Irish starved--largely because of the British government's neglect and the widespread fear of political economists that a too generous provision of charity would lead to welfare dependency. Some discussion of this topic would have enabled Searle to make connections between issues of imperial trade, poor relief, and debates about charity that he discusses with such aplomb elsewhere in the book.

George Robb
William Paterson University

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