CHAPTER I THE HISTORY OF EARLY CAPITALISM WHEN the Industrial Revolution began in the second half of the eighteenth century, the organisation of English industry was better prepared for an advance than that of any other European state. It is true that, as elsewhere, industrial undertakings found their freedom of movement restricted by the survival, partly in law and partly in custom, of the gild system; but much as these restrictions were opposed to the interests of large capitalist industries, they could not repress the many enterprising spirits who were eager to use to the full the new developments of trade. Long before the actual repeal of the Statute of Apprentices and other gild regulations completed the freedom of English industry, the way had become open even within the bounds of industrial capitalism for individual activity and mutual competition. In other countries the productive activities of single economic units were limited not merely by the demands of the gild system, but in the majority of cases, even after that difficulty had been overcome, by privileges, concessions, monopolies and the official regulation of capitalist manufacture, which united to make individual operations difficult and often impossible. In England also, at the time when industrial capitalism commenced, the system of granting privileges to particular persons prevented the growth of competition among many who were both willing and fitted to be leaders of industry. Only when that system, which gave advantages to the few 4 NEW TRADES OF 16TH & 17TH CENTURIES at the cost of all the rest fell after prolonged struggles at the end of the seventeenth century, did that most important factor in modern freedom of industry, the abolition of all legal recognition of private monopolies, come into play. Nearly a century later a new technical and economic movement began, but the significance in this connection of the earlier won industrial freedom not observed by the English economists. They regarded the free play of competition as a natural phenomenon in capitalist industry, and the unsophisticated reader might well imagine from their writings that no other system had ever existed since the rise of capitalism. The more this earlier triumph of free industry was taken as a matter of course, the more content economists were to apply the expression "freedom of industry" solely to the delivery of industry from the fetters of the gild regulations. As a result classical economy and its pupils never examined the liberation of English industry from the rule of monopoly in all its bearings, nor gave it its true importance in economic history. It is only now that in all countries, including England, a new form of monopoly is beginning to arise in industry, that attention is directed to the monopolies which saw the birth of early capitalism, and whose fall was the necessary preliminary of that epoch of free competition, which in its turn appears to be inevitably coming to an end through the action of cartels and trusts. The period which can be marked out in the early history of English industrial capitalism as predominantly that of monopoly lasts from the end of the sixteenth century to about 1685. Not that trade monopolies were unknown before that time; on the contrary they were very common. What made the monopolies of the time of Elizabeth, James I. and Charles I. appear in many ways something new, was that they bore a purely capitalistic impress, and perhaps for this very reason represented ALUM-SALT-GLASS 5 national industrial organisations in contradistinction to the former trade monopolies1 of the gilds which were of purely local importance. The period starts with the rapid economic expansion at the end of the sixteenth century. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and even more in the first ten years of the seventeenth century, a great number of new industries were introduced into England partly by foreigners and partly by Englishmen. The majority were from the beginning of a capitalistic character, and far removed from the domestic handicraft. The adventurers consisted in most cases of well-to-do foreigners acquainted with the new industries, native merchants or rich courtiers, and the amounts invested were often not inconsiderable even in comparison with modern times. The four capitalists who undertook the working of the Yorkshire alum deposits in 1607 put £20,000 to £30,000 into this undertaking within a short period. In 1612 it was estimated that any one of the six existing companies employed 60 hired labourers, not counting foremen and their assistants or the necessary mechanics. The total expenses of such a company were put at about £2100 yearly.3 Salt mining and the glass industry were also organised from the beginning on a capitalist basis. The last—if we neglect primitive beginnings-first became important in 1619, when Sir Robert Mansell started to erect glass works in Newcastle, which still survived till about 1855. He undertook to make a yearly payment of £1000 to the Crown. That he employed 4000 men is, no doubt, an exaggeration, but it is clear that the whole enterprise was of a purely capitalist character. Soap was another industry 1H. Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly,' Boston 1906, pp. 6 and 7; also G. Unwin, 'Industrial Organisation,' Oxford 1904, p. 175. 'W. Cunningham, 'The Growth of English Industry,' Cambridge 1907, p. 78 and following and p. 518. 3 Price, pp. 82 and following, 88 and 89. 4 Cunningham, p. 78. 'R. L. Galloway, 'History of Coal Mining,' London 1882, p. 38. *Price, pp. 74 and 67-81 passim. |