Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. Richard Holmes

Conditions in these warrens were appalling.

      From three to eight individuals of different ages often sleep in the same bed, there being in general but one room and a bed for each family…The room occupied is either a deep cellar, almost inaccessible to the light, and admitting of no change of air, or a garret with a low roof and small windows, the passage to which is close, kept dark, and filled not only with bad air but with putrid excremental effluvia from a vault [cess-pit] at the bottom of the staircase.⁹⁰

      The rustic who made his way to town had often been dispossessed by the steady enclosure of the countryside, part of it the result of parliamentary enclosure acts in the second half of the eighteenth century, but at least as much resulting from a slower and quieter process which was already long in train. Its general effect was to replace the small yeoman proprietors with a far steeper rural pyramid, in which large farmers, themselves often the tenants of gentry landlords, employed, as landless labourers, men whose fathers had once farmed their own land. This process paralleled a similar development in the towns, as individual artisans were swallowed up in large-scale enterprises, their loss of status being accompanied by dependency on ‘new men’. They were sometimes philanthropic, like Robert Owen, who added an institute and community centre to mills built by his father-in-law at New Lanark, but often they were more concerned with their profits than their workers.

      Three industries rose head and shoulder above all others: coal, iron and textiles. Between 1750 and 1800 coal production doubled as steam pumps enabled miners to reach deeper, richer seams. Railways, their trucks drawn by horses at the start of our period but by steam engines before its close, took coal to the rivers and canals which carried so much of the country’s heavy freight. The construction of a canal from Worsley to Manchester in 1761 initiated a canal-building boom that saw over 2,500 miles built by the time that the railway moved centre stage. In mid-century coke became widely used for smelting iron, and cast iron items, which came straight from the factory and did not require the attentions of finery, mill and smithy, became increasingly popular. In the 1780s Henry Cort patented the processes of puddling and rolling, in which molten iron was first stirred to allow the sulphurous gasses to escape and then rolled to remove remaining impurities. War fuelled the demand for iron: in the decade from 1788 the output of pig iron in Britain doubled, and by 1806 it had doubled again.

      But ‘textiles were the power which towed the glider of industrialisation into the air.’⁹¹ The wool trade had long been important, as so many stunning English churches built or improved with wool money, and now all too often dwarfing their tiny congregations, show. Cotton was more amenable to machine production, and the growth of slavery in the American south made raw material abundant. From the 1750s a spate of new inventions, like John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, and Samuel Crompton’s mule, improved both the spinning of individual threads of cotton and then its weaving into finished cloth. The first inventions made individual handloom weavers more productive, and increased their income at a time of growing demand. But subsequent developments first began to bring individual processes together in small factories, and then, after Edmund Cartwright patented the power loom in 1785, saw the conversion of the whole cotton industry to the factory system. The process was gradual: there were only 2,400 power looms in use by 1814, 45,500 by 1829, and 85,000 in 1833. Similar developments, which often used the same machinery, also revolutionised the woollen industry.

      The social impact of this change was enormous. Eighteenth-century Britain grew into a more polarised society. Improvements in literacy and communications made comparisons between rich and poor both frequent and striking: ‘The extravagant life-style of a ruling elite which seemed to live in a blaze of conspicuous consumption, and also the more modest but cumulatively more influential rise in middle-class standards of living, made the inequalities of a highly commercial, cash-based economy glaringly plain.’⁹² The politics of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had focused on the relationship between monarch and parliament, and latterly on the issue (much more than simply dynastic, for it involved political and religious questions) of the Hanoverian succession and Jacobite claims to the throne.

      The dominant political issue of our period, however, was the nature of parliamentary representation. Until the first great Reform Act of 1832 the starkest polarity lay in the mismatch between a House of Commons which reflected the structure of medieval England and the fast-changing nation it ruled. The franchise was limited to men with the appropriate property qualification: only one man in seven had the vote in England, but a mere one in 44 in Scotland. Some constituencies, ‘pocket boroughs’, were in the pocket of the local magnate and dutifully returned him or his nominee; others, ‘rotten boroughs’ had a tiny number of electors whose bribery or coercion was facilitated by the fact that they voted in public. There was no relationship between parliamentary representation and population. In 1801 the 700,000 inhabitants of Yorkshire returned two county and 26 borough MPs, while Cornwall, with 188,000 people, had two county and 42 borough MPs. The tiny Cornish boroughs of Grampound and Tregony returned two members apiece, while Birmingham, Manchester and Bradford were unrepresented. The Norfolk constituency of Dunwich had gradually receded into the North Sea, but its fishy inhabitants were duly represented by two members. Few doubted that some sort of reform was essential: the difficulty was how it could be kept within constitutional bounds.

      The pressures generated by agricultural and agrarian change found political expression as radicals, within parliament and outside it, demanded reform. The same pressures helped encourage the masses – designated ‘the crowd’ by sympathetic witnesses and ‘the mob’ by the more conservative – to riot with frequency and abandon.⁹³ Often their outbursts had a direct economic cause. The silk-weavers of Spitalfields rioted in 1719–20 in protest against the import of cheap and cool foreign calico, and in 1774 English haymakers fought pitched battles with immigrant Irish harvest workers.

      Innovation provoked physical opposition by those who felt threatened by it. In 1736 a collier was hanged for turnpike-cutting, the 1760s saw several serious clashes between weavers and soldiers, and in 1836 an upsurge of loom-breaking in East Lancashire, as the installation of power-looms gained full momentum, required the commitment of troops and culminated in a pitched battle at Chatterton. Other rioters had political motivates, though they often found themselves seconded by the disadvantaged and by simple opportunists. When John Wilkes, a well-to do journalist, MP and militia colonel, attacked the government over its use of general warrants, which permitted arbitrary arrest, and then demanded that the debates of the House of Commons should be published, he was supported not only by many of ‘the middle and inferior’ sort of men, but also by rural gentry and urban bourgeoisie. The authorities recognised that such rioters could not be treated as if they were disaffected coal-heavers or weavers. Juries, by definition middle-class, were not only inclined to acquit them, but, worse still from the government’s point of view, to convict magistrates who ordered the military to fire and the troops who actually did so.

      The Gordon riots of 1780 were far more serious than the Wilkesite disturbances twenty years before. Lord George Gordon gained widespread support, much of it from the ‘middling sort’ of men, in his demand for the cancellation of the 1778 Toleration Act which had removed some legal constraints imposed on Roman Catholics. After the Commons rejected his petition, the crowd of supporters in Parliament Square was swollen by weavers and others. When a battalion of footguards opened a path to Parliament to allow its harassed denizens to escape, the mob embarked upon an orgy of violence, first burning the Catholic chapels belonging to foreign embassies, the only ones legally allowed to exist. The rioters then turned their attention to the law’s visible manifestations, destroying the houses of prominent politicians and magistrates, sacking Newgate jail, releasing all its prisoners, and looting and then burning a large Catholic-owned gin distillery. The government eventually cracked down hard, bringing over 11,000 regular troops into the capital. More than 300 rioters were killed, mainly by gunshot wounds, although some perished from drinking neat alcohol, or when buildings collapsed on them. Twenty-five were hanged on specially constructed gallows near the scenes of their crimes: seventeen of them were eighteen and three under fifteen. ‘I never saw