ABSTRACT
Britain witnessed huge changes between 1700 and 1850, not least because imperial expansion, military success, and the development of trade made the nation into the leading world power. In addition, as urbanization, industrialization, and the commercialization of agriculture served to transform the landscape of much of Britain, population growth, changes in social structure and political and religious developments greatly affected its people. The aim of this volume is to describe women’s experiences in the context of the major social, economic, and cultural shifts that accompanied such transformations. It is not, however, our intention to present a picture of permanent revolution: much changed over the 150 years charted here, but many important continuities are also evident. Moreover, while this is a book specifically about women in the past, it does not pretend that we can speak of a shared female historical experience. Instead, it is assumed that factors such as social status, location, age, race, and religion could significantly affect women’s lives – sometimes to the extent that gender can appear less important than other factors in determining the experiences of individual women. Finally, while this volume is about British women’s history, it concentrates on the history of women in England, Scotland, and Wales. Some contributors do touch upon the experience of women in Ireland, but Irish women’s history for this period is a topic in its own right and cannot be adequately addressed here.
Between 1700 and 1850, Britain was transformed from a largely rural society to an increasingly urban one. Nearly half the population of England
and Wales lived in towns by 1851. Scotland reached this level of urbanization by the later nineteenth century. In the countryside, increasing amounts of land were cultivated. Enclosure and the commercialization of farming drove some agricultural workers off the land, but they also ensured the development of a strong agricultural sector, which was vital to support the growing towns. Of the urban centres, London was unique in terms of its size from the beginning of our period. By 1801, at the time of the first census, its population was around 1 million, or 8 per cent of the population. Other provincial centres were significantly smaller: none numbered more than 100,000 inhabitants at the turn of the nineteenth century, but the growth of manufacturing, towns such as Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds, was striking. Although Scotland and Wales remained less urbanized throughout our period, Edinburgh and Glasgow had sizeable populations of over 50,000 in 1801. Wales had no large towns, but, notably, its biggest urban conurbation in 1801 was Merthyr Tydfil, an entirely new town, devoted to the rapidly expanding iron industry.1 The towns of, particularly, early nineteenth-century Britain are commonly associated with peculiarly harsh living conditions for the poorer sections of society. The second half of our period probably saw greater deprivation for urban labourers, but a decline in the standard of living was also evident among rural workers, who – like their urban counterparts – were also subject to periodic unemployment, food shortages, and price rises.2
