Taxation and representation in the Victorian city

Cities involve a huge transfer of costs and benefits, of external economies and diseconomies. They generate rents and monopoly profits for some, and pollution, exploitation and disease for others. The relationship between these gains and losses troubled those responsible for the government of cities in the pre-industrial past, and still trouble politicians in the post-industrial present. However, they created particular intellectual and conceptual problems in early Victorian Britain. At this point, Britain had emerged as the most urbanized nation in human history; it was also experiencing an unprecedented shift from organic to mineral fuels and raw materials. ¹ The result was to free the economy from the limits of a Malthusian world in which population pressed against the limit of resources, at the cost of a greater capacity to pollute. At the same time, economic policy was debated and contested with the shift from protectionism to free trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Rent-seeking power of the old monopolies of the East India Company or the protected producers of Caribbean sugar had been swept aside. The result might simply be to create a new group of monopolists with power to exploit the consumer railway, gas or water companies. Could the benefits of free trade and liberty from the exploitative power of monopolists be subverted? ²