ABSTRACT
Britain's economic expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was achieved by the sum total of the self-interested decisions of the thousands of farmers, manufacturers and merchants who controlled the resources of the nation—the land and its mineral wealth, the labour force, its skills and energy. Their decisions allocated resources to new points of growth within the economy and the consequences of their decisions were not only economic but social. New occupations were created and new skills required; even more rapidly old skills were eliminated and old crafts destroyed. A new labour force was created to serve the needs of new industries employing new techniques of production and enforcing a new discipline in which the hours of labour followed the rhythm of steam rather than the rhythms of Nature. For hundreds of thousands of men, women and children these changes brought new opportunities and new aspirations, balanced by new modes of exploitation and new depths of misery. It is important to remember that the factory worker was still untypical in 1851, that agriculture still employed more labour than any other single occupation and that twice as many people were employed in domestic service as in cotton manufacture, a ratio which was to increase in the second half of the century. It is important also to realise that many occupations were not transformed by machinery, particularly building, and that the small, labour-intensive unit of production, where a dozen men and boys made boots or furniture, remained ‘typical’ until well into the second half of the nineteenth century.
