The Vital Century?

The hundred years separating the Hanoverian succession from Waterloo witnessed changes which in the economic sphere at least were more profound and significant than those which can be located in any earlier period of similar length. These may have been dwarfed by the huge changes associated with the triumphant industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, but many were anticipated or even set in train during the ‘vital century’. Scholars will not cease arguing as to whether these changes amounted to a ‘transformation’ or marked the ‘transition to the modern world’, but their cumulative and ultimately determining impact is hard to deny. By 1815, having doubled its population, England had the demographic base for industrialisation, which it had not had in 1714. Even if revised estimates of its ability to outpace that population surge with growing output suggest a more faltering performance at the end of the eighteenth century, it cannot be denied that the onset of rapid demographic increase after about 1750 did not, in the event, turn out to be yet another optimistic start destined to crash into a Malthusian trap. Estimates of agricultural output confirm that by the end of the century England could not feed herself to the level and standard the population expected, but she nearly could. That in itself was an achievement when mouths had doubled while the proportion of the occupied population engaged in agriculture had fallen to a third. Such an occupational structure was hardly the European norm; in France a third of the population still farmed in 1914. The significance of the fact that Britain was already dependent on exchanging manufactured products for food imports by 1815 and yet had exported grain up to the mid eighteenth century is surely an historical turning point to note.