First cost of a piece of calico, 28 yards long
From this we see that the employers were left with a similar profit, and that the difference in the cost of buying twist and weft (the lower cost to foreign buyers being due to their shrewd dealing, according to Radcliffe) was a few pennies. The major difference is in the cost of labour: 4s. Now, if the weaver of Elberfeldt was paying all his living costs, including rent, out of 2s., and given that there was no significant difference in the wages of the Blackburn and Elberfeldt workers, it appears that the English weavers were paying (or having paid for them out of the poor rates) over 4s. in rent! The difference in costs between the two weaving centres is almost wholly attributable to rent. Radcliffe’s data is consistent with the general economic facts of the period.
This was a time of great prosperity for the owner of land, who was favoured by the increased locational concentration of industries. The rise in rents began in the 1790s, and reached its zenith in the late years of the second decade, between 1813 and 1820.24 Speculation was rife. Thorold Rogers condemned the land monopoly which enabled owners to exploit the power
which the law confers on corporations and private proprietors to withhold land from the market at a minimum cost. It will be clear that if the law encourages an artificial scarcity, it creates an unnatural dearness. By permitting corporations to hold land in towns, it gives such persons a power of exacting the highest terms possible for the use of their property, by keeping it out of the market till they can enforce their price. To use an American phrase, taken from the slang of speculators, the Russells and the Bentincks, the Cecils, the Portmans, the Grosvenors, and the rest, with the corporations, have had for a long period a ring or corner in the land market, and can force buyers to give famine prices.25
There can be no doubt that rent rises were making themselves felt. Radcliffe observed that ‘the change from the old system of hand-labour to the new one of machinery operated in raising the price of land ...’26 There was, admittedly, a financial burden on the landowners: poor rates were rising. This, however, was something which they could well afford to accept. ‘The rise of the poor rate was certainly vexatious,’ wrote Halévy, ‘but was compensated by the rise of land values. A farm of 100 acres counted for very little, but when this insignificant piece of land became the site of an entire suburb of some large town, the owner found his property better worth having.’27
The mill owners had to buy or rent more land before they could undertake investment in new technology and reorganise their plants to combine the process of spinning, weaving and finishing the cloth. If rents were at a realistic market level (i.e., the surplus above the returns to labour and capital), this would have been a paying proposition. But rents were penal. A capitalist who undertook the expansion of his factory, and installed the power looms, would have had to have accepted an uncompetitive rate of return on his capital. So it was necessary to retain the use of an obsolete process of production by letting the hand weavers in their damp cellars carry the burden of the rents! Not until 1818 to 1820 did the pressure of speculative rents ease off: and that was when the entrepreneurs undertook their capital investment and modernisation programmes.
The macro-economic influences of the land monopolist were hidden from the public consciousness. This does not mean that the victims could not see the visible effects of land speculation. ‘It is well known that vile and loathsome buildings, probably the property of some opulent landowner, yield from the misery of their inmates a far larger rent than the plots on which the most luxurious and convenient mansions are built.’28 But the way that the exploiters distorted the allocation of resources and the pattern of consumption and production, and the whole range of matters — social and environmental — which constitute the human condition, were well concealed from the political and economic decision-makers of the time.
This is not to admit that the processes could not have been correctly analysed. Radcliffe provided a remarkably detailed account of the causal connection between the development of land values, technological advances and the growth of output.29 When the machine was introduced into the process of spinning yarn there was an immediate demand for new space. Old loom-shops were inadequate, so that ‘every lumber-room, even old barns, cart-houses, and outbuildings of any description were repaired, windows broke through the old blank walls, and all fitted up for loom-shops. This source of making room being at length exhausted, new weavers’ cottages with loom-shops rose up in every direction; all immediately filled’. And along with the increase in wages, rents doubled and trebled. As Radcliffe put it, ‘the plough was wholly indebted to the shuttle’, although — he claimed — many landlords did not seem to appreciate this fact. Radcliffe was anxious about the fact that the landlords were insufficiently concerned about the commercial welfare of the cotton industry.30 He warned the landlords that ‘the landed and agricultural purses were filled even to the brim by every article produced from the soil, or the farm yard being raised in price in proportion to the advanced labour and profit above-mentioned. This source held out even when the income from manufacturers and commerce had gone to the continent with the raw material, cotton yarns; hut unless this new system checks its decline, it cannot hold out much longer!'31
The weavers were obliged to spend long hours in a damp atmosphere in confined workrooms, often cellars near streams; the dampness was necessary to keep the thread supple. The power loom afforded the prospect of dry, healthy working conditions in new factories, as Radcliffe persisted in pointing out. But the machine could not come to their aid: it, too, was a victim of land monopoly.
The cotton weavers were trapped in a captive labour market. Ideally, they should have been free to decline to work in the industrial sector, which they would have done had their land not been confiscated from them and their forefathers. The entrepreneurs should have had to have attracted them off the land. Wages and working conditions would have had to have been at least as good as what the self-employed farmer/artisan could provide for himself.
But the freedom to decide one’s future was effectively denied to the workers and those who saved or borrowed to go into business on their own account. Labour and capital were united as victims of the land monopolists, and there was greater sympathy between them than is generally admitted. During the agitations of the time, the weavers who combined to press for higher wages did not propose that these should come out of existing profits: they recommended that prices should be raised. And there were sympathetic employers (Radcliffe was not alone) who did want to raise wages. The landlords in Parliament looked upon these proposals with horror. A general rise in wages would have come out of the ‘surplus’ of the nation’s product, which would have entailed a reduction in rental income.
Fortunately for the land monopolists, they had a reliable spokesman in the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, the owner of considerable estates. Sidmouth used spies to watch over, and prosecute, the hungry workers. When it was discovered that magistrates could use existing laws to enforce a minimum living wage he acted promptly in the House of Lords: the laws were repealed.32 Consequently, with both man and machine shackled to a particularly severe phase of exploitation by the land monopolists, the owners of labour and capital found themselves competing with each other instead of cooperating to their mutual advantage.
The
