The History and Nature of Capitalism

By Bill Geddes

Revised: 27^th January 2012

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[Minor revisions/additions occur regularly as new relevant studies appear and are integrated into the text - often as footnotes. All versions are regularly updated to reflect these changes.]

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Chapter Headings

• Introduction
• Ideology, The World Economic System and Revitalization Movements
• An Explanation and History of the Emergence of Capitalism
• How Born Again Christians Rescued Capitalism
• The Virtuous Capitalist, The Poor and the Wasteland
• Capitalism and Work: the White Man's Burden
• Capitalism and its Colonies
• Global economic forces, Western realities
• Global Capitalism, Third World Development
• Epilogue – What Drives Western People to Commoditize their World?
• Addendum: We're All Equal! Independence and Exchange
• How to Cite a Reference
• End Notes
• References
• Chapter Content Indexes

Chapter 1:
Introduction  

It is said that the aphorism 'Know Yourself' was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Finding out who we are can be an unsettling experience.

Not only do human beings gild memories of experiences in their own lifetimes, they are extremely adept at reinventing those of their historical past. It can be an educative experience to strip away what the French philosopher Voltaire called the 'fable upon which we are all agreed'.

It's time we, living in capitalist countries, got ourselves into perspective.

Over the past three centuries, people living in Western (capitalist) countries have increasingly imposed their understanding of reality on others. Now, they are becoming aware of a growing antipathy toward 'The West' around the world. Henry Hyde's view of the problems facing Western countries is not isolated,

Let us begin by accepting there is no single enemy to be defeated, no one network to be eliminated. Al-Qa'eda is but our most prominent opponent, but its outlook is shared by many others who are equally committed to our destruction… we know now that we have permanent, mortal enemies who will seize upon our vulnerabilities to bloody us, to murder our citizens, to commit horror for the purpose of forcing horror upon us…
(US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations October 3 2001)

For the past decade the West has confronted what it perceives as a growing 'climate of terror' around the world. While estimates vary, it is reasonable to say that thousands of lives have been lost and billions of dollars have been spent in pursuing, capturing and killing those deemed a threat to the security of Western nations.

It is time to take stock. Before continuing to pursue phantoms and shoot at shadows (and, in the process, alienate thousands caught in the crossfire) we need to understand what is producing this apparently burgeoning antipathy toward Western capitalist countries.

Western capitalist nations, over the past several centuries, have attempted to re-organize the world to reflect their understanding of reality. Although we often fail to recognize it, this requires a far-reaching reorganization of people's lives in non-Western countries. It would be surprising if there was not, sooner or later, a reaction against such activity.

So, what is capitalism? What gives people living by capitalist understandings of the world such a determination to reorganize the rest of the world to their understanding? And, what impact does this attempt to reorganize the world have on people living in non-Western regions?

People living by capitalist understandings of the world have, over the past four centuries, felt driven to compel those who do not think and live as they do, to change. They have committed their lives to a refashioned world, to a capitalist world. So, what is it that has produced in Western people such a deep need to dominate and change the world?

Human beings (including members of Western capitalist nations) believe that they interact with 'objective reality', that is, a reality that exists independently of themselves and is perceived in the same way by all human beings. In every community, models are built from that assumed objective reality which, in the opinion of those who order their lives by them, provide the best ways of organizing life to make the most of the reality in which they live.

Western people hold a peculiar understanding of objective reality and believe they have a duty, a responsibility, to reorganize other people and communities to live by the understandings they hold. When people in other communities are subjected to Western capitalist demands for change, based on very different presumptions about 'objective reality', their understanding of their environment and of themselves in terms of their environment decreasingly 'makes sense'. They lose their sense of identity and self-worth as their indigenous status and prestige systems break down and brutality, despotism and corruption escalate in their communities.

Over time, people begin to realize that the problems they face and the disorientation they experience are connected to Western activity within their regions. Inevitably anti-Western sentiment grows.

We need to understand the nature of this very Western understanding of objective reality. To do so, we need to trace its emergence over the past thousand years of western European history.

Unless we do, not knowing our history, we might well, as Edmund Burke suggested, unwittingly repeat it.

This is the age of Capitalism.

In the following chapters I attempt dispassionately to explore the nature and history of capitalism ¹ . I leave it to you to decide whether it heralds a future of blessings or cursings.

The book starts with an examination of the nature of ideology and, more specifically, capitalist ideology. It is essential to start by examining the nature of ideological frameworks in human thought, interaction and action. This will enable us to get capitalism into contextual perspective.

With questions of the nature of primary and secondary ideology dealt with in Chapter 2, in chapter 3 we launch into an explanation and history of the emergence of capitalism in western Europe. We pose and attempt to answer the question:

• How have the most basic presumptions which underpin Western understandings of life been shaped by history, becoming seen as features of the real world, the unfocused backdrop to secondary ideological disputes?

This exploration takes us from the 10^th century to the start of the 18^th century; the century when, in western European thought, 'the economy' became clearly differentiated from 'the social', a distinct environment with its own laws and interests.

In chapter 4 we explore the century in Western European history when the turmoil of previous centuries had distilled into a new version of 'objective reality' for those who held the reins of power.

Most importantly, it was the century when capitalism gained its evangelical fervor as millions of people, threatened with economic and social ruin, became 'born-again' Christians, the 'moral majority' of Western communities.

This was the century in which they would take responsibility for transforming the rest of the world to live by the reality they now lived in – starting with their own, home grown 'savages'. It was also the century in which the justification for natural laws shifted from divine decree to the innate characteristics of environments in a self-existent natural world.

In chapter 5 we investigate how capitalism became 'virtuous'. The 18^th was the century when the merchant, trader and banker moved to center stage, the period when the newly respectable, and often 'born-again', capitalist became morally and socially respectable. As Adam Ferguson, a Scottish gentleman, explained,

… in the progress and advanced state of his art, his views are enlarged, his maxims are established: he becomes punctual, liberal, faithful, and enterprising; and in the period of general corruption, he alone has every virtue, except the force to defend his acquisitions. He needs no aid from the state, but its protection; and is often in himself its most intelligent and respectable member.
Adam Ferguson (1767 Pt 3, Section 4)

It was also the century in which, as Thomas Jefferson claimed, Western Europe,

…divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. …man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
(Thomas Jefferson, 1787)

With the distillation of a new objective reality for Western Europeans – now recognized as 'capitalism', in Chapter 6 we examine the ways in which Western European responsible people set out to ensure that the indolent, the 'lazy poor', pulled their weight and learned to work. As Western Europeans gained control of the rest of the world, it would also be time to teach 'natives' the same lesson.

In the 19^th century, it was time for Western Europe, in search of resources to feed its rapidly expanding industries and needs and wants, to invade the rest of the world. By 1914 it controlled more than 80% of the earth's surface.

This was the time of European empire. The time when Western European nation-states would attempt to become global in extent. In Chapter 7 we examine the establishment of 'nation states'. Western Europe's colonies were assumed to be the 'overseas' extension of its nation states. Their acquisition and reorganization enabled Western people to continue and increase their accumulation of material wealth and expand consumption.

Finally, we arrive at the 20^th century, the century of electricity, of streamlined industrial production, of capitalist control of the world. In Chapter 8 we examine the experiences of Western communities and nations as they moved from:

• free markets, patchy welfare capitalism and piecemeal welfare legislation;
• to protectionism, regulation, and welfare states and then back
• to neoliberal free markets, scaling back of state welfare provision, and globalization of economic activity.

Following this exploration of Western economic realities in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, Chapter 9 turns the focus back to non-Western nations and communities and examines their experiences over the past seventy years. In the era of global capitalism, why are there so many 'failing states'?

The final chapter examines the nature of commoditization. It suggests that capitalism is the process of commoditizing reality. The world becomes a global marketplace where commoditized objects take pride of place. Everything can be bought and sold, and the driving force behind this buying and selling is the commoditized value of the objects, rather than their inherent use values.

Chapter 2:
Ideology, the World Economic System,
and Revitalization Movements  

• Introduction
• Human Beings organize Life using Historically Constructed Models
• Categorizational Models are Unique to Each Community
• Models Have Unique Combinations and Qualities of Relationships
• Primary ideology
• Secondary ideology
• World economic system
• Imposition of Western secondary models: The breakdown and revitalization of communities
• Revitalization movements and fundamentalism
• Revitalization and dissident groups
• Non-Western revitalization movements
• Western revitalization movements
• Conclusion

Introduction  

Those who live in capitalist communities have, over the past century, introduced their ways of organizing and interacting with the environment to people throughout the world. In doing so, they have set about re-organizing other communities to conform to the requirements of life in a capitalist world.

Vast amounts of 'aid money' ² have been spent in other communities assisting them to develop capitalist institutions and practices. Development experts, trained in Western ³ universities, have dedicated their lives to improving the lot of 'under-developed' and 'less-developed' communities ⁴ . Yet, the consequences of all the dedication, effort and resources committed to 'Third World development' seem to have produced very mixed results around the world.

To understand the process of 'development' and its consequences in non-Western communities, we need to understand the ways in which people organize themselves and their surroundings.

Human Beings organize Life using Historically Constructed Models  

Human beings are natural model builders. Before they can begin to interact with their world it must be imbued with meaning and that requires a set of criteria for categorizing and classifying experiences ⁵ , and for connecting the classified experiences with each other.

If every individual had, from birth, to invent his or her own categorizational criteria, human beings would forever be trapped at the dawning of sentience. Meaningful communication between people would be severely limited. So it should be no surprise that newborn babies are not left to develop their own criteria for categorizing experiences.

Just as human beings teach their young to speak their native language, so they teach them, from birth, the indigenous criteria for categorizing their experiences and interconnecting those categorized experiences.

The criteria used in building a community's categorizational models are historically determined. So, to the extent that the community is isolated from other communities, its categorizational models will be unique to the community (just as a community's language is unique).

This is one of the reasons why anthropologists recognize that they should handle apparent similarities between communities with extreme caution. One should never assume that 'models of kinship' or any other forms of social organization and structure can be applied across communities.

Categorizational Models are Unique to Each Community  

Consider, for example, the kinship categorization (or 'definition') of the 'elder brother' and 'younger brother' in Confucian Chinese families. The categorizational criteria that produce these related categories of persons are quite different from those that determine the definitions of older and younger brothers in, say, Anglo-Celtic Australia.

Few people in Anglo-Celtic Australia recognize the kinship elements 'elder brother' and 'younger brother' as categorically distinctive, carrying their own prescribed characteristics and sharing formalized rights and responsibilities (or reciprocal duties) that are distinctive to those two categories of persons.

Both sets of communities recognize the existence of older and younger brothers. After all, brothers, as male siblings of the same parents, exist in all communities. However, the characteristics they recognize and the relationships they presume between them are very different. Kalman Applbaum (1998) sums up the Western understanding of 'horizontal' ⁶ relationships:

… [Western] individuals may be seen in relation to other individuals as free actors, free choice makers, whose unfailing goal of satisfying primordial needs and achieving the construction of self-identity are not compromised by such interferences as filial duty or custom.
(Applbaum 1998)

The chief characteristics of such persons are that they are autonomous and independent. They recognize rights and responsibilities as incentives and constraints channeling the pursuit of their independent 'needs and wants'.

The focus is on individuals attaining 'needs and wants' and the regulatory structures defining legitimate attainment of them (i.e. in economic terms – or is it Star Trek terminology? – the 'rules of acquisition'). The focus is only secondarily on other persons (whatever their kinship relationships might be) with whom one might or might not interact in achieving one's needs and wants.

The consequences of accepting the centrality of filial and other forms of reciprocal duty, as in Confucian China, may however, (as Confucius 500 BC ⁷ suggested) require that individuals are not seen as free actors pursuing individual needs and wants. Rather, they should be seen as interdependent members of a community who can only understand themselves and ensure their needs and wants through understanding and accepting their kinship and other communal responsibilities.

Confucius summed up the major formal focuses of reciprocal responsibility (which provide templates for other focuses of reciprocal responsibility) in traditional China like this:

The duties of universal obligation are five and the virtues wherewith they are practiced are three. The duties are those

• between sovereign and minister,
• between father and son,
• between husband and wife,
• between elder brother and younger,
• and those belonging to the intercourse of friends.

Those five are the duties of universal obligation.

Knowledge, magnanimity, and energy, these three, are the virtues universally binding. And the means by which they carry the duties into practice is singleness.

Some are born with the knowledge of those duties; some know them by study; and some acquire the knowledge after a painful feeling of their ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some practice them with a natural ease; some from a desire for their advantages; and some by strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same thing.
(Confucius 1893)

If a Western person is not aware of the very different relational presumptions built into Confucian ideas of reciprocal duty, he or she is likely to presume that the independent pursuit of needs and wants is central to involvement in such relationships.

Robert Westwood does this when he sums up the Confucian position from a Western perspective. He assumes that all individuals are 'free actors' who 'lose freedom' when they are required to accept super-ordinate or subordinate hierarchical status. It is this that allows him to speak about relative 'power' in hierarchical, interdependent relationships:

Challenges to authority and the 'natural' order are not countenanced. This is encapsulated in the Confucian precepts of the so-called 'Five Cardinal Relationships' or wu lun, which delineate a hierarchical power structure over key societal relationships. The wu lun are dyadic sets of unequal, mostly hierarchical relationships between emperor – minister, father – son, husband – wife, older brother – younger brother, friend – friend.

Although the power structure is differentiated and unequal (except for the latter), mutual obligations and reciprocities are inherent in the relationships. The person in the dominant position expects and receives obedience, deference and compliance, but in return should respect the dignity of the lower party and provide appropriate care and concern.
(Westwood 1997, p. 459)

Tsui, Farh and Lih, however, sum up the differences in the following way:

… Chinese often view themselves interdependent with the surrounding social context, and it is the 'self in relation to other' that becomes the focal individual experience. This view of an interdependent self is in sharp contrast to the Western view of an independent self.

The latter sees each human being as an independent, self-contained, autonomous entity who (a) comprises a unique configuration of internal attributes (e.g. traits, abilities, motives, and values) and (b) behaves primarily as a consequence of these internal attributes (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).

This divergent view of self has implications for a variety of basic psychological processes (e.g. cognition, emotion and motivation) and may be one of the most fundamental differences between the East and the West in social relations.
(Tsui et al. 1997, p. 59)

Models have Unique Combinations and Qualities of Relationships  

The categorizational models held in different communities not only have distinctive sets of categories and idiosyncratic placement of elements within categories, they also have unique combinations and qualities of relationships through which categories and their elements are interconnected.

It is very easy for a researcher or commentator to apply his or her own understandings of the nature of relationships to those observed in other communities. Westwood (1997) does this when he assumes that hierarchical relationships must involve dominance and subservience, relative power and powerlessness.

These are features of relationships between individuals who define themselves as 'free actors'. They see relationships of dependence in terms of costs and benefits and degrees of loss of independence⁸ .

The independent self is quintessentially Western. The interdependent self, in one guise or another, is found in communities where individuals know who they are through the forms of relationship they recognize between themselves and other members of the community. They perceive rights and responsibilities as qualities of the interactants rather than inhering in the 'objects' of interaction (as rules of acquisition).

In such communities the rights and obligations of individuals in exchange relationships remain with the interactants rather than being attached to the objects of exchange. So, the other party in an exchange is the focus, rather than the needs and wants of the interactants.

In one case, the process of exchange (or interaction) tends to emphasize the separate identities (and, therefore, motivations) of the exchangers (leading to a stress on independence). In the other, it tends to emphasize their relatedness and reciprocal responsibilities (stressing interdependence). The qualities of the relationships invoked in exchange in the two orientations are very different.

Such interactional orientations tend not only to 'flavor' recognized relationships between people but permeate relationships connecting both elements within categories and categories themselves throughout the primary ideological frames (see 'Primary ideology' – below) of the communities. Not only are perceived relationships specific to communities, so too are the perceived qualities that inhere in relationships.

By definition, two individuals living in different communities will, therefore, have quite distinctive 'understandings' from each other. How similar their understandings are will largely depend on the nature of the historical connections that have existed between their communities and the degree to which the hegemonies ⁹ of their communities have interacted over time ¹⁰ .

Throughout their lives, people in communities are constantly corrected and disciplined whenever their interactions or their understandings do not conform to those considered accurate in their community. To quote Confucius, 'some acquire the knowledge after a painful feeling of their ignorance' through a process of 'teaching and learning'.

In order to understand the ways in which communities build their categorizational models and then from them construct models of community organization and individual interaction, we are going to address two related sets of structures. These determine how human beings, in any community, see 'reality' and then organize their communities in the 'best possible ways' to make the most of the reality they live in.

Primary ideology  

The first set of structures is the set of categorizational models that all members of a community (or set of related communities) hold in common. If they did not hold these models in common they would find it very difficult to make sense of each other's organization, interaction, behavior and communication. We are going to call these fundamental organizational models primary ideology.

Processes of categorization ¹¹ require frameworks of categories and rules (in language these would be called 'grammars') for both the placement of elements of experience in those categories and the interconnection of the categories and of the elements of experience contained in them. The interconnections are, of course, 'relationships'.

Not only are the categories and the framework of those categories unique to a community (or set of related communities), so are the sets of interactional relations and the 'qualities' that are invested in those relations.

The criteria that produce both the categorizational framework and its internal categories and relations are primary ideological presumptions. These are the most basic understandings people have of their worlds, in terms of which categorization proceeds. Any attempt to alter these understandings attacks the ability of people who hold them to think, and therefore to interact meaningfully with their environments.

Most people, when asked to explain their understanding of primary ideological presumptions, find it very difficult (just as they find it difficult to explain why they place words in a particular order in their sentences or why certain words should always, never or only in certain contexts appear together).

One of the features of the presumptions is that they are taken for granted. Those who hold them often find it difficult to identify their features and usually presume that they are so 'self-evident' that they need no explanation or justification.

This makes it very difficult to research primary presumptions since people, anywhere, will consider questions related to the definition of the assumptions to be inane. One should not question the obvious, particularly when the people being questioned find it difficult to express their understandings or even focus on the issues being raised.

It needs to be remembered, however, that primary ideological presumptions are not universally held understandings of the world. They are the understandings that are required by the most basic categorizational models of the community. So, not only should they not be questioned, they cannot easily be altered. Changes in such assumptions occur over hundreds of years and produce strains and tensions in communities experiencing the changes ¹² .

People in any community inherit the primary ideology of their community in the same way that they inherit the language of their community. It is taught to them from birth or as Confucius put it 'some are born with the knowledge…'.

Every time a child makes inappropriate connections between objects, people or experiences, those around the child, who feel responsible for its upbringing, correct the child. They are ensuring that its 'understanding' (i.e. its sets of categories, categorization within those sets and their inter-relationships) of the world approximates the understanding of the world held by the responsible people in the community (members of the hegemony).

All communities develop a range of acculturative processes and structures squarely aimed at ensuring that the primary ideology of the community is learned. People, throughout their lives, live by and conform to the presumptions of the fundamental categorizational models of their community. Even trivial deviations will be subjected to correction, in much the same way as people are corrected when their speech patterns deviate from accepted practice in their community.

Where the models are not held consistently or life is not organized in ways required by the primary ideology of the community, those involved are usually defined as socially or mentally defective in some way. They are, to one extent or another, in need of re-education or 'correction'.

Those who do not readily respond to correction are often considered dangerous – very often isolated from the rest of the community, or even killed (especially when community cognitive models are under attack and people feel a need to reassert the fundamental certainties of life, as in the revitalization movements we will consider shortly).

For some three to four hundred years Western Europeans became increasingly aware and fearful of the effects of madness as the fundamental presumptions of their primary ideologies were challenged and altered. As Laura Nader put it:

Foucault (1967) demonstrates how changes in the concept of madness led to changes in diagnosis and treatment of the insane and of social attitudes toward them. He describes how changing perceptions of madness in parts of Western Europe from the medieval times to the end of the 19^th century led to the separation of 'mad' persons from the rest of society, their classification as deviants, and finally their subjection to social control. He focuses on the cultural controls that led to the social controls; ideas about madness led to asylums for the mad.
(Nader 1997, p. 719)

In any community, members are certain that their primary ideology is not simply a set of categorizational models but is, in fact, the way the external world is ordered. After all, they have viewed and interacted with their world through that model since birth. Whenever something in the 'real' world seems not to fit their models (i.e. their understanding) they, usually subconsciously, change it so that it does. (This is what Westwood (1997) does in his description of relationships in Confucian Chinese communities.)

There is a continuous, but subliminal ideological management of reality. So, whenever people in a community investigate the 'real world' to see whether it fits their most basic understandings of life, they, inevitably, find that it does. As Nader says of the ways in which people understand 'the body' in different communities:

Images of the body appear natural within their specific cultural milieus.
(Nader 1997, p. 719)

The primary ideology of individuals and communities is fundamental to the way they think and understand themselves and their worlds. They instinctively apply their primary ideological presumptions in classifying new experiences and objects. Human beings, in applying their primary presumptions to new phenomena, inevitably reorganize 'reality' to fit their models rather than reorganizing their models to fit 'reality' (i.e. they act to conserve their understanding of their world and themselves) ¹³ .

Secondary ideology  

The second set of structures is derived from the common primary ideology of members of a community. These structures start from the presumption that the primary ideology is not a subjective set of categorizational models held by members of the community. It is the way the external world is organized, it is 'objective reality'.

The purpose of this second set of structures, which we will call secondary ideology, is to spell out the best possible ways of organizing community life, given the constraints of 'objective reality'.

There can be any number of secondary models in a community. What they all have in common is that they take the primary ideology and its presumptions, from which they are built, for granted. It is the unquestioned, organized, backdrop to life.

This second level of model building, as Claude Levi-Strauss explained, is not only designed to ensure that communities are organized and individuals interact in the 'best possible ways'. It is also designed to reinforce and perpetuate the fundamental features of their primary ideologies. According to Levi-Strauss:

[C]onscious models… are by definition very poor ones since they are not intended to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them. Therefore structural analysis is confronted with a strange paradox well known to the linguist, that is: the more obvious structural organization is, the more difficult it becomes to reach it because of the inaccurate models lying across the path which leads to it.
(Levi-Strauss 1963, p. 282)

Many of the 'explanatory' models of communities confirm Levi-Strauss' observation. They affirm and reinforce the central presumptions of the primary ideologies of the communities in which they are built ¹⁴ .

Community members 'instinctively' understand, and are cognitively committed to the basic presumptions upon which the secondary models in their community are built. They can readily weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of the secondary models available to them and so choose which of the models they will support and which they will oppose.

This, in Western communities, is known as 'political', 'social', 'economic' or 'religious' (or any mixture of these) deliberation, debate or activity. These are the models of which community members are conscious and about which they enter into dispute with and support one another.

It is taken for granted by those who espouse a model and organize life by it that their model is all about organizing the real world to maximize benefits to community members and protect the most important basic principles of life in their communities (the fundamental presumptions of their primary ideology). It is the other models, those they do not endorse, which are defined by them as 'ideology'. As Philip Williamson explains of the British conservative movement of the late 20^th century:

Conservative politicians, intellectuals and publicists confused matters by denying they had any such thing, whether ideology, creed or doctrine; their concern was the real and the practical, 'ideology' being an infection among their opponents which it was their task to resist.
(Williamson 2003, p. 270)

In Western communities, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is one dominant secondary ideology – capitalism, with a variety of derived models that offer variations on the major themes of capitalism ¹⁵ .

People in Western communities, convinced that their dominant secondary ideologies are not ideologies but are the best ways of organizing objective reality, have imposed and continue to impose them, often with considerable force, on the rest of the world. This set of imposed Western secondary ideological models underpins and constitutes the world economy, perpetuated and reinforced by the almost irresistible hegemonic forces of globalization.

This imposition of Western secondary ideological models on non-Western communities (which have very different primary ideologies) leads almost inevitably to their disruption. Since human beings require a primary ideology in order to think and interact with their worlds, the imposition of secondary models which do not fit their primary ideological understandings, leads to mental and social confusion.

However, both those imposing the new models and those on whom they are being imposed do not recognize the existence of primary ideological models. Both assume that the dominant and apparently 'successful' Western secondary models are the most efficient and 'practical' ways of organizing a shared objective reality.

So, it is assumed, the problem for the victims of this hegemonic imposition is one of lack of 'education' and/or lack of 'discipline'. They, therefore, sponsor and accept educational and restructuring programs (which are based on the primary ideological understandings of the hegemonic powers) to tackle the burgeoning chaos. This exacerbates the problems of social and mental confusion in the receiving communities.

Many communities around the world, suffering the consequences of enforced reorganization of their worlds to fit the requirements of capitalism, are in various stages of disintegration – victims of the globalizing forces of international capitalism. As Wallerstein (1991) claimed, the imposition of economic organization and activity on the rest of the world by Western nations is not new.

Since the 16^th century Western Europeans (and those First World countries that have their hegemonic roots in Western Europe) have become increasingly militarily dominant around the world. They have required the rest of the world to accept reorganization of their models and understandings. In doing so they have established and maintained a 'world economic system'.

World economic system  

To understand the ways in which people live and organize their lives in the early 21^st century we need to understand the nature of this world economic system. Unless we do, many of the most important influences on the lives of people in communities will be missed or misinterpreted.

Over the past fifty years there have been many attempts to explain the presence of this system. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) has said:

its peculiar feature is that it has shown itself strong enough to destroy all other [world-systems] contemporaneous to it.

In this article, Wallerstein provides a brief discussion of the nature of the 'world-system' as he understands it. His article is a response to an earlier article by Andre Gunder Frank, which was, itself, a critical response to a 1990 article by Wallerstein.

Wallerstein says that his 1990 article 'L'Occident, le capitalisme, et le systeme-monde moderne' was written as a rebuttal of the belief that the world-system is an 'economic miracle' of Western industrialism. He says, those who claim this:

believe two things simultaneously: (a) something distinctive occurred in (western) Europe which was radically new somewhere in early modern times; (b) this 'something' was a highly positive or 'progressive' happening in world history. My position is that (a) was true but that (b) was distinctly not true.
(Wallerstein 1991)

Capitalism is based on an individualized, status-driven, open-ended accumulation and consumption of goods and services, requiring open-ended production. The basis for social status and self-definition in Western communities is peculiar. Systems of status and self-definition in other communities are equally peculiar to them.

Imposition of Western secondary models: The breakdown and revitalization of communities  

Feudalism, while unique to medieval Europe, shares many of the characteristics of patron – client forms of communal organization and interaction around the world. It was a territory-based, patron – client system in which those higher in the hierarchy took responsibility for those below them. They 'parented' those who depended on them.

Feudal communities presumed an 'interdependent self' rather an 'independent self'. The political organization directly mirrored the social system, and councils of people of similar hierarchical position met to determine affairs of their dependents ¹⁶ .

On the other hand, capitalism is based on individual independence; the acquisition of an ever-expanding set of needs and wants and promotion of the individual rather than his or her responsibility for dependents. Its political frame, therefore, is democracy.

If one insisted on a feudally organized community accepting democracy as its political frame, this would directly undermine the 'parenting' responsibilities of hierarchically superior members of the community.

Democracy requires communities to be organized in terms of an 'independent self', not an 'interdependent self'. It is no more a universally applicable model of governance than is feudalism, and when communities are compelled to reorganize in 'democratic' ways, all their other understandings of life are automatically challenged.

If, in patron – client organized communities, those in superior hierarchical positions were freed from their parenting responsibilities, those who depend on them would find the world a very insecure and inhospitable place. Far from improving the lot of the poor, the imposition of democracy can disenfranchise them and strip them of those supports that have protected them in the past. Interdependent relationships are disrupted, redistributive processes dismantled, and poverty, anomie and violence escalate in their communities.

Thomas More (1516), in his book Utopia , described the consequences of such disenfranchising of the peasantry of England in the early 16^th century, during the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The hero of his book, Raphael, was the guest of the 'Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal, and Chancellor of England':

One day when I was dining with him there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places.

Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak freely before the cardinal, said there was no reason to wonder at the matter since… 'The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men, and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men the abbots, not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good.

They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes, for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners as well as tenants are turned out of their possessions, by tricks, or by main force, or being wearied out with ill-usage, they are forced to sell them.

By which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell almost for nothing their household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay for a buyer.

When that little money is at an end, for it will be soon spent, what is left for them to do, but either to steal and so to be hanged (God knows how justly), or to go about and beg? And if they do this, they are put in prison as idle vagabonds; while they would willingly work, but can find none that will hire them; for there is no more occasion for country labor, to which they have been bred, when there is no arable ground left.

One shepherd can look after a flock which will stock an extent of ground that would require many hands if it were to be ploughed and reaped. This likewise in many places raises the price of corn.'
(More 1516)

A major problem in Third World countries is now not simply the grinding poverty of the poor, but the continuing costs of the conspicuous consumption of the rich. The imposition of forms of democracy (based on presumed independence rather than interdependence) and economic organization required by the world economic system have reduced increasing numbers of people in Third World countries to penury, with diminishing political, economic and social protection.

The imposition of democracy has been responsible for dismantling traditional forms of land tenure and utilization. It has eroded and disrupted social organization and communal support mechanisms.

In patron – client systems of governance it has disrupted the parenting responsibilities of hierarchically superior members of the community. This, in turn, has allowed those in positions of responsibility to accumulate wealth with less and less acceptance of patron – client responsibilities for former dependents (i.e. for redistribution of goods and services). ¹⁷

There has been a considerable inflation of expectations and a very great increase in conspicuous consumption amongst some groupings in non-Western communities. This inflation of the material requirements of status positions is in many ways, though not all, similar to that which occurred in Western Europe from the late 15^th century with the denial of hierarchical feudal responsibilities by those who controlled resources ¹⁸ .

The effects of the 'trickle down' development policies of the 1960s and 1970s show how readily the requirements of status positions can be inflated. Particularly those which are primarily determined through non-economic criteria but reinforced by the acquisition and/or consumption of material goods and services.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the 'trickle down' policies of Third World Development projects and programs and the 'globalization' activities of the past 50 years has been that high-status people in many Third World communities have had the material requirements of their positions greatly inflated by the massive injection of capital into their countries.

Since they were not primarily geared to Western forms of open-ended production ¹⁹ , the injected capital was diverted into existing social template activity and those of high status found themselves able to buy Mercedes Benz cars, live in mansions, have overseas assets, and engage in many other forms of excessive conspicuous consumption. Over the past half century the ownership and consumption of these luxury goods has become institutionalized.

As the injection of outside funds dried up with the failure of 'trickle down' policies, those who require these possessions to underscore status have had to find other sources of funds to obtain them. This has resulted in a 'trickle up' effect. Those of low status, dependent on high-status people in a variety of ways, have, through lowered wages, decreased returns on produce, decreased welfare support, and increased pressure on land and other income generating possessions, borne the brunt of the inflated expectations of elites.

In many non-Western communities and countries, as a result of the 'development' activities of the past half century, the relationships between lower and higher ranks of hierarchically ordered systems of status and community organization have become severely distorted. By insisting on the 'democratization' of communities run by 'dictators', the lowest ranks of hierarchical systems have effectively been disenfranchised ²⁰ .

In almost all traditional patron – client systems wealth initially flows from the base (the peasantry in feudal Europe) upward through the hierarchy, creating concentrations of wealth in the higher reaches of the pyramid. Patrons, having accumulated wealth, take responsibility for the well-being of those below them, redistributing goods and services as needed and, in doing so, ensuring the continued and strengthened interdependence of patrons and clients in the hierarchy.

When such communities are 'emancipated' by Western development enthusiasts, the land and resources, having been vested in the upper reaches of the hierarchy, become their possessions and clients find themselves no longer entitled to the land and resources on which they have always relied. The lowest rankings of status hierarchies therefore find themselves facing very similar problems to those faced by the peasantry of Western Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism ²¹ .

Revitalization movements and fundamentalism  

The consequences of this impoverishing distortion of status requirements and erosion of communities have been profound. The primary ideological presumptions of many non-Western communities have been challenged and organizational features of their secondary models dismantled.

Increasing numbers of people see the growing problems of their communities and uncertainties of their individual lives as stemming from Western-based activities in their countries and involvement of national leaders in Western forms of organization, activity and consumption. Eqbal Ahmad, in 1996, gave vent to his opinion of Western involvement in Muslim regions:

Our first encounter with democracy was oppressive. Democracy came to us as oppressors, as colonizers, as violators. As violators, they spoke in the language of the Enlightenment and engaged in the activities of barbarians ….

Historically the United States has spoken of democracy and has supported Somozas, Trujillos, Mobutu Sese Seko, Suharto of Indonesia, the Shah of Iran, Zia ul Haq of Pakistan ….

Therefore, our first experience with democracy was one of outright oppression, and our second experience with democracy was one in which [the West] promoted fascism, global fascism in some cases ²² .

They perceive the breakdown of law and order and the escalating violence that surrounds them largely as a consequence of Western intrusion and influence in their countries and communities.

Inevitably, as the perceptions crystallize, resentment of and resistance to Western forms of organization and activity mount. This, in turn, is reflected in Western attitudes and Western peoples become increasingly aware of a world of:

mortal enemies who will seize upon our vulnerabilities to bloody us, to murder our citizens…
(Hyde 2001).

Having lived through the second half of the 20^th century in Western countries, with their increasingly hedonistic biases, I am impressed by the mounting fundamentalism of both Western and many non-Western communities. When life becomes increasingly difficult and apparently dangerous, then communities and individuals search for the reasons and for ways of reasserting order and security in their worlds.

People in the later medieval period in Western Europe became aware of, and increasingly vociferously denounced corruption and simony in their communities ²³ , leading to the 16^th century reformation wars. Similarly, very commonly, the problem in non-Western communities is seen as 'corruption': the loss of morality and/or commitment to the central principles of life in their communities.

The answer is seen to lie in determination to 'reform' their communities, to reaffirm and recommit themselves to the most important fundamental understandings of life, the central presumptions that underpin and give coherence to their primary ideologies, spelt out in one or more sets of secondary ideological models.

When those presumptions that are central to people's lives are perceived as being threatened, people everywhere reaffirm their commitment to the values which they know are necessary to ensure that life remains secure and ordered. They very readily become involved in activity aimed at reinforcing the forms of organization, interaction and understanding that are required by the fundamental presumptions of their primary ideologies.

They attempt to revitalize both communal and individual life. Inevitably, they do so through commitment to and enforcement of secondary ideological models derived from their primary ideological presumptions. These models are usually developed and promoted by a charismatic leadership, which demands and obtains from the bulk of the population unswerving loyalty to the principles of the espoused secondary ideology.

In writings on the late medieval world of Western Europe, the revitalization models and the movements associated with them have been referred to as 'The Reformation'. Their leaders were, almost without exception, identified with religious causes.

In the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, examples of such movements abound in both Western and non-Western communities and countries: from the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Taliban (identified as religiously motivated); to George Bush in the United States in its early 21^st century commitment to rooting out terrorism around the world and reaffirming and reasserting Western values wherever they appear to be under challenge.

Revitalization and dissident groups  

The fact that the revitalization leadership promotes a particular secondary ideological model means that, however committed the bulk of the population might be to that leadership and the requirements of the model it promotes and protects, there will always be opposition from community members holding alternative secondary ideological frames.

Outside forces can, and do, exploit those minority groups in attacking the legitimacy of the movement. This, in turn, can result in the oppositional groups being considered in league with immoral, corrupting external forces.

Khomeini (1979) provided an excellent illustration of this when he described the emergence of factions within Iran, promoted and supported, he claimed, by foreigners:

[U]nfortunately we see that some differences are created within the opposition, that is between the secular and the Islamic factions. I must point out that the origin of these parties which have appeared in Iran since the beginning of the constitutional revolution, as one understands it, is that they were, without themselves knowing it, founded by foreigners, and some of them have served the foreigners…

When the foreigners see that there are people who are useful (for the country), people who, it is hoped, will be able to reform the country, they use all their energies to set them against each other; consequently, these people quarrel with one another, each one's writings oppose the other's, and they reject one another's ideas.

Some of them have done such things knowingly and were the primary agents of the foreigners, while others were not aware of what was happening, were not aware that they were being dragged down a road which went against the interests of their own country.
(Khomeini 1979 – accessed 26^th July, 2010)

The 'Coalition of the Willing', comprising the United States, Great Britain and sundry camp followers, in its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq (2003 – 2010?), and in its fomenting of opposition to the fundamentalist leadership in Iran, has exploited such dissident groups.

However, to conclude that these dissenting groups are committed to Western secondary ideological principles, as many commentators in both the United States and other Western countries have, leads to unrealistic presumptions about the consequences of backing their overthrow of fundamentalist regimes ²⁴ .

They also build their secondary ideological models from the basic presumptions of the common primary ideological frame which informs the models of the revitalization movement they oppose. They might, in order to win and maintain support from outside forces, speak the language of those forces from which they want support. However, it is foolish and naïve to believe that the rhetoric employed for this purpose is indicative of the principles and models they are committed to promoting.

This failure to realize that the motivations of opposed factions within a country are derived from their particular understandings of themselves and the world is not recent in Western engagements with the rest of the world. It underlies most Western support of particular warring factions against others since the dissolution of Western empires following World War II.

A great deal of the Western literature on the Western invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrates this continued presumption by commentators. They assume the commitment of dissident groups within those countries to the fundamental capitalist principles of the countries they are courting for support.

Non-Western revitalization movements  

Among the many non-Western revitalization movements of the past fifty years one must include both the fundamentalist movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran from 1979 and the Taliban movement of Afghanistan in the 1990s. In one of his 1979 speeches Khomeini described those who supported the Shah and would try to reintroduce Western ideas to Iran:

Xenomaniacs, people infatuated with the West, empty people, people with no content! Come to your senses; do not try to Westernize everything you have!

Look at the West, and see who the people are in the West that present themselves as champions of human rights and what their aims are. Is it human rights they really care about, or the rights of the superpowers?

What they really want to secure are the rights of the superpowers.
(Khomeini 1979 – accessed 26^th July, 2010)

Revolutionary Iran became an enemy of nations and communities that have their hegemonic roots in Western European history.

The United States, with Western European and Soviet support, fomented a war between Iran and Iraq, and supplied both weaponry and military training to Iraqi forces. For ten years revolutionary Iran endured a prolonged and savage war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in which deaths, on both sides, numbered more than a million people.

It is the nature of revitalization movements that they often go to extremes. Those involved feel deeply threatened by 'corruption' within and by outside forces that promote immoral values and threaten their security and well-being.

They root out immorality among their own people and introduce often draconian measures to ensure compliance with the central presumptions of their moral code. They look for traitors – the enemy inside the walls – and attempt to weed them out. In the process there is, all too often, great human suffering.

So long as the threat of outside intervention continues to be perceived as real, hard-line fundamentalists gain a ready audience and strong support from the populations they lead.

Western leaders are as driven by their understandings of reality as are the leaders of non-Western revitalization movements. They are just as committed to protecting and reinforcing what they see as the most important fundamental principles of life. These Western understandings are often identified by non-Western revitalization leaders as forms of corruption against which they must fight.

All-too-often, Western leaders react to the resulting extremes and make the perceived threat a reality – as happened to Iran from 1980 to 1989 (and is now happening again) and as happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan in the first decade (and more) of the 21^st century.

When they do so they ensure that the fundamental extremism they oppose is prolonged and strengthened. As the perceived threat from outside forces diminishes and the revitalization leaders become increasingly secure in their leadership, fundamentalist movements tend toward moderation ²⁵ . Max Weber (1947) described this process as the routinization of charisma.

Western commentators all-too-often misread that moderation as Westernization and trumpet the downfall of 'extremist leaders'. The ultimate democratization of Iran is an almost universal theme in Western literature dealing with the liberalizing tendencies in Iranian society (i.e. the processes of routinization) ²⁶ .

Western revitalization movements  

The Western preoccupation with terrorism in the early 21^st century is a fundamentalist reassertion of basic Western values. So is the declared determination to stamp out terrorism and reimpose democratic principles of social and political life on those countries and communities that display or encourage anti-Western sentiments.

As with all such movements, the leadership demands loyalty not only from its followers but from all within the boundaries of its control. Alisa Solomon described the domestic climate of the 'war on terror' in the United States:

Like any avalanche, this one started at the top, and likely dates back to the moment after 9/11 when President Bush warned the world's nations, 'Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists'. From Bush on down, in the months that followed, government officials drew limits around acceptable speech.

White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer told Americans to 'watch what they say'. Such words gained force when the Patriot Act gave the government extensive new powers to spy, interrogate and detain. When civil libertarians began to protest the curbing of constitutional rights, Attorney General John Ashcroft offered a forbidding rejoinder:

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists.

These kinds of remarks from our government's top leaders, says Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, have granted ordinary people license 'to shut down alternative views'. The Administration has fashioned a domestic arm of its new doctrine of pre-emption.
(Solomon 2003 – accessed 27 July 2010)

An editorial in The Economist (2003) described the mindset of the neo-conservatives who wielded considerable clout in the second George Bush presidency,

They see the world in terms of good and evil. They think America should be willing to use military power to defeat the forces of chaos.

Martin Sieff, in a United Press International (2003) commentary on the aftermath of the Iraq invasion of 2003, explained the ambition of those who championed the 'war on terror',

[S]o confident were Office of the Secretary of Defense planners and their neo-conservative allies of the coming oil bonanza from Iraq that they openly advocated using it, as Judis wrote in The New Republic 'to remake the Middle East in our democratic, capitalist image…'
(Sieff, United Press International 2003)

John Judis explained their ambitions clearly:

…the neoconservatives inside and outside the administration take a radical, even revolutionary, view of what is possible and desirable in the region; they see turmoil as inevitable and desirable. Says one senior administration official, "Upheaval is on its way. We might as well get in front of it." They see Saddam's ouster not just as a means of preventing a future nuclear threat but of remaking the entire region along democratic, free-market lines.…

The neoconservatives don't worry about offending potential critics in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Syria because they think of them as enemies who should eventually be swept aside by the installation of a democratic, free-market Iraq on their borders. They reject U.N. or multilateral participation in a post- Saddam transition.

Says one senior official,

This is the moment where our ideas will be vindicated, or we can walk away. You can't count on the international community to establish a new democratic or political order.

The way it would work is that the reigning power would distribute power and businesses, and which people it chooses to deal with are automatically made into kings. Do we want to be the kingmaker, or do we want to default that over to the U.N.? I am not sure we want to cede it.

I would bet the U.N. would seek the acquiescence of Iraq's neighbors–all of which have vested interests. There are three that would be problematic: Riyadh, Tehran, and Damascus. And the U.N. would work through them.

(Judis 2003 – accessed 27 July 2010)

Neo-conservative leaders of the United States of America, and their allies in other Western countries, know that capitalism and democracy are not ideological models, but the way the objective world is (or must be) organized. They have a duty to ensure that wherever dark, dangerous and irrational forces are at work, attacking democracy and capitalism, those forces are challenged, their supporters eliminated ²⁷ .

As Western communities feel themselves threatened by the growing influence of what the United States' President George W Bush called 'the axis of evil' they know that, at all costs, the evils of anti-capitalism and anti-democracy must be challenged and beaten back.

Henry Hyde, Chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations spelt it out, on October 3 2001, weeks after the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York:

Let us begin by accepting there is no single enemy to be defeated, no one network to be eliminated. Al-Qa'eda is but our most prominent opponent, but its outlook is shared by many others who are equally committed to our destruction.

If we believe that our safety can be secured by destroying any one organization or any single person, we will only ensure that we will remain unsafe and unprepared once again. For we know now that we have permanent, mortal enemies who will seize upon our vulnerabilities to bloody us, to murder our citizens, to commit horror for the purpose of forcing horror upon us….

Our strategy, plans, and actions must be comprehensive, deliberate and formulated for the long-term. We must be prepared not only to protect ourselves from new assaults, not only to intercept and frustrate them, but to eliminate new threats at their source. This must be a permanent campaign, similar to the ancient one humanity has waged against disease and its never-ending assault upon our defenses.
(Hyde, October 3 2001 – accessed 27 July 2010)

In such times, human beings feel the need to reassert and reinforce those principles that they instinctively know to be central to a properly ordered and secure world. Equally, they know, beyond any doubt, that unless they resolutely and uncompromisingly confront the enemy, intent on destroying it, it will destroy them.

As Henry Hyde (2001) claimed, one of the major terrorist threats against Western nations at the start of the 21^st century has been perceived as coming from Al-Qa'eda ²⁸ . For Hyde and most other Western leaders the organization is a network of terror and evil, master-minded by a Saudi Arabian, Sheikh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin.

Bin-Ladin spelt out his reasons for seeing the activities of the United States (and Western countries in general) as a plague, destructively consuming the resources of his country, undermining the most important central understandings of life, and threatening the unity, security and well-being of his people and his world:

The Arabian Peninsula has never – since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas – been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and destroying its plantations. All this is happening at a time when nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.
(Bin-Ladin 1998 – accessed 27 July 2010)

Just as Henry Hyde insisted that the enemies of democracy and capitalism must be eliminated, so Bin-Ladin insists that those who threaten the existence of his world must be eliminated.

The more threatened people feel, the more strongly they recommit themselves to those fundamental primary ideological principles, which they know will reassert order and security within their communities and lives.

In the West, people during the threatening years of the 1970s and 1980s recommitted themselves to fundamental economic doctrines. In the early years of the 21^st century, under the fundamentalist leadership of the second George Bush and his coterie of 'born again' believers in the efficacy of 'Western democratic principles', Western communities remained committed to globalization, privatization, economic growth; reducing public expenditure; re-imposing democracy (the political frame of Western capitalism) wherever it has been weakened or displaced and to eliminating those who most vociferously oppose their activities.

Because Western people organize their lives through economically focused social templates, the forms they re-emphasize in times of stress and threat focus on economic issues and are aimed at rectifying economic processes and bolstering economic performance on the presumption that this will alleviate the perceived problems.

In the last decades of the 20^th century Western countries and communities recommitted themselves to the fundamental principles underpinning free-market capitalism. Since that time they have also recommitted themselves to ensuring that the fundamental principles of capitalism and its political frame – democracy – are enforced and reinforced wherever 'anti-Western' sentiments seem to be mounting and capitalism seems to be losing its influence.

The first Western leader in the second half of the 20^th century to steer her country determinedly toward a Western fundamentalist future as a means of arresting and reversing the moral decline of the nation was the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

As a prime minister representing the newly energetic right wing of the Conservative Party (the 'Dries', as they later called themselves, as opposed to the old-style moderate Tories, or 'Wets'), Thatcher advocated greater independence of the individual from the state; an end to allegedly excessive government interference in the economy, including privatization of state-owned enterprises and the sale of public housing to tenants; reductions in expenditures on social services such as health care, education, and housing; limitations on the printing of money in accord with the economic doctrine of monetarism; and legal restrictions on trade unions.

The term Thatcherism came to refer not just to these policies but also to certain aspects of her ethical outlook and personal style, including moral absolutism, fierce nationalism, a zealous regard for the interests of the individual, and a combative, uncompromising approach to achieving political goals.
(Encyclopedia Britannica)

The following readings provide an insight into the kinds of social reorganization that Western people felt they had to undertake in order to ensure that life was secure and that the world remained 'sane' in the latter part of the 20^th century.

Milton Friedman (with Rose Friedman) (1980), the theoretical mind behind a great many of Margaret Thatcher's policies in the early years of her British government (1979 – 1990), provided an explanation of the essential requirements for:

… building a society that relies primarily on voluntary cooperation to organize both economic and other activity, a society that preserves and expands human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping it our servant and not letting it become our master.
(Friedman & Friedman 1980)

Stelzer (1992) described the 'decline' of Britain between 1945 and 1979 and gives a very positive summing up of the achievements of the Thatcher Government in reversing that decline. As Irwin Stelzer says:

It was individual responsibility, rather than reliance on government, that now became the accepted standard against which to measure policy initiatives…. Thatcher restored to the UK a sense that appropriate policies and driving entrepreneurialism can produce steady increases in material well-being.
(Stelzer 1992)

Stuart Hall's (1988) analysis of Thatcherism provided a Marxist perspective on the precursors and consequences of Margaret Thatcher's privatization policies.

As we suggested earlier, within any community of people who share a common primary ideology, there will be a range of secondary ideological models. Friedman and Stelzer provide explanation of how the world should be organized and people interact with each other from the perspective of one set of Western secondary ideological models. Hall presents an alternative, dissident way of organizing the world.

Both perspectives share a common set of primary ideological understandings. Underlying both neo-conservative (right) and Marxist (left) emphases and perspectives is a level of common understanding:

• All share similar understandings of the nature of time and of the ways in which it should or should not be 'used'.
• All accept that there is an economic sphere or domain or environment within which people interact in order to achieve greater personal well-being.
• All accept that the aim of government is to organize the 'public arena' to ensure improved economic organization and performance.
• All assume that there is a 'private' realm or environment within which individuals interact. The disagreements concern the relative duties and responsibilities of private and public spheres.
• All assume that human beings are 'free actors' and that human relationships are based on independence not interdependence.
• All assume that prime aims in life include earning a cash income; improving one's material position; 'developing' oneself.
• All assume that there is a 'formal' economy and that, necessarily, people will interact in terms of that economy in the ways which are spelt out as 'legitimate' and 'appropriate'.
• All presume the 'rule of law'.

Conclusion  

Commentators on life in non-Western communities and countries always have, and always will, be faced with the problem of disentangling themselves from their own primary and secondary ideological commitments in order better to understand the primary and secondary ideological presumptions and commitments of the people amongst whom they are undertaking research.

This has never been more important than it is in the early 21^st century. Despite (or, more likely, because of) the driving commitment of Western communities to globalization and democratization in countries and communities around the world, increasing numbers of people in non-Western communities are seeing people of the West not as harbingers of good, but as exploitative, immoral, and intent on destroying the most important fundamental understandings of life in their communities.

People in the West are certain that their understandings and forms of organization and interaction are derived from the nature of objective reality and provide the most efficient, equitable means of ensuring individual (and therefore communal) development and well-being. Forces that oppose Western forms and understandings are therefore irrational and dangerous to the well-being of human beings everywhere.

So, they are determined, wherever they find 'fundamentalism' and its associated 'terrorist' activity to oppose them and finally displace these evils by those forms of organization and interaction to which they are committed. That Western determination to impose their own fundamentalist agenda on the rest of the world, if the reasoning contained within this chapter is valid, ensures the perpetuation and deepening of the forces they oppose.

Like it or not, Western people live in a world of diverse primary and secondary ideologies (which only make sense in terms of the primary ideologies from which they are derived). Every attempt to impose Western secondary ideological models on people who do not share Western primary ideological understandings guarantees the disruption of their communities and ultimately the emergence of revitalization movements aimed at reasserting and reinforcing their own understandings of life.

Chapter 3:
An Explanation and History of the Emergence of Capitalism  

• The emergence of Capitalism
• People and recognized 'environments'
• The 'economic' environment
• The development of systems of law
• The Feudal 'Secular Domain '
• The Feudal 'Spiritual Domain'
• The Investiture Conflict
• The need for Written, Centralized, Secular Systems of Law
• The Aquinas Solution: Natural Law Distilled from Secular Experience
• 'Money-making' patron-client networks and an emerging emphasis on quantification
• Autonomy and systems of law
• The separation of states and commerce
• From personalized, cooperative hierarchical relationships to object-oriented, competitive oppositional relationships
• The alienation of property and stress on legally bounded confrontation
• Using Law to Rob the Poor and Dispossess the Weak
• Private ownership, consumption and accumulation
• From the subversion of tradition to plotting the future
• 'Public' V 'Private': Oppositional Couplets; Categories of Likeness
• They should Become "Habituated to Labor and Fatigue"
• Conclusion

In a way which is common to people in all societies, people in Western communities, when considering the fundamental rights and responsibilities of community members towards one another, speak in ideological terms.²⁹

While each Western secondary ideological frame spells out a particular version of 'reality', they all presume certain fundamental understandings about the nature of individuals, communities, the environment, and the metaphysical realm, and about the forms of relationship found in and between them.³⁰

It is from these less than consciously held basic presumptions that individuals and communities construct their own particular variants of 'ideal realities' (or secondary ideologies) ³¹ .

To communities which do not share Western primary ideological presumptions, the confrontations among competing Western secondary ideologies will appear less than rational. Because their own forms of secondary ideology are based on their own primary ideological presumptions about life, which are likely to be very different from the basic presumptions contained within Western primary ideology, it is very difficult for them to enter into a dialogue with Western people.

Rather, as has happened during the last half century, people become opposed on the basis of subconsciously held basic presumptions about life, rather than on the basis of variant secondary ideologies. So, we speak of the confrontation between 'Islam and the West', rather than about a confrontation between Shiites and capitalists. What we have is a confrontation between primary rather than secondary ideologies.

Through this century, as non-Western communities become increasingly self-assertive, we are likely to find that confrontations will occur between communities holding variant primary ideologies – variant sets of basic presumptions about the meaning, purpose and organization of life ³² . These presumptions, being reflections of the basic cognitive frames of communities, will be poorly expressed. Those who attempt dialogue based upon such confrontations will find the explanations and basic positions of their adversaries rationally and logically unconvincing.

Before we can grapple with the confrontations which are already occurring and will repeatedly re-occur throughout this century, we need to comprehend the basic presumptions underpinning Western capitalist understandings of life. In this discussion we will attempt to do this through exploring the historical experiences which shaped and molded Western European communities over the past thousand years as they moved from feudalism to capitalism.

How have some of the most basic presumptions which underpin Western understandings of life been shaped by history, becoming seen as features of the real world, the unfocused backdrop to secondary ideological disputes? ³³

Here I will examine:

• the ways in which 'the economy' became separated from other 'environments' in Western thinking ³⁴ ;
• the emergence of an emphasis on 'market exchange' as the 'correct' form of exchange between individuals and groups;
• the reasons why formal economies are so strongly bound by legal frames and supported by both legal and fiscal bureaucracies;
• the nature of 'consumerism' and its historical underpinnings;
• and why those who became committed to Western ideologies became so missionary-oriented, focused on the material world and convinced of the need for the whole world to be organized according to their ideological understanding ³⁵ .

In the examination of these issues I am going to look at some of the historical experiences of Western Europeans which have, over more than eight hundred years, produced the consumer culture of today. To understand the present we have to know the experiences of the past which shaped and molded Western European thinking and action and produced the primary ideological presumptions which underpin interaction, meaning and organization in Western communities.

People and recognized 'environments'  

Fundamental to understanding Western primary ideological presumptions is an understanding of the ways in which people conceive of and interact with their environments. In order to grapple with the ways in which Western Europeans conceive of themselves in relation to their environments, we need to understand several important fundamental assumptions ³⁶ from which they operate.

• First, all human beings are individuals who independently interact with the various environments within which they live, and develop their own unique personas through that interaction.
• Second, these independent individuals are autonomous fashioners of their environments, which are passive, being molded by, and reflecting, human activity.
• Third, individuals interact with a number of quite distinct environments:

• There is the physical or material environment, bound by natural laws. For Western people, the 'natural world' can be controlled and directed by mastering sets of laws which relate to its various aspects – those of physics, chemistry, geology, botany, and so on.
• There is the social environment bound by social laws, again controlled and directed through understanding and applying sets of laws – the economic, political and social. The search for, and outlining of, such sets of laws has produced a reification of these aspects of social life, so that most Western people think of each area as a self-existent whole, as an environment with its own raison d'être, and, its own logic.
• And there is, for many Western people, approximately eighty per cent of the population in most Western national censuses, a spiritual, or religious, or metaphysical environment bound by its own quite distinctive sets of laws.

The set of laws ordering each environment is self-contained. The rules for interaction with, and in, each environment can be spelt out, providing people with all the necessary information for interacting in the best possible ways with each of those environments.

This belief has led Western people to assume that the sets of laws can be 'discovered', understood and mastered through research and education. Through mastering the principles and rule requirements for interaction with each environment, the best possible forms of behavior, attitude, organization and interaction for individuals and groups can be determined. Once those best possibilities have been outlined and people commit themselves to living in accord with those possibilities, both individuals and communities become 'developed'.

Once Western researchers have determined the fundamental laws for interaction with each recognized environment, they are able to prescribe the best forms of activity and organization for any community. They are therefore able to evaluate the performance of any community in terms of their prescriptions.

The sets of prescriptions reflect, of course, the secondary ideologies of Western communities. The presumption of the existence of a range of separate environments with which people interact is, however, a primary ideological presumption, one which is basic to the ways in which Western people think and organize their lives, no matter what secondary ideology they might subscribe to.

So, the keys to development ³⁷ are:

• research to ascertain the principles underlying human interaction with each Western environment, together with the ways in which the environments might be reorganized for individual and community advantage;
• establishment of the bureaucratic frameworks through which the activities of individuals can be focused and channeled to the requirements of those prescriptions; ³⁸
• and education of people to live by those principles, so ensuring physical, social, political, economic and spiritual well-being.

Rathbone Gregg, in the 1870s, put the need for education very clearly:

The lot of man … is in his own hands, from his being surrounded by fixed laws, on knowledge of which, and conformity to which, his wellbeing depends. The study of these and obedience to them form, therefore, the great aim of public instruction. Men must be taught:

• The physical laws on which health depends.
• The moral laws on which happiness depends.
• The intellectual laws on which knowledge depends.
• The social and political laws on which national prosperity and advancement depend.
• The economic laws on which wealth depends.

(quoted in Holyoake 1896, p. 85)

Western people find it natural ³⁹ that all activity should be circumscribed by rules and regulations. Rarely, if ever, has there been such an acceptance of and compliance with systems of rules and regulations as exists in Western communities ⁴⁰ . But, because those rules are applied by impersonal bureaucracies, they are not seen as intrusive.

Western people regard rules and regulations as necessary for the protection of their individuality and a guarantee of their right to interact with their environments for their private ends ⁴¹ . Since the 12^th century, Western Europeans have increasingly committed themselves to uncovering systems of law governing the various environments, and to educating people to live in accordance with them once they have been uncovered.

Among the reasons for the phenomenal success of Western Europeans in imposing their world views on others throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries is their absolute certainty of the superiority of their 'knowledge' of how the physical, social and spiritual worlds 'really work', and their ability to impose on others well-organized systems of law and government, centered not on individual personalities but on impersonal bureaucracies.

Western people have come to believe that, whereas all other people live in the mists of superstition and dubious rationality, governed by the whim of their rulers, they have discovered the 'laws' of the physical, social and spiritual worlds. So, they can act 'rationally', ensuring that all their behavior, interaction and organization conform to those principles which underpin the rule-bound systems they are in the process of uncovering.

When Europeans imposed themselves upon the rest of the world during the 19^th and 20^th centuries they took with them the 'best' ways of using the physical environment, of organizing communities, and of ensuring individual 'development' and a successful life in the next world. They therefore set about changing the worlds they encountered in terms of their understandings.

The physical environment could (and should) be dominated, managed and organized to 'realize its potential', that is ensure high yields, whether of minerals, crops or anything else which Western people might consider a 'potential' for that environment (e.g. 'tourism').

The social environment could (and should) be managed and organized to 'realize its potential', to ensure individual development (defined, of course, in terms of the particular secondary ideology of those holding the power).

And the spiritual environment could (and should) be managed and reorganized to ensure high rates of conversion and commitment to the religious forms and beliefs of Europe (which would not only ensure life in the next world, but also orient people to be responsible citizens in this ⁴² ).

Not only were Western Europeans committed to systems of laws, rules and regulations, they also strongly emphasized the use of mathematics to measure success by quantifying results. This emphasis on quantification coincided with yet another emphasis, that on material possessions, on the accumulation of goods and the generation of material wealth.

Industry and frugality would inevitably produce riches. The demonstration of these virtues, in turn, would inevitably bring respect and status. So, in order to attain and maintain status and respect, one needed to demonstrate that one had gained wealth by one's own efforts – that one had realized one's own potential and the potential of the environments within which one lived.

One's material worth is most easily ascertained by giving cash values to possessions so that a total value can readily be calculated by interested others. This led 'naturally' to conspicuous consumption and ownership, demonstrating the wealth of the person. And so there emerged, in Western Europe, apparently paradoxical emphases on hard work and frugality on the one hand, and increasing conspicuous ownership and consumption on the other.

Of course, Western Europeans are convinced that these emphases are 'logical', and necessary for the 'rational' direction and control of the environments within which they live.

Whereas almost all other people are bound by 'tradition', by forms of organization, interaction and behavior which have their roots in the historical experiences of their forebears, Western people believe that they organize life in terms of rational constructs, derived not from tradition but from scientific investigation of their environments. As they uncover the principles governing their natural and social environments, they gain control of them and are able to manage them to produce the best possible returns for people.

We need to confront this belief.

Do the constructs and understandings of Western Europeans come from their scientific investigation of substantive environments, or is the nature and form of those 'environments' the result of reification of aspects of the natural and social worlds, required by the historical experiences of Western people?

Are the environments with which Western people interact objective features of the world which are recognized as such by all people everywhere, or are they only real to Western Europeans?

In the following historical sketches I suggest that the environments which are recognized are consequences of the historical tensions and confrontations of Western Europe. They are, in fact, understandings which are derived from, and required by, Western historical experience. They are as shaped and determined by 'tradition' as any other system of knowledge and understanding in other communities. The presumption that there are sets of laws waiting to be uncovered for the control of each environment is, equally, a consequence of particular historical experience.

The Western European conviction that they have 'got it right', while others have not, is based in their certainty of the validity of their view of the world, and the effectiveness with which it allows them to manipulate their environments in engaging in forms of activity and organization which are required by Western industrial social templates.

Western communities, no less than any other communities, have inherited their understanding of how their world is organized and the ways in which they relate to the environments in which they live.

A key and fundamental difference between Western communities and most other communities lies in the Western presumption of the existence of separate environments, each of which operates in terms of its own logic and its own set of operational principles or laws. Before any such sets of laws can even be anticipated, one must recognize the existence of the separate environments to which they relate.

For people not brought up in Western communities, and therefore not thinking in terms of Western presumptions, the existence of the identified environments, let alone the rules for interaction with them, is unlikely to be recognized.

In the same way that Western people take the existence of separate environments as a subconscious given, something which needs no justification, other people take their own understanding of the environment within which they live for granted, together with their understanding of their interaction with it.

When they are required to organize life in terms of Western European understandings, they inevitably warp the organized environments within which they are required to operate towards their own, quite different presumptions about their environment. This effect is most clearly seen in what, for Western people, is the dominant social environment, the economy.

Before I begin an examination of the historical emergence of this Western view of environments governed by systems of law, a few qualifiers are necessary. When investigating historical trends one has to start somewhere. The important primary understandings of any community do not suddenly appear. They are shaped over hundreds of years and through a multitude of interacting variables and circumstances. So, one has somewhat arbitrarily to decide on a starting point in time and on the variables which one will investigate. What is described in one century will have its roots in preceding centuries.

The influences on community understanding which I highlight are, themselves, modified and focused through a wide range of other variables and circumstances on which I have chosen not to dwell. However, for our purposes here, those issues I investigate do seem to be central to understanding how Western Europeans came to conceive of life as being lived in a number of distinct environments, governed by systems of law, and subject to quantification and evaluation in terms of material returns for individual endeavor.

The 'economic' environment  

Elsewhere I have suggested that many people in non-Western communities make no clear distinction between their 'economic' and their 'social' (or any other) environments ⁴³ . So, when they engage in 'economic' activity, they, quite naturally, without needing to think about it, integrate their activity with social responsibilities and concerns. This integration produces a very different form of activity from that presumed to be 'economic' by Western people.

Because of this 'confusion' (in Western terms) of environments, the presumptions in terms of which they organize activity are also very different (and they are highly unlikely to have developed detailed sets of economic rules and regulations defining and governing activity and impartially applied across communities ⁴⁴ ).

Their economic activity does not match that anticipated and required by Western people. They seem to be indulging in 'informal', or even 'illegal', economic activity, that is, activity which falls outside the scope of 'legitimate' economic activity for Western people.

Even when they have attended the West's best teaching institutions, through which the 'necessary' forms of legislation, organization and activity are inculcated, all too often, once back in their home countries, they seem to 'warp' and 'distort' the forms they have learned.

In order to sketch the emergence of primary ideological presumptions underpinning economic organization and activity in Western communities I am going to have to examine the ways in which those presumptions became established in late medieval Europe. As will become clear, the understandings and organizational forms of the period were very different from those of Western communities in the 20^th century.

Unfortunately, given the constraints of this discussion, the sketches must necessarily be brief and therefore inadequate. The focus will also have to be limited, bypassing the emergence of particular metaphysical understandings, and the emergence and establishment of the various 'disciplines' for uncovering systems of law operating within the recognized environments.

The development of systems of law  

In the feudal period of the 10^th to the 12^th centuries, western Europeans saw the world as divided into two domains: a spiritual domain and a secular one, which included political, economic, social and material environments as now understood in Western communities. These were hierarchically interrelated, with the spiritual domain dominant and the secular domain subject to spiritual oversight and direction.

The spiritual domain was dominated by the Roman Church, with the pope at its head and bishops as representatives of the pope within territorial districts. In their own districts, in all normal matters, bishops took final responsibility, only referring to Rome when something out of the ordinary needed definition, or when they needed support in the face of challenges to their authority.

The Feudal 'Secular Domain'  

The secular domain was the arena within which the Church exercised authority. In the secular domain, feudal princes held political power within hierarchically organized territories. As Maitland has described, feudalism was:

… a state of society in which the main bond is the relation between lord and man, a relation implying on the lord's part protection and defence; on the man's part protection, service and reverence …

The national organization is a system of these relationships: at the head there stands the king as lord of all, below him are his immediate vassals, or tenants in chief, who again are lords of tenants, who again may be lords of tenants, and so on, down to the lowest possessor of land.

Lastly, as every other court consists of the lord's tenants, so the king's court consists of his tenants in chief, and so far as there is any constitutional control over the king it is exercised by the body of these tenants.
(quoted in Macfarlane 1987, pp. 182-3)

Although Western capitalism depends on a division of the world into private and public arenas, feudal Europe did not require such a division. As Macfarlane, quoting Maitland, says:

The English lawyer Bracton [in the mid-13^th century] knew of the distinction of 'private' and 'public', yet 'he makes little use of it. This was because

feudalism … is a denial of this distinction. Just in so far as the ideal of feudalism is perfectly realized, all that we call public law is merged in private law: jurisdiction is property, office is property, the kingship itself is property; the same word dominium has to stand now for ownership and now for lordship.

(Macfarlane 1987, p. 182)

While the distinction between public and private made little sense in the feudal world, it was during the feudal period that the Western European emphasis on the importance of publicly formulated law, governing private interactions, developed. As Tay and Kamenka explain:

The feudal compact, in keeping with Germanic tradition, was not an act of authority but a voluntary agreement between independent legal persons – one agreeing to serve, the other to provide and protect. It was an enforceable contract which bound the king or lord as much as it bound the subject or leigeman.

In a very important sense, it brought the whole basis of political authority and obedience into the area of private law, of relations between individuals capable, for the purposes of law, of abstract equality and of rationally and freely seeking their individual well-being and subordinating themselves voluntarily. Those not capable of such freedom, e.g. serfs, were not fully legal persons.
(Tay & Kamenka 1983, p. 69)

Although feudal relationships did not require a distinction between public and private realms, the concept of 'free' legally defined individuals entering into contracts with one another was born in the feudal period. It became greatly expanded and provided a basis for understanding the nature of the relationship between the individual and society during the 17^th century, but it underpinned the development of feudal law.

It also provided one of the rationales for the emergence of a wide range of common-interest groupings during the medieval period. During this period numerous 'associations', 'unions', 'guilds', 'fraternities', 'communities', 'colleges', 'leagues', 'nations' ⁴⁵ and other forms of common-interest grouping developed, managed by those who constituted the group and designed for mutual protection and self-help ⁴⁶ . Interaction among individuals within these groups was fraternal, with most exchanges being based on cooperation rather than competition.

This form of egalitarian, common-interest grouping is usual in hierarchically organized communities. It allows those who see themselves as being in a similar relationship within a hierarchy to join with others of like mind in promoting and protecting their interests.

As feudal organization became increasingly distorted during the medieval centuries ⁴⁷ , these groups became increasingly important. Amongst the most important were those which brought educated people together to protect their interests against others, and those which emerged amongst the 'money-making' people of western Europe.

Together, these two groups were to challenge and finally displace feudal leaders, and, with their displacement, introduce an entirely different rationale for the organization of society, new forms of interpersonal relationship, and new understandings of the meaning and purpose of life. And, for a variety of reasons, some of which will be sketched here, these forms of reorganization required a very different set of primary ideological presumptions.

Western Europe, over a period of eight hundred years, with enormous difficulty, learned to think in ways which were foreign to people who lived in the feudal communities of the 10^th to 13^th centuries.

While the sense of legitimate, approved feudal hierarchy within the society was strong, the dominance of hierarchically determined social position over membership of such groupings ensured the subordination of group interests to those of the wider society. Whenever, for whatever reason, the cohesion of the wider society was suspect, these common-interest groupings became more demanding, leading to strikes, riots and other forms of social challenge.

So, in the period when we begin our story, people lived in hierarchically organized communities, with their primary social and political status defined by their relationship to land. Those of similar status within the society recognized egalitarian bonds of common interest, and tended to support one another and make demands of each other on the basis of their shared identity. But, equally, they recognized those who were hierarchically superior as leaders who both required and deserved their allegiance. In fact, they recognized common-interest association only in terms of these hierarchical responsibilities.

At the base of the hierarchical pyramid of feudal communities were the peasants who, though they held some land, usually held too little to ensure their livelihood. Few peasants could have lived off the land they held within an estate alone. As Ganshof has described for the later medieval period:

… However great its contribution to livelihood, agriculture had by no means altogether displaced the very ancient practices of pastoral life, hunting, and food collecting. By his fields alone the peasant literally could not have lived. All about the area more or less permanently cultivated and, when under crops, held in strict individual or family possession, he required access to immense stretches of common waste left in its natural condition.

These moors and marshes and forests did not merely furnish necessary food for his cattle. His own nourishment depended on them; for wild vegetables and fruits were even more important in his dietary than wild game …

In villages where there was no lord, or where the lord's power was a late growth, the village community sometimes retained absolute control of these common lands; it owned them, in feudal phrase, en alleux … But throughout the greater part of Europe, where common was essential but still only a sort of annexe to the arable, the lord almost always extended his power over commons as well as over fields …

[However] it is no doubt vain to look for the true medieval 'owner' of the commons.
(Ganshof 1971, pp. 281, 282)⁴⁸

Land was held by families who owed allegiance to those above them who provided not only access to land but also political and other forms of protection and a sense of community to those under their jurisdiction. And a great deal of the land in an area was 'common'; that is, it had no legal owner.

European feudal organization was not based on the need to ascribe individual ownership to all existing land. In this feature, it has a lot in common with many non-Western communities before the imposition of Western forms of organization in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. When land is not primarily seen as a wealth-creating resource, and people are not primarily geared to the 'wealth-creating' use of their environment, there is no strong compulsion to claim ownership of 'un-owned' land.

The West, as a result of experiences to be sketched here, came strongly to believe in the necessity for all land to be legally and exclusively held by identifiable 'real' or 'artificial' individuals, and used to generate increasing cash income for its owners.⁴⁹

The Feudal 'Spiritual Domain'  

The communities in which medieval people lived were serviced by clergy who belonged to a hierarchically organized Church and claimed very important rights and responsibilities within the communities they serviced.

The metaphor which emerged to describe the relation between pope and emperor, between clergy and laity, was that of the soul and the body. The body without the soul is of no consequence. It is the soul which animates the body. Equally, the Church ensured the spiritual life of the secular world. The Church was, therefore, central to life in the medieval world. It therefore claimed authority over the secular world and reinforced its claims with legal statutes based upon written, historical evidence accumulated over the centuries ⁵⁰ .

This assumption of the superiority of the soul over the body, of that which is life over that which is a 'container' for that life, was to become significant in the emerging belief in the independence of self-contained, pre-social individuals from the 17^th century onwards.

Then, with the material and the spiritual thoroughly separated, a similar separation was to be assumed between human beings and the material environments they controlled. Individuals were to be perceived as separate from and superior to the material world, over which they rightfully exercised dominion. Just as the Church believed it had a mandate from God to direct the medieval world, so Western individuals came to believe that they had a mandate to 'realize the potential' of the resources of the material world wherever they might be found.

The Church's power came from two sources. It held large tracts of land controlled by bishops and abbots who, as feudal lords, had authority in the secular domain, and it was also perceived to hold a very real power to condemn people to hell.

If one could, as the Roman Church after Augustine (354 – 430 AD) claimed (cf. Warfield 1970, p. 122ff), be saved only by belonging to the Church, then to be excommunicated was to be consigned to eternal damnation. In an age when people were convinced of the existence and potency of a spiritual realm, one placed the destiny of one's soul at risk by challenging the Church.

However, there were long periods, particularly following the disintegration of the ninth-century Carolingian empire, when the papacy was politically weak, dominated by local Roman families, and unable to assert its claimed authority.

During the 10^th and 11^th centuries increasing numbers of secular rulers extended their authority over bishops within their territories. This situation came to a head with the accession of the Duke of Saxony, Otto the Great (912-973), to the German throne in 936. Otto, ostensibly to rescue Pope John XII, conquered Italy and received an imperial coronation from the pope.

As part of his strategy for securing his reign, Otto had made an alliance with the German Church. Bishops and archbishops were given lands and immunity from some of the royal claims on landlords in return for full support of Otto's reign. With the papacy very weak, another way of ensuring support from the ecclesiastical hierarchy was to appoint it (cf. Hayes, Baldwin & Cole 1962, p. 142ff).

The Investiture Conflict  

The situation was similar throughout northern and western Europe during the 10^th and 11^th centuries. It was brought to a head by Pope Gregory VII in 1075 when he prohibited any form of lay investiture of the clergy. Gregory, calling on legal precedent as established within the Church canons (laws), denied the right of secular leaders to appoint ecclesiastical office holders. He argued that, on the contrary, the pope had the right both to anoint and to depose secular leaders.

Henry IV (1050-1106), King of Germany from 1056 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1084, opposed the decree and called on the pope,

…now not pope, but false monk, [to]… relinquish the Apostolic See which you have arrogated.
(Koenigsberger 1987, p. 166)

The pope responded by excommunicating him, and, faced with resultant challenges to his authority, Henry was forced personally to petition the pope for absolution and reinstatement to his position as emperor.

The pope had demonstrated that he held very real political power within western European territories. Secular leaders, very aware of the way in which Henry had been humiliated, felt a need to counter this power in some way. This confrontation marked the start of growing conflict between the papacy and secular rulers throughout western Europe, a confrontation which has come to be known as the Investiture Conflict, which finally climaxed in the 16^th century Reformation.

The Roman Church argued that, since kings were established in their kingdoms through the Church's administration of the ritual of Unction ⁵¹ , religious authority was superior to secular authority. As Ullman (1965, p. 86) says, 'It was that act alone which made the king'. The stage was set in the 10^th and 11^th centuries for mounting conflict between secular and religious leaders. The political history of this period is that of fluctuating but constantly increasing papal fortunes and claims to ascendancy and authority over secular rulers.

The Roman Church underwrote its political dominance through appeals to canon law, established over the centuries, and taking its form from Roman law, defined by the legal works of Justinian, compiled in the sixth century. Such appeals depended on the maintenance of a strong legal framework and of people schooled in interpreting both the canons and the legal prescriptions of Roman law as defined by Justinian.

From the 11^th century onwards, as Murray points out,

popes, legates and councils saw the evils of their age as "contempt for the canons". They sought to revive the Church's ancient legal framework, with a few surreptitious accretions
(Murray 1978, p. 214).

This revival of the Church's legal framework, coupled with its use as a justification for political claims, led to legal expertise, and the development of legal frameworks, being widely perceived as of great practical importance within both secular and religious spheres. For the Church,⁵²

Mankind is ruled by two laws: Natural Law and Custom. Natural Law is that which is contained in the Scriptures and the Gospel.
(d'Entreves 1965, p. 33)

Natural law was canonical law; all other law was of suspect quality and should be altered to conform to the canons of the Church. Secular leaders, ruling by custom, should, themselves, be subject to the natural law of the Church. All legal statutes of states and nations should conform to canonical law.

The clash between Henry II, King of England, and Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (1163 – 1170 AD), resulting in Thomas's death, was a product of this conflict:

… when the king had drawn up sixteen "Constitutions", which he said embodied the "Customs of the Realm", the archbishop denounced them as contrary to canon law, and refused to seal them.
(Ward 1905, p. 47)

With the Church's legal framework revived and a new stress placed on legal training within the Church, increasing numbers of legally trained scholars passed out of the schools and universities of medieval Europe.

One paradoxical result of the canonical revival and the burst of education which followed it, was that kings could now lay their hands on learned officials.
(Murray 1978, p. 217)

What followed, with many slips for kings who were initially forced to rely on scholars who had been dedicated to and trained for the Church, was a burgeoning emphasis on the study of Roman law throughout the late 12^th century.

The Need for Written, Centralized, Secular Systems of Law  

The Investiture Conflict underscored a need for secular rulers to have alternative legal frameworks to those employed by the Church. One way to do this was to develop alternative interpretations of Roman law, based on scholarship, countering the interpretations of the Church.

However, if they were to break the shackles of the Church by challenging canonical law, they had, first, to give the concept of 'natural law' a new meaning. It had to be something other than simply 'the laws of the Church'. The study of law had begun in earnest.

During the following three centuries secular bureaucracies were developed which were firmly anchored in written legal decrees and statutes. If anything was not legally defined, it was suspect. The basis for legitimacy was to be found in written statutes.

The Investiture Conflict convinced the people of western Europe of the need for the independent development of centralized, secular legal systems, maintained, refined and applied by state bureaucrats and bureaucracies, with all documentation stored within state archives, to protect and assert the interests of rulers. They needed to be able to beat The Church at its own game.

As such legal systems became elaborated, they inevitably affected the lives of people throughout Europe. Génicot described some of the effects:

… the local and traditional tribunals were more and more replaced by superior courts run by doctores who were not known and whose integrity (not without reason) was suspect, and who practised a new, the Roman, law, rather than the ancient customary one.

The state now advanced a claim, mainly under cover of this jus, to the entire ownership of waste, forest and water, and to their exclusive use, or at any rate the right to regulate arbitrarily their utilization. The villages also had to submit to orders from above and from distant places, and to officials sent from outside …
(Génicot 1971, p. 701)

As states developed legal systems to protect the interests of rulers against the claims of the Church, those involved in developing statutes extended the legal rights of rulers over more and more of the activities and properties of their subjects.⁵³ So, in succeeding centuries, conflict was to develop not only between Church and state, but also between the state and its people. As a result, emphasis was to be placed on the legal rights of individuals within the state against the state itself.

Increasingly, people and state were to become defined in oppositional terms.⁵⁴ This change in emphasis was brought to a head in the 17^th century in the writings of the Protestant jurist-theologians, chiefly by Hugo Grotius, whose principal work, The Law of War and Peace, appeared in 1625. As Roscoe Pound (1921) put it:

Grotius and those who followed him made reason the measure of all obligation. They conceived that the end for which law exists is to produce conformity to the nature of rational creatures

… at the very time that a victory of the courts in the contests between the common law courts and the Stuart kings had established that there were fundamental common-law rights of Englishmen which Englishmen must maintain in courts and in which courts would secure them even against the king, a juristic theory of fundamental human rights, independent of and running back of all states, which states might secure and ought to secure, but could not alter or abridge, had sprung up independently and was at hand to furnish a scientific explanation when the next century called for one.

By a natural transition, the common-law limitations upon royal authority became natural limitations upon all authority; the common-law rights of Englishmen became the natural rights of man.
(quoted in Grotius 1957, p. xiv)

Increasingly, during the medieval centuries, customary obligations and rights between people, not supported by written, legally acceptable documentation, could successfully be challenged by appeal to this developing system of legal statutes.

Of course, the experiences of various western European regions differed. In England there was no 'violent breach between folk-law and jurist law' (Cam 1957, p. 13) as experienced in some other areas of Europe with the establishment of Roman law as the law of the land and the supervention of customary law.

There seems to have been a stronger sense of independence amongst English law makers and practitioners, with the result that, by the reign of Henry VIII, common law had become separated from both Roman law and the canons. As Maitland observes,

Roman law was by this time an unintelligible, outlandish thing, perhaps a good enough law for half-starved Frenchmen. Legal education was no longer academic – the universities had nothing to do with it.
(see Cam 1957, p. 125)

English law had accommodated the 'customs of the realm'. In doing so, it provided rulers with a centralized, bureaucratically developed legal system which differed widely from the Roman law upon which Church authority and canons were established.

Henry II had set England on a legal course which resulted in an alternative base for legal authority to that used by the pope and by many of the monarchs of Europe. By the reign of Henry VIII, the king was able to appeal to this body of law as legal justification for independence from the Church. Common law had incorporated customary law, and in doing so had become immediately relevant to people at all levels of society.

For the English, to a degree found in few other regions of western Europe, both formal and informal mechanisms of dispute settlement involved attorneys and recourse to courts of law. Justices of the Peace were accessible to all or most members of society, and

…the total impression is that the multitude of overlapping courts and laws penetrated right down to the level of the lowest inhabitants, and that ordinary people had a good working knowledge of the national system of criminal law…
(Macfarlane 1987, p. 74)

and their own legal rights. Macfarlane claims that in Westmoreland, between 1550 and 1720, large numbers of villagers personally initiated complex legal actions against their fellows, which were heard in the central courts of England. 'English society was based on, and integrated by, two principal mechanisms – money and the law'.

The continuing conflict between Church and state in western Europe produced:

• strong emphasis on the development of centralized legal systems spelling out the rights and responsibilities of individuals towards each other and to the state, and greatly expanding the state's powers over its members;
• a growing sense of the need to separate Church and state: each with its own independent set of laws and regulations governing life within the secular and spiritual domains; its own bureaucracy to promulgate and administer legal statutes; and its own set of archives to preserve the documentation upon which the developing systems of law were predicated;
• an expansion of the concept of law to cover an ever-increasing spectrum of daily life;
• a recognized need to separate the rights of the state over its members, and the separate rights of those members, independent of the state;
• and a burgeoning emphasis upon the importance of education.

Education became an alternative avenue to status attainment. Feudal lords became increasingly dependent on educated people to run their bureaucratic machinery, and citizens increasingly needed access to legal expertise to protect themselves from the claims of both the state and fellow citizens.⁵⁵ And with this emerging means of status attainment came an increasing emphasis on money income.

Since western Europe in this period was feudally organized, it was inevitable that key positions in the emerging bureaucracies were filled in the feudal manner, through the patronage of the royal household, rather than on the basis of educational training or legal expertise. So, within bureaucracies one had 'political' appointments to key positions, and people employed for their expertise and training under them.

Over succeeding centuries this arrangement was to produce increasing tension between educated 'experts' and feudally appointed principals. By the 17^th century this tension had hardened into a strong conviction on the part of the educated (who, by allying themselves with various other protesters of the period, gained increasing power) that principal positions within state bureaucracies and private enterprise should be filled on the basis of educational achievement and demonstrated 'expertise', not on the basis of patronage.

In later years placement on the basis of education was to be regarded as achieved; placement on the basis of patronage was to be considered ascribed. Of course, feudal appointments were just as 'achieved' as those of the modern period within the capitalist framework; only the kind of activity through which one achieved was very different.⁵⁶

The Aquinas Solution: Natural Law Distilled from Secular Experience  

As seems common at crisis points in western European history, at the time when Church and state confronted each other most directly, a person emerged who provided a philosophical construct from which both Church and state could argue.

Thomas of Aquinas (1225?-1274) was able to focus the debate and provide a logical construct which appeared to sum up and resolve the problem of the relationship between Church and state in the Church's favor. However, it was not long before princes, and those who worked for them, found in Aquinas's construct a justification for a separation of Church and state, each with its own set of laws, and each with its own independent rationale for existence.

Western Europe experienced a growing fascination with the work of Aristotle from the mid-12^th century onwards. Aristotle's focus upon categorization of the particular within the sensible world was to result in the re-emergence of a focus on human beings as part of the natural world. As Ullman has suggested:

It was as if a new continent had been discovered – the discovery of man's real nature – and a new subject-matter was revealed. With every justification has it been said that there was a Renaissance, a rebirth of the long-forgotten natural man.
(Ullman 1965, p. 167)

This was a natural man firmly placed in his supernatural context. The medieval fascination with Aristotle received impetus when scholars recognized that he offered a means of defining a new kind of law – natural law – law which God had established as the principles through which the natural world was organized and sustained.

This new definition of natural law directly challenged the traditional understanding of natural law as canonical law. It seemed that a confrontation was brewing between Church and state. If Aristotle could be seen as inspired, as spelling out the natural laws of God in the natural world, then people who sought bases for secular law which were different from those underpinning Church, or supernatural, law could appeal to him.

Aquinas's new model and definition of natural law would provide a way of resolving the looming confrontation. Both were legitimate. The emerging definition of natural law referred to a subset of God's laws, those relating to material existence.

The term 'supernatural' was coined in the 13^th century, at the time when there arose a strong need to differentiate clearly between two separate realms (cf. Murray 1978, p. 12). The spiritual realm was governed by spiritual laws, and the natural realm, and people, as creatures within that realm, were governed by natural laws. Human beings within society were governed, or ought to be governed, by laws which reflected those laws of nature.

God makes everything perfect. He had established laws for the governance of the spiritual realm, canonical law. He had also established laws for the governance of the secular world, natural law. Each set of laws would be found to be self-contained and perfect in its organization and functioning.

So, it was the responsibility of people in the secular realm to uncover the laws of nature, established by God for the smooth running of the secular realm, just as it was the responsibility of the Church to uncover and apply the laws God had established for the running of the Church and the spiritual realm. So Aquinas argued:

Now in human affairs a thing is said to be just from being right according to the rule of reason. But the first rule of reason is the law of nature …

Consequently every human law has just so much of the character of law as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it differs from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a corruption of law.
(Aquinas 1952, Pt 1: 2, Q. 95:2)

Whereas the Church had defined 'natural law' as a set of rules spelt out in Scripture and Church canons, Aquinas affirmed the validity of the emerging definition of natural law which came from Roman jurisprudence ⁵⁷ and Greek philosophy. To develop legal systems which reflected natural law, it was necessary to understand the 'nature' of human beings.

The claim by Aristotle, that civilization is based on people ordering their lives by instincts implanted in each individual,⁵⁸ resurfaced in the high Middle Ages. But the definition of those instincts reflected the recognized needs of medieval society.⁵⁹

In Aquinas's model we have a melding of the concepts of Roman jurisprudence and orthodox theology. The laws of nature should be sought, but, when found, would be discovered to be a coherent, immutable whole. If natural laws could be uncovered by examining the material world, the material world, in turn, would be found to be governed by sets of immutable laws established by God. By conforming to the laws established by God for the optimal performance of his creation, people could reasonably expect burgeoning prosperity.⁶⁰

Human beings bridged the natural and spiritual realms. Spiritually, they were governed by laws of the spirit, and, naturally, they were governed by laws of nature. As Aquinas put it,

To the natural law belongs everything to which a man is inclined according to his nature.
(Aquinas 1952, Pt 1: 2, Q. 94:4)

An understanding of natural law required comprehension of the nature of human beings, and the nature of human beings could be determined by observing them within their social setting.

Aquinas's construct made Church law 'supernatural law' and laws of the state 'natural law'. According to Aquinas, there were natural laws to which all creation conformed, which were implanted in human beings and in a subservient relationship to divine law. Those who conformed to natural law conformed also to the will of God, as expressed in the natural order.

Natural and divine law were hierarchically related, not opposed to each other. And it was possible for people to live according to the dictates of natural law, with a this-worldly, secular focus to their lives, and yet be living in tune with the will and purpose of God. For the natural world was a law-directed whole, composed of parts which were perfectly placed within the whole through the operation of that law.⁶¹ So, Aquinas observed:

… natural processes develop from simple to compound things, so much so that the highly developed organism is the completion, integration, and purpose of the elements. Such indeed is the case with any whole in comparison with its parts.
(Gilby 1960, p. 369)

The natural and supernatural wholes were logically prior to their elements, which only existed as parts of the whole. Without the whole, there is no point or purpose in the existence of its elements. The parts were created because they were necessary to the whole. Individuals did not exist in or for themselves. They only existed as members of a society.

A perfect creation required perfect parts. It was, therefore, the responsibility of all people to live as God had intended they should. Otherwise, they could be held accountable for the trials and troubles visited upon people in this life. And the perfect society was that which, in all its forms and functions, conformed most closely to natural and spiritual law.

Aquinas set western Europe on the search for natural laws governing every area of life in this world. From this time onwards, western Europeans increasingly accepted that if a natural law was discovered, people had a moral and spiritual duty to live by it.

It was this quest which set western Europeans on a path which led to the eventual change from natural laws legitimized by God, to natural laws legitimized by rational logic ⁶² , a move already prefigured in Aquinas's model. And, finally, as the secularism of the 18^th and 19^th centuries unfolded, to natural laws legitimized statistically ⁶³ . This made the elements primary and the characteristics of the wholes constructed from them determined by the characteristics of the elements⁶⁴ .

By the 17^th century, although it was still accepted that natural law had been established by God, it was increasingly accepted that any phenomenon in the sensible world could be explained by reference to natural laws. The natural realm was a self-contained, self defining whole. So, one could 'explain' phenomena in the natural world without recourse to the divine. There were no exceptions.

Understanding of natural laws, coupled with rational extrapolation from those laws would provide a full understanding of the possibilities and potential of the natural realm. One could also, by rationally extrapolating from known laws, determine the likely existence and character of associated natural laws.

And all the while, western Europeans became increasingly aware that individuals had a moral duty to 'make the most' of themselves, to fulfill their lives, to 'develop their potential'.

With devout people proving their sincerity and morality through a life focused within this world, the responsibility of each person to strive for perfection through self-development became the prime obligation of life. They had to 'fulfill their potential' – as defined by 17^th century 'responsible people'.

It was, equally, and for the same reason, their responsibility to ensure that they realized the potential of the resources placed in their hands. People who misused the 'talents' given to them by God could expect the fate of the indolent servant in Jesus' parable of the talents ⁶⁵ . Richard Baxter, in 1678, spelt this out very clearly:

If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be God's steward, and to accept his gifts, and use them for him when he requireth it; you may labor to be rich for God, though not for the flesh and sin.
(1838, p. 377)

Then the greatest of all sins became, as Foucault has eloquently described, the sin of Sloth. To waste the life which God had given, or the resources he had placed in your hands, was not only a sin against oneself; it was a sin against society.

Initially, given the concerns of the age, the focus on natural law was a focus on social organization and activity. Natural was social, and the focus of intellectual inquiry, strongly influenced by the Investiture Conflict, was political.

Within a generation of Aquinas's teaching, those who had been seeking legal and philosophical foundations for the independent rights of kings from popes succeeded in separating natural law from canonical law and arguing for their entirely independent legitimacy and efficacy.

God had created separate, self-consistent, natural and supernatural worlds, each with its own set of laws defining the correct interrelations among the parts. It was in the interests of civil powers to insist on, and to provide philosophical justification for, the entirely separate development and efficacy of civil law.⁶⁶

Over succeeding centuries this process was to produce recognition of a whole range of separately existing bodies of law relating to specific areas of the natural realm. Western Europe became convinced of the importance of written law as sets of basic principles through which elements in any whole could be perfected and combined and through which the whole gained its identity. To control the natural world, one needed to discover the sets of laws for such control. Knowledge of laws was power.

The search for systems of laws defining the correct interrelations among parts of logically constructed wholes had begun in earnest. And, because in the medieval world all law was enshrined within a guardian bureaucracy, the search for laws assumed such bureaucratic underpinning. Where a body of laws was uncovered there should be a bureaucratic body to safeguard, preserve and apply those laws.⁶⁷

By the end of the 12^th century western Europeans were already becoming aware of the potential political value of an understanding of the natural world. Alexander Neckham (1157-1217) claimed that when

the subtle truths that lurk in the very bosom of nature' had been uncovered, 'what enemies could withstand the kingdom that was able to triumph over [i.e. master] the sciences?'
(quoted in Murray 1978, p. 124).

With Aquinas's new interpretation of 'natural law', Western Europe quickly came to believe that, by uncovering the laws for the organization of the material environment, people could gain power to manipulate it in their own interests.

From the outset the recognized importance of establishing secular law as an independent, self-contained system was based on a pragmatic determination to use it in establishing secular independence, empowering the state. Knowledge of laws, and the ability to manipulate them, was power. The search for natural laws was, from the outset, accompanied by a belief that those who found them and learned to master them empowered people to exploit to the full the domains or environments governed by them.

During the later medieval period people became increasingly aware of both religious and secular corruption, as those with access to legal expertise used their power to disinherit those who had no access to it.

People felt less constrained by social obligation as hierarchical relationships became challenged with the growing abuse of power and authority in the medieval world. They therefore felt free to pursue private gain without the need for social justification. In fact, if one could gain an advantage through appeal to law, one could claim 'legitimacy' in making the most of that advantage.

Over succeeding centuries people increasingly learned to manipulate legal statutes to increase their private wealth, accepting fewer and fewer social responsibilities which were not required by written law. By the 17^th century, people were able to challenge many of the customary responsibilities of earlier centuries in this way. Joseph Lee, a succinct spokesman for the cause of enclosure and independence espoused by new landowners in that century, could say:

Let it be granted that our land and businesse lying nearer together fewer servants will be kept; are any bound to keep more servants than are needful for their businesse; or may they not cast how to do the same businesse with least labor … Is a man bound to keep servants to pill strawes or labor in vain? By what law? …
(quoted in Appleby 1978, p. 61)⁶⁸

'Money-making' patron-client networks and an emerging emphasis on quantification  

Prior to the 13^th century, merchants were constantly on the move in an unending pursuit of profit. They were fringe dwellers, outside normal society, who challenged many of the central moral presumptions of the feudal period and were regarded with suspicion by upright citizens ⁶⁹ . In an endeavor to contain them and yet, at the same time, attract them to establish their bases in their territories, states established rules and regulations both governing their activities and defining the necessary obligations of people who interacted with them.

They formed a common-interest group who regulated their affairs amongst themselves on the basis of cooperative rather than competitive exchange. Because of their exclusion from feudal society, they formed parallel, informal networks of patron-client relationships among themselves. Over time, there emerged an informal ranking of the 'money makers' of western Europe and an intermeshing of their interests. They then used their wealth and collective power increasingly to subvert the feudal system.

By the 13^th century the relationship between feudal leaders and the wealth holders of western Europe was increasingly based on transfers of wealth in return for feudal position.⁷⁰ Those who gained wealth were able, from the outset, to use it to purchase position and recognition within feudal society. As they increasingly gained the upper hand, they were finally, in many regions of western Europe, to displace the feudal hierarchies with their own, alternative networks based on patron-client relationships.

Of course, as they gained political power, they increasingly influenced the exercise of government and the formation and implementation of law. By the 17^th century, the foundations had been laid for the transformation of feudal structures into those which we now realize are required by capitalism.

The intermeshed patron-client networks of those engaged in wealth-accumulating activities remained important throughout Western Europe during the succeeding seven hundred years. Muldrew (1993: 163) has shown that during the early modern period, those who identified each other as engaged in similar activity within the marketplace 'stressed credit relations, trust, obligation and contracts' amongst themselves rather than unbridled individualistic profit making. They acted as common-interest groupings within patron-client networks.

Western European merchants travelled throughout the Mediterranean, into Egypt, through central Asia, and throughout western and northern Europe. They were not scholars. They were morally suspect adventurers, willing to incorporate any ideas or practices which might increase the profitability of their ventures.

Above all, what they needed was a clear, simple method of accounting and calculation. During their travels they encountered Muslim traders, who had gained a new form of calculation from northern India, based on the abacus. The abacus required a base-ten number calculation system which employed the zero to retain all place columns throughout calculation. Traders who accepted this new system gained great advantages in bargaining and exchange.

The ponderous Roman numbering system, enshrined in the literary, legal and political worlds, was cumbersome, made any attempts at either multiplication or division extremely complex, and was inappropriate to the use of the abacus. It was, however, for a variety of reasons, strongly supported by scholars.

Scholars, remaining wedded to the Roman system, had great difficulty in mastering the principles of the new mathematics – principles which required the use of the zero as a place holder. This produced a clear divergence between money makers and scholars, with the money makers of Europe gaining increasingly independent control over financial matters as their expertise outstripped that of people tied to the use of the Roman numbering system.

The new mathematics of the late medieval period was important in driving a wedge between scholarship and practical bookkeeping which has been reflected in the Western separation of the humanities from the sciences and commerce, ever since. It was also to mark the beginning of a developing interest in numeracy as a prime means of expressing the quantitative evaluation of individuals and groups (required by the emerging 'modern' social template which needed means for comparing the material worth of individuals).

While scholars depended on the existence of feudal society for their success, since scholarship was a means of upward mobility, merchants gained greater freedom of activity as feudal society weakened.

These developments occurred at the time when secular rulers were seeking increased independence from religious domination and were looking for people with the necessary skills to help them to become truly independent. High on the list of those who were most valued were those who had developed successful mercantile ventures. They were able to support secular rulers financially and to provide the kinds of skills necessary for the more efficient development of taxation and other forms of revenue earning and accounting. As Murray claims,

Authorities needed arithmetic because they, like merchants, had counting houses.
(Murray 1978, p. 195)

In western European capitals the expansion of legal bureaucracy was paralleled by the expansion of fiscal bureaucracies, and an area of law emerged, focusing on commercial activity.

By the reign of Henry II the English administration of finances was already being formally systematized, with its own sets of laws and regulations. This organization was spelt out in a descriptive handbook entitled the Dialogue of the Exchequer.

Similar developments occurred in both France and Germany, while in Italy a range of very sophisticated commercial techniques were developed, supported by handbooks of commercial practice. Those from the rest of Europe who wished to master the intricacies of double entry bookkeeping or buying and selling on credit travelled to Italy, where they were able either to enter employment in established business firms or to study the new methods of accounting and banking at schools and universities.

Regionally based administrations became stronger as the hierarchical interrelationships of feudalism weakened. They also became more formally organized and economically viable as the political structures supported by the administrations increased in stability.

The development of legal and fiscal institutions provided a base for bureaucratic government which had not existed in medieval feudal Europe. Over time, a rationale for government emerged which was different from that of feudalism, based on control of legal and fiscal bureaucracies and systems of law rather than on the personal allegiances of land holders.⁷¹

Autonomy and systems of law  

As towns arose in an economically reviving Europe during the later medieval period, people were provided with new means of livelihood. Merchants needed bases, markets, merchandise and security. They were to find all these in the newly forming urban areas. As trade increased, the need for artisans grew to provide the merchandise for trading. Towns, gaining their prosperity from trading, consciously provided support to their traders and encouragement to merchants to relocate to their districts. Rural dwellers from estates near towns gravitated to them and became involved in the production of goods or in the provision of various services to other urban dwellers.

Most larger towns managed to distance themselves from feudal lords and laws, developing their own sets of laws and bureaucracies to administer them. The legal statutes of towns spelt out the rights and responsibilities of citizens, the legal relationships between towns and rural land holders, and the 'freedom' of citizens from the claims of rural lords and statutes.

In most towns there was a gradual evolution towards equality before the law and this equality came to be extended to unfree persons who settled in towns. "Town air makes free" became an important principle in medieval law.
(Koenigsberger 1987, p. 146)

In most towns of western Europe it became accepted that residence for a year and a day set serfs free from their obligations to the estate owners under whom they formerly served. In the minds of the inhabitants of western European towns, freedom and 'progress' became closely associated. Equally, rural laboring, servitude and domination by 'tradition' became conflated. For a laborer to better himself, he should do what the fabled Dick Whittington did in the folktale – go to town to seek his fortune.

Since urban areas became identified with freedom from servitude and increased material wealth, and towns emphasized the importance of merchant activity, the merchant, from the mid-13^th century onwards, slowly emerged as more of a hero than a rogue. In the minds of western Europeans, country life became equated with serfdom and tradition, town life with freedom and self-improvement.⁷²

As Hertz observed,

the feudal disintegration of the central government .. , gave many towns the opportunity of winning an almost republican independence.
(Hertz 1972, p. 57)

Where any region, however small in territorial extent, could successfully establish and maintain autonomous legal and fiscal bureaucracies for the government of the people, it could claim autonomy on the basis of the existence of these structures. The state became identified with control of bureaucracies which applied systems of laws and regulations. Those who controlled the bureaucracies controlled the state. Any territory which could successfully establish such bureaucracies and legal systems could claim autonomy.

The weakening of feudal institutions resulted in a range of demands on kings as pressures for self-government of regions within their territories mounted. Not only were regions within kingdoms claiming limited autonomy, they were also insistently demanding the limitation of legal prerogatives of the Crown.

While the Magna Carta was an unusually sweeping charter, similar limitations on the rights of rulers were being negotiated throughout western Europe.

Nearly everywhere in Europe kings acceded to such demands for the sake of peace at home and support for their foreign wars … Everywhere rulers granted charters to cities in their territories, allowing them varying degrees of self-government.
(Koenigsberger 1987, p. 233)

The separation of states and commerce  

During the 13^th and 14^th centuries there arose, in western Europe, as in England, groups of well-to-do merchants, wealthy professionals and rural property holders. Either through direct purchase or through the judicious use of credit, they were able to gain control over increasing areas of land. Over time they developed into a country gentry with resources of their own on which they might call.

Landlords, where they claimed power over common lands, could see in them sources of revenue through sale which would in no way diminish the size of their domains. They increasingly claimed title to these lands and sold them to the highest bidders. Rural small holders, who required access to common land in order to supplement the inadequate returns from their holdings, found their access being denied, and increasing numbers were forced from their lands.

From personalized, cooperative hierarchical relationships to object–oriented, competitive oppositional relationships  

One could no longer, in the later medieval centuries, speak of any simplistic division of rural society into lords and peasants. Rather, there were some large landlords who controlled estates of considerable extent, with large numbers of resident villeins, and there were landowners with very small holdings, working for themselves and eking out a living which was little different from that of the feudal villein.

Between these extremes there was a large group of landlords who controlled estates of varying size, with varying numbers of dependent land holders, and with varying degrees of acceptability by those tenants.

Not only were there large and small property holders, there was also a growing number of property holders whose wealth came from commercial activity and who had strong links with towns. These land holders were 'owners' rather than holders. They had not acquired rights to property through feudal favor but through purchase.⁷³ They therefore felt under less obligation to accept feudal responsibilities, either towards those who were hierarchically superior or towards those inferior to themselves.

Most lived in the country but conducted their business activities in towns. Gaining status from their rural addresses and wealth from their town pursuits, they were in a position to play one off against the other to their own advantage. In the process they became defined as separate from both town and country, an independent group who became increasingly aware that they could, by manipulating various systems of law, gain an advantage for themselves.

This group, in succeeding centuries, became identified as a common-interest group, an incipient 'class' with interests of their own which they should pursue.⁷⁴ Their success in manipulating legal statutes to their own advantage made them a major force in western Europe and provided a class of 'owners', 'employers' and 'directors' as the emerging economic concerns of Europe became increasingly dominant.

Acting as the 'unions' and 'nations' of medieval Europe had acted, those who identified with the 'country gentry' saw themselves as having common interests, as sharing cooperative relationships with each other against opposing groups – the workers, the poor, the Crown, the 'idle rich'.

There was also a constantly expanding population of itinerant laborers who had lost access to land, or whose lands, without access to common land, were inadequate to meet their needs ⁷⁵ . They moved with the crops and seasons, employed, as needed, by land holders. They were coming to understand the world in terms which directly reflect the experience of those employed by others. As Thompson argues:

Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer's time and their 'own' time. And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.
(Thompson 1967, p. 61)

The relationship between the growing population of employed people and those who employed them was being transformed from one of hierarchical responsibility into one based on wage labor, with employers and employed, landowners and tenants being increasingly seen as opposed groups.

With decreasing populations in the later 14^th and early 15^th centuries, and opportunities abounding for material advancement for those who wished it, the emphasis on material returns for labor input greatly increased:

The Black Death … brought a sense of urgency, especially in urban areas. The work day was extended and night work became common as merchants sought greater profits and workers, higher wages …

Clocks and the rhythmic chimes of bells became more important than ever …

By the end of the century, 'merchant's time', rather than 'the traditional conception of time in Christian theology', became the rule.
(Gottfried 1983, p. 81)⁷⁶

In the process, there developed a need for the determination of starting and finishing times in work.⁷⁷ It became a common practice, perpetuated over several hundred years, for early morning and curfew bells to be sounded to alert people to the start and end of the working day.

As one, by-lined P.Q., wrote in an item in the February 17^th, 1838 edition of The Mirror: in 1644, Richard Palmer of Workingham had left a bequest to the town ensuring that in future the great bell of the Workingham Church was to be rung for half an hour daily at 4am and again at 8pm:

… that as many as might live within the sound might be thereby induced to a timely going to rest in the evening, and early arising in the morning to the labors and duties of their several callings, (things ordinarily attended and rewarded with thrift and proficiency)
… the same being done in most of the cities and market towns, and many other places in the kingdom.
(The Mirror No. 879, 17^th February, 1838, p. 98)

During this period of feudal decay the peasants of Europe, in the words of Blum, threw off:

… the bonds that held them in serfdom. Nonetheless, they still owed servile obligations to seigniors, and they were still subject, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the locality, to the jurisdiction and punitive authority of seigniors.

Some historians have made much of the fact that the dependence or servility of these peasants was not attached to their persons (as it was to the person of a serf). Rather, they argue that the dependence adhered to the land. It became part of the price the peasant paid for the use of his holding to the seignior who had the superior ownership of the land.
(Blum 1978, p. 33)

This progressive transference of rights and responsibilities from person – person hierarchical relationships ⁷⁸ to person – property – person oppositional relationships, often confused and ambiguous during the 14^th to 16^th centuries in western Europe (and during the 17^th to 19^th centuries in much of eastern Europe), removed direct responsibility for the welfare of tenants from landlords and resulted in an increasing sense of alienation.

Landlords were increasingly able to demand servility as a cost to the tenant, and the land holder or rural laborer increasingly objectified such costs as the price of the land or of employment. This social distancing of rural poor and landlord distorted recognized social relationships, emphasizing the differences and decreasing the recognized commonalities between them. Cooperative, interdependent relationships were being displaced by oppositional, independent relationships, mediated through legal statutes governing the ownership and use of property.

During the 19^th century Marx was to comment on these developments, arguing that, over time, the dependence of the serf on the lord of the manor became increasingly transformed into apparent independence with the individual 'hemmed in on all sides by material relations' (Fischer & Marek 1973, p. 57). Increasingly, the rights and responsibilities of individuals to each other became legally spelt out and materially measurable, objectified. These obligations could then be traded in the same way as other objects.

That is, the rights and responsibilities implicit in social relations could be treated as rewards and costs and the potential labor input of the obligation could be evaluated against labor inputs into commodities. One could calculate the money worth of social obligations. This development did not do away with the obligations; it only made the individual who owed them appear to be independent of those to whom the obligations were owed. As Marx perceptively observed of the production of commodities:

… it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things …

This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
(Marx 1887, p. 43)

Since the obligations were costs attached to the land worked by the tenant, the tenant could be seen as independent of the landlord to whom the obligations were owed. Previously hierarchical obligations and responsibilities were transformed into 'terms of rent' and attached to the property rather than to the people involved.

A social relation between individuals had assumed 'in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things'. The focus of Europeans was being fixed on the legal obligations and quantifiable costs of social interaction, attached to or incorporated into the object of any exchange, rather than the persons involved in the interaction.⁷⁹

Increasingly, over succeeding centuries, people were to see all social relationships in terms of costs and rewards within a legalized framework of obligations and rights. What was gained and what was lost through social interaction became the determinants of social exchange.

The focus of interaction was on the products rather than the participants. One could now aim to minimize costs and maximize personal gains with less and less consideration of social responsibilities not spelt out in legislation. Social relationships were being reduced in form to commercial transactions.⁸⁰

The alienation of property and stress on legally bounded confrontation  

The focus of life was increasingly on the gains and losses of interactions. This competitive calculation of costs and rewards was coupled with an emerging belief in the morality of 'realizing the potential' of one's resources; and with burgeoning possibilities of both attaining and enhancing status by accumulating wealth with which to purchase estates.

Business people and country gentry therefore saw it as more and more important to use their assets to generate increased wealth. In order for landlords to increase their personal incomes from their holdings it was necessary to rationalize land holding and land use practices.

This focus on reducing costs and increasing profits resulted in permanent reductions in the number of people living off the land, the consolidation of land holdings, and increasing farm size, together with alterations in land use practices. In turn, these developments could only lead to increasing tension between landlords and tenants and increasing alienation (see 16^th Century Land Alienation for a contemporary account of this alienation).

During the 15^th century, as population increased again, increasing numbers of rural dwellers were displaced from their holdings. The number of itinerant laborers moving with the seasons, crops and availability of work escalated, and towns' populations rapidly expanded.

Increasingly, it became a fact of life that the person without an inalienable legally recognized right to property was at the mercy of those who controlled the means of livelihood. Any person who was materially or socially dependent on another gave that person material power over him or her. One needed to own property (that is, have written, legal entitlement to exclusive possession) in order to maintain social and material independence.

The small holders and laborers of western Europe were forced, by bitter experience, to re–evaluate their relationship to feudal hierarchies and find alternative bases for social and economic security. The natural direction in which this took them was towards the personal legal ownership of land and other means of livelihood, with all the rights and responsibilities of ownership spelt out in legislation and attached to the property.

Using Law to Rob the Poor and Dispossess the Weak  

Europe was passing through a period of profound political, social, religious and intellectual change. And, as with all such fundamental change, affecting and being affected by alterations in the primary presumptions of thought and organization, people became less and less sure of themselves and those around them.

From the 15^th century onwards, as Foucault so graphically describes,

…the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western man.
(Foucault 1971, pp. 15) ⁸¹

Nothing made any sense.

A contemporary comment from the 1350s paints a graphic picture:

justice and pity were powerless, so soon as it appeared advantageous to murder or poison rivals in power at the hospitable board. The science of finance was reduced to robbery, politics to perjury … .
(quoted in Nohl 1961, p. 96)

The miracle play of Theophil included sentiments which summed up the mood of the age:

O Thou thoroughly wicked God, if I could but lay hands on Thee! Truly I would tear Thee to pieces. I deny Thee, deny Thy faith and Thy power. I will go to the Orient, turn Mussulman, and live according to the law of Mahomet. He is a fool who puts his trust in Thee!
(quoted in Nohl 1961, p. 97)

People seemed able to apply the laws, established by God for the more perfect organization and functioning of society, to personal gain, to robbing the poor, to dispossessing the weak, to denying long-established social responsibilities. And the justifications they gave for their actions did not make sense in terms of the understandings of the feudal world.

While their actions could be justified by law, they contravened all the sensibilities of medieval people. They had long assumed that society was organized in terms of complementary, cooperative hierarchies, with the hierarchically superior taking responsibility for the welfare of those under their protection.

With the fundamental assumptions of communities in a state of change and disarray, people found it difficult to keep control of reality. There were too many conflicting and contradictory understandings of life, and it was increasingly difficult to know who or what to believe. Europeans became increasingly aware, and fearful, of the effects of madness, of people whose view of the world did not 'make sense', who flirted with 'forbidden wisdom'. As Foucault says:

What does it presage, this wisdom of fools? Doubtless, since it is a forbidden wisdom, it presages both the reign of Satan and the end of the world …

Apocalyptic dreams are not new, it is true, in the 15^th century; they are, however, very different in nature from what they had been earlier. The delicately fantastic iconography of the 14^th century … where the order of God and its imminent victory are always apparent, gives way to a vision of the world where all wisdom is annihilated …

Victory is neither God's nor the Devil's: it belongs to Madness … On all sides, madness fascinates man.
(Foucault 1971, pp. 22,23)

During this period the movement towards the enclosure of common land and the rationalization of land holding and land use produced severe social distortions. As Polanyi has described:

Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'.

The fabric of society was being disrupted, desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defences of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.
(Polanyi 1957, p. 35)

Monarchies of the Reformation period, increasingly despotic, looked for support from the common population against an increasingly independent rural gentry who were challenging feudal responsibilities and insisting on the logic of what we now call 'economic rationality'. As Polanyi claims, the Tudors and Stuarts of England used the power of central government to relieve the victims of this transformation in property rights and, in the process, gained the increasingly vociferous opposition of those who stood to benefit from enclosure, the rural gentry.

The monarchies of western Europe and their bureaucracies were essentially feudal, not business-oriented. Political power in the 16^th century still rested with hierarchies whose positions were legitimized by their relationship to the Crown, not by their control of material resources.

The 'money-making' gentry and the feudally oriented political hierarchies of Europe were increasingly seeing their interests in oppositional rather than hierarchical terms. This confrontation produced an expansion and elaboration of the centralized legal system, developed through preceding centuries, to incorporate rules and regulations governing relationships between state and rural gentry and commercial interests. Another elaboration spelt out the relationships between landowners and tenants and between employers and employees.

The state, through its legal bureaucracies, became an intermediary between tenant and landowner, between employer and employee. Legal systems therefore became more detailed, spelling out the rights and obligations between subjects as well as those between subjects and princes.

Blum (1978, p. 60ff) has succinctly spelled out the consequences of this movement for peasants and seigniors on the European continent. Over time the obligations of tenant and landowner, employer and employee, became standardized, with labor commitment, tithe of produce, and cash payments becoming increasingly objectified by statute. Peasants or workers – who dared – could appeal to the courts if they considered themselves unfairly treated.

In England the scene was a little different. During the 15^th century legal developments resulted in the spelling out of a comprehensive law of contract. According to Maitland, the bonds of family settlements through which land had been tied up within kin groups were loosened, so that each inheritor gained alienable title, and villein tenure was converted into the secure copyhold tenure of modern times (see Cam 1957, p. 126).

This removal of responsibility for the tenant's welfare from landlord to state, from the feudal person – person hierarchical relationship of the lord and tenant, to a person – state bureaucracy – person oppositional relationship profoundly affected medieval understandings of the world. It was part of a general movement towards the interpolation of a non-personal, apparently objective legal framework in terms of which interpersonal relationships (increasingly being identified as a body of interactions relating to a particular 'environment' – the economic) could be assessed and limited.

As the rights and responsibilities of interactants were legally objectified, knowledge of the law became a means of maximizing profits. One needed to know the statutes. Prest explained it well:

the Elizabethan and early Stuart gentry learnt their law … from the various manuals and texts designed specifically to meet the needs of landlords and J. P.s.
(Prest 1967, p. 21)

Strong emphasis was placed on legal knowledge as a means of protecting one's interests against opposing groups.

Inns of Court, the principal legal schools of the period in England,

attracted two classes of students: those who sought to become lawyers, and those whose parents "do not desire them to be trained in the science of the laws, or to live by its practice, but only by their patrimonies".
(Prest 1967, p. 22)

Those who owned estates needed to know the law in relation to estate ownership. The Inns of Court had become 'the nurserie of the greater part of the gentrie of the realme' (Prest 1967, p. 22).

While the poor had to hire the services of lawyers – whose fees, as we have already seen, were considered exorbitant – the gentry were being trained to defend their legal rights to property. Legal power was on the side of landlords and employers. And they were being trained to view relationships as based on legal definition and confrontation.

The 'modern' world would be one in which people identified themselves in terms of classes, hierarchically ranked through their former statuses within feudal society, with the 'higher' having access to legal expertise not available to the 'lower', and considering themselves the 'natural' directors of 'lower' classes. Society was becoming divided into competing common-interest groups, into embryonic classes, whose confrontations would be framed by state legislation.⁸²

Private ownership, consumption and accumulation  

As previously feudal relationships became legally objectified, the possibility of making demands of tenants and rural laborers without considering them as people became increasingly conceivable. With landlords and employers decreasingly needing to confront tenants and employees as persons with whom they shared direct social relationships, it became possible to whittle away the rights of the poor.

Jurists steadily reduced the tenants' right of freedom and movement; allowed landlords to raise their demands for labor service beyond long-accepted norms; and steadily weakened the security that attached to customary rural tenures. And employers successfully argued for state legislation compelling the poor to work.

This attenuation of recognized social obligation deepened the emphasis on freeholding and private enterprise so that, by the 16^th century, as Christopher Hill observed,

when the business man of … Geneva, Amsterdam or London looked into his inmost heart, he found that God had planted there a deep respect for the principle of private property.
(Hill 1966, p. 46)

Increasingly, to ensure social and physical well-being, people had to own what they needed. This requirement placed mounting demands on production, fuelling a growth in commodity output.

Demonstrating to others that one was materially independent or self-sufficient gave one increased status and prestige. It became increasingly 'obvious' that property should be privately owned, and that such ownership was ownership of the thing itself, not merely of socially approved rights to its use. The principle of private property was undeniably a natural law principle. Those who could demonstrate such ownership, demonstrated their moral and therefore social worth.

During the 16^th century in much of western Europe (and a century or two later in most eastern areas), as Blum argues:

… monarchs had managed to divest the nobility of much of its political power as a corporate entity. Yet the nobles not only continued but were strengthened in their social position and in their claim to special privilege, and they retained and broadened their claim to the land, labor, dues, and subservience of the peasantry.
(Blum 1978, p. 197)

Monarchies managed to secure their own political positions and emasculate the political authority of the nobility and powerful landowners by granting legally sanctioned privilege to them at the expense of the poor.

The reduction of political responsibilities and the reaffirmation of legal and economic entitlements led in turn to the development of absentee landlords. They left their estates in the hands of managers and lived in an increasingly profligate manner. This required excessive borrowing, often against either the future production of estates or the value of the estate itself. As McCracken described:

In the last quarter of the 16^th century, a spectacular consumer boom occurred. The noblemen of Elizabethan England began to spend with a new enthusiasm, on a new scale. In the process they dramatically transformed their world of goods and the nature of Western consumption …

They changed their patterns of hospitality as well, vastly inflating its ceremonial character and costs. Elizabethan noblemen entertained one another, their subordinates, and, occasionally, their monarch at ruinous expense.
(McCracken 1988, p.11)

This situation was tailor-made for the mercantile capitalists of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Having inherited the entrepreneurial skills and the structures of medieval capitalism and mobile capital, they were able to relocate their enterprises and take advantage of the profligacy of nobility to accumulate sizeable fortunes. Yet, once having accumulated their fortunes and having purchased the rundown estates of those whose profligacy had been their undoing, they found themselves expected to live in the same extravagant manner.

There developed a tension between increasing consumption and conserving one's gains for further expansion of one's holding which required increased stress on the material productivity of estates. As Mukerji says:

… the hedonistic culture of mass consumption was probably as crucial in shaping early patterns of capital development in Europe as the asceticism usually associated with this era. Hedonism was to consumers what asceticism was to entrepreneurs: it provided the cultural rationale for increased interest and participation in economic activities.
(Mukerji 1983, p. 2)

The new emphasis on conspicuous consumption coincided with a strong expansion in commodity output, which provided burgeoning incomes to those who controlled commerce. In a period of rapid economic expansion, entrepreneurs could both indulge in the hedonistic consumerism of the age and greatly expand their mercantile interests, funded by the new wealth.

The rise of Antwerp as the financial capital of Europe in the late 15^th and early 16^th century coincided with the opening up of the Portuguese spice trade and the conquest of the Americas by Spain. These developments stimulated entrepreneurial activities throughout most of western Europe and further fuelled the growth of commercial activity. Western Europe entered into a prolonged economic boom which coincided with the growing emphases on conspicuous consumption, material independence, and the use of holdings to generate increasing surpluses.

This was an age of merchant houses, acting across territorial boundaries and developing their own sense of identity as semi-independent political, as well as economic, enterprises.⁸³ Princes, seeing in the granting of monopolies to merchant houses another way of raising revenue and of tying merchant houses into the political structure, granted to them exclusive rights to trade in certain goods. Joyce Appleby described the process:

… the king had long had the power to grant monopolies, which took the form of issuing licenses for the exclusive public control of a product, a trade, or even a government service like the inspection of tobacco. James found the granting of monopolies a particularly facile way of increasing his income.

A typical Englishman, as Christopher Hill noted, lived 'in a house built with monopoly bricks … heated by monopoly coal … His clothes were held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins … he ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, monopoly lobsters' …

With the growth of both the internal and external markets, monopolies distorted the whole pattern of trade.
(Appleby 1978, p. 33)

What started out as being to the advantage of mercantile entrepreneurs became another means of revenue collection, a further drain on business houses which already saw themselves as separate from, and using, the state in which they operated. As Appleby pointed out, increasing numbers of traders, who found their activities severely curtailed by monopolies, began insisting that the right to free trade (that is, the abolition of state controls on production and sale) was a basic human right, a natural law right which, since Aquinas, made it a legally required right.

Over a period of more than a century the money makers of western Europe came to oppose the granting of monopolies. They argued increasingly forcefully for the separation of political and economic activity and increased autonomy for merchant houses to act on their own, in their own interests without government prohibitions.

Free trade was to imply not only the right of traders to trade, but also the reduction of government restrictions on trade. Traders should not be subject to political or social restrictions on their activities. Rather, laws and regulations should be passed which guaranteed individuals and businesses freedom to pursue their own independent interests without interference from the state.

Increasingly, what we now unhesitatingly define as economic concerns became distinguished from the political and social concerns of the period, the province of a common-interest grouping which included country gentry, traders, merchants, financiers and manufacturers. They demanded greater autonomy, and government interests demanded greater control of this newly emerging environment.

The role of government was being redefined by this common-interest group as the provision of a secure fiscal, legal and social background to commercial activity, not the regulation of business. Business should operate under its own laws and regulations, those which applied to the economic world.

By arguing for the existence of a separate environment, a realm which was governed by its own internal principles and logic, those who saw themselves as operating within that environment could advocate its independence from state control. It should conform to its own laws. And such laws would necessarily facilitate business activity, providing a dependable set of rules governing business transactions which would ensure the consistency of economic decisions and planning. Inevitably, those rules and regulations reflected the emerging relationships of the period.

Many members of this business-oriented group looked with some contempt on those whose self-indulgence led to the dissipation of their inherited wealth.⁸⁴ It was clearly not in their interests to support monarchical regimes of similar temper which saw them as sources of ready income through taxation. Most either applied pressure on regimes for reform of business regulation and control or moved their centers of operation to areas where such reform was already occurring.

The Renaissance state of the 16^th century supported bureaucracies which, from the 20^th century perspective, would be considered very corrupt. No clear distinction was made between the office and the office holder, and the expenses of office were not clearly distinguished from those unconnected with the office.

The rulers of western Europe were not business people; they were traditional rulers, supported by a nobility which was feudally justified. While the emerging nations of Europe supported bureaucracies, those bureaucracies were organized in ways which facilitated patron-client access to the wealth, information and influence which they focused. The personalized bureaucracies of patron-client states are organized and operate on very different principles from those of Western industrialized states.

Bureaucratic posts were tied into the traditional systems of leadership and patronage. Those who identified with the business and new property interests of the period found themselves in conflict with the traditional, non-business-oriented claims and requirements of the bureaucracies with which they were forced to deal. It became increasingly 'obvious' to money makers that those appointed to bureaucratic offices were a drain on their resources, not there to facilitate their activities but to put obstacles in their way.

This belief led to an increasing insistence that the roles of bureaucratic offices should be clearly defined and limited, and that a clear distinction should be made between the bureaucratic office and the office holder. Holders of offices should be trained for their posts and paid stipends, and should not assume that they could use their offices as means of generating income.⁸⁵ As Trevor-Roper claimed:

To cut down the oppressive, costly sinecures of Church and State, and to revert, mutatis mutandis, to the mercantilist policy of the cities, based on the economic interest of society – such were the two essential methods of avoiding revolution in the 17^th century.
(Trevor-Roper 1972, p. 77)

During the 16^th century religious demands for reform of the Roman Church changed into demands for independence and for the removal of Church authority. By the 17^th century there was a strong belief amongst Protestants, property holders and business people that 'responsible' people, primarily those who belonged to the educated and business communities, should be freed from state and Church interference. They should be able to 'develop' themselves, both spiritually and materially, unhindered by state and Church bureaucratic demands.

Entrepreneurs favored the decentralization of political control for business reasons and found themselves in accord with Protestant groups advocating decentralization for other reasons. Inevitably, the arguments of the various groupings became intermixed, with Protestants making claims which could more easily be understood from a mercantile position, and mercantile entrepreneurs supporting arguments which seemed primarily religious in character.

The growth of mercantile power coincided with the decay of feudal structures and a decreasing acceptance of responsibility for the welfare of their tenants by landowners. By the turn of the 17^th century increasing wealth, flowing from imperial expansion, coupled with expanded trade between regions of western Europe, provided a buffer against the unfolding effects of land enclosure and the appropriation of peasant holdings by landowners.

As rural people became displaced, many of them drifted into towns where they could obtain some form of employment. Movement into towns was traditionally linked with the freedom of the individual from obligation to landowners. A presumption of independence accompanied this movement, which naturally allied these displaced rural-urban migrants with a pragmatic Puritanism which emphasized the independent, private rights of individuals against both Church and state.

This sense of independence was coupled with a strong sense of injustice at being displaced from rural holdings which had long been their means of livelihood and identity. Those who should have provided feudal protection had failed them. Traditional authorities could no longer be trusted to protect the rights of the poor and, increasingly, they would be prepared to align themselves with those who opposed such authority.⁸⁶

From the subversion of tradition to plotting the future  

By the turn of the 17^th century there was a growing sense among business people, Puritans and the dispossessed that those who claimed authority on the basis of tradition, whether prelates, princes or bureaucrats, should be displaced by those better fitted to govern, who complied with the natural law requirements of the age.

They too should have the law applied to them, and people should be protected by law from the excesses of a leadership which seemed out of step with the pragmatic business concerns of the age. The 'property-owning, money-making' people of western Europe became increasingly aware that their interests did not coincide with the interests of those who controlled the state bureaucracies of Europe.

There was a feeling in western Europe that life was improving. The terrible uncertainties of the 15^th and 16^th centuries were being replaced by a dawning sense that the future would be better than the past. The awareness of an uncontrolled madness in the air, which Foucault described, was being displaced by a sense that Europeans, by devoting themselves to the reform of society, could take control of their own destinies.

But, as we have seen, the reform of society required, first, the reform of the person. Those who wanted to reform society recognized that such a change required the reformation of individuals. Individuals should apply themselves to self-development, to self-improvement. Then society would indeed be reformed.

While the world was still in turmoil, the primary ideological assumptions of the emerging dominant groups in western Europe were becoming more certain. Amongst 'responsible' people ⁸⁷ , those who were demanding increasing freedom and control in western Europe, the feudal thinking of the past was being displaced by what we now term 'modern' ways of understanding the world. Now, if western Europeans could ensure that people lived by the laws being uncovered in the natural and social worlds they would surely usher in a golden age of prosperity.

Thinkers of the 17^th century applied themselves to utopian schemes and dreams. Whether in the writings of Bacon or Campanella, Comenius or Dury, of Hartlib or Hobbes, social philosophy became the discernment of necessary alterations in the present to ensure the realization of a better future. And, it was assumed, the necessary alterations could be ascertained through reasoned consideration of the natural laws which underwrote all valid human activity and organization. The protesters of western Europe became increasingly sure of themselves, aware that they had a destiny to fulfill.

Samuel Hartlib (or possibly Gabriel Plattes), in a treatise on the requirements of the 'perfect society', A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641), claimed that the 'whole world should be reformed'. Such reformation could only happen, however, if those who were determined to ensure it had the political authority to set the necessary changes in place.

There was indeed a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood would lead to the millennium. The future would be better than the present – provided that society was reorganized to allow people to fulfill their own private destinies and, in the process, bring into being a perfect society based upon the natural laws established by God and being spelt out by Hugo Grotius and other jurists.

If Aquinas was correct, and each person had a place and purpose in society, then society could only be reformed if individual people were reformed, 'realizing their potential' by living their lives in accordance with the natural laws which God had established. ⁸⁸ 'Responsible' Western Europeans (those who were becoming recognized as the 'middle ranks') were becoming conscious of the goal-oriented nature of life in this world. The individual life should demonstrate progress. An individual should aim at self-improvement, and self-improvement could only be judged through increasing mastery over the material world around one.

Over a period of more than three hundred years, economically oriented western Europeans moved to a focus on the future, a condemnation of tradition as a validation of action or organization, and an assumption that progress in this world was inevitable for those who obeyed the laws of God. Therefore, those who did not progress could be assumed to have not been obedient to the laws of God. As Gellner put it:

The consequence of a belief in progress … is that time ceases to be morally neutral … there is, at the very least, some predisposition to tie up past with bad (in one word: backward), and future with good (progressive).
(Gellner 1978, p. 3)

From the late 15^th century onwards, with the writing of Erasmus and More, the responsibility of western Europeans for securing the future had become a preoccupation of western Europe. Europe was alive with millenarian speculation and interpretations of the apocalypse. This time of turmoil and madness was surely the time preceding the return of Christ, and that would herald the arrival of the perfect age.

Before that day, the events spelt out in the Revelation of John ⁸⁹ would be fulfillled. The Anti-Christ would be bound and cast into a pit which would be shut and sealed over him for a thousand years. The Beast would be captured and cast into the 'lake of fire that burns with brimstone'. And those who had not worshipped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands would reign with Christ in a perfect society of the blest for a thousand years.

For the subsequent four hundred years the social philosophers of western Europe were to focus on the required precursors of the millennial age which was surely almost upon the world. So institutionalized did this focus become that philosophers were to forget its origins, were to accept its societal assumptions, with their implicit religious underpinnings, without acknowledging them. Europe engaged in a quest for utopia – assumed to be attainable – and in a discovery of the necessary social alterations which must occur to ensure its arrival.

Europe became focused on the future – a real and yet, at the same time, an ideal future towards which the present should be molded. And, because people were now becoming recognized as self-developing, independent and opposed to one another, the attainment of the ideal depended on the diligence with which individuals ensured that they fulfillled the potential of their separate lives.

In the political arena, no less than the philosophical, there was an air of expectancy and of duty. As Trevor-Roper has eloquently put it:

[Oliver Cromwell] believed that a new heaven and a new earth were coming … and that Christian men had a duty, while reforming the society around them, and gathering up their strength to beat back the temporarily triumphant Anti-Christ, to seek the key to the Scriptures, which were now being fulfillled: the vials that were being poured out, the trumps that were being sounded, and the inscrutable number of the Beast.
(Trevor-Roper 1972, p. 282)

As Hartlib claimed, Europeans were in the process of uncovering 'that model by which the whole world should be reformed' and of ensuring its practical outworking in this world.

Since the millennium was within reach of western Europeans, people had a duty to apply themselves to ensuring its arrival. For the next three hundred years the 'responsible' people of western Europe undertook to organize those who were 'not responsible', ensuring that they lived moral, productive lives. As Polanyi explained,

under Elizabethan law the poor were forced to work at whatever wages they could get and only those who could [demonstrably] obtain no work were entitled to relief.
(Polanyi 1957, p. 79)

The view that the able-bodied poor should be put to work reinforced an emerging belief in the need for employment as both an obligation and a duty. Those who were gaining political and economic control of western Europe were becoming convinced that the promised utopia would be realized only if people diligently applied themselves to whatever work was available. The state should ensure that employment was available for those without work, and there should be no charity in the form of unearned hand-outs.

Yet, in the early 17^th century, this was more easily said than done. As Foucault described:

Despite all the measures taken to avoid unemployment and the reduction of wages, poverty continued to spread in the nation. In 1622 appeared a pamphlet, Grievous Groan for the Poor, attributed to Thomas Dekker, which … condemns the general negligence:

Though the number of the poor do daily increase, all things yet worketh for the worst in their behalf; … many of these parishes turneth forth their poor, yea, and their lusty laborers that will not work … to beg, filch, and steal for their maintenance, so that the country is pitifully pestered with them.

It was feared that they would overrun the country, and since they could not, as on the Continent, cross the border into another nation, it was proposed that they be 'banished and conveyed to the New-found Land, the East and West Indies'.

In 1630, the King established a commission to assure the rigorous observance of the Poor Laws … it recommended prosecuting beggars and vagabonds, as well as 'all those who live in idleness and will not work for reasonable wages or who spend what they have in taverns'. They must be punished according to law and placed in houses of correction.
(Foucault 1971, pp. 49-50)

The necessity to work had become recognized either as a requirement of natural law which, of course, made it an inescapable obligation, or as a requirement of sanctification. As Foucault put it:

If it is true that labor is not inscribed among the laws of nature, it is enveloped in the order of the fallen world. This is why idleness is rebellion – the worst form of all … the sin of idleness is the supreme pride of man once he has fallen, the absurd pride of poverty …

In the Middle Ages, the great sin … was pride … All the 17^th century texts, on the contrary, announced the infernal triumph of Sloth: it was sloth which led the round of vices and swept them on.
(Foucault 1971, pp. 56-7)

Joyce Appleby claimed that

laws were not seen as coming down from authority; rather they worked up from the propensities of people. Policy makers could best realize their aims by working with the known nature of man.
(1978, p. 96)

All people were ruled by the same natural tendencies and biases, so it was possible to formulate legislation which could be applied to everyone, no matter what their status or position. Good law was universally applicable.

Of course, since, as Roscoe Pound (1921) observed, the natural laws sprang from the common law rights of 17^th century society, in fact they closely reflected the social circumstances in which they were formulated. Louis Dumont has said of this focus on the propensities of human beings as the basis for law that:

For the moderns, under the influence of Christian and Stoic individualism, natural law, as opposed to positive law, does not involve social beings but individuals, i.e. men each of whom is self-sufficient, as made in the image of God and as the repository of reason.

This is to say that, in the idea of jurists in the first place, first principles regarding the constitution of the state (and of society) have to be extracted, or deduced, from the inherent qualities of man taken as an autonomous being independently of any social or political attachment.

… in short, the hierarchical Christian Commonwealth was atomised at two levels: it was replaced by a number of individual states, themselves made up of individual men.
(Dumont 1965, pp. 29-30)

Those who were morally upright disciplined themselves, living by the natural laws which underwrote all reasonable human endeavor.

This emerging focus on independent individuals was strongly supported by Puritanical insistence on the independent rights of individuals to approach their God directly without relying on mediation by a professional hierarchy. However, the apparent consequences of this insistence on separate rights seemed to be social chaos.

Many people became disturbed by the apparent civil consequences of Puritanical insistence on the rights of independent individuals. Bertrand Russell has neatly summed up the fears of the mid-17^th century:

Every community is faced with two dangers, anarchy and despotism.

The Puritans, especially the Independents, were most impressed by the danger of despotism.

Hobbes, on the contrary having experienced the conflict of rival fanaticisms, was obsessed by the fear of anarchy.
(Russell 1979, p. 539)

If one emphasized independent individual rights, one had, simultaneously, to spell out independent individual responsibilities.

Moral people abided by the terms of the social contract. Their lives conformed to the natural law requirements of all members of society. And those natural laws could not be challenged. They had been established by God. If, as Newton was to demonstrate and Galileo had already described, the planets obeyed natural laws when orbiting the sun, equally, members of society obeyed natural laws when they conformed to the moral rules of society.

By the mid-17^th century, with the English revolution, political power in England passed into the hands of property owners. For almost two hundred years they had been arguing for the curtailment of power derived from tradition. Laws which stemmed from 'traditional' authority were increasingly regarded as suspect.

The legal systems of western Europe, but particularly of Britain, were being refashioned to reflect the basic assumptions underpinning what we now call 'democracy'. Protestant jurist-theologians provided the theoretical charter based upon the natural rights of human beings. This gave legitimacy to the individualism of Protestant and merchant groups and to an increasingly insistent demand for economic and political freedom to pursue one's own interests.

In the Europe of decaying feudalism, land ownership had become increasingly seen as ownership of the thing itself, with particular social and material costs and prices attaching to it. Not only was there an emerging recognition of the differences between government and people, there was a parallel recognition of the difference between people and their physical environments.

It was becoming increasingly certain to most western European landowners that people used land rather than being identified with and defined in terms of locality. It was becoming equally clear that the poor were potential labor and that, just as property owners had a duty to use their land resources productively, so government should ensure that this labor resource was prepared and able to be employed productively.

Sir William Coventry, somewhere round 1670, put it most clearly when he argued for the repeal of the Poor Laws and the development of workhouses 'where such as will not work for themselves may be compelled to work for others'.

'Public' V 'Private': Oppositional Couplets; Categories of Likeness  

 …there is, at the very least, some predisposition to tie up past with bad (in one word: backward), and future with good (progressive). (Gellner 1978, p. 3)

Appleby has summed up the new mood well:

The emancipation of property owners from most forms of political control over the use of their land and money had shifted the source of economic planning from regulations shaped by the past to private decisions oriented toward the future.

Where earlier the disposal of a harvest or the pursuit of a trade had been conditional upon the likely social impact, the acceptance of near-absolute property rights had driven a wedge between society and the economy.

With the curtailment of political oversight over economic life, the formal link between the material resources of the country and the people to be sustained by them had been cut. The commonwealth had become an aggregation of private wealth.
(Appleby 1978, p. 151)

In western Europe, decentralization of political authority, reassertion of individual rights and responsibilities, and demand for deregulation of economic activity became interfused. These became increasingly seen in terms of oppositional couplets:

And, as perceptions matured, demands for clear separation between the social expressions of those oppositions became more forceful.

This separation was not simply a matter of recognizing and spelling out social oppositions. Not only were there oppositional pairs, there were also conceptual categories of likeness:

It became difficult to assert the need for the clear separation of one oppositional pair without, by implication, asserting the need for the rest.

Entrepreneurs became religiously and socially respectable. But they did not, for these reasons, become any less earthly-minded. It was their individualistic pragmatism which had brought them into alignment with religious protest groups. Each party in the alignment simply assumed their own orientation in those with whom they associated.

They should Become "Habituated to Labor and Fatigue"  

The consequences of this new-found respectability and assumption of religious morality were not to the advantage of less fortunate members of society. Yet, as Wilson argues in focusing on the 18^th century poor law,

The social legislators of the Restoration aimed at nothing less than making the poor a source of profit to the state by forcing them to work for reduced wages [but]

…what came to be regarded by later critics as a system of calculated brutality and repression arose in the first place not from unconcern or harshness, but out of a desire to protect the efforts of those local authorities who were trying hardest to improvise remedies.
(Wilson 1969, pp. 119, 134)

As property owners and their allies took control of government, they became increasingly insistent that the 'natural laws' which underwrote their activities should be applied to all people. So important did it appear to be to ensure that the poor became involved in productive activity that otherwise moral and upright people could entertain extreme measures to ensure that this happened.

A major problem among the poor was that there appeared little desire on their part to increase their material possessions or to indulge in work for work's sake. There was therefore little incentive to engage in continued labor beyond that which was required to supply their perceived needs ⁹⁰ . This attitude made labor inefficient and the laboring poor unreliable workers. They needed external stimulus to labor. In 1700, in setting out labor laws for the Crawley Iron Works, Crawley spells out his problem:

Some have pretended a sort of right to loyter, thinking by their readiness and ability to do sufficient in less time than others. Others have been so foolish to think bare attendance without being imployed in business is sufficient … Others so impudent as to glory in their villany and upbrade others for their diligence.
(quoted in Thompson 1967, p. 81)

The poor felt that they were being employed for a particular set of tasks. Crawley felt that he had hired their potential to labor, and that they should 'put in a good day's work'. His solution was to provide external checks on the punctuality and performance of laborers:

Every morning at 5 a clock the Warden is to ring the bell for the beginning to work, at eight a clock for breakfast, at half an hour after for work again, at twelve a clock for dinner, at one to work and at eight to ring for leaving work and all to be lock'd up.
(quoted in Thompson 1967, p. 82)

Since there was no internalized discipline in these laborers, they had to be regimented and checked by those who could supply such discipline.

Over succeeding decades this problem of ensuring greater reliability and effort from the laboring poor was a perennial concern of those who wanted to harness the productive possibilities of the century. In order to ensure consistency, those in charge seemed to need to be constantly vigilant against a population apparently determined to impair their constitutions by laziness and dull their spirits by indolence (Thompson 1967, p.83).

Employers were looking for ways in which consistent effort could be guaranteed. One of the best seemed, initially, to compel laborers to conform to clock time. Factories had clocks built into their facades, which chimed the time so that laborers would know when to start work.

Schooling was quickly seen as one of the prime means by which people could be taught the importance of punctuality and sustained labor so that,

by the time the child reached six or seven it should become "habituated, not to say naturalized to labor and fatigue".
(Thompson 1965, p. 84)

Inevitably, over time, less scrupulous employers started to manipulate their clocks, starting early and finishing late by altering the time shown:

… in reality there were no regular hours; masters and managers did with us as they like. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression.
(quoted in Thompson 1965, p. 86)

This practice, far from undermining people's reliance on measured time, made people increasingly conscious of 'correct' clock time, of working 'to the clock'.

However, all the measures adopted during the 18^th century to retrain people to 'use their time productively' were of mixed success, and on into the 19^th century employers and reformers continued to lament the indolence of the laboring poor ⁹¹ .

In the second half of the 18^th century, Townsend provided one of the more extreme solutions to the problem of compelling people to diligent work, which was to be taken up in the early 19^th century:

…hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays a lasting and sure foundation for good will and gratitude …
(Joseph Townsend 1786 )

To the bridle of time discipline was to be added the spur of necessity. If people's needs could be kept at a high level, then their efforts to supply their needs would ensure consistent long-term 'habits of industry'. The silent, unremitting pressure of a constant threat of starvation, which could only be countered by engaging in wage labor, could be relied on to channel people into 'adopting those habits of industry, which always tend to steadiness and sobriety of conduct, and to consequent material wealth and prosperity' (Codere 1950, p. 24).

These means were to be reinforced by developing education for the poor. From John Bellers who, in 1696, suggested the establishment of 'colleges of industry' in which the 'involuntary leisure of the poor could be turned to good account' (quoted in Polanyi 1957, p. 105), to increasingly frequent attempts at the social education of the poor during the 18^th and early 19^th centuries. It became a recognized social responsibility of mature people to re-educate the morally suspect poor and to ensure, in the meantime, that they were gainfully employed.

By the middle of the 18^th century, the primary ideological assumptions of modernity had become well established. Now, it seemed, to most well-educated, well-enculturated western Europeans that people were (or should be) undeniably separate, private, self-developing, acquisitive individuals whose moral and social worth could be calculated by observing the extent and nature of their private property.

It seemed equally certain that economic enterprise should be undertaken by private individuals and corporations, not by the state, but that the state had responsibility to ensure that the workforce was properly trained and that those who would not work were put to work.

Perhaps the most successful of the 18^th century social philosophers was Adam Smith ⁹² – not because he had anything particularly new or revolutionary to say – but precisely because what he had to say expressed the emerging primary ideological assumptions of western European industrialism when increasing numbers of British people were already organizing their lives and thinking in terms of them.

He made explicit, in an organized form, what people already unconsciously 'knew'. And, of course, he is recognized as the father of economics. He also, in a way which may now be difficult to understand if one reads his writings, became an immensely popular author. His work, particularly The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1974), which was first published in 1776, became the topic of drawing room discussion. People easily identified with his description of how the world was, or should be, organized, but that description was novel in the literature of the time.

Western Europeans did not become economically oriented because Adam Smith provided a systematized account of rational economic behavior. Those in control were already economically oriented. Adam Smith systematically described what was happening around him. The primary assumptions of those in control in the mid-18^th century already assumed the existence of independent, self-interested, competitive, acquisitive, rational beings, focused on life within an economic environment.

Adam Smith made the inevitable, moral, by spelling out the system of laws which underwrote economic behavior. Since economic behavior was governed by rational conformity to natural laws it could scarcely be otherwise than morally acceptable.

By the late 18^th century, at the outset of what we now refer to as the industrial revolution, prosperous western Europeans knew that life should be lived in an economic environment, that they were private, self-promoting individuals whose lives were oriented to use of the material world, with the correct forms of relationship and organization spelt out in the 'economy'.

Moral people worked hard. The evidence of their morality was their increasing prosperity. Their increasing prosperity could best be demonstrated by increased accumulation of possessions and by increased consumption. The ways in which they should engage in economic activity were all spelt out by the 'principles' through which they could guarantee both individual prosperity and the wealth of the nation. Those principles had been distilled through five hundred years of history.

Moral western Europeans 'knew' that there were natural laws, and that, whether they had been established by God or not, conformity to them would lead to a better world. On the other hand, failure to live by them would bring chaos and poverty. Western Europeans had a moral duty to transform the world by reorganizing it to conform to the rules and regulations which guaranteed successful economic endeavor and burgeoning material prosperity.

Conclusion  

The past two hundred years have seen the primary ideological presumptions of Western Europe become those of more and more of her people, whether in Europe or in colonized lands. And, as Western Europeans have become increasingly convinced that these presumptions are features of the real world, they have increasingly devoted their time to defining and particularizing the rules and principles of economic activity and organization.

The past fifty have been years in which Western 'experts' have increasingly insisted on reorganizing the rest of the world to engage in 'correct' economic activity and organization. This reorganization requires:

• the establishment of institutions and bureaucracies to govern economic enterprise;
• the reorientation of government to guarantee a secure fiscal, legal and social background appropriate to the self-interested, contractual activities of private individuals in pursuit of wealth and independence;
• and the establishment of the statutes and regulations governing 'formal economic activity'.

One of the continuing problems for Western Europeans, who are as convinced of the need to transform the world as their forebears were, is that so little of the economic activity in Third World countries conforms to the prescriptions of formal economics. People seem, all too easily, to engage in forms of activity and develop forms of organization which are clearly 'informal' and 'illegitimate'.

As was said at the start of this discussion, the primary ideological assumptions of any community change through time. They both reflect experiences of the past and modify those of the future. The primary ideological assumptions of Western Europeans have given birth to a number of competing secondary ideologies, and to a felt compulsion on the part of Europeans to refashion the rest of the world to participate in 'economic development'.

Both the Western assumption of the independent existence of an 'economic environment' and the equally accepted belief that there is an objective set of laws governing behavior in that environment come from, and reflect, the particular historical experiences of Western Europeans over a thousand years.

Every community has such a history, whether written or not. And all communities think and act on the basis of primary ideological presumptions which stem from their own unique history. It is as difficult to change the forms of organization and behavior of other communities which are based on their primary ideological assumptions as it would be for Western Europeans to live their lives in terms of the understandings of another society.

To the extent that Western 'experts' demand that other communities deny those basic features of their world which they 'know' to be true, and that they, instead, live by Western presumptions, they bring confusion and disorientation to individual lives and to communities. If these communities need to 'develop', that development must be on their own terms, based upon their own primary assumptions and filtered through their own secondary ideologies. Otherwise, advisers bring not 'development' but confusion to the lives of other people.

If there are increasing numbers of people who are becoming marginalized in non-Western communities, they are being marginalized by forms of organization, interaction and understanding which come from Western Europe's historical experiences. Only by allowing them to reorganize the world from their own perspectives can that marginalization be countered. Then, of course, Western Europeans will find themselves marginalized, unable to come to grips with the forms of organization and interaction which they experience when living in those communities.

If other communities, organizing life in terms of their own primary assumptions, become industrially organized, it may well be that some will prove to be better at the game of competitive profit making than the West. But the West is likely to find it difficult to understand what gives them their edge ⁹³ . They are also likely to argue that the competitive advantage of those communities comes from their engaging in illegitimate forms of economic organization and activity.

Chapter 4:
How Born Again Christians Rescued Capitalism  

• They have divided their nations…
• In Search of the 'Greatest Good' – The Summum Bonum
• The Economy: a new 'Environment'
• The Need to separate Government and Commerce
• A Deeply Religious Capitalist Revival
• Born-Again to Industry: the Conversion of the little gentry
• Born Again Manufacturers and Retailers
• A New Moral Leadership and Support Network
• First The Savages at home, then the rest of the World!

 …they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. …man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor. (Thomas Jefferson, 1787) ⁹⁴

The 18^th century saw the crystallization of what, in later centuries, would be considered 'modern' forms of understanding and action ⁹⁵ . This was the century of 'the enlightenment':

• the time when western European educated and wealthy 'middle sorts' ⁹⁶ became increasingly convinced of the material nature of life in this world;
• the time when they began to live life by truly 'rational' principles as independent, autonomous, self-interested individuals whose activities would inexorably produce both individual and social well-being;
• the time when they took increasing responsibility for mastering and profitably 'using' the natural world;
• the time when most of the remaining rural laborers and small farmers were dispossessed of their livelihoods and robbed of their access to land;
• the time when the activities of Protestant evangelists, coupled with the catastrophic failure of small businesses and impoverishment of trades people (the 'little gentry'), dependent on the patronage of the 'poor', kick-started capitalism into an industrial revolution;
• and the time when the 'middle sorts' finally took full responsibility for re-educating the 'indolent poor' ⁹⁷ .

This was the century in Western European history when the turmoil of previous centuries had distilled into a new version of 'objective reality' for those who held the reins of power. It was the century in which they would take responsibility for transforming the rest of the world to live by the reality they now lived in – starting with their own, home grown 'savages'. It was also the century in which the justification for natural laws shifted from divine decree to the innate characteristics of environments in a self-existent natural world ⁹⁸ .

In social thought, independent, autonomous individuals became the 'atoms' of human interaction and society. As Louis Dumont put it,

the hierarchical Christian Commonwealth was atomised at two levels: it was replaced by a number of individual states, themselves made up of individual men.
(1965, pp. 30)

The material realm, also, would be found to be comprised of independent 'atoms' – the building blocks of a new reality resulting from the new understanding of the world. And a new 'environment' would be conceived, to contain and explain the newly apprehended natural laws found to be driving human ambition and the wealth of nations.

In Search of the 'Greatest Good' – The Summum Bonum  

All the presumptions of the past concerning the nature and purpose of natural laws remained intact. It seemed absurd to question the Summum Bonum consequences of employing them in furthering human control of the material world ⁹⁹ . By conforming to and employing the principles being uncovered in daily life, human beings could look forward to living in the best of all possible worlds.

Immanuel Kant would explain this at the end of the century,

The realization of the Summum Bonum in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law. But in this will the perfect accordance of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the Summum Bonum.
(1788 Bk 2, Ch. 2, pt. 4)

For increasing numbers of the 'middle sorts' in the 18^th century, individuals were self-existent, self-developing beings. The presumption of previous centuries, that "the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part" (Aristotle, Politics Bk 1, Part 2) ¹⁰⁰ now seemed under attack.

To the intellectual protagonists of the century, the controversy between atomism and holism was a real one, perceived as a confrontation between materialism and spirituality, between atheism and godliness. It was, however, the logical outcome of Aquinas's model in an age when life within this world became the dominant focus, with religion secondary in importance to material prosperity for those who held the reins of power.

Now, one did not start from a presumption of perfect wholes and distill the laws which enabled them and determined the nature of their parts. One started with the 'atoms' from which the wholes were extrapolated and determined the innate characteristics of those atoms. One then extrapolated from that information to ways in which the atoms could best be 'developed' and combined to yield their potential ¹⁰¹ .

For those 'on the side of God', human beings reaped the rewards of their morality. And that morality was summed up in obedience to the 'will of God' spelt out in the natural laws he had established to ensure the perfection of the natural world.

For those 'on the side of nature', human beings exercised their innate talents, pursued their own 'natural' interests, and reaped the rewards of successfully doing so. Conformity to the 'real' nature of human beings, it was assumed, must necessarily result in the Summum Bonum.

It is this implicit presumption of collective good being a necessary outcome of individual self-interest ¹⁰² which is the inconsistent heart of utilitarian philosophies of the period and of the gamut of utilitarian and economic models which have flowed from them.

Bernard Mandeville's acerbic verse on the ways in which the private vices of the bees of a hive produced prosperity for the whole, set the scene for confrontation between the two perspectives,

… every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th'Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.

Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.
(1705, lines 155-168)

By the 1720s Mandeville's verses, together with a range of similar writings, were provoking a storm of protest from those who knew that the material gains of prudence and industry came not from self-interested greed but from correct application of and adherence to the laws of God which underwrote the natural world.

It seemed that the very basis for morality was being undermined. If Mandeville's assertions were right, then morality was a chain about the neck of society, and immorality was virtue well disguised. The fundamental principles underpinning the natural rights of human beings seemed to be under challenge as these thinkers pointed to greed and self-interest as the fundamental motivational factors leading to material success and the consequent Summum Bonum.

By the 18^th century, there were a number of fundamental presumptions which 'responsible' western Europeans subconsciously employed in 'making sense' of their world ¹⁰³ :

• order was built into the 'structure' of the universe;
• the material and sensible world was separate from and independent of the supernatural, governed by its own ordering principles;
• human beings were separate from, and should control and 'develop' their material environments which, when developed, would yield their 'potential';
• entities within any environment could be separated into their constituents which could then be recombined in a range of ways, limited only by human ingenuity and the laws governing form and process in each environment.
• the principles upon which 'natural order' rested were not only explicable and immutable, but also, in their correct utilization, would inexorably produce social and individual well-being. Even if, in the short term, this did not appear to be the case.
• there could be 'no gain without pain' ¹⁰⁴ . Not only did the responsible people of western Europe believe in the existence, and positive consequences of employing natural laws, they also firmly believed that short term hardship is usually necessary in order to secure long term well being ¹⁰⁵ .

The Economy: a new 'Environment'  

The search for natural laws, and determination to live by them, had been a preoccupation of western Europeans over several centuries. That search focused on phenomena which were identified as belonging within recognized 'environments' of the natural world. Sets of natural laws were derived from and legitimate within the domains within which they had been distilled.

By the 18^th century, a number of distinct environments had been identified in the non-human material realm ¹⁰⁶ . However, in the realm of human existence in the natural world, no distinct environments had been identified. All human activity was considered contained within the 'social' domain, interconnected and subject to the same set of 'moral' laws.

At the start of the 18^th century, the money-makers moved to center stage. Their behaviors became accepted as important to the well-being of all members of society and the nature of their activities became the focus of serious deliberation. Mandeville's observations might have been delivered with sardonic humor, but he meant what he said.

Natural laws were not merely important in explaining the operation of the natural world, they also justified what they explained. They provided legitimate, indeed, necessary means for successfully manipulating (for the common good) those areas of the natural world which western Europeans recognized as having objective existence. Now, however, it seemed as though the area of natural law which applied to human behavior was flawed. How could it be that the self-interested 'unsocial' behavior of those engaged in trade could contribute to the Summum Bonum?

Attempts to explain this, were to produce recognition of the first social 'environment', anticipated in the 17^th, but formally outlined in the 18^th century – The Economy. Since its 'discovery', this new environment, through the laws and associated structures formulated and reformulated within it, has increasingly dominated and controlled life in Western European communities.

In the first half of the 18^th century, the money-makers of Europe were in relatively secure political control. Their activities were accepted as fundamental to social and individual wellbeing by those who now dominated political life in Britain and Western Europe.

However, it became increasingly obvious that there were certain fundamental human behaviors which seemed to underwrite economic success, which were not in harmony with the moral laws which western European jurists had identified and spelt out in the 17^th century ¹⁰⁷ . These behaviors had not been incorporated within the moral law structures developed in the 17^th century and seemed, once they were identified, to challenge and often invalidate them.

Bernard Mandeville (1718) directly focused on this problem in his Fable of the Bees. As Harold Cook explained,

The book seemed to argue that what most people recognized as human vices were the main engines of the collective good.

Mandeville's critics,

correctly detected a view of reason that made it largely into a device for calculating ends rather than for developing inner moral wisdom. The essay began with a meditation on whether people really did act out of charity, defined as

that sincere Love we have for our selves … transferr'd pure and unmix'd to others, not tied to us by Bonds of Friendship or Consanguinity.

Acts on behalf of friends and family, or to gain honor and public respect, were not counted as truly charitable by this definition. Nor were any actions arising from the passions of pity or compassion, which make us feel better when we indulge them.

Pride and Vanity have built more Hospitals than all the Virtues together,

Mandeville declared, referring sarcastically to the recent munificent gifts in the will of Dr. John Radcliffe.

Mandeville went on to declare that

Charity, where it is too extensive, seldom fails of promoting Sloth and Idleness, and is good for little in the Commonwealth but to breed Drones and destroy Industry.

He urged that while the helpless needed relief, most seeking charity should be put to work.
(1999, pp. 101, 104)

For the next fifty years controversy was to rage in gentry circles as to whether the recognized virtues of a social conscience did undermine sound economic management and promote sloth, or whether the apparent logic of Mandeville's assertions was nothing more than well phrased sophistry.

For those who believed that the moral virtues were primary and that life should conform to them, it was necessary to actively address the social problems of the age through education and a variety of forms of welfare. For those who saw the virtues of the age as undermining sound economic management, well-meaning people simply compounded the difficulties they sought to ameliorate. This was to be a theme which grew louder as the century passed, producing a range of policies aimed at ensuring that the gentry were freed to disciplined self-interest. ¹⁰⁸

In the intellectual climate of the 18^th century, it is scarcely surprising that someone should finally conclude that such behavior related to a particular realm of social life, an environment with its own internal logic and operational principles or laws. The necessary behaviors which underpinned success in this environment really did seem to conflict with the recognized moral virtues which applied to the rest of life.

Of course, if an environment was discovered, it would be found to be governed by its own set of natural laws, essential to successful endeavor in that environment, but illegitimate in other environmental contexts. Behaviors and attitudes which seemed to threaten the moral values of social and spiritual life, could be contained, insulated within the bounds of this new environment.

Appropriately, the nature of this new environment was to be distilled and explained by someone who had trained for the Anglican clergy and could be considered a morally responsible gentleman. As Adam Smith (1723-1790) explained, in a hugely popular text entitled An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the apparent contradiction between moral virtue and the requirements of successful economic activity was due to a confusion of environments.

It could be traced to a failure to recognize that all economic activity conformed to sets of principles which were appropriate to economic behavior. There was a confusion of environments implicit in the observed contradiction.

Just as all other environments in the world were governed by natural laws which determined their characteristics, so was 'the economy' governed by a set of natural laws. These laws determined not only its characteristics, but also the kinds of behavior appropriate for individuals and groups when engaged in economic activity.

So, behavior which was highly appropriate in economic activity could still be regarded as entirely inappropriate in other spheres of life. On the other hand, to apply those values which related to non-economic activity within an economic setting would produce economic malaise.

'The economy' was a self-existent, self-sustaining environment, with its own peculiar characteristics and principles of organization and behavior. And, of course, if natural laws were found within this newly described environment, human beings had a moral responsibility to live by them. ¹⁰⁹

The movement of the money-makers of western Europe from the demonized periphery of the 10^th and 11^th century medieval world ¹¹⁰ to the sanctified center of the new modern world was complete. They not only could be considered moral by association with religious reformers, now they were moral because of the very behaviors and attitudes in which they engaged in making money.

Indeed, a new kind of immorality was to emerge, that demonstrated by people who, when engaging in economic activity, did not conform to the necessary behaviors and attitudes and so jeopardized not only their own activity, but the activity of all those with whom they associated. What Kant was to assert concerning moral law could be asserted with equal certainty of economic law, 'the perfect accordance of the mind with the [economic] law is the supreme condition of the Summum Bonum.' As Adam Smith explained, considering the activities of merchants,

… he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, … led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.
(1776, Book 4 Ch. 2)

Here was a solution which rescued moral virtue, while establishing the appropriateness, indeed, the necessity of self-interested behavior in economic activity.

In keeping with the times, Smith claimed to have distilled the laws of economics through an examination of the actual economic behavior of people ¹¹¹ . In doing so he seemed to satisfy both sides of the controversy. He had distilled his laws from the 'real' world, but he had, at the same time, rescued moral virtue from the materialist assault. Both camps could accept the laws he presented without seeming to betray their own positions ¹¹² .

The capitalist could, quite reasonably, be a self-interested individual intent on his own gain on Friday and a public spirited philanthropist on Sunday (or even at the same time in different contexts!) and remain a truly moral, consistent person throughout.

Inevitably, Adam Smith became the 'father of economics', the person who first spelt out the natural laws which underwrote economic organization and activity. At the same time, his writing reaffirmed, for Western European 'responsible' people, the correctness of both their understandings of the world and their preoccupation with economic activity.

Of course, when one distills the fundamental attributes of human beings from the current behaviors of oneself and one's compatriots, inevitably, those behaviors which stem from the primary ideological presumptions of one's own community become accepted as the fundamental attributes of all people.

Adam Smith did for economics what Pound (1921) claimed Grotius did for the “natural rights” of human beings ¹¹³ . Just as the common law rights of the English became the natural rights of all people in the 17^th century, so the economic predilections of 18^th century British gentry became the instinctive behaviors and economic motivations of human beings ¹¹⁴ .

From that time to the present, western Europeans, whether in their homelands or in their colonized worlds, have assiduously applied themselves to refining and expanding the natural laws which underwrite economic activity and organization. And the task is not yet, and, of course, never will be, complete. As we've already seen, the primary ideological presumptions upon which human understanding is founded are in long-term flux through dialectical interaction with the environments which human beings define and within which they live.

Over the last two hundred years western Europeans have attempted to reach a consistent and coherent explanation of the positive consequences of the exercise of both economic self-interest and moral virtue.

• Could it be that the apparently contradictory requirements of economic and moral law might, in some less than obvious way, or at some 'deeper' level of congruence, work together for good?
• Might human beings achieve much more in life through holding the requirements of moral and economic law in tension?

If this could be shown then, indeed, economic activity would receive its final validation ¹¹⁵ .

It was, perhaps, inevitable, that it would be the foremost Western European philosophical thinker of the late 18^th century who would first convincingly draw the threads together. John Locke's philosophical validation and justification of modern primary ideological presumptions had established the early credentials of modern business ¹¹⁶ . Immanuel Kant, a century later, would explain why the apparently contradictory sets of economic and moral laws were both essential in reaching toward the Summum Bonum.

There is an innate antagonism between opposed human capacities which is mediated in human nature. Through a dialectical tension, or 'antagonism', between self-interest and sociability, all the finest qualities of human society and achievement are generated.

By antagonism, I here mean the unsocial sociability of mankind – that is, the combination in them of an impulse to enter into society, with a thorough spirit of opposition which constantly threatens to break up this society.

The ground of this lies in human nature. Man has an inclination to enter into society, because in that state he feels that he becomes more a man, or, in other words, that his natural faculties develop. But he has also a great tendency to isolate himself, because he is, at the same time, aware of the unsocial peculiarity of desiring to have everything his own way; and thus, being conscious of an inclination to oppose others, he is naturally led to expect opposition from them…

All the culture and art which adorn humanity, the most refined social order, are produced by that unsociability which is compelled by its own existence to discipline itself, and so by enforced art to bring the seeds implanted by Nature into full flower.
(Kant 1784 p. 147)

Human beings are 'compelled' by their unsociability to discipline themselves and from that discipline flow the enhancements and benefits of 'all the culture and art which adorn humanity' ¹¹⁷ . The corollary, of course, is that lack of self-discipline threatens the 'refined social order'.

Human beings who wished 'to bring the seeds implanted by Nature into full flower' had a responsibility not only to be self-disciplined, but also to discipline those who seemed unable or unwilling to discipline themselves. Stifle that urge to unsociability, and one stifles human progress. At the heart of human progress lies disciplined independent individualism. The manure of competitive self-interest grows beautiful flowers! ¹¹⁸

By the middle of the 19^th century Kant's explanation had grown into a belief ¹¹⁹ in the innate propensity of human beings, allowed to indulge in unfettered self-interest and self-promotion, to produce the common good. The moral virtues of an earlier age were to be displaced, for many western Europeans, by a belief that all things work together for good – provided self-disciplined individuals are freed to pursue their own self-interested ends.

Life was to be considered an evolutionary adaptation of individuals to their environments. Provided it was not distorted and choked by government regulation and direction, this would result in the best possible adaptation of not only individuals but of human societies to their environments ¹²⁰ .

The Need to separate Government and Commerce  

Increasingly, as the 19^th century unfolded, it was to be argued that social and political controls, regulations, and 'interference' in individual lives produced only social ill. The only role for government was that of ensuring that no-one and nothing interfered with the right of each self-disciplined individual to pursue his or her own self-interest uninhibited by social and political rules and regulations. The role of government would become seen as that of a 'watchdog' of private liberty and a stern school-master to those who threatened disciplined self-interest.

For those who took the new doctrine to extreme, and there were many very influential people in this camp by the latter half of the 19^th century, governments should not get involved in trying to 'improve' society. Such attempts were doomed to long-term failure. The role of the state was the protection of those who, through their disciplined self-interest, had acquired the wealth which was its sure reward ¹²¹ . The 'free market' would sort out everything else!

Thomas Huxley (1871) described the position of those who opposed legislative attempts at improving the lot of the poor in the second-half of the 19^th century:

… the Education Act is only one of a number of pieces of legislation to which they object on principle;

and they include under like condemnation:

• the Vaccination Act, the Contagious Diseases Act, and all other sanitary Acts;
• all attempts on the part of the State to prevent adulteration, or to regulate injurious trades;
• all legislative interference with anything that bears directly or indirectly on commerce, such as shipping, harbours, railways, roads, cab-fares, and the carriage of letters;
• and all attempts to promote the spread of knowledge by the establishment of teaching bodies, examining bodies, libraries, or museums, or by the sending out of scientific expeditions;
• all endeavors to advance art by the establishment of schools of design, or picture galleries;
• or by spending money upon an architectural public building when a brick box would answer the purpose.

According to their views, not a shilling of public money must be bestowed upon a public park or pleasure ground;

not sixpence upon the relief of starvation, or the cure of disease.

Those who hold these views support them by two lines of argument.

They enforce them deductively by arguing from an assumed axiom, that the State has no right to do anything but protect its subjects from aggression. …

These views are supported a posteriori, by an induction from observation, which professes to show that whatever is done by a Government beyond these negative limits, is not only sure to be done badly, but to be done much worse than private enterprise would have done the same thing.
(1893, p. 258-9) ¹²²

In order to understand how these views could become so dominant one needs to understand the social and political tensions of the preceding century. The 18^th century saw the flowering of the assertion of near-absolute property rights and the private aggregation of wealth, which had matured in the previous century. Self-interested pursuit of wealth and accumulation of property had become socially approved.

Over the next 150 years, the gentry pursued their own interests at the expense of all those who lacked the political or economic power to resist them. They dispossessed most of the small holders of Britain and completed the alienation of the commons ¹²³ from those who had for centuries relied on access to it for survival.

In the process, millions lost access to rural resources and were forced into relying on parish welfare support ^124. Then, because the burden became too great for the parishes to sustain in the long-term, the dispossessed were compelled to move to the emerging industrial towns of Britain. As the process compounded the problems of the poor, many were compelled to move to the 'New Found' lands which were rapidly becoming a destination for people who felt or found themselves disenfranchised by developments in the 'Home Country' ¹²⁵ .

By the start of the 18^th century, Britain, with most of the rest of western Europe to one extent or another, had in place all the necessary primary ideological understandings, motivations and organizational processes and practices which would produce both the discipline of economics and the 'industrial revolution'. What it lacked, was a deep religious commitment to capitalism.

The 'middle sorts' now thought and organized life as capitalists. However, their earthly-minded materialism, self-satisfied complacency and self-interested stripping of the livelihoods and entitlements from more than half the population could very easily have produced not an industrial revolution but a 'revolution of the proletariat'. Without the continued religious dedication and commitment to 17^th century morality of a small minority of the gentry, the self-interested greed of the 'middle sorts' in the early 18^th century might well have reduced capitalism to a footnote in European history.

A Deeply Religious Capitalist Revival  

But for the peculiar consequences of the dispossession of small landholders and the consequent undermining of small business through much of Britain, capitalism might well have faltered in the 18^th century, another 'blind alley' of history ¹²⁶ . Those who held the purse-strings of Britain, in their self-interested drive to accumulate property and wealth, not only dispossessed 'the poor', they threatened the livelihoods and wellbeing of less affluent members of the middle ranks. Less wealthy households and individuals, who held to the same understandings and were motivated by much the same impulses as the financiers, stock-holders and large property owners, were being threatened by their activities with both social ruin and material destitution. ¹²⁷

These 'little-gentry' found themselves victims of policies and practices geared to enhancing the wealth and increasing the property of those with political clout. And, as they either lost their livelihoods or became fearfully aware of the possibility of becoming destitute, they found themselves being treated as though they were members of those 'lower ranks' who 'ought' to be subjected to the disciplines of the century.

It would be easy to see battle lines drawn in 18^th century Western Europe between the reforming 'middle ranks' and the oppressed 'lower ranks' of the century. But this would be a distortion of reality. Those consigned to the lower ranks of society had lived through the same centuries as the middle rank reformers. The growing influence and authority of the money makers of western Europe had not left them untouched.

While the broad rankings of society included the aristocracy, gentry and 'the poor', there were, between each ranking, large numbers of people who did not quite fit the stereotypes of the age:

• There were aristocracy who more properly seemed to be middle ranking in their behavior and in their fortunes, and middle ranking people who moved easily in the ranks of the nobility.
• There were middle ranking people who, in their behavior and fortunes could easily be ranked with the poor, and people who might be considered peasants or yeomen but who moved easily in the ranks of the gentry.
• In particular, there was a substantial grouping which comprised small landholders, artisans, tradespeople and other small business people who certainly considered themselves separate from 'the poor', and, in their own minds, were ranked as 'almost gentry'.

The 'almost gentry' and those who identified with them as employees and neighbors – in England, who had fought with the forces of Oliver Cromwell – very often held the opinions of the gentry toward the 'idle poor' as strongly, or more strongly than those whose lifestyles seldom brought them into direct contact with such people. They had long ceased to consider themselves members of 'the poor'. They were, in their own minds, closely allied with the gentry and, through their networks of associates and friends this perception was continuously reinforced.

As is all-too-often true in such situations, those who subconsciously sensed that they could easily be lumped together with people they considered hierarchically inferior to themselves, strongly emphasized the differences, emphasizing the negative stereotypes of those from whom they wished to be separated ¹²⁸ .

The 'little gentry' of the 18^th century were strong in their denunciations of people who seemed to expect the parish to support them. Why should the parishes, and therefore, people who provided the parishes with their income, support the lazy poor who were, in growing numbers, relying on parish support for their subsistence?

Paradoxically, as these people found their own livelihoods under threat they more strongly resented the costs of supporting the indigent. They were not presuming that some day they also might need parish help – the specter of being forced into the ranks of the poor was, for these people, one they could scarcely contemplate. Rather, their own difficulties were best addressed through minimizing the demands of the parish on their own incomes.

As the reformers set about rationalizing land ownership and use, these people found themselves caught up in the consequences of the policies. Rural laborers and small holders were dispossessed and driven from the land and the infrastructural supports sustained by them collapsed.

As is true in the present in countries all around the world, as rural communities disintegrated, both those directly affected by the reformist policies of the century and all those who depended on them for their subsistence, found their livelihoods collapsing and found themselves no longer able to subsist in the countryside. As they lost their means of livelihood they found themselves defined with the poor by the authorities, rather than recognized as members of a disenfranchised 'lower middle' ranking in society. Toynbee (1884) described it all:

at the conclusion of the 17^th century it was estimated by Gregory King that there were 180,000 freeholders in England,… less than a hundred years later, the pamphleteers of the time, and even careful writers like Arthur Young, speak of the small freeholders as practically gone…

'The able and substantial freeholders,' described by Whitelock, 'the freeholders and freeholders' sons, well armed within with the satisfaction of their own good consciences, and without by iron arms, who stood firmly and charged desperately,' – this devoted class, who had broken the power of the king and the squires in the Civil Wars, were themselves, within a hundred years from that time, being broken, dispersed, and driven off the land.

The 18^th century was a century of wealth and well-being for the middle and upper ranks of society but, as Toynbee (1884) says, in the midst of all the wealth and prosperity which began in the 18^th century, there were vast numbers of destitute people. The later 18^th and 19^th centuries were to demonstrate that unfettered competitive self-interest does not necessarily produce the Summum Bonum ¹²⁹ .

Wendeborn, a German living in England during the second half of the 18^th century described what he saw,

In no other country are more poor to be seen than in England, and in no city a greater number of beggars than in London. A foreigner who hears of many millions annually raised for the benefit of the poor… will find himself unable to explain how it happens, that in his walk he is, almost every hundred yards, disturbed by the lamentations of unfortunate persons who demand his charity.
(quoted in Simon 1908 p.60)

As the 18^th century unfolded, those people in the lower-middle ranks of British communities ¹³⁰ looked for support and help from those whom they had long considered their superiors and community leaders. All-too-often, they found not only no support, but an active rejection of them and the difficulties they faced. They seemed to have been condemned by those they sought to emulate to a life of fear and possible destitution.

These 'almost poor', 'almost middle ranking' people knew that their only hope of avoiding the destitution which was all around them lay in being accepted, and so being supported by the middle ranks who seemed to be escaping the worst consequences of the reforms of the era. They both deeply wanted to be accepted by them and, at the same time, felt a deep need to be identified as not belonging to the pernicious ranks of the slothful.

They were not vagabonds and wastrels. They took life seriously and wanted nothing more than to be recognized as morally upright, desirous of owning and conserving property and willing to engage in work to that end. They had already adopted, or were more than willing, if they could find employment, to adopt “those habits of industry, which always tend to steadiness and sobriety of conduct, and to consequent material wealth and prosperity” (Codere 1950, p. 24).

They found the means of achieving both of these heartfelt longings in the religious revivals which swept Britain and the American colonies (soon to become the United States) through the 18^th and on into the 19^th century. The religious revivals were to provide a means for lower-middle ranking people to demonstrate and reaffirm their respectability.

Nothing reduces human beings to greater despair and distress than threat of the imminent loss of not only the means of livelihood but of self-esteem and status. The lower middle ranks of the 18^th century found themselves facing possible destitution and treatment as though they belonged with those who, as Joseph Townsend (1786) described them later in the century, had

by their improvidence, by their prodigality… drunkenness and vices, … dissipated all their substance… by their debaucheries… ruined their constitutions, and reduced themselves to such a deplorable condition that they have neither inclination nor ability to work. ¹³¹

There seemed no way out, no way in which they could reassert their status and respectability and demonstrate their commitment to industry and to all the associated 'middle sort' moral virtues of the century.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they were thrown a lifeline. Preachers, clearly members of the gentry, began travelling the country, offering them acceptance, legitimacy, and the possibility of banding together into societies of disciplined, industrious, moral people. They flocked to hear them and to commit their lives to their causes in the hundreds of thousands. At meeting after meeting, they expressed their heartfelt relief at the possibility of redemption, of committing themselves, unreservedly, to a life of industry and frugality, of religious and moral discipline and virtue ¹³² .

Born-Again to Industry: the Conversion of the Little Gentry  

The preachers were bemused both by their own success in attracting such crowds to hear them speak, and by the depth of the emotional response to their message. Time and again, to messages as prosaic as many of the sermons of John Wesley, people lost emotional control, falling to the ground, crying uncontrollably, losing control of their faculties. And the fervor with which they sang the songs of the revival was a testimony to the depth of their despair and their revived hope for the future.

In the early to mid 18^th century the middle ranks increasingly confused money-making and religious ideals. More and more of them justified themselves through involvement in money-making activities and the churches, which had been so strong in the 17^th century, found it difficult to attract and hold members ¹³³ .

At the same time, the minority who took their religion seriously felt increasingly ill at ease with the worldliness and materialism of the age and felt themselves burdened with a responsibility of their own to maintain their spiritual focus. John Wesley, as a young man in 1734, expressed it well in writing to his father,

I take religion to be, not the bare saying of so many prayers, morning and evening, in public or in private; nor anything superadded now and then to a careless or worldly life; but a constant ruling habit of the soul; a renewal of our minds in the image of God; a recovery of the Divine likeness; a still increasing conformity of heart and life to the pattern of our most Holy Redeemer.
(quoted in Harrison, 1942, p. 17)

Through the 18^th century, in the face of what such people saw as a constantly increasing hedonistic materialism among the affluent middle ranks, they held to their faith and brought it to those who were prepared to listen. But, of course, they carried within them the understandings of their time and of their social ranking.

As historians have stressed over the years ¹³⁴ , the religious revivals of the 18^th century were conservative, not radical in orientation. The disciplines imposed on and accepted by the converts have been viewed as repressive and restrictive. Yet, as we will see, these were the very features which resulted in its enormous influence over the subsequent three hundred years in, first, English speaking countries and communities, and then, through the subsequent efflorescence of capitalism, in much of the rest of western Europe.

It was one of the early concerns of the Wesley brothers and other members of the 'Holy Club' at Oxford (from which many of the preachers came) that they too easily succumbed to laziness, a great 'weakness of the flesh', when God wanted them to 'employ their time profitably'. Industry and frugality, as John Wesley was to repeat time and again, are the inevitable outcomes of true godliness.

The following advice to his followers, in a tract published in 1762, providing instructions for daily living to those who belonged to Methodist Societies, is typical of his views on the subject,

Be active. Give no place to indolence or sloth; give no occasion to say, `Ye are idle, ye are idle.' Many will say so still; but let your whole spirit and behavior refute the slander. Be always employed; lose no shred of time; gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost. And whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. ¹³⁵

If human beings found themselves destitute, if they felt that God had abandoned them, they had only to commit their lives to Him and live as He had intended them to live. This would inevitably result in God's blessing. The demonstration of one's commitment to God was the diligence with which one applied oneself to 'one's calling'. If one was called to preach, then preach one must. If one was called to ply one's trade, then ply one's trade 'as unto God'. As Wesley put it, “Religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches.” (quoted in Thompson 1980, p. 391)

In the 18^th century, for both the religiously committed and for the majority of more loosely religious people of the middle ranks, progress was closely tied to God's plan for the world. Those who lived by his precepts, through their commitment and dedication, would ensure that the future would be that which He had planned. To show weakness in the face of unrepentant immorality was to endorse such behavior. One rejoiced 'with the Angels at one sinner brought to repentance', but one thundered the wrath of God to those who willfully refused His grace.

The century saw many very successful evangelists carrying this message to the 'lost'. It was, however, John Wesley, a man who knew that God had a plan for the world and that His plan could only be worked out through people who dedicated themselves to ensuring it, who was to fashion the doctrinal base for evangelical Protestantism over the next two hundred years. He was, in their hundreds of thousands, to 'convert' the deeply threatened lower-middle ranks to 'Methodism' ¹³⁶ . In doing so, he was also to set the scene for the 'Victorian morality' of the next century.

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, emphasis on the freedom of the individual from domination by both political and religious bureaucracies had led, in some instances, to anarchy, to an anti-law (antinomian) view of the rights of the individual. Since the individual was saved by grace, any attempt to merit God's favor through 'works' countered the grace of God. So, it was, in the most extreme forms of antinomianism, argued that the individual could display the depth of the grace of God through ignoring or contravening both moral and social rules and regulations.

In reaction to this, Luther, Calvin and other protest leaders of the 16^th century emphasized the importance of civil law and order, and required their followers to live closely regulated lives. Nonetheless, the evils of the centuries were commonly believed to be a consequence of this lawless strain in extreme forms of Protestantism.

By the turn of the 18^th century the common teaching was that, while individuals were saved by grace through faith, this salvation was demonstrated in the life of the individual through the Christian's 'blameless' life – as Jesus had said, "By their fruit you will recognize them" (Matthew Ch. 7 Verse 16). Wesley, as a consequence both of his family's experiences while growing up and of his own disputes with antinomian pietists and Calvinist dissenters, developed a theology which, while perhaps not as consistent as those of earlier protestant leaders, nonetheless directly addressed what he perceived to be fundamental weaknesses of both antinomianism and Calvinism.

Calvinists stressed the Divine prerogative in salvation. Since people were saved by grace, not works, no person could do anything to gain salvation, it was a 'free gift of God'. If people had to believe in order to be saved, they had to perform a 'work', that of actively believing. To get around this problem, Calvin had argued that God had, from the time of creation, 'elected' those to be saved. All that happened when people became religiously 'awakened' was that they became aware of what had already happened.

This awakening did not bring about their salvation, they simply became conscious of the salvation which God had accomplished 'before the foundation of the world'. Because they now knew they were among the elect, they delighted to do the will of God. Any person who was truly one of the elect, once he or she realized this, would, in thankfulness to God, want to live to please him. By their lives they would show that they really were among the elect. Of course, the flaw in this was that if people were destined to be saved, no matter what they did, then the door was always open to antinomianism.

Wesley, as a confirmed high church Anglican, was brought up in a religious environment in which faith and works went hand in hand. One showed one's faith through membership of the church, and one 'worked out one's salvation with fear and trembling'. The danger of this approach was, of course, the one which the Calvinists sought to avoid through the doctrine of election. People could be seen as 'earning' salvation through their works – the papist doctrine which Protestants claimed had brought about the Reformation in the first place.

Wesley's solution, while perhaps logically flawed, was nonetheless persuasive for ordinary people not embroiled in the intricacies of theology. First, people were saved by God's grace, through the active exercise of their free will. This was the only 'work' that any person could do to merit salvation. No form of morality, no form of legal rectitude, no membership of any religious body could bring a person to salvation. They merely exercised their 'free-will' in deciding whether or not they wanted to be saved.

When the person approached God in this way, He always accepted them. As a hymn of the period put it – "Only Believe, Only Believe, all things are possible, Only Believe". So, there were no 'elect', with the rest of humanity damned whether they liked it or not.

When people, aware of their utter helplessness and sinfulness, approached God, He gave them a 'new life', they were 'born again'. It was no longer them, but 'Christ in them'. They were given the 'Spirit of Christ' and from that point on could please God by their works, since they were not their own works, but the works of 'Christ in them, the hope of glory'. They were on the path to sanctification. Their hearts having been reoriented to God, they were being “transformed by the renewing of their minds”.

As Kathryn Long has put it, speaking of attitudes reflected in the religious revivals of that century in 19^th Century United States,

the stress on personal piety confirmed long-standing convictions that the only true path to social change came through individual conversions.
(1998 p. 107)

However, Wesley felt the need for some stronger reason for living lives 'acceptable to God' than an individual desire to be sanctified. Not only were people saved through an act of faith, they could also be lost through an act of will. The person who did not live to God, lived to self and, therefore, gave room to evil. This was why one had to 'work out one's salvation with fear and trembling'.

Wesley was to teach, for more than half a century, that while individuals were saved by grace through faith, and could not begin to please God until they had been 'born again', they could also commit spiritual suicide by failing to live as God intended them to. Such people had 'the form of godliness but denied the power of it'. When these people who were 'neither hot nor cold' were found within a community of Christians they should be expelled. Christians had a duty to discipline one another.

Those who were not “pressing on toward the goal” of the renewing of their minds, were 'backsliding'. And Christians could recognize such people. As Jesus had said,

By their fruit you will recognize them… Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord', will enter into the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
(Matthew 6: 16, 21)

So, one either pressed toward the goal, or one was in danger of being rejected by God – and, if by God, then also by Wesleyan Christians.

The theology might have been shaky, but the motivational message was forceful. It proved hugely successful in motivating those who accepted the message on both sides of the Atlantic over the next two hundred years.

By the end of the 18^th century they would become a major religious, economic and political force within Britain and the emerging United States of America, deeply dedicated to industry and frugality, to the principle of “whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might”. And it was they, not the financiers, bankers, and landowners of the country, who provided the engine for what was, indeed, to be an 'industrial revolution' which would set Britain and her transatlantic offspring on course to world empire and economic domination in the next centuries.

In a century when the moral commitment of the gentry to industry and frugality faltered, and might well have died, a new kind of 'gentleman' emerged, religiously dedicated to the unending pursuit of wealth and property, and to innovative production.

Born Again Manufacturers and Retailers  

The religious organizations which grew from the revivals or were transformed to accommodate them, provided these people with an ongoing means of deeply reaffirming the values which their 'conversions' had affirmed. Through them, they could re-establish the networks of respectability in which they had been brought up, and promote those values as essential to salvation for all human beings.

They knew that 'but for the grace of God', they too would have found themselves counted among the destitute of the century. They also quickly learned, through the preaching and teaching of the itinerant evangelists who were their leaders and mentors, that, having been saved by grace, through faith, they had begun lives of discipline and commitment to all the virtues of the century.

The Wesleyan Methodist societies, classes and bands provided the clearest model, but what John Wesley built up over more than fifty years in England was replicated with modification by many other evangelists not only in England but through Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the American colonies ¹³⁷ . The religious revivals of the time were, largely as a result of Wesley's vision, strongly organized, with the redeemed encouraged to long-term discipline and direction by their peers and leaders.

The deep, emotional nature of their conversion, based on a commitment to the moral values of those who brought the possibility of redemption to them, resulted in them being far more committed and determined to live by the understandings of the century than those who, till this time, had been the major promoters of modern values. By the mid 19^th century, the religious revivals of Britain and the United States were overtly focused within the newly successful middle ranks of the population.

The 1858 revival in New York sprang from “a weekly prayer meeting for businessmen” (Long 1998, p. 13). Those involved in the religious 'awakenings' which recurred over more than a century on both sides of the Atlantic from the early 1730s onwards, became, over the next two centuries, the moral center, the 'moral majority' of the western communities in which they lived.

They were convinced that only through faith and reliance on 'the grace of God' had they escaped catastrophe, committed to living by both moral and economic laws and convinced, as Kant explained, that

All the culture and art which adorn humanity, the most refined social order, are produced by that unsociability which is compelled by its own existence to discipline itself, and so by enforced art to bring the seeds implanted by Nature into full flower.

When they sang “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me”, they meant it with every fiber of their being.

The 18^th century had launched a new, emotionally committed, community of capitalists. The driving force of the 'industrial revolution' was to come, not from the financiers and well-established gentry of the era, but from those who had been redeemed to be productive.

The term 'Methodist industrialist' was, by the early 19^th century, a common descriptor for those who took both their religion and their productive enterprise seriously. They established factory towns and day schools and were concerned not only with money-making, but also with the moral development of those they employed.

Andrew Ure, in 1835, speaking of Richard Arkwright's ¹³⁸ contribution to the emergence of the industrial factory explained this:

What his judgment so clearly led him to perceive, his energy of will enabled him to realize with such rapidity and success, as would have done honour to the most influential individuals, but were truly wonderful in that obscure and indigent artisan…

The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one cooperative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation.

To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright.
(The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835)

The revivals of the 18^th century shared little with the cerebral, theological drive for religious reform which had brought 16^th and 17^th century protestant groups into being. They were 'charismatic', as that term has come to be used of similar movements in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Those who were 'saved', displayed all the passion for salvation and for recognition one might expect from people who felt themselves trapped and destined to be treated as what they were not. And they accepted and determined to live by the precepts and directives of their spiritual mentors.

Their mentors reaffirmed the presumptions of capitalism. As Whitefield, one of the very successful evangelists of the century on both sides of the Atlantic explained,

Nothing tries my temper more than to see any about me idle; an idle person tempts the devil to tempt him… if anybody says the Methodists [followers of the Wesley brothers] teach to be idle, they injure them. We tell people to be at their work early and late, that they may redeem time to attend the word. If all that speak against the Methodists were as diligent, it would be better for their wives and families. What, do you think a true Methodist will be idle?
(quoted in Armstrong 1973, p. 123)

A New Moral Leadership and Support Network  

The Methodist movement of the 18^th century found its leadership, not in the dissenting churches, descendants of the puritanical, protestant movements of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, but in the established Church of England. And, although the hierarchy of the state church seemed reluctant to be associated with such enthusiastic Christianity, the leaders of the movement were, largely, committed to ensuring that their converts remained within the Church. So, for more than fifty years, the tightly organized and disciplined Methodist societies remained religious communities connected to the parishes of the state church.

This prolonged association did more to convince dedicated Methodists of the worldliness and lack of moral leadership in higher levels of society than almost anything else could have. Since the Anglican clergy were appointed by the Anglican hierarchy, local communities had little influence over those selected to lead them. Very often, they found themselves having to endure leadership which seemed almost inimical to the lives they had committed themselves to leading. As Archibald Harrison put it,

The Methodists themselves were increasingly reluctant to attend services conducted by clergy with no apparent interest in spiritual religion, and, too frequently, with reputations far below the standards of the gospel it was their business to proclaim.
(1942, p. 169)

They became increasingly convinced that they, themselves, would have to provide the moral leadership they sought. They could not look to their social superiors for moral direction. Rather, they could expect that those above them would, at best, display a lukewarm attitude to the moral virtues.

For these 'born again' Christians, the 'upper middle ranks', together with the aristocracy, were largely composed of people who, as Paul had explained to Timothy (2 Tim. 2:5), held “the form of religion but denied the power of it.” Wesley had no hesitation in endorsing Paul's advice, “Avoid such people”. He provided his own description of their shallowness, “So much paint and affectation, so many unmeaning words and senseless customs among people of rank” (quoted in Armstrong 1973, p. 88).

Those 'born again' in the 18^th century revivals became the guardians of morality and prosperity. So dominant did they become that the virtues they espoused and promoted became the virtues of more than a century of middle ranking people. Even those who were, in truth, part of the earlier gentry, largely untouched by the religious revivals, found themselves having to publicly endorse the virtues. And born-again Methodists knew, with a conviction confirmed by experience, that if they did not hold the moral center, no one would.

The stern nature of the discipline they imposed on each other was tempered by social responsibility for those who repented and joined their ranks. The societies and classes of Methodism were not just religious groupings, they took moral, social and economic responsibility for each other. In doing so, they formed strong support networks, providing a social and economic refuge for people who saw the world closing in on them. As Armstrong described,

The societies helped the poor among their members – it was one of the duties of the stewards to arrange such relief. The maintenance of a 'lending stock' by the societies meant that loans of from one to five pounds could be made to poor members on the recommendation of the borrower's class leader.
(1973, p. 88)

This approach to the problems of the poor in their ranks is very similar to some of the 'pump priming' activities of 'credit banks' over the last forty years in 'developing' areas. The primary difference is that the pump priming lending of Methodist societies went to people who were already oriented to capitalist endeavor and whose activities were overseen by others of similar bent.

The lending did not produce the capitalist orientation, as some credit societies seem to presume will happen in Third World communities. Rather, it facilitated small business activity for people already aware of the need for frugal industry, the deferment of short term rewards for long term gain, and intent on the accumulation of capital as a means of demonstrating their inherent morality ¹³⁹ .

Methodists did not develop small scale credit societies among the unredeemed poor as a means of stimulating small business among them. They knew that money lent to such people would be spent on present needs and wants, not used to make more money.

In fact, many of those who were 'saved' from the ranks of 'the poor', failed to remain within the societies. They quickly proved themselves unreliable borrowers, who could not be trusted to use the money given them 'wisely' and, consequently, fell short of the moral requirements of the communities in which they found themselves.

The Methodists, quite unconsciously, selected people of like temper, those who were already committed to the middle ranking virtues of the century. Those whose background was among the 'poor' seldom demonstrated the long term 'habits of industry' which ensured acceptance.

Not only was this kind of support given within Methodist societies to help members out of poverty, it was also seen as a means of ensuring that they remained committed to Methodism. The networks of Methodism provided strong business support to small business people. Those who found themselves expelled from a society because they failed to measure up to the spiritual and moral requirements of the group, often found that their businesses suffered once they no longer had access to the networks through which their business activity had been established.

John Wesley, ever a practical leader, realized the power which such support had in ensuring that people remained committed to the cause, or were drawn back to commitment through being helped in this way. In a letter to the Methodist Society at Keighley, London, in 1779, he describes the financial difficulties into which a former member of the Society had fallen.

The person concerned, one William Shent, had for many years been a faithful member of the Society, but had been disciplined some time earlier and expelled for not living up to the moral requirements of membership. With support from the group removed, his business activities fell apart and he and his family were now in danger of being evicted from their home. Wesley wrote,

Who is he that is ready now to be broken up and turned into the street? William Shent. And does nobody care for this? William Shent fell into sin and was publicly expelled from the Society; but must he also starve? Must he with his grey hairs and with all his children be without a place to lay his head?…

Who is wise among you? Who is concerned for the Gospel? Who has put on the bowels of mercy? Let him arise and exert himself in this matter. You here all arise as one man and roll away the reproach. Let us set him on his feet at once. It may save both him and his family.
(Brash 1928, p. 105)

It is in this group of religiously committed capitalists that one must look to find the capitalist spirit of the 19^th century, that spirit to which the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher referred when she claimed, in the late 1970s, that British people should revive the moral values of the previous century.

The superficial charge laid against 19^th century middle ranking people, that their morality was largely hypocritical, only holds if one fails to recognize the large number of fellow travelers who came under the influence of Methodists and members of those dissenting Churches which were reinvigorated through participation in the 18^th century religious revivals. It is a testament to the social force of the movement, that the values of those saved by grace in the 18^th century, became the values of an age.

Of course, although the religious revivals of the 18^th century produced a morally committed middle class of capitalists, they brought their values with them into the revival. The revival preachers and teachers of the 18^th century strongly reaffirmed the important moral values of the middle ranks of western European communities. Those from the lower middle ranks, who found themselves most directly threatened by the reforms of the period, were drawn to leaders who offered them both recognition and practical support.

In a time when little distinction was being drawn between the poor and the lower middle ranks, reformers set out to teach the lower ranks the importance of work. In the process, those who were converted developed strong, religiously reinforced support networks which enabled them to succeed in business in a way that had not been possible in earlier times.

Wesley summed up the impact of Methodism on the lives of his followers in a sermon toward the end of his life,

The Methodists grow more and more self-indulgent, because they grow rich. Although many of them are still deplorably poor… yet many others, in the space of twenty, thirty or forty years, are twenty, thirty, yea, a hundred times richer than they were when they first entered the society. And it is an observation which admits of few exceptions, than nine in ten of these decreased in grace, in the same proportion as they increased in wealth. Does it not seem (and yet this cannot be) that Christianity, true scriptural Christianity, has a tendency to destroy itself?
(quoted in Armstrong 1973, p. 95)

While the Methodists took their religion seriously, all their energies were focused on life within this world. The religious virtues they promoted were capitalist virtues from the 17^th century, shaped by the understandings of the 18^th. They lived in an age when self-interest and the private accumulation of wealth and property were assumed to result in the Summum Bonum. As Appleby has explained,

Where earlier the disposal of a harvest or the pursuit of a trade had been conditional upon the likely social impact, the acceptance of near-absolute property rights had driven a wedge between society and the economy. With the curtailment of political oversight over economic life, the formal link between the material resources of the country and the people to be sustained by them had been cut. The commonwealth had become an aggregation of private wealth.
(Appleby 1978, p. 151)

Good Methodists knew that self-interested private enterprise, driven by a deep commitment to industry and frugality, and resulting in the private accumulation of wealth, were virtuous. As Harrison says,

The Wesleyans were particularly numerous among the shopkeepers, farmers, and better-class artisans… In some cathedral cities nearly all the shops in the High Street would be Methodist shops and a great Wesleyan congregation would gather under the very shadow of the Cathedral… In big business and in Northern factories, too, Wesleyan Methodism was prominent and grew in wealth in the prosperous years.
(1942, p. 180)

As Methodists grew wealthy they found themselves able to emulate the lifestyles and become accepted by the middle sorts with whom they had long desired to be identified. Methodism provided a moral leavening to the 19^th century. In the process, the 'old money' middle ranking families took on a veneer of 'morality' which enabled the 'new money' Methodists to interact with them without seeming to betray their Methodist values. The values of the two groupings slowly merged. In business one emphasized disciplined self-interest. In social life one accepted philanthropic responsibility for the 'improvement' of the poor.

By the 19^th century, Methodists and others belonging to communities which came out of the 18^th century revivals were dominant in both manufacturing and retailing. Those who were the descendants of 17^th and 18^th century gentry very often provided the finance for the more extensive of their activities. As Andrew Ure (1835, pp. 20,1) described, while explaining the emergence of factories in the late 18^th century,

In its precise acceptation, the Factory system is of recent origin, and may claim England for its birthplace. The mills for throwing silk, or making organzine, which were mounted centuries ago in several of the Italian states, and furtively transferred to this country by Sir Thomas Lombe in 1718, contained indeed certain elements of a factory, and probably suggested some hints of those grander and more complex combinations of self-acting machines, which were first embodied half a century later in our cotton manufacture by Richard Arkwright, assisted by gentlemen of Derby, well acquainted with its celebrated silk establishment.

From the outset, as Brash (1928, p. 179) says, “Methodism was an army of missionaries”. Every convert was a potential evangelist, every society and class accepted an evangelical mission to 'the lost'. Those who were at the forefront of the religious revival movements in Wales, England, Ireland, Scotland and in the various American colonies, believed they had been directly chosen by God. They had His mandate to “bring sinners to repentance”, and if they failed, the damnation of those they had failed to reach would be their responsibility. They knew that the warning God had given Ezekiel was theirs also,

… if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people and the sword comes and takes the life of one of them, that man will be taken away because of his sin, but I will hold the watchman accountable for his blood.
(Ezekiel 33:6)

Equally, they accepted the responsibility that Wesley had made his own. They not only 'saved' the lost, they organized them into churches and communities, and they introduced the disciplines of 18^th and 19^th century Methodist Christianity and economic rationality to those they organized in these ways. They had the responsibility not only to bring salvation to the lost, but, in the process, to bring them civilization and consequent material prosperity.

Richard Whateley, Archbishop of Dublin, in 1854, explained the problem,

Men, left in the lowest, or even anything approaching the lowest, degree of barbarism, in which they can possibly subsist at all, never did, and never can raise themselves, unaided, into a higher condition ¹⁴⁰ .

Because all human beings were sinners, and because 'enlightenment' depended on the grace of God, not only were people 'saved' from perdition, they were also, inevitably, saved to a new way of life, to a higher level of civilization than they could ever reach on their own. They were, by God's grace, and by the disciplines of their churches, delivered from lives of sloth and indigence into lives of industry and prosperity. Through this they would

overcome the present disposition either to sloth or to enjoyment. This habit is slowly acquired, and is in reality a principal distinction of nations in the advanced state of mechanic and commercial arts.
(Ferguson 1767 Part 2, Section 2)

As Herbert Schlossberg described,

In 1837 a clergyman in Leeds remarked that

the most established religion in Leeds is Methodism, and it is Methodism that all the most pious among the Churchmen unconsciously talk,

That is, Methodism, which by then had separated from the Church of England, had come to dominate the thinking of the city to the extent that even Anglicans had been swallowed up in its spirit, albeit without realizing it…

The “secular' 18^th century, when we look beneath the surface, turns out to be the start of a profound spiritual revival. As it spread from the Church of England throughout the society, it affected the life of non-Anglican, or Dissenting, congregations. The chapels in which the dissenters worshiped increasingly rang with the ideas and hymns of the evangelical movement.
(2000, pp. 8, 10)

By the mid 19^th century, Methodism would become the leavening of Victorian Britain. From the high, to the lower-middle, to the artisanal 'working class' (but seldom to the 'idle poor'), the British increasingly committed themselves to the understandings of Methodism, to a religiously invigorated capitalism.

The American War of Independence resulted in a hiatus in direct influences from Britain to the American colonies. The revival in Britain preceded a similar movement in the colonies by some thirty to forty years. The missionaries of the British 'Awakening' proved most effective as the colonies settled down and law and order were reimposed under the new United States administration.

As Mary Cayton (1997) explained, between 1794 and 1832 thousands of converts streamed into the non-conformist churches of British North America, and, as in Britain, the bulk of those who committed themselves to an active religious life were involved in petty-business. As Cayton said,

Especially in the Northeast, then rapidly being drawn into a net of complex market relationships, those entering upon the responsibilities of adulthood but also many of other life stages, and members of an emerging entrepreneurial class but also those of other stations and callings, were caught up in intensified religious expression.

They experienced conversions, joined organizations designed to promote a host of benevolent causes, and swelled church rolls. They were Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, and together they comprised a movement that historians in retrospect have called the Second Great Awakening.

First The Poor, Then The World!  

What started in Britain, very quickly reached outward to the whole world. Those who entered the movement in the 18^th century knew that there were no geographical boundaries to bringing sinners to repentance. With Wesley, they asserted that the world was their parish.

Out of the 18^th century religious revivals came the evangelical missionary movement of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. And, as they moved into the world, they took their Western European lower middle class values with them. As Cairns has described of missionary attitudes in central Africa in the 19^th century,

The proper attitude was indicated by Carson of the L. M. S. [London Missionary Society] who, after noting that African men spent 'much time in indolence', remarked that it was inconceivable 'how the practice of that vice in the African race can be supposed to conduce to happiness in them when it makes us so miserable'.
(1965, p. 80)

Those who were 'born again' should, in the minds of these missionaries, be born into frugal, self-disciplined industry, into conserving possessions, into accumulating wealth, and into using the wealth they accumulated 'wisely'.

They took capitalism to the world. And, since people in other communities seemed to have so little internalized discipline, so little regard for prudent, productive endeavor, they realized they had a responsibility to discipline and train them.

Out of missionary endeavor among the poor, among the destitute in western Europe, and out of similar activity among the 'benighted' of other regions, came a strong belief in the need for practical education to teach converts to live as 'God had intended them to live'.

But, despite all its success in the Anglo-speaking world, and the extensive network of societies and churches which sprang from the movement, very few of those on the lowest rungs of the social order were drawn into the revival movement. The redemption of the lower middle rankings of British and North American communities still left large numbers of poor dispossessed and cast adrift in the century, relatively untouched by the revivals which had swept their countries.

The redemption of the artisans, tradespeople and small holders of the century did not predispose them to accepting the irreligion and laziness of the poor. It made them resolute in doing something about 'the problem'. They did not have to look far to find those who constituted it. They were on their own door step, a group of people who defied all law and morality. James Kay (1832) described the lower classes inhabiting a district in Manchester,

This district has sometimes been the haunt of hordes of thieves and desperados who defied the law, and is always inhabited by a class resembling savages in their appetites and habits. It is surrounded on every side by some of the largest factories of the town, whose chimneys vomit forth dense clouds of smoke, which hang heavily over this insalubrious region.

Capitalism was in full bloom! It was time for the new moral capitalist leaders of Britain to tame and civilize the hordes of thieves and desperadoes which lived on their own doorsteps. And they set about it with all the determination they had employed in building their new industrializing world.

Chapter 5:
The Virtuous Capitalist, The Poor and the Wasteland  

[Factory Workers] pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their in-door occupations
(Andrew Ure 1835, p. 298)

• Bubbles and Wasteland
• Who were 'The Poor'?
• Who's to blame for their poverty and degrading circumstances?
• What shall we do with The Poor?
• The Poor are lazy with no desire to 'Better Themselves'!
• Born Again or Not – They need to Learn Discipline!
• They'll work if they're hungry!
• We'll Compel Them through Laws and Regulations!
• Let's Train their Young
• And … No Charity!!
• Don't allow them to organize – it's Bad for Them!
• Organizations of Artisans
• organizing the 'Working Poor'
• Conclusion

Bubbles and Wasteland  

The trader, in rude ages, is short-sighted, fraudulent, and mercenary; but in the progress and advanced state of his art, his views are enlarged, his maxims are established: he becomes punctual, liberal, faithful, and enterprising; and in the period of general corruption, he alone has every virtue, except the force to defend his acquisitions. He needs no aid from the state, but its protection; and is often in himself its most intelligent and respectable member.
Adam Ferguson (1767 Pt 3, Section 4)

Ferguson's description of 18^th century Western European gentry in the 2^nd half of the 18^th century is in stark contrast to Thomas Jefferson's description,

…they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. …man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
(Thomas Jefferson, 1787 ¹⁴¹ )

Jefferson was a visitor to Europe and his reaction is that of a relatively detached outsider witnessing the consequences of the enlightened self-interest of the gentry: injustice and oppression of those least able to defend themselves – the poor.

Ferguson was a Scottish gentleman. He had lived inside the bubble of middle class Western European society all his life and saw everything outside that bubble as a wasteland which needed to be reclaimed.

If that wasteland was to be reclaimed, its inhabitants rescued from poverty, moral depravity and sloth, it would be because the gentry set the example and took responsibility both for 'developing' their environments and for re-educating the indolent poor. Those who practised enlightened self-interest did so for the most moral of reasons. They were securing the future for everyone. They needed protection from the state to ensure that all the benefits which flowed from enlightened self-interest were realized ¹⁴² .

The wasteland was a 'nursery for thieves and villains'. They were poor because they were indisciplined and lazy, not because of the rapacious greed of the gentry! ¹⁴³ The poor lacked the virtues that had become natural to the gentry.

When middle ranking people looked at a gentleman they saw a virtuous man. Adam Smith, in a book appropriately entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, explained it well. It was from the realization that such people were securing the future for everyone in society that there,

arises that eminent esteem with which all men naturally regard a steady perseverance in the practice of frugality, industry, and application, though directed to no other purpose than the acquisition of fortune. The resolute firmness of the person who acts in this manner, and in order to obtain a great though remote advantage, not only gives up all present pleasures, but endures the greatest labor both of mind and body, necessarily commands our approbation. ¹⁴⁴
(1759 Part 4 Ch. 2)

Such people did not merely pursue prudent self-interest for their own gain or because others insisted they should. They knew, in their own hearts, that prudent, self-interested industry and frugality were amongst the most important of the virtues:

In the steadiness of his industry and frugality, in his steadily sacrificing the ease and enjoyment of the present moment for the probable expectation of the still greater ease and enjoyment of a more distant but more lasting period of time, the prudent man is always both supported and rewarded by the entire approbation of the impartial spectator, and of the representative of the impartial spectator, the man within the breast.
(Smith 1759, Part 6 Section 1)

The 18^th and 19^th centuries were the centuries in which capitalism was to flourish, unfettered by laws and regulations. It was to be the period when the long-term impact of capitalism on the living conditions of the poor would become obvious.

What would happen to the least fortunate, to the inhabitants of the wastelands, when the 'steady perseverance in the practice of frugality, industry, and application, though directed to no other purpose than the acquisition of fortune' was allowed full play?

Who were 'The Poor'?  

They were the dispossessed, inhabitants of the wastelands of Western Europe. They were the rubble of feudal society. For them, feudal understandings ¹⁴⁵ , inevitably warped and altered by the centuries of turmoil, confrontation and change in western Europe, were still central.

But, the patron-client structures of the feudal past were gone. There were no patrons on whom they could rely, no institutional supports which might protect their rights. They had lost those over more than three hundred years of feudal decay and collapse. They had become

hordes of thieves and desperados who defied the law … a class resembling savages in their appetites and habits
(James Kay (1832)).

Thomas More had described their plight two centuries earlier, when their patrons resolved 'to enclose many thousand acres of ground'.

… [T]he owners as well as tenants are turned out of their possessions, by tricks, or by main force, or being wearied out with ill-usage, they are forced to sell them.

By which means those miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell almost for nothing their household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay for a buyer.

When that little money is at an end, for it will be soon spent, what is left for them to do, but either to steal and so to be hanged (God knows how justly), or to go about and beg? And if they do this, they are put in prison as idle vagabonds
(1516, Utopia, Book 1)

Not much had changed in two centuries!

They were the dispossessed of Western Europe, the weak who could not defend themselves against patrons turned capitalist (or, as Jefferson put it, 'turned wolf'). They constituted separate communities from the gentry, money makers and aristocracy of Europe, only connecting with them as menials, laborers, vagabonds and thieves. They had not socialized with or shared the interests and understandings of the middle ranks. The gentry, with their distinctive ways of living, moved in social spheres beyond their vision, and, largely, beyond their interest.

Among the more intemperate descriptions of these people is that given by Daniel Defoe (1725?), son of a tallow chandler (a member of the Worshipful Company of Butchers) and aspiring member of the gentry. His writings grew in popularity through the 19^th century:

How many frequent robberies are committed by these japanners? And to how many more are they confederates? Silver spoons, spurs, and other small pieces of plate, are every day missing, and very often found upon these sort of gentlemen; yet are they permitted, to the shame of all our good laws, and the scandal of our most excellent government, to lurk about our streets, to debauch our servants and apprentices, and support an infinite number of scandalous, shameless trulls, yet more wicked than themselves, for not a Jack among them but must have his Gill.

By whom such indecencies are daily acted, even in our open streets, as are very offensive to the eyes and ears of all sober persons, and even abominable in a Christian country.

In any riot, or other disturbance, these sparks are always the foremost; for most among them can turn their hands to picking of pockets, to run away with goods from a fire, or other public confusion, to snatch anything from a woman or child, to strip a house when the door is open, or any other branch of a thief's profession.

In short, it is a nursery for thieves and villains; modest women are every day insulted by them and their strumpets; and such children who run about the streets, or those servants who go on errands, do but too frequently bring home some scraps of their beastly profane wit; insomuch, that the conversation of our lower rank of people runs only upon bawdy and blasphemy, notwithstanding our societies for reformation, and our laws in force against profaneness; for this lazy life gets them many proselytes, their numbers daily increasing from runaway apprentices and footboys, insomuch that it is a very hard matter for a gentleman to get him a servant, or for a tradesman to find an apprentice ¹⁴⁶ .

Innumerable other mischiefs accrue, and others will spring up from this race of caterpillars, who must be swept from out our streets, or we shall be overrun with all manner of wickedness.

Who's to blame for their poverty and degrading circumstances?  

They were childish ingrates, who expected something for nothing, who refused to take life seriously and suffered the consequences of their indisciplined laziness. It was time for them to grow up, to accept responsibility for life, not live on unearned handouts.

Bernard Mandeville expressed it well. If one supported people through offering them unearned handouts they would become lazy and dependent on welfare.

Charity, where it is too extensive, seldom fails of promoting Sloth and Idleness, and is good for little in the Commonwealth but to breed Drones and destroy Industry.
(Appendix to 1724 edition of Fable of the Bees entitled 'An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools')

Samuel Smiles (1859), in a popular book of the mid 19^th century, entitled 'Self-Help', provided the reasons why, after one hundred and fifty years of unregulated capitalism, the poor were still poor, all-too-often living and working in sub-human conditions. They were 'the extravagant', who 'wasted their resources'. It was their own fault if they were poor!

…the lesson of self-denial – the sacrificing of a present gratification for a future good – is one of the last that is learnt. Those classes which work the hardest might naturally be expected to value the most money which they earn. Yet the readiness with which so many are accustomed to eat up and drink up their earnings as they go, renders them to a great extent helpless and dependent upon the frugal.

Any class of men that lives from hand to mouth will ever be an inferior class. They will necessarily remain impotent and helpless, hanging on to the skirts of society, the sport of times and seasons. Having no respect for themselves, they will fail in securing the respect of others. In commercial crises, such men must inevitably "go to the wall." Wanting that husband power which a store of savings, no matter how small, invariably gives them, they will be at every man's mercy, and, if possessed of right feelings, they cannot but regard with fear and trembling the future possible fate of their wives and children.

"The world," once said Mr. Cobden to the working men of Huddersfield,

has always been divided into two classes – those who have saved, and those who have spent – the thrifty and the extravagant.

The building of all the houses, the mills, the bridges, and the ships, and the accomplishment of all other great works which have rendered man civilized and happy, has been done by the savers, the thrifty; and those who have wasted their resources have always been their slaves.

It has been the law of nature and of Providence that this should be so; and I were an imposter if I promised any class that they would advance themselves if they were improvident, thoughtless, and idle.

(1859, Chapter 9 Para.5)

Samuel Scriven's 1842 report to the House of Commons on factory conditions in 'Mines and Manufactories', outlined the problems in dealing with the poor. No matter what good, virtuous gentlemen did, nothing could be improved so long as the poor behaved as they now did.

To contextualize Scriven's views, one needs to remember the contemporary situation in which he was writing.

The Speenhamland decrees ¹⁴⁷ in the late 18^th century allowed employers to pay “market rates” for labor, which soon drove wages below what was necessary to maintain subsistence. Parishes were required to make up the shortfall from their rates. The significance of this is that wages really did fall below what was considered necessary to ensure subsistence. It was not possible to live on the wages of just one or two members of the family without parish support.

In 1834 the Poor Laws were amended to remove this 'burden' from the parishes, transferring it to the poor. After all, what had they to complain about? All they had to do was 'get a job'.

Parents, in 1840, did not send children to work because they were 'proverbially improvident'. They desperately needed every penny they could get. As William Booth could still explain at the end of the century,

… the want of money is the cause of an immensity of evil and trouble. The moment you begin practically to alleviate the miseries of the people, you discover that the eternal want of pence is one of their greatest difficulties.
(William Booth (1890))

This, however, is clearly not the view of Samuel Scriven:

The manufacturers are gentlemen who 'evince a warm-hearted sympathy for those about them in difficulty or distress, contribute as much as possible to their happiness, and are never known to inflict punishments on the children, or to allow others to do so':

The manufacturers are a highly influential, wealthy, and intelligent class of men: they evince a warm-hearted sympathy for those about them in difficulty or distress, contribute as much as possible to their happiness, and are never known to inflict punishments on the children, or to allow others to do so.

It, would be invidious to particularise individuals, but I should do them injustice as a body if I did not acknowledge their liberality in allowing me unrestrained admission to every department of their works, as well as the desire they have shown to render me every assistance and co-operation, with the view of carrying out the objects of the Commission …

They can hardly be held responsible for the consequences of the lifestyles of their proverbially improvident employees.

The processes being such as to admit of the employment of whole families father, mother, and some two, three, or more children – their united earnings are sometimes 3l. or 4l. per week: but, proverbially improvident, and adopting the adage,– "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof", they squander the proceeds of their labor in gaudy dress, or at the skittle-ground and ale-house; so that, when overtaken by illness or other casualty, and thrown for a few days out of work, they resort to their masters for a loan, or to the parish workhouse for relief.

Thoughtless and improvident parents, showing no regard for the consequences to their offspring, permit them to continue working in sub-standard conditions. So long as they can reap the advantages of their labor they encourage them to work in conditions like these:

The processes and departments to which I beg leave to direct your especial attention are the dipping, scouring, throwing, plate, saucer, and dish making, and printing, as those in which very young children are found. The effects I have observed in the first and second, on many of the older hands, and the evidence I have recorded from all, have satisfied me that they are the most pernicious and destructive in the whole process of potting.

It is true that in many instances persons have been known to have worked as dippers many years without any material consequences resulting, or being perceptible, and they will tell you "'tis not so bad now as formerly, when a greater proportion of the poisonous metal entered into the composition of the liquid;" but even in them, whose constitutions may have been less susceptible of its influences, I have been able to trace in their dull and cadaverous countenances its insidious workings.

In most of the rooms there are one or two adults, with their attendant boys, whose business it is to bring the ware in its rough, or, in the phraseology of the potter, in its biscuit state, from the warehouse or painting-room to the tub. By constant handling, the fingers become so smooth and delicate that they sometimes bleed, and thereby render the process of absorption more certain and rapid. The dipping itself; performed by the man, is momentary, and, when completed, the article is passed on to the boys for shelving and drying; the liquid consists of borax, soda, potash, with whiting, stone, and carbonate of lead, finely ground and mixed together with water; for coarse goods a large proportion of lead is used, and in some cases arsenic.

The workers seem to have a complete disregard of the dangers around them. They recklessly eat their meals in the most unhygienic of surroundings.

Both men and boys have their hands and cloths almost always saturated with it; and reckless of the danger they incur, seldom or ever change, or use precautionary measures, frequently taking their meals in the same room, sufficiently satisfied to wipe their hands on their aprons. I have never seen rooms provided for cleansing, although it appear in some of the returned schedules that there is plenty of water and at their command.

From their disregard of prophylactic measures; you will not be surprised that paralysis, colica pictonum, epilepsy, and a host of other nervous diseases; are to be met with in all their aggravated forms. The most constant, however, is that of partial paralysis of the extensors of the hands in men, and of epilepsy in children, accompanied at all times with obstinate constipation of the bowels and derangement of the alimentary canal.

But the strongest assurance that can be adduced of the deleterious effect that this process has on children, to be found in the evidence of the men themselves, who, when their affections have been appealed to as fathers of families, have invariably, to the question " Would bring your own son to the dipping-tub ?" replied " No: " and in the instance of John Cooper he continued because I love my child, and would rather that should live."

The average amount of weekly wages for men in this department is 30s., for boys 5s., which is higher than in many others, and obtained as an equivalent for " the risk they run." This pay is a strong temptation to the thoughtless and improvident parent, who, regardless of consequences to their offspring, permit them, so long as they reap the advantages of their labor, to continue in this pest-house.

The parents seem to have no interest in educating their children, sending them at too early a period of life to labor from morning till night.

The masters show the concern one would expect from socially aware gentlemen. They acknowledge and lament the children's low and degraded condition.

The problem really is the total indifference of the parents.

I almost tremble, however, when I contemplate the fearful deficiency of knowledge existing throughout the district, and the consequences likely to result to this increased and increasing population, and would willingly leave the evidence to speak for itself, did I not feel that I should ill discharge my duty were I to shrink from the task; on an examination of the minutes of evidence which I have the honour to forward from Cobridge, Burslem, &c. &c., it will appear that more than three-fourths of the persons therein named can neither read nor write.

An internee may be possibly drawn that I may have been partial in my selection of them, but I beg distinctly to be understood as having on all occasions had them before me irrespective of any educational competency they may have possessed. But it is not from my own knowledge that I proclaim their utter, their absolute ignorance. I would respectfully refer you to the evidence of their own pastors and masters, and it will appear that as one man they acknowledge and lament their low and degraded condition.

My experience has satisfied me that this state of things is attributable to the three following causes:

30) The first, and perhaps most prominent, I conceive to be that of sending children at too early a period of life to labor from morning till night, in hundreds of cases for 15 or 16 hours consecutively, with the intermission of only a few minutes to eat their humble food of " tatees" and " stir pudding", and where they acquire little else than vice, for the wages of ls. or 2s. per week, whereby they are necessarily deprived of every opportunity of attending a day or evening school.

31) Another is the total indifference of parents, who, although in numberless instances earning from 2s. to 3s. or 4s. per week, and not requiring the early labor of their offspring, nevertheless care so little about their immediate or future welfare, as to be equally satisfied whether they continue in ignorance or not.

32) A third is doubtless the poverty of others unemployed.

The workers appear to have no self-respect. They live in disgusting, squalid conditions,

The position of the town being elevated, and upon the brow of a hill, it is consequently exposed to the winds from all quarters, but more especially to the north-east, for a valley approaches the town in this direction, and serves to give force and increased effect to the cold winds which prevail from that quarter.

It is to this elevated position and free ventilation that I am disposed to attribute our comparative exemption from epidemic and certain endemic diseases, especially to the common fever of the country, which in the summer and autumn more particularly prevails in the surrounding towns of Burslem, Newcastle, and Stoke; whilst Hanley and Shelton suffer much less from the disease. But owing to this position and particular exposure to the most ungenial wind of the heavens, the north-east, I conceive a peculiar character is, to a certain extent, given to the diseases of the town-pulmonary affections prevailing very extensively.

The direction in which the streets are built might have slightly counteracted this unfavorable exposure, but unfortunately the inhabitants have, no doubt in ignorance and without design, given it increased effect by arranging most of the streets on the north-east and eastern side of the town in a direction parallel to the current of the wind when it blows from this quarter.

There is a small closely-built district near the centre of Hanley, called Chapel Field, and a series of blind streets branching off from the main street in Shelton, both which places are crowded with inhabitants living in squalid poverty. Many of the inhabitants of these spots, but especially the children, have a peculiarly sickly aspect, most probably from the poor and improper food they take, conjoined with the impure air they breathe. Numbers of children die during infancy in these quarters of the town, and fevers and other epidemic diseases prevail there most extensively and in their most virulent forms.

In different parts of the town and on its outskirts there are many stagnant pools in which vegetable matter is constantly undergoing a process of putrefaction, for they are used for the purpose of steeping hazel-rods in, to render them more pliant in the use to which they are applied, that of forming crates, in which the earthenware of the neighbourhood is packed.

They are very well paid in comparison with workers in other manufacturing districts but their improvidence is their undoing!

The wages paid in this neighbourhood are good, better than those of most other manufacturing districts. Habits of improvidence prevail notwithstanding extensively; and it not unfrequently happens that men who draw 3s. a-week for their own work and that of their children, suffer some of the evils and many of the irregularities of poverty.

Intemperance in intoxicating drinks is a serious evil among the working class. Many of them allowing their families almost to starve to beg in order that they may indulge in this vice. The numbers of public-houses, beer, and spirit shops being great, and the latter appearing to enjoy a very prosperous trade …

The women do not acquire those domestic habits which would best fit them for housewives and mothers. They continue to work while they are pregnant and then send out their infants to nurse during the day.

The females, from being employed from an early age in the manufactories as transferrers painters, burnishers, &c., do not acquire those domestic habits which would best fit them for housewives and mothers: and it frequently happens that when they are bearing children they continue to labor in the manufactories, and send out their infants to nurse during the day, This is a source of great mortality amongst infants, for they are fed by their nurses chiefly with bread steeped in water, and they early become sickly, and die of various diseases of the digestive organs, those of the chest, or head …

One could continue with this report, but it is simply more of the same: atrocious conditions, and improvident, irresponsible inhabitants who seem to disregard both their own and their children's wellbeing.

The Report concludes with a set of appendices in which both responsible people of the towns and employees in the various factories are given a voice. The conclusions to the first and last of these is given below.

Scriven Report: Doctors report on health conditions: Appendix No. 1. A few REMARKS on the GENERAL and sanatory condition of the town of HANLEY and SHELTON, and its Inhabitants, more especially with respect to the Health of the Children of the Working Classes:

…In conclusion I may add, as the result of my observation from a residence of 17 years in this town, during which time I have practised as a surgeon, that children are sometimes cruelly overworked, in the process of plate-making especially, and that in other labors, and in the collieries, they are exposed to very unhealthy occupations. They also suffer greatly from the improvident and intemperate habits of their parents. In such cases their clothing is defective, and especially towards the end of each week their food very scanty. Their education is exceedingly imperfect, and the religious instruction they receive ought to be much more contemplate in the department of morals.
(Signed) J. B. DAVIS, Surgeon

Perhaps we should allow the Reverend Aitken to have the final comment. Scriven Report: Teachers & Clergy reports: Appendix No. 119. LETTER from the Rev. R. E. Aitkens, incumbent of Hanley:

Sir;
To the inquiries which you have been pleased to submit to me respecting the moral condition of the children employed in the manufactories in this place, I cannot give any additional evidence to that which you have received from the worthy master of the National School, which you read in my presence before him, and which with some slight alterations, in which he concurred, I confirmed viva voce. I am not sure whether it was expressed in your notes that the school is under the superintendence of the incumbent of Hanley.

Respecting the two subjects of inquiry (at the bottom of p.10 and the top of p.11) to which, by your marginal mark, you have directed my especial attention, I beg to offer the following observations, which are the result of considerable experience.

I have almost invariably found that the habits invariably acquired by women, rendering them more or less fit to perform their duties as wives and mothers, depend infinitely less on the occupations by which they procure their maintenance, than in their domestic training by the instructions and examples of their mothers. Let the mother be industrious, notable, decorous, and devout, and generally you will find her daughters of the same character, whether they continue to reside at home and earn their livelihood by the use of the needle, or whether they are employed in the manufactories. I have uniformly found the case in this rank of life similar to the oft-debated and endless question of the respective advantages of public or private schools among the higher and middle classes of society. In both cases the eventual moral habits of individuals will depend more on the dispositions which they bring from home than what they acquire in the school or manufactory.

No reference is made to the consequences of changes in the Poor Laws. Wages are assumed to be more than adequate for the legitimate needs of the inhabitants. And adverse conditions are largely of their own making.

These were the conditions of 'the poor' in Britain after one hundred and fifty years of politically dominant capitalist development.

We need to ask how conditions like these emerged.

What shall we do with The Poor?  

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, 'the poor' were to find that it was time for them to be re-educated. They were to become the 'mission field' for morally upright, responsible Western Europeans. And for the good of both 'decent society' and their immortal souls, they were to be taught discipline and obedience, they were to be taught to work. It would be a long, drawn-out and painful process, and those being re-educated would endure much misery and heartache, but they were going to be taught.

Although it might seem a cruel policy, the only reasonable way of dealing with those who needed help was to compel them to work. There were times in life when one had to be cruel to be kind. As James argued,

the social legislators of the Restoration aimed at nothing less than making the poor a source of profit to the state by forcing them to work for reduced wages.
(in Wilson 1969, p. 119)

But they did not do so vindictively. This was not a 'class war', it was a class-focused re-education program. As Wilson says,

what came to be regarded by later critics as a system of calculated brutality and repression arose in the first place not from unconcern or harshness, but out of a desire to protect the efforts of those local authorities who were trying hardest to improvise remedies.
(1969, p. 134)

The Poor are lazy with no desire to Better Themselves!  

A major problem encountered in dealing with 'the poor' was that they seemed to have little desire either to accumulate possessions or to save for the future ¹⁴⁸ . And, perhaps more importantly for those who now held the reins of power in Britain, and, increasingly, in the rest of western Europe, the poor did not seem to understand or appreciate the vital importance of work, for its own sake, that is, for its character building potential ¹⁴⁹ . This was not merely a concern of the 18^th century. It had become an increasingly important concern of 'responsible' people over the previous two hundred years.

Edmond Fitzmaurice explained that Sir William Petty, writing in 1665, recognized how intractable the problem was of getting 'The Poor' to work consistently. They seemed content "to live in a condition little above that of animals".

His own observations of the habits of the cloth-workers in England and of the Irish peasantry compelled him, however reluctantly, to the opinion that the general standard of living was as yet too low to make high daily wages of any advantage to the laborer, because of their tendency at once to reduce their hours and be content with wages just sufficient to support existence at a very low level of material civilization.

"It was observed," he says,

by clothiers and others who employ great numbers of poor people, that when corn is extremely plentiful that the labor of the poor is proportionately dear and scarce to be had at all, so licentious are they who labor only to eat, or rather to drink.

It was the same in Ireland, especially since the introduction of that

breadlike root, the potato. A day of two hours labor was there sufficient to make men to live after their present fashion, and the cheapness of food was the excuse for the people to live in a condition little above that of animals.

(1895, p. 220)

Sir Josiah Child, in 1668, put his finger on the problem,

And for our own Poor in England, it is observed, that they live better in the dearest Countries for Provisions, than in the cheapest, and better in a dear year than in a cheap, (especially in relation to the Publique Good) for that in a cheap year they will not work above two days in a week; their humor being such, that they will not provide for a hard time; but just work so much and no more, as may maintain them in that mean condition to which they have been accustomed.
(Child 1668)

The poor seemed focused on the present, unaware of the future, living from hand to mouth.

Sir Henry Pollexfen pronounced in 1697 that

the advances of wages hath proved an inducement to idleness; for many are for being idle the oftener because they can get so much in a little time;

and Bernard Mandeville in 1714 asserted that

Every Body knows that there is a vast number of Journey-men … who, if by Four Days labor in a Week they can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth; and that there are Thousands of Laboring Men of all sorts, who will … put themselves to fifty Inconveniences … to make Holiday.

(Hatcher 1998, p. 68)

Ferguson identified the problem as one of being 'uncivilized'. In straying from speaking of the poor to speaking of the barbarian, Ferguson, in common with most other writers of the 18^th century, betrayed his view of the poor in his own country. It was as though they belonged to another society, alien and devoid of the moral virtues of the civilized; impetuous, artful, rapacious, violent, deceitful and slothful,

Actuated by great passions, the love of glory, and the desire of victory, roused by the menaces of an enemy, or stung with revenge; in suspense between the prospects of ruin or conquest, the barbarian spends every moment of relaxation in the indulgence of sloth.

He cannot descend to the pursuits of industry or mechanical labor: the beast of prey is a sluggard; the hunter and the warrior sleeps, while women or slaves are made to toil for his bread.

But shew him a quarry at a distance, he is bold, impetuous, artful, and rapacious: no bar can withstand his violence, and no fatigue can allay his activity.
(1767 Part 2, Section 3)

As Foucault (1971) claimed, for 'responsible' western Europeans of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, sloth had become the worst of all sins, and productive labor the best of all disciplines and virtues, having its own, inevitable rewards.

'The poor', like the barbarians, appeared unable to understand why this should be so. Consequently, they labored for only so long as was necessary to supply their meager wants and needs and then focused on other activities, more often than not, various forms of 'time wasting' such as socializing and 'loitering'.

For 18^th and 19^th century reformers, 'loitering' was a pernicious past-time of those who were 'slothful', those who seemed content with their miserable lot and who clearly lacked all motivation to 'better themselves' ¹⁵⁰ . John Marshall (1698), in a commentary on John Bunyan's writings, put it well,

Bunyan well knew that idleness engenders poverty and crime, and is the parent of every evil; and he exhorts his runner to the greatest diligence, not to 'fool away his soul' in slothfulness, which induces carelessness, until the sinner is remediless …¹⁵¹

Born Again or Not – They need to Learn Discipline!  

The nature of the activity in which 18^th century responsible people were to engage in getting the poor to commit to consistent work was strongly influenced by their religious predisposition. For those less religiously inclined, the poor could be disciplined to work through legal compulsions; for those who saw religious commitment as central, no amount of discipline, no depth of punishment could bring about the needed transformation until the heart and soul of the individual had been reborn ¹⁵² .

For the great majority of middle ranking people, the answer lay in laws and regulations, in disciplining and directing the activity of those who threatened the prosperity of the age. But, for a significant minority, those who still strongly identified with the religious longings and ambitions of the 17^th century, the problems of the age could not be overcome simply through compulsion and legislation. Before people could even contemplate such transforming changes in their lifestyles they needed to be empowered by God. People needed to be 'born again', starting out on a new life empowered by God to become sanctified in mind and body.

They would still have to yield to discipline, and they would still have to show that perseverance and industry which marked the truly moral person, but the transformation could not begin until they had been made into new people, saved to serve God in the way He chose (and Responsible Western Europeans knew) they should. Having yielded their lives to God, they should focus on the life before them, determined to “work out their salvation with fear and trembling”.

John Wesley, in 1762, adjured his followers,

Be always employed; lose no shred of time; gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost. And whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.

Only God could perform the miraculous transformation which was needed in the lives of those who were trapped in sloth and its consequences. Unless there was true repentance, born of clear understanding of the depths of depravity in which they were sunk, there could be no redemption.

The redeemed, in gratitude to God, would apply themselves unstintingly to virtuous, productive lives. As Charles Wesley, in a popular hymn of the period, wrote,

Depth of mercy, can there be, mercy still reserved for me? Can my God his wrath forebear, me the chief of sinners spare?

Isaac Watts put it equally eloquently,

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see!

Once that transformation had been made, it was the responsibility of the redeemed to make the most of the new lives they had received at God's hand.

Over the next two hundred years these alternative focuses were to produce very different determinations in those who held them.

Those who saw the future as one of discipline and punishment knew that attempting to relieve the sufferings of the poor would be counter-productive.

Herbert Spencer (1884), in the late 19^th century, was still wrestling with how best to ensure that 'The Poor' acquired 'the capacities needful for civilized life'. This had exercised the minds of 17^th and 18^th century writers like Petty, Child, Pollexfen, Marshall, Mandeville, Defoe, Ferguson and Townsend. Yet, at the end of the 19^th century, it had still not been resolved.

Spencer explained what he believed was required to make the lower classes 'fit for the social state'. Those who felt sorry for the poor, who wanted to rescue them from the harshness of their lives, were working against the tide of human evolution. All the evils of the age; the poverty, degradation, maltreatment of the lower classes 'are unavoidable attendants on the adaptation now in progress':

To become fit for the social state, man has not only to lose his savageness, but he has to acquire the capacities needful for civilized life. Power of application must be developed; such modification of the intellect as shall qualify it for its new tasks must take place; and, above all, there must be gained the ability to sacrifice a small mediate gratification for a future great one.

The state of transition will of course be an unhappy state. Misery inevitably results from incongruity between constitutions and conditions. All these evils which afflict us, and seem to the uninitiated the obvious consequences of this or that removable cause, are unavoidable attendants on the adaptation now in progress.

Humanity is being pressed against the inexorable necessities of its new position – is being molded into harmony with them, and has to bear the resulting unhappiness as best it can. The process must be undergone, and the sufferings must be endured.

No power on earth, no cunningly-devised laws of statesmen, no world-rectifying schemes of the humane, no communist panaceas, no reforms that men ever did broach or ever will broach, can diminish them one jot.

Intensified they may be, and are; and in preventing their intensification, the philanthropic will find ample scope for exertion. But there is bound up with the changes a normal amount of suffering, which cannot be lessened without altering the very laws of life.
(1884 Ch. 3, p. 40)

For Spencer, as for the vast majority of 'responsible' Western Europeans of the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, human beings were on a millennial evolutionary journey. There was a direction to social change and that direction, provided people took their responsibilities seriously, was upwards, into a future of growing material prosperity and well-being.

The utopian presumptions of the previous two centuries ¹⁵³ had become a part of the background of understanding for the 'middle sorts' of western Europe. And, with the absorption of these presumptions into the unconscious substrate of reasoning, the implied dangers of not pressing toward that goal of the 'upward call of God' became similarly internalized, no longer a matter of belief but one of certainty, no longer religiously justified, but now materially certified.

The progress of humanity was written into the material constitution of human beings, just as the changes in the earth's surface and in the heavens were increasingly being seen as consequences of inescapable and unstoppable 'forces of nature'.

The attitudes of western European employers in the 18^th and 19^th centuries toward the poor were hundreds of years in the making. By the 15^th century, employers and landowners were already convinced that 'the poor' would only work consistently if compelled to do so. Their experiences following the Black Death of the mid 14^th century ¹⁵⁴ , when labor became very scarce while the tasks to be done remained about the same as they had been when there was a much larger workforce, convinced them that they could not rely on the goodwill of those they employed.

Of course, if one sees the situation from the laborers' point of view, the demands made of them from the early 1350s onwards were entirely unreasonable. The presumption that those who remained would meet all the laboring demands previously met by as much as double their number five years earlier, resulted in them being required to work for very long hours, for very little more reward.

Since they were geared to labor as a means of meeting needs and wants rather than as a means to the open ended accumulation of money and possessions, once they obtained the cash they needed it seemed pointless to continue working. There were better things to do than work when the product was no longer needed.

How deep-seated such understandings and motivations in life are, and how difficult it is to retrain people to new perspectives. 'Responsible' western Europeans had been passing laws and organizing processes of retraining for 'the poor' for more than three hundred years before the concerted efforts of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The 'responsible public' of the 18^th century was, undoubtedly, largely comprised of self-serving, self-interested, self-promoting individuals who wanted the world organized to their benefit. They were, however, nonetheless, convinced of the historical necessity underpinning the reforms they supported.

The world, for them, was becoming, more and more certainly, a world of resources and a world of productive, wealth-generating activity. They were the vanguard of the future, creating a world which would benefit all. But, to effectively pursue these goals, the laziness, indiscipline and profanity of the 'lower rank' had to be addressed. Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame, described the problem in the 1720s,

… the conversation of our lower rank of people runs only upon bawdy and blasphemy, notwithstanding our societies for reformation, and our laws in force against profaneness; for this lazy life gets them many proselytes, their numbers daily increasing from runaway apprentices and footboys, insomuch that it is a very hard matter for a gentleman to get him a servant, or for a tradesman to find an apprentice.

In the 18^th century, following a relative lull in activities during the later 17^th century, the enclosure of common land, dispossession of peasant landholders and consolidation of landholdings took on new momentum. As it did so, the ranks of dispossessed and indigent people were swelled by those moved from the land. The common view of 18^th century reformers was that almost half of the land available for farming in Britain was 'waste', that is, not used 'profitably'. They set out to make it economically productive and efficient.

They'll work if they're hungry!  

 The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action – pride, honour, and ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labor; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger. The laws, it must be confessed, have likewise said that they shall be compelled to work.

But then legal constraint is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise; creates ill will, and never can be productive of good and acceptable service: whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays a lasting and sure foundation for good will and gratitude …

The wisest legislator will never be able to devise a more equitable, a more effectual, or in any respect a more suitable punishment, than hunger is for a disobedient servant. Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse.
(Joseph Townsend 1786 )

Sir Josiah Child had identified the problem in the 17^th century, the poor "work so much and no more, as may maintain them in that mean condition to which they have been accustomed". It was time to make sure that they received no more than would keep them working. And it was time to take away any supports the poor might be relying on other than wage labor.

The 'responsible' people of the mid 18^th century found a way to do this which would both force the poor into a consistent commitment to work and ensure the rational reorganization of the countryside. They accelerated the alienation of common lands and the dispossession of small holders:

The enclosure of commons had been going on for centuries before 1760, but with nothing like the rapidity with which it has been going on since, it is known that 554,974 acres were enclosed between 1710 and 1760, while nearly 7,000,000 were enclosed between 1760 and 1845.
(Arnold Toynbee (1884))

The dispossession of small holders gathered momentum as the 18^th century unfolded. Toynbee (1884) summarized the movement,

A third result of landlord supremacy was the manner in which the common-field system was broken up. Allusion has already been made to enclosures, and enclosures meant a break-up of the old system of agriculture and a redistribution of the land. This is a problem which involves delicate questions of justice.

In Prussia, the change was effected by impartial legislation; in England, the work was done by the strong at the expense of the weak. The change from common to individual ownership, which was economically advantageous, was carried out in an iniquitous manner, and thereby became socially harmful.

Great injury was thus done to the poor and ignorant freeholders who lost their rights in the common lands.

In Pickering, in one instance, the lessee of the tithes applied for an enclosure of the waste. The small freeholders did their best to oppose him, but, having little money to carry on the suit, they were overruled, and the lessee, who had bought the support of the landless 'house-owners' of the parish, took the land from the freeholders and shared the spoil with the cottagers.

It was always easy for the steward to harass the small owners till he forced them to sell… The enclosure of waste land, too, did great damage to the small freeholders, who, without the right of grazing, naturally found it so much the more difficult to pay their way.

Those who lost access to lands joined the ranks of 'the poor', forced to live on the charity of parishes or move to the outskirts of towns in an attempt to find some alternative means of subsistence. As they did so, the 'problem of the poor' became increasingly obvious to responsible citizens ¹⁵⁵ .

The problems attending the enclosure of common lands were just the tip of the iceberg. At the same time as people who relied on common lands found themselves denied access, small holders who held sufficient land to make ends meet found that their lands, in the eyes of those who held political power, were 'waste land' that could be 'more productively' used. They found the political conditions of the time stacked against them.

Large landowners had gained the whip hand and set out to dispossess the yeomen of England of the lands they held:

To summarise the movement: it is probable that the yeomen would in any case have partly disappeared, owing to the inevitable working of economic causes. But these alone would not have led to their disappearance on so large a scale. It was the political conditions of the age, the overwhelming importance of land, which made it impossible for the yeoman to keep his grip upon the soil.
Toynbee (1884)

People who, until the mid 18^th century, had felt themselves relatively safe from the dispossession experienced by rural laborers and others who relied heavily on access to the commons for survival, now found themselves the target of land reform.

Their problems were not only brought on by rapacious landlords and changes in statutes which were strongly weighted against them. They were compounded by the movement of industry through the 18^th century from the countryside into towns. Traditionally, small holders had augmented their income by spinning, weaving and other forms of handicraft. As these activities became the focus of factory development, the returns for their labors were greatly reduced. Very often the market for their produce simply disappeared.

Many who were not evicted or defrauded of their properties, found that they could no longer make a living from the land they held, and were either compelled by circumstance into sending more and more members of their households into towns in search of work, or found themselves having to accept the very low prices being offered for rural land and move to the rapidly growing towns and cities of western Europe (but particularly of England) ¹⁵⁶ . And, as is always true under capitalism, the increased labor which became available to employers resulted in constant reductions in wages.

We'll Compel Them through Laws and Regulations!  

For the Middle Ranks, of course, the problems were not those of dispossession and abuse, they were problems of sloth and intemperance, which inevitably resulted in crime and violence. The poor were fundamentally lazy and unwilling to put the needs of the country above their own petty concerns and interests. They would, if they could, undermine all that was being achieved in ensuring the 'wealth of the nation'.

The indolent poor must be compelled to contribute to the prosperity of the country, and the government must act strongly and decisively to deal with what was rapidly becoming not 'the poor' but 'the criminal' class. John Simon described the scene,

Sir Samuel Romilly [1786] in his Observations on a Late Publication, intituled Thoughts on Executive Justice, reviews the criminal law of England, and says –

The first thing which strikes one is the melancholy truth that among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been declared by Act of Parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death.

Romilly founds his statement on Blackstone’s Commentaries; and, in a note, he draws attention to the fact that, since the publication of those Commentaries, the number of felonies had been considerably augmented by the legislature. Sydney says

To steal a horse or a sheep; to snatch property from the hands of a man and run away with it; to steal to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house, or privately to the value of five shillings in a shop; to pick a pocket of only twelve pence and a farthing; these offences all continued till the end of the eighteenth century to be punishable with death.
England and the English, vol. ii. pp. 268, 269.

Mr. John Latimer, in The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, gives a list of the persons executed in that city during the first half of the eighteenth century. The list is confessedly incomplete, but, so far as we can judge by its details, executions for murder were comparatively infrequent. Out of the seventy-seven criminals whose cases and crimes are cited, only eighteen suffered death for murder. The rest were executed for offences, which would now be punished by imprisonment.

It is no wonder that the number of executions in England was great. Lecky tells us that, when Blackstone wrote, it was a very ordinary occurrence for ten or twelve culprits to be hung on a single occasion, and for forty or fifty to be condemned at a single assize. In 1732 no less than seventy persons received sentence of death at the Old Bailey. In the same year eighteen persons were hung in one day in the town of Cork.
History of England, vol. i. p. 505.

… It is painful to record these brutalities, but it is impossible to understand the temper of the English people in the eighteenth century unless we do so. An utter callousness to the sufferings of criminals prevailed. We may go further. Those sufferings were a source of pleasurable excitement to the crowds that witnessed them. When the death-carts rumbled along the road from Newgate to Tyburn, the pavements were crowded with spectators. From the windows of the houses, hosts of people looked out with admiration upon the jaunty men who, with nosegays on their breasts, journeyed on the solemn path that broke away so suddenly into eternity.

Let the wanderer along the present Oxford Street imagine the scene. Let him try to conceive the possibility of its repetition to day. He will then be able to form some idea of the immeasurable distance that divides us from the spirit and the customs of the eighteenth century.

We ask in amazement if any voice was raised in Church or State, against the brutal punishments contained in the criminal code of England. The answer is disappointing. The ascertained facts show that, so far as the executions for felony are concerned, not only was there an absence of protest, but such executions were approved by the most enlightened opinion of the time.
(1908 p. 63)

Boswell recorded a discussion between Samuel Johnson and Sir William Scott in 1783, when told that criminals to be hanged were no longer to be publicly paraded on the way to execution,

… He said to Sir William Scott, ‘The age is running mad after innovation; all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; men are to be hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation.’

It having been argued that this was an improvement,—‘No, Sir, (said he, eagerly,) it is NOT an improvement: they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?’

I perfectly agree with Dr. Johnson upon this head, and am persuaded that executions now, the solemn procession being discontinued, have not nearly the effect which they formerly had.
(Boswell 1791)

Punishments were not to be viewed as acts of vengeance, but as cautionary devices, discouraging others from similar behavior (reminiscent, of course, of Thomas More's 1516 description:

…the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who … were then hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet

– there has been a long history of blaming and punishing victims in western Europe).

Throughout the century, the vastness of the problem, and the difficulties of dealing with it, occupied the minds of socially aware, responsible people. Those most directly involved in addressing the problem felt a sense of hopeless frustration at the immensity of the task which confronted them. It was not that a few of the 'lower rank' were lazy and degenerate, this seemed to be the condition of everyone.

E. P Thompson described the attitude of Josiah Tuck, dean of Gloucester, in 1745,

'the lower class of people' were utterly degenerated. Foreigners (he sermonized) found 'the common people of our populous cities to be the most abandoned, and licentious wretches on earth': 'Such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority… Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty.'
(1967, pp. 80-81)

Daniel Defoe in the 1720s seems to have put the common view of 'responsible members of the public' into words in a pamphlet entitled, Everybody's Business Is Nobody's Business Or, Private Abuses, Public Grievances: Exemplified In the Pride, Insolence, and exorbitant Wages of our Women, Servants, Footmen, &c., which rapidly ran to five editions.

As he says in the preface to the fifth edition, his intentions, in writing the pamphlet have,

had the good fortune to meet with approbation from the sober and substantial part of mankind; as for the vicious and vagabond, their ill-will is my ambition.

His language is blunt and his views uncompromising,

It is with uncommon satisfaction I see the magistracy begin to put the laws against vagabonds in force with the utmost vigour, a great many of those vermin … having lately been taken up and sent to the several work-houses in and about this city; and indeed high time, for they grow every day more and more pernicious…

I, therefore, humbly propose that these vagabonds be put immediately under the command of such taskmasters as the government shall appoint, and that they be employed, punished, or rewarded, according to their capacities and demerits; that is to say, the industrious and docible to woolcombing, and other parts of the woollen manufacture, where hands are wanted, as also to husbandry and other parts of agriculture.

His solution to the problem of the unreliability of day workers and servants was to pass innumerable laws and regulations governing their behavior with which they

must either comply or be termed an idle vagrant, and sent to a place where they shall be forced to work. By this means industry will be encouraged, idleness punished, and we shall be famed, as well as happy for our tranquillity and decorum.

Not only were the poor idle, irreligious and wanton, those who were employed could simply not be trusted. Defoe's pamphlet provides one example after another of the duplicity, deceit and light-fingeredness of servants and other employees. They displayed

saucy and insolent behavior, …pert, and sometimes abusive answers, [and] daring defiance of correction.

If they were not watched constantly, they would cheat their employers of all their belongings.

E. P. Thompson described the lengths to which Crowley, owner of the Crowley Iron Works, went in attempting to get his employees to work and in trying to protect himself from their blatant dishonesty. In preambles to two of the 'Orders' of the extensive 'Law Book' of the Company, Crowley wrote,

I having by sundry people working by the day with the connivance of the clerks been horribly cheated and paid for much more time than in good conscience I ought and such hath been the baseness and treachery of sundry clerks that they have concealed the sloath and negligence of those paid by the day…

To the end that sloath and villany should be detected and the just and diligent rewarded, I have thought meet to create an account of time by a monitor, and do order and it is hereby ordered and declared from 5 to 8 and from 7 to 10 is fifteen hours, out of which take 1½ for breakfast, dinner, etc. There will then be thirteen hours and a half neat service…

[This service must be calculated] after all deductions for being at taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, breakfast, dinner, playing, sleeping, smoaking, singing, reading of news history, quarelling, contention, disputes or anything foreign to my business, any way loytering.
(1967, pp. 81-2)

The stress on the 'period of work', and of ensuring that employees worked their full number of hours, was, of course, not new to the 18^th century. It was a growing concern of merchants and landowners through the late 14^th and 15^th centuries, and it grew in importance in succeeding centuries ¹⁵⁷ . By the 18^th century, Crowley felt it unnecessary to justify this stress.

Everyone who mattered knew that people labored for a set period of time each day, and that they ought to spend all of that time 'on the job'. Work was not simply 'labor', it was spending a set time in a 'place of employment' where the time was 'owned' by the employer.

Not only 'the poor' were organized to 'work time' and 'leisure' or 'non-work' time, so were the industrious middle sorts. Only the gentry, who spent their time in 'public' activities, were not organized in this way. But they too had their sphere of service and should, also, allot a period in each day to the performance of their 'duties'.

While one could rely on responsible members of the community taking their work commitments seriously, this simply could not be assumed of 'the poor'. They would cheat and steal and rob employers of the time they wanted to be paid for. Only constant vigilance, thorough regulation and supervision could ensure that they spent their time in work rather than in taverns, alehouses, and coffee houses, 'loitering' rather than working.

The poor were, as they had been seen for centuries, unreliable, untrustworthy, dishonest, lazy and duplicitous. Responsible people in the 18^th century realized that if they continued in this 'savage' state they threatened all the advances of civilization which seemed promised in the century.

Something had to be done to address what, to the responsible citizens of Britain and the rest of western Europe, was both a disgrace and a dire threat to the well-being of every responsible person. This mass of unredeemed, degenerate humanity had to be redeemed, retrained, made responsible.

Let's Train their Young  

In the 18^th century, as in earlier centuries, the means to ensuring conscientious commitment to work by employees were all based on external regulations and legal compulsions. If enough pressure was applied, and people were organized and supervised thoroughly, their work commitment would improve. Government provided the background legislation compelling the poor to work, and individual industrial enterprises provided additional structures and regulations ensuring that laborers really did labor.

But, despite all these measures, the problem of getting the poor to take their laboring responsibilities seriously seemed worse than ever. It was clear that the problem could not be addressed simply by trying to coerce and police adults. It was very difficult to change the habits of a lifetime.

Aphorisms were at hand to justify one of the approaches to retraining the poor: You can't teach an old dog new tricks; you've got to break a horse when it's young. If laws and regulations alone did not work, perhaps overt training of the young would do it.

Edgar Furniss described a range of opinions on the matter expressed during the 18^th century,

Very significant of the point of view of these writers are the projects which they advanced for shaping and moulding the characters and destinies of the children of the laboring classes.

Many of these projects strike the modern reader as almost fantastic distortions of justice, but it is necessary that we bear in mind, in attempting to gain an insight into the attitude of their authors, that the proposals were advanced for the good of the nation, and not for the immediate benefit of the children who were to supply the material for experimentation.

William Temple, always an extremist in his point of view, devised one of these:

When these children are four years old, they shall be sent to the country workhouse and there taught to read two hours a day and be kept fully employed the rest of their time in any of the manufactures of the house which best suits their age, strength and capacity.

If it be objected that at these early years, they cannot be made useful, I reply that at four years of age there are sturdy employments in which children can earn their living; but besides, there is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours in a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them …
(William Temple, Essay (1770))

(1920, p.114 ¹⁵⁸ )

Children had to be taught, as John Locke (1692) had explained in the late 17^th century, to defer gratification of immediate, imprudent desires and lusts in favor of working towards long-term, prudent rewards for diligent endeavor. This would benefit not only the individuals themselves, but also their dependents and communities.

They had to learn the immorality, the sinfulness of sloth and the virtue, the sanctifying power of industry. The evangelist of the age, John Wesley, put it very clearly,

Know ye not then so much as this, you that are called moral men, that all idleness is immorality; that there is no grosser dishonesty than sloth; that every voluntary blockhead is a knave? He defrauds his benefactors, his parents, and the world; and robs both God and his own soul.

Yet how many of these are among us! How many lazy drones, as if only fruges consumere nati! "born to eat up the produce of the soil." How many whose ignorance is not owing to incapacity, but to mere laziness!
(1741 sermon )

It was becoming clear to 18^th century responsible people that the horse must be broken when young, or not at all. As Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas explained late in the 18^th century,

Obedience is one of the capital benefits arising from a public education, for though I am very desirous of having young minds impregnated with classical knowledge, from the pleasure I have derived from it, as well as the utility of it in all stations of life, yet it is but a secondary benefit in my estimation of education; for to break the natural ferocity of human nature, to subdue the passions and to impress the principles of religion and morality, and give habits of obedience and subordination to paternal as well as political authority, is the first object to be attended to by all schoolmasters who know their duty and do it.
(The Gentleman's Magazine (1811) Volume 109 p. 449 ¹⁵⁹ )

Through the second half of the 18^th century, and on into the 19^th, both focuses were to be developed. On the one hand, laws and regulations compelling people to work would be strengthened and applied more and more vigorously, and alternative means of material support would be removed wherever possible. On the other, increasing emphasis would be placed on training the young.

This was not, of course, education, as given to the children of the middle ranks. That might well back-fire, giving the children of the poor ideas which were beyond their station. Among those who had not been directly involved in or affected by the religious revivals of the period, the view of education for the masses which Bernard Mandeville expressed in 1724 seems to have been standard,

From what has been said it is manifest, that in a free Nation where Slaves are not allow'd of, the surest Wealth consists in a Multitude of laborious Poor; for besides that they are the never-failing Nursery of Fleets and Armies, without them there could be no Enjoyment, and no Product of any Country could be valuable.

To make the Society happy and People easy under the meanest Circumstances, it is requisite that great Numbers of them should be Ignorant as well as Poor. Knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our Desires, and the fewer things a Man wishes for, the more easily his Necessities may be supplied.

The Welfare and Felicity therefore of every State and Kingdom, require that the Knowledge of the Working Poor should be confined within the Verge of their Occupations, and never extended (as to things visible) beyond what relates to their Calling. The more a Shepherd, a Plowman or any other Peasant knows of the World, and the things that are Foreign to his Labor or Employment, the less fit he'll be to go through the Fatigues and Hardships of it with Chearfulness and Content.

Reading, Writing and Arithmetick, are very necessary to those, whose Business require such Qualifications, but where People's livelihood has no dependence on these Arts, they are very pernicious to the Poor, who are forced to get their Daily Bread by their Daily Labor.…

Going to School in comparison to Working is Idleness, and the longer Boys continue in this easy sort of Life, the more unfit they'll be when grown up for downright Labor, both as to Strength and Inclination. Men who are to remain and end their Days in a Laborious, Tiresome and Painful Station of Life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they'll submit to it for ever after.
(Fable of the Bees (1724) Appendix: An Essay On Charity, and Charity Schools).

This view of the educational requirements of the poor remained dominant through the century. An anonymous writer to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1797 put it even more clearly,

Industry is the great principle of duty that ought to be inculcated on the lowest class of the people, as it is the best and most effectual barrier against vices of every kind; as it occupies the mind, and leaves no vacancy for licentious thoughts and mischievous projects…

The laborious occupations of life must be performed by those who have been born in the lowest stations; but no one will be willing to undertake the most servile employment, or the meanest drudgery, if his mind is opened, and his abilities increased, by any tolerable share of scholastic improvement: yet these employments and this drudgery must be necessarily performed… and, surely, none can be more properly fitted for this purpose than those who have been born in a state of poverty.

The man, whose mind is not illuminated by one ray of science, can discharge his duty in the most sordid employment without the smallest views of raising himself to a higher station, and can take his rest at night in perfect satisfaction and content.

His ignorance is a balm that soothes his mind into stupidity and repose, and excludes every emotion of discontentment, pride and ambition. A man of no literature will seldom attempt to form insurrections, or plan an idle scheme for the reformation of the state.
(in Goldstrom 1972, p. 22,3)

Mr Davies Giddy, member of parliament, in a debate on the Parochial Schools Bill in 1807 ¹⁶⁰ , expanded on the problems of educating the poor:

['The giving of education to the laboring classes' would] be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors; and, in a few years, the result would be, that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them…
(in Goldstrom 1972, p. 29)

For these people the problem was one best dealt with by direct means:

• through finding a variety of ways of compelling the poor to work;
• reducing the circumstances of those who refused to work to such low levels that they would have no option but to accept whatever work was offered;
• and by retraining their offspring to become habituated to work.

The impact of the 18^th century revivals resulted in a very different approach being employed by those who accepted that they had a duty of care for the weak and the poor.

The 19^th century saw the proliferation of day schools for the poor. The aims of the schools, however, were in line with sentiments expressed through the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Wilmot's views on education for the poor, given above, seem to have summed up the aims of most day schools. The aims of public school education for the middle classes were rather different (though public schools did emphasize "habits of obedience and subordination to paternal as well as political authority").

An advertisement explaining the object of the Kennington District Schools, in 1824, provides a clear explanation of their purpose,

The object in forming Establishments of this nature, which now happily exist in almost every Parish and District throughout the Kingdom, is, to train the Infant Poor to good and orderly habits, – to instil into their minds an early knowledge of their civil and religious duties, – to guard them, as far as possible, from the seductions of vice, – and to afford them the means of becoming good Christians, as well as useful and industrious Members of Society: – These are the benefits proposed by the Promoters of these Schools; benefits, it is presumed, not more essential to the Children themselves, and their Parents, than to the Community at large.
(Silver and Silver 1974, p.1)

As a consequence of the 18^th century revivals, Sunday Schools ¹⁶¹ emerged in the second half of the century as a means of providing a rudimentary education to both children and adults in association with religious worship services.

Samuel Scriven, in his 1842 Report to Parliament, described what he considered to be the value of the Sunday schools he investigated,

There are in the district Sunday-schools belonging to the church, and to dissenters of many denominations, but chiefly to Methodists of the "Wesleyan", " New Connexion", "Christian Association", and "Primitive" connexion. In these are congregated immense numbers of children of both sexes.

The practice of all is to open their doors at nine o'clock in the morning, and close them at half past ten, when they retire to the religious worship of their respective churches or chapels: to open again at one o'clock, and retire at half past two generally, for the same purpose, thus giving three hours of instruction deducting half an hour for prayer and singing, with which they commence their duties.

There are defects in the system of Sunday-school training, or whence arises the fact of children whose depositions I hand you from Burslem, the very pride of the potteries, their very seat of learning, being so profoundly ignorant as not to know one letter from another, and yet regularly "attend Sunday schools" my deliberate opinion is; that in an educational point of view they are not doing the good which is attributed to them: first, on account of the limitation of the hours of schooling; next; from the absence of writing, and other such secular instruction; and, thirdly, on account of the teachers; who with honour be it spoken, are eight-tenths of the working classes, yet unequal to the task of teaching.

I do not mean to detract from the merits of Sunday-schools as a source of religious knowledge, which by some is considered the basis upon which all others should be built, or from the moral effects resulting from the congregating of children in religious places; or from associating with religious friends; but would rather give my humble praise to the many sects who have with such determined efforts striven to stem the torrent of infidelity, profligacy, and drunkenness, and continue with pious zeal, in imitation of their founder, to extend the knowledge and love of God.

Thomas Jordan (1993) has summed up the value of education during the first half of the 19^th century,

In 1851, Henry Mayhew reported that costermongers sent their children to school only to "save the trouble of tending them" (Quennell 1969). In the early decades, reformers established Sunday schools to promote access to the Bible, although some of them were anxious about educating the poor beyond their presumed station in life.

At a more political level, the tension between the Anglicans' National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church and the Chapel's British and Foreign Schools Society delayed reform of education. The National Society was the larger, and the Royal Lancasterian Society was smaller than either.

Overall, the pattern of schooling was spotty in the early and middle decades of the 19^th century, and Bedfordshire had the highest rate of illiteracy. Wolverhampton, according to the Morning Chronicle's special correspondent in 1851, had " … 15,000 children in a space of a few square miles growing up in dense and total ignorance."

It should be noted that education in the period owed much to the efforts of individuals. Hannah More, early in the 19^th century, promoted literacy through Wesleyanism, Robert Raikes' Ragged Schools laid a foundation for later efforts, and Mary Carpenter directed her efforts toward delinquents through scholarship and penal reform.

With the Elementary Education Act of 1870, the government finally undertook serious educational planning. A series of commissions from the Devonshire Report in 1872 subsequently undertook further reform of education. In 1902, public policy led to administrative changes and to promotion of secondary education.

And … No Charity!!  

Among the most unfortunate consequences of government 'hand-outs', in the minds of many writers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, was their negative impact on the willingness of the poor to work. One of several writers quoted by Edgar Furniss (1920), in examining the issue, was William Temple,

Temple wrote at a time when the poor rates were computed at two and a half millions of pounds annually and were continually on the increase; when the minds of men were filled with fresh memories of the destructive riots which the past four years had seen; when, in fact, there seemed to be lacking no evidence of the despair-engendered viciousness of the lower classes necessary to convince the short-sighted observers of the day of their innate depravity.

Temple proceeded to find the cause of this immorality in the existing laws for poor relief:

Our poor laws are at present a snare to the poor, and leave them loose to idleness, debauchery and insolence; because they depend on these laws for support in necessity; and knowing that a justice of the peace will relieve them, they despise parish officers, insult the inhabitants, and do not feel themselves obliged to their benefactors for what they receive.

It is upon the poor laws that the poor rely and not upon their own behavior and conduct; and this tends to destroy all subordination as well as gratitude and mutual esteem. (William Temple, 1770, Essay)

But the writer's belief that the poor laws were responsible for the condition he decried, did not cause him to absolve the laborer from all blame for his " idleness, debauchery, and insolence."

The reaction of the laborers toward these well-intentioned efforts to ease their life conditions, was rather construed as evidence of a deep-lying moral taint in the character of the people, a proneness to evil which became pronounced in the presence of conditions in the least degree favorable to an indulgence of their congenital habits of indolence and debauchery.

Temple concluded that life had been made too easy for the laborer, that he had fallen into the evil ways so congenial to his temperament, and that necessity alone could enforce labor — the labor which the poor man owed to his nation; necessity, visualized in hard times, low wages, high prices, toil-inducing want.

This is the one strong note which sounds through the writings of the eighteenth-century social reformers, the demand for rigorous life conditions to discipline the laborer and purge his character of the evil habits of "luxury" and "sloth," a demand which takes a variety of forms during the period, advocating different expedients, all calculated to render the hard lot of the laboring classes still harder.…
(Furniss 1920, pp. 106-7)

Joseph Townsend, in A Dissertation on the Poor Laws , in 1786, provided perhaps the most rational, calculated solution to the problem of compelling the poor to work when he suggested that the best means was to strip them of all alternative means of livelihood; and reduce wages to the bare minimum required for subsistence. The problem, as many had explained through more than two centuries, was that the poor would work for only so long as they absolutely had to in order to obtain their subsistence. If they could do this in three or four days of work then they would only work for that period. So, it was clearly counterproductive to provide them with above-subsistence wages.

For Townsend, as for Mandeville, Temple, Ferguson and many other writers of the century, one of the greatest errors of reformers over the previous two centuries was that they had attempted to deal with the problem of poverty by providing welfare payments of various kinds to those who were destitute. In doing so, they expanded and perpetuated the very problem they were trying to address ¹⁶² .

First, Townsend states the problem, stemming, he believes ¹⁶³ , from the old monastic system which supported the poor in their indolence and was dismantled when Henry VIII, in the early 16^th century, broke up the monasteries and appropriated their possessions.

At the dissolution of the monasteries, the lazy and the indigent, who were deprived of their accustomed food, became clamorous, and, having long since forgot to work, were not only ready to join in every scheme for the disturbance of the state, but, as vagrants, by their numbers, by their impostures, and by their thefts, they rendered themselves a public and most intolerable nuisance ¹⁶⁴ .

According to Townsend, these wretches, once succored by the Church and, in the main, a product of the foolishness of misplaced charity, were, with the breakup of the feudal Church in England, forced to fend for themselves. Only, having for so long been fed and clothed by the religious communities, they no longer possessed the skills, motivation or inclination to work for their own living.

Now, according to Townsend, in the latter part of the 18^th century, it was time to seriously address the problem posed by the descendants of those lazy and indigent wards of the Church. And, since the responsible people of the age now approached everything rationally, presuming that in a rational consideration of the elements of a problem the solution would become plain, this problem should be approached in that way.

There never was greater distress among the poor: there never was more money collected for their relief. But what is most perplexing is, that poverty and wretchedness have increased in exact proportion to the efforts which have been made for the comfortable subsistence of the poor; and that wherever most is expended for their support, there objects of distress are most abundant; whilst in those countries or provincial districts where the least provision has been made for their supply, we hear the fewest groans. Among the former we see drunkenness and idleness cloathed in rags; among the latter we hear the chearful songs of industry and virtue.
(Townsend 1786)

So, the solution was obvious, take away charity. Misplaced charity breeds the problems it claims to address. Force the poor to fend for themselves and they will develop those skills which they presently lack. Having learned to work, they will come to enjoy it and their regions will resound to “the chearful songs of industry and virtue”.

How could the state go about this without provoking widespread civil unrest? Again, Townsend claimed, to understand the solution one needed to examine measures previously tried and determine why they had failed.

Through the previous two hundred years, the major approaches to the problem of the laziness and indigence of the poor had involved legislation and social compulsion. Innumerable laws had been passed compelling the poor to work. None had succeeded. Even more laws had been passed, and draconian penalties applied to address the immorality and dishonesty of the idle poor; again, without any apparent success in dealing with the problems of crime and immorality among the poor. So, to continue with either of these seemed pointless.

The poor were clearly not motivated to work through any sense of pride in achievement, ambition or self-respect. They were 'not yet civilized'. But they must be taught to work. Best, therefore, to resort, not to manmade laws and compulsions, which are seldom successful, but to those 'natural' motives which drive human beings to labor.

Freemen should not be compelled to work, but they can be motivated by lowering their incomes to levels which will reduce them to 'the bread line'. Then they will work because they need to, and the wages they receive will lay

…a lasting and sure foundation for good will and gratitude.

The slave must be compelled to work; but the freeman should be left to his own judgment and discretion; should be protected in the full enjoyment of his own, be it much or little; and punished when he invades his neighbour's property. By recurring to those base motives which influence the slave, and trusting only to compulsion, all the benefits of free service, both to the servant and to the master, must be lost.
(Townsend 1786)

The second half of the 18^th century saw the final push to strip away small-holdings from the rural poor of Britain, making them entirely dependent on wage-labor for subsistence.

The enclosure of commons had been going on for centuries before 1760, but with nothing like the rapidity with which it has been going on since, it is known that 554,974 acres were enclosed between 1710 and 1760, while nearly 7,000,000 were enclosed between 1760 and 1845.
(Toynbee, 1884)

If the poor were going to eat, they would have to accept wage labor. And the wages they would receive would be those which the market set. Of course, in a labor market flooded by the rural dispossessed, competition for work gave employers an enormous advantage and wages dropped below amounts required for subsistence.

The Speenhamland decrees ¹⁶⁵ in the late 18^th century allowed employers to pay “market rates” for labor, which soon drove wages below what was necessary to maintain subsistence. Parishes were required to make up the shortfall from their rates. This soon placed parish finances under great strain.

In 1834 the Poor Laws were amended to remove this 'burden' from the parishes, transferring it to the poor. After all, what had they to complain about? All they had to do was 'get a job'. As Andrew Ure insisted in 1835, many workers "pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their in-door occupations"!

Don't allow them to organize – it's Bad for Them!  

  … Before the "strike" of 1836-7, many of [the houses] were tenanted by their owners; but that unfortunate and mistaken attempt to coerce their masters, provoked by some few itinerant demagogues that visited the neighbourhood under the pretence of improving the condition of their occupants, occasioned most of them to change hands, and contributed to reduce those who were in a previous state of prosperity and happiness, to one of dependence, humiliation, and poverty, from which they have never recovered.
(Scriven Report 1842 Point 11)

 The workmen… very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessary superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders.
(Adam Smith 1776, p. 85)

Confrontations between employers and workers were not new to the 19^th century. They had occurred throughout western Europe over more than three hundred years ¹⁶⁶ . And, because legal force has always favored employers and landowners ¹⁶⁷ , it was inevitable that throughout the period laws would exist constraining united action on the part of workers.

Adam Smith (1776), in his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations, described the nature of confrontation between workers and employers in the mid 18^th century; an astute description which has proved valid over the past two hundred years ¹⁶⁸ .

In the 19^th century and later there would be two quite distinct groups of 'workers'. One group would have its roots in the artisanal groupings of the 18^th century and feel a 'natural' connection with their employers. The other group would come from 'The Poor' and bring quite different motivations and understandings with them into the 'workplace'. Both groups would confront employers with their demands, but laws would apply most effectively to the second group, to the 'working poor'.

The anti-combination laws of 1799-1800 most directly addressed the artisanal workers who were already effectively organizing at the start of the 19^th century. And it was toward them that many of the restrictions on worker protest activity written into the 'repeal' of those laws during the 1820s would be directed. It would not be until the second half of the 19^th century that the second group would begin to have an effective voice in protesting working conditions.

Organizations of Artisans  

Christiane Eisenberg provided an account of the emergence of the 'labor aristocracy' of the 18^th and 19^th centuries,

The guilds split into the wealthy masters' and merchants' Livery Companies (whose functions were soon restricted to sociability) and the Yeomanries of poorer artisans, masters as well as journeymen. Most members of the Yeomanries becoming sooner or later dependent on merchants and other putters-outs, the numbers of self-employed artisans diminished.

In his 1776 Wealth of Nations Adam Smith wrote of twenty men working for wages for every one who was his own master. In a more recent study, this calculation has been confirmed for London, which by the end of the 18^th century was by far England's largest center of artisanal production.
(1991 p. 510)

As a consequence of the 18^th century Revivals, the lower middle ranking people of Western Europe were reorganized and firmly placed as an urban small-business and artisan 'class', with some of the more ambitious providing the manufacturing elites of the 19^th century.

The artisanal groups provided a skilled labor force. They were allied to those whose morality and self-image came out of the 18^th century revivals. They were capitalist, not pre-capitalist in orientation ¹⁶⁹ . They held many of the capitalist understandings of the world and attitudes toward the idle poor even more strongly than the 'old-money' middle ranking people of the time ¹⁷⁰ .

Artisans, employing artisan apprentices of their own, either maintained their own small businesses or became attached to large manufacturing enterprises. As productive enterprises grew in size, many became either sub-contractors to those businesses or became skilled employees. Focusing on Birmingham and Sheffield, Maxine Berg described the scene in the first half of the 19^th century:

From the 1820s there was a rise in the size of establishments, the introduction of machinery, and falling apprenticeship and wages. It was in this period that the balance of power shifted away from the skilled artisan to the larger scale unit.

This dramatic break between the large and small producers appeared to prevail in most of the town's industries between 1829 and 1840, whether they were 'traditional', such as tailoring or the leather trades, or new mechanised industries, such as steel-toymaking. The large-scale units dominated the town by 1840, and the small firm depended on the credit and market facilities controlled by the larger …

Often, independent artisan producers moved by choice into the factory, where by subcontracting they could maintain the viability of their small enterprises
(1993 pp. 19, 21).

In either case, they remained detached from the 'ordinary worker', a distinct group of small-scale capitalists who supported each other and met in their own clubs and institutes. They increasingly needed to organize to protect their interests and, in the process, became recognized as a radical force within British society.

Inevitably, since through the later 18^th and the 19^th century they increasingly found themselves working in the same enterprises as the 'working poor', the distinctions between the groups blurred at the boundaries. Some of them, over time, became leaders in Union movements among the 'working poor', a 'labor aristocracy', concerned to improve the lot of less fortunate workers.

However, most remained aloof, a group with their own interests to pursue. As James Jaffe (2000) has described, even now, when unionization is weak, it is as often because workers mistrust unionization as because employers and governments deliberately attempt to prevent workers from collective bargaining.

At the start of the 19^th century, articulate workers and trades-people, the artisans of the period, were as suspicious of organizations which focused on the independent rights of the laboring poor as were their employers. This made attempts at worker organization very difficult.

They were motivated by all the moral virtues of the age. They knew the importance of both industry and frugality! Christine Macleod (1999) provided a picture of:

the innovative pursuits of shop-floor inventors in the grimy workshops and factories of Victorian Britain … It is important to emphasize that we are dealing here with the upper echelons of the working class. The 'working man' that Victorian commentators had in mind was almost certainly 'the respectable artisan',

a member of the lower-middle classes of Victorian Britain. Driven by the entrepreneurial spirit of the 18^th century revivals among the 'little gentry', they provided much of the innovative force of the 19^th:

It was a commonplace in mid-nineteenth-century Britain that the majority of inventors were working men, and both sides in the 'patent controversy' – reformers and abolitionists – claimed to be acting in the interests of the working-class inventor as they advocated contrary strategies.

'Generally, inventions come from the operatives', Paul Rapsey Hodge, himself an inventor, engineer and patent agent, told a parliamentary select committee in 1851. Isambard Kingdom Brunel concurred, as did patent agent Thomas Webster, who explained that,

In an established manufacture, improvement must consist in small details; the workman is better educated as to, or has more experience of, the wants of the machine than any other person.

The Manchester engineer, William Fairbairn, insisted that in larger mechanical engineering firms it was the 'working partner' (or a foreman or manager) who was responsible for most inventions, 'from his great experience and desire to expedite the work', but then explained that such a man had usually 'been originally a workman, who [had risen] by his industry and careful attention to business'.
(Macleod 1999 p. 19)

Robin Pearson gave a description of some of them in the 19^th century,

…the lower middle class, a heterogeneous body of tradesmen and small employers who came to dominate the public life of the industrial suburbs in the mid-Victorian decades …

In the local press, in almanacs and histories, in lectures at political clubs, school halls and mechanics' institutes, shopkeepers and small employers invoked a community sentiment which was at once radical in its hostility to central authority, and conservative, in that it sought to maintain their hegemony in the out-townships at the expense of a labor solidarity based on class opposition.

The latter was attempted, for instance, via repeated homilies to the worker to accept his lot. Praise for the nobility of work was qualified by strictures on the need for humility and caution, "knowing one's place," both in the sense of loyalty to one's local community, and in the sense of social deference.
(1993, p. 21)

The emerging lower middle classes of Britain felt as threatened (or, perhaps, more threatened because of their own social proximity) by attempts at political organization amongst the recently 'idle poor' as did their social superiors. The 'Working Classes' of Britain were composed of people like those described by Don Herzog:

…workers banded together in clubs, some more formal than others, and met in alehouses to talk about politics. One churchman catalogued the rise of “Revolutionary Clubs” figuring they meant the onset of riots and worse. Other conservatives were unhappy, too, pondering the malignant example of France's Jacobin Clubs.

In 1802, the Leeds Mercury printed a letter musing over such nightly meetings:

Almost every street in a large town has a little senate of this description; and the priviledges of sitting in council over the affaires of the nation, and a pot of porter has long been claimed by free Britons…

(1998 p. 60)

Their experiences during the 18^th century had made them suspicious about the moral reliability of those who still held political power and control of most major financial institutions ¹⁷¹ . This had left them with a reinforced conviction of the importance of the separation of commerce and politics, and a growing belief in the moral inadequacy of state institutions, including the state church. They were even more dismissive of the poor.

organizing the 'Working Poor'  

In 1834, in response to continued concern among the middle ranks about the laziness, lack of moral fiber and costs of maintaining the 'idle poor', the Poor Laws were amended. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1839,

The New Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently distinct, that whosoever will not work ought not to live. Can the poor man that is willing to work, always find work, and live by his work?

… A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that Fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
(1885, p. 21)

John Fielden, a member of parliament and, himself, a cotton manufacturer from Lancashire, spoke against the conditions applying to the 'working poor' in 1836:

Here, then, is the "curse" of our factory-system; as improvements in machinery have gone on, the "avarice of masters" has prompted many to exact more labor from their hands than they were fitted by nature to perform, and those who have wished for the hours of labor to be less for all ages than the legislature would even yet sanction, have had no alternative but to conform more or less to the prevailing practice, or abandon the trade altogether.

This has been the case with regard to myself and my partners. We have never worked more than seventy-one hours a week before Sir JOHN HOBHOUSE'S Act was passed. We then came down to sixty-nine; and since Lord ALTHORP's Act was passed, in 1833, we have reduced the time of adults to sixty-seven and a half hours a week, and that of children under thirteen years of age to forty-eight hours in the week, though to do this latter has, I must admit, subjected us to much inconvenience, but the elder hands to more, inasmuch as the relief given to the child is in some measure imposed on the adult.

But the overworking does not apply to children only; the adults are also overworked. The increased speed given to machinery within the last thirty years, has, in very many instances, doubled the labor of both.
(John Fielden, M.P., 1836, pp. 34-35)

The abject poverty and destitution of vast numbers of casual and low paid workers and unemployed people through the 18^th and 19^th centuries makes any belief in the Summum Bonum ¹⁷² consequences of disciplined self-interest seem myopically absurd.

If capitalism flourished and bloomed through this period, it provided little relief for the poor. A few contemporary descriptions of Manchester and similar regions, representative of a much larger body of literature from the period, paint a grim picture:

Alexis de Tocqueville, in the 1830s, described the scene as he approached Manchester:

An undulating plain, or rather a collection of little hills. Below the hills a narrow river (the Irwell), which flows slowly to the Irish sea. Two streams (the Medlock and the Irk) wind through the uneven ground and after a thousand bends, flow into the river. Three canals made by man unite their tranquil lazy waters at the same point. On this watery land, which nature and art have contributed to keep damp, are scattered palaces and hovels.

Everything in the exterior appearance of the city attests the individual powers of man; nothing the directing power of society. At every turn human liberty shows its capricious creative force. There is no trace of the slow continuous action of government. Thirty or forty factories rise on the tops of the hills I have just described. Their six stories tower up; their huge enclosures give notice from afar of the centralisation of industry.

The wretched dwellings of the poor are scattered haphazard around them. Round them stretches land uncultivated but without the charm of rustic nature and still without the amenities of a town … Some of [the] roads are paved, but most of them are full of ruts and puddles into which foot or carriage wheel sinks deep …

Heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stagnant pools are found here and there amongst the houses and over the bumpy, pitted surfaces of the public places …

Amid this noisome labyrinth from time to time one is astonished at the sight of fine stone buildings with Corinthian columns … But who could describe the interiors of those quarters set apart, home of vice and poverty, which surround the huge palaces of industry and clasp them in their hideous folds?

On ground below the level of the river and overshadowed on every side by immense workshops, stretches marshy land which widely spaced muddy ditches can neither drain nor cleanse. Narrow twisting roads lead down to it. They are lined with one-storey houses whose ill-fitting planks and broken windows show them up, even from a distance, as the last refuge a man might find between poverty and death.

Nonetheless the wretched people reduced to living in them can still inspire jealousy of their fellow beings. Below some of their miserable dwellings is a row of cellars to which a sunken corridor leads; twelve to fifteen human beings are crowded pell-mell into each of these damp, repulsive holes.
(1958, pp.105-6)

James Kay described an area of Manchester between 1831 and 1844,

The cottages are very small, old and dirty, while the streets are uneven, partly unpaved, not properly drained and full of ruts. Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. The atmosphere is polluted by the stench and is darkened by the thick smoke of a dozen factory chimneys.

A horde of ragged women and children swarm about the streets and they are just as dirty as the pigs which wallow happily on the heaps of garbage and in the pools of filth.

In short, this horrid little slum affords as hateful and repulsive a spectacle as the worst courts to be found on the banks of the Irk. The inhabitants live in dilapidated cottages, the windows of which are broken and patched with oilskin. The doors and the door posts are broken and rotten.

The creatures who inhabit these dwellings and even their dark, wet cellars, and who live confined amidst all this filth and foul air-which cannot be dissipated because of the surrounding lofty buildings-must surely have sunk to the lowest level of humanity.

That is the conclusion that surely must be drawn even by any visitor who examines the slum from the outside, without entering any of the dwellings. But his feelings of horror would be intensified if he were to discover that on average 20 people live in each of these little houses, which at the moment consist of 2 rooms, an attic and cellar. One privy – and that usually inaccessible – is shared by about 120 people.

In spite of all the warnings of the doctors and in spite of the alarm caused to the health authorities by the condition of Little Ireland during the cholera epidemic, the condition of this slum is practically the same in this year of grace 1844 as it was in 1831.
(from The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes by James Phillips Kay MD (1844))

Phil Chapple provides a glimpse into conditions in Preston in 1844,

A visitor entering Queen Street, finds himself facing a row of privies of more than 100 yards long. The doors of the privies are about 6 feet from the house doors opposite and the space between one privy and another is filled up with all imaginable and unimaginable filth; so that the street consists of passages little more than 6 feet wide, with dwelling houses on one side and a continuous range of necessaries, pigsties and middens on the other, with a filthy surface drain running along one side … 12 houses have their only outlets upon this disgusting and pestiferous passage.

The working-class slums of the mid-19^th century English industrial town have fascinated and horrified social historians for decades. The example above, from the Reverend J. Clay's report on Preston in 1844, presented a vision of squalor repeated many times over across industrial urban England.

In such environments children were born, lived, played and worked, and for hundreds of thousands life was short and brutal … While industrialization and urbanization undoubtedly brought about great national wealth, they also produced misery …
(Chapple 2000, p. 42)

Attempts by the 'working poor' to improve their lot were strongly resisted through both centuries.

In 1835 Andrew Ure examined conditions in factories, with a typical middle ranking understanding of the world in which he lived. As he explained,

It seems established by a body of incontestable evidence, that the wages of our factory work-people, if prudently spent, would enable them to live in a comfortable manner, and decidedly better than formerly, in consequence of the relative diminution in the price of food, fuel, lodgings, and clothing. (p.306)

Earlier in the same publication he described the problem of workers' agitation against their conditions,

The textile manufactures consist of two distinct departments; one carried on by multitudes of small independent machines belonging to the workmen, another carried on by concatenated systems of machinery, the property of the masters …

The operatives of the latter class are necessarily associated in large bodies, and moreover have no capital sunk in machinery or work-shops. When they choose to strike they can readily join in the blow, and by stopping they suffer merely the loss of wages for the time, while they occasion to their master loss of interest on his sunk capital, his rent, and his taxes, as well as injury to the delicate moving parts of metallic mechanisms by inaction in our humid climate.

There are several cotton-mills in Manchester, of which the interest on sunk capital amounts to from 5,000l. to 10,000l. per annum. If we add to the loss of this interest, that of the profit fairly resulting from the employment of the said capital, we may be able to appreciate in some measure the vast evils which mischievous cabals among the operatives may inflict on mill-owners, as well as on the commerce of the country …

Proud of the power of malefaction, many of the cotton-spinners, though better paid, as we have shown, than any similar set of artisans in the world, organized the machinery of strikes through all the gradations of their people, terrifying, cajoling the timid or the passive among them to join their vindictive union.

They boasted of possessing a dark tribunal, by the mandates of which they could paralyze every mill whose master did not comply with their wishes, and so bring ruin on the man who had given them profitable employment for many a year. By flattery or intimidation, they levied contributions from their associates in the privileged mills, which they suffered to proceed, in order to furnish spare funds for the maintenance of the idle during the decreed suspension of labor.

In this extraordinary state of things, when the inventive head and the sustaining heart of trade were held in bondage by the unruly lower members, a destructive spirit began to display itself among some partisans of the union. Acts of singular atrocity were committed, sometimes with weapons fit only for demons to wield, such as the corrosive oil of vitriol, dashed in the faces of most meritorious individuals, with the effect of disfiguring their persons, and burning their eyes out of the sockets with dreadful agony.

The true spirit of turn-outs among the spinners is well described in the following statement made on oath to the Factory Commission, by Mr. George Royle Chappel, a manufacturer of Manchester, who employs 274 hands, and two steam-engines of sixty-four horse power.

I have had several turn-outs, and have heard of many more, but never heard of a turn-out for short time. I will relate the circumstances of the last turn-out, which took place on the 16^th October, 1830, and continued till the 17^th January, 1831. The whole of our spinners, whose average (weekly) wages were 2l. 13s. 5d., turned out at the instigation, as they told us at the time, of the delegates of the union. They said they had no fault to find with their wages, their work, or their masters, but the union obliged them to turn out.

The same week three delegates from the spinners' union waited upon us at our mill, and dictated certain advances in wages, and other regulations, to which, if we would not adhere, they said neither our own spinners nor any other should work for us again! Of course we declined, believing our wages to be ample, and our regulations such as were necessary for the proper conducting of the establishment.

The consequences were, they set watches on every avenue to the mill, night and day, to prevent any fresh hands coming into the mill, an object which they effectually attained, by intimidating some, and promising support to others (whom I got into the mill in a caravan), if they would leave their work. Under these circumstances I could not work the mill, and advertised it for sale, without any applications, and I also tried in vain to let it.

At the end of twenty-three weeks the hands requested to be taken into the mill again on the terms that they had left it, declaring, as they had done at first, that the union alone had forced them to turn out. The names of the delegates that waited on me were, Jonathan Hodgins, Thomas Foster, and Peter Madox, secretary to the union.

(Andrew Ure 1835 pp. 281-4)

Andrew Ure's account of the duplicity and greed of workers in the cotton industry who "pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their in-door occupations" is representative of many middle class writings on attempts at unionization by the working poor during the first half of the 19^th century. As he continues,

We have seen that the union of operative spinners had, at an early date, denounced their own occupations as being irksome, severe, and unwholesome in an unparalleled degree. Their object in making this misrepresentation was obviously to interest the community in their favor at the period of their lawless strike in the year 1818.

Subsequently to this crisis, some individuals of their governing committee made the notable discovery, that if the quantity of yarn annually spun could by any means be reduced, its scarcity in the market would raise its price, and consequently raise the rate of their wages. They accordingly suggested the shortening of the time of labor to ten hours, as the grand remedy for low wages and hard work; though at this time they were receiving at least three times more wages than hand-loom weavers for the same number of hours' employment, and therefore had very little reason to complain of their lot.

In fact, it was their high wages which enabled them to maintain a stipendiary committee in affluence, and to pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their in-door occupations. Had they plainly promulgated their views and claims, they well knew that no attention would have been paid to them, but they artfully introduced the tales of cruelty and oppression to children, as resulting from their own protracted labor, and succeeded by this stratagem to gain many well meaning proselytes to their cause.
(1835, pp. 298-9)

William Booth, a Methodist evangelist, at the end of the 19^th century could still say,

Alas, what multitudes there are around us everywhere, many known to my readers personally, and any number who may be known to them by a very short walk from their own dwellings, who are in this very plight!

Their vicious habits and destitute circumstances make it certain that without some kind of extraordinary help, they must hunger and sin, and sin and hunger, until, having multiplied their kind, and filled up the measure of their miseries, the gaunt fingers of death will close upon them and terminate their wretchedness.

And all this will happen this very winter in the midst of the unparalleled wealth, and civilization, and philanthropy of this professedly most Christian land.
(Booth 1890, Preface)

These conditions had first emerged some three hundred years earlier. They had grown steadily worse over two hundred years. Capitalism was built on these foundations ¹⁷³ .

In the second half of the 19^th century, with wealth flowing to Britain from its considerable empire, conditions for the poor slowly improved. Robert Steinfeld (2007) has given a succinct explanation of the freedoms won by workers' unions in the 1870s:

the "Employers and Workmen Act," which eliminated criminal penalties for breaches of employment contracts in most cases, and the "Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act," which repealed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, revised the controversial picketing clause, and completely removed trade disputes between employers and workmen from the reach of the common law of criminal conspiracy ¹⁷⁴ .

While still oppressive, conditions for the 'laboring poor' of Britain were changing for the better. They were rapidly deteriorating for colonial populations.

Conclusion  

  … If the love of money is the root of all evil, the want of money is the cause of an immensity of evil and trouble. The moment you begin practically to alleviate the miseries of the people, you discover that the eternal want of pence is one of their greatest difficulties.

In my most sanguine moments I have never dreamed of smoothing this difficulty out of the lot of man, but it is surely no unattainable ideal to establish a Poor Man's Bank, which will extend to the lower middle class and the working population the advantages of the credit system, which is the very foundation of our boasted commerce.

It might be better that there should be no such thing as credit, that no one should lend money, and that everyone should be compelled to rely solely upon whatever ready money he may possess from day to day. But if so, let us apply the principle all round; do not let us glory in our world-wide commerce and boast ourselves in our riches, obtained, in so many cases, by the ignoring of this principle.

If it is right for a great merchant to have dealings with his banker, if it is indispensable for the due carrying on of the business of the rich men that they should have at their elbow a credit system which will from time to time accommodate them with needful advances and enable them to stand up against the pressure of sudden demands, which otherwise would wreck them, then surely the case is still stronger for providing a similar resource for the smaller men, the weaker men.

At present Society is organized far too much on the principle of giving to him who hath so that he shall have more abundantly, and taking away from him who hath not even that which he hath.

If we are to really benefit the poor, we can only do so by practical measures. We have merely to look round and see the kind of advantages which wealthy men find indispensable for the due management of their business, and ask ourselves whether poor men cannot be supplied with the same opportunities. The reason why they are not is obvious. To supply the needs of the rich is a means of making yourself rich; to supply the needs of the poor will involve you in trouble so out of proportion to the profit that the game may not be worth the candle.

Men go into banking and other businesses for the sake of obtaining what the American humorist said was the chief end of man in these modern times, namely, "ten per cent." To obtain a ten per cent. what will not men do? They will penetrate the bowels of the earth, explore the depths of the sea, ascend the snow-capped mountain's highest peak, or navigate the air, if they can be guaranteed a ten per cent. I do not venture to suggest that the business of a Poor Man's Bank would yield ten per cent., or even five, but I think it might be made to pay its expenses, and the resulting gain to the community would be enormous.

Ask any merchant in your acquaintance where his business would be if he had no banker, and then, when you have his answer, ask yourself whether it would not be an object worth taking some trouble to secure, to furnish the great mass of our fellow countrymen, on sound business principles with the advantages of the credit system, which is found to work so beneficially for the "well-to-do" few.

Some day I hope the State may be sufficiently enlightened to take up this business itself; at present it is left in the hands of the pawnbroker and the loan agency, and a set of sharks, who cruelly prey upon the interests of the poor.

The establishment of land banks, where the poor man is almost always a peasant, has been one of the features of modern legislation in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere. The institution of a Poor Man's Bank will be, I hope, before long, one of the recognized objects of our own government.
(William Booth (1890))

William Booth was a Methodist preacher. He would found a movement, The Salvation Army, which still, today, accepts a deep responsibility for providing practical help (in Booth's words, 'soup, soap and salvation') to the poor ¹⁷⁵ . His practical approach to poverty was based on the tried and true principles of Methodism ¹⁷⁶ . Their influence on both policies and practice in 'reforming the poor' would lead to the development of 'welfare' programs both by other religious organizations and Western governments. The wastelands of Western Europe and its offspring would slowly but surely be converted into a 'lower middle capitalist class'.

True to the vision of John Wesley, the mission to redeem the lost would not stop with the poor of London, or even of Western Europe. Western Europeans now had vast colonial territories. There was a new wasteland – vast and daunting in its scope – and Western Europeans could not escape their God-given responsibility for reclaiming it, bringing 'soup, soap and salvation' to the lost. The West knew that it was destined to bring 'civilization' and 'development' to the populations of the world.

One could paraphrase the song 'Streets of London', written by Ralph McTell in 1969,

So how can you tell me you're lonely,
And say for you that the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets
of – any of a thousand slums around the world
I'll show you something to make you change your mind.

Chapter 6:
Capitalism and Work: the White Man's Burden  

• The nature of work
• The White Man's Burden
• Getting things into Perspective!
• The 'Development' Business
• Of globalization and 'Failing States'
• The Decay of Western Influence
• Work discipline, titles of consumption and status
• The Computer Revolution
• Globalization, Free Trade Zones and Definitions of Employment
• Distinction between Labor and work
• The Able-bodied and the Disabled – The Deserving Poor
• Work and its antonyms
• Work and leisure
• The organization of work
• Teaching Western Europeans to work
• The morality of work
• From indolent subsistence to Labo