ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: State versus Market in the early historiography of the British Industrial Revolution, c. 1890-1914
Author: Howe Anthony
This paper will examine the debate over industrialization in Britain following the publication of Arnold Toynbee’s Industrial Revolution in 1884. It will show how on the one hand the contention that Britain’s early industrialization had been fostered by a protectionist trade policy became central to the understanding of the emerging school of historical economists, on the other, for the bulk of the economics profession, as Toynbee himself implied, industrialization had only been unleashed when the burden of the mercantilist past had been largely swept away or rendered defunct by the growing impact of Smithian economics and steam power. However this debate itself became deeply entwined in the contemporary political debate over the merits of free trade versus protection. Thus, the recent economic history of England became a central ingredient in the case for tariff reform developed by economic historians such as Ashley and Cunningham, while the case for free trade in Edwardian Britain relied strongly upon a view of history which emphasised slow economic growth before 1760, the importance of mechanization and the emancipatory effects of free trade rather than the benefits of state control. We can therefore locate clearly the reverberations of Toynbee’s Industrial Revolution in the politics of Liberal free trade versus Conservative tariff reform. This moulded a lasting division between two views of the Industrial Revolution, with the former emphasising individual enterprise and a minimal role for the state while the latter emphasised evolutionary change, the importance of empire, and the beneficent hand of the state. These in turn corresponded to two distinct visions of the British future, a Liberal (and to some extent, Labour) continuation of free trade as the basis of economic welfare and imperial policy or a Conservative wholesale reconstruction of state, economy and empire. While the contest between these rival conceptions of the British industrial past was at its most significant during the Edwardian controversy over free trade and tariff reform, echoes of this debate continued to be heard well into the later twentieth-century historiography
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