ALIGNMENTS, INTERESTS AND TENSIONS OVER ‘REFORM’ IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN: THE MANCHESTER COMMITTEE OF TRADE, 1774–1786

Abstract

THE MANCHESTER COMMITTEE OF TRADE is important as one of the earliest examples of attempts to develop a general interest business body. It existed from 1774 until about 1786, being renamed as Society for Protection and Encouragement of Trade in 1781–82, both hereafter referred to collectively as the CoT to distinguish the Committee as a whole from its executive and sub-committees. It has been examined before in studies that provide the basis of most modern overviews. However, some previous conclusions need revisiting, and there has been no systematic examination of its members and how their alignments influenced developments, despite many of the polarised divisions of the 1790s being recognised as having earlier resonances. Previous studies have argued that eighteenth-century Manchester presented significant difficulties for developing a general interest business organisation because of the scale and complexity of the different sector interests involved, which led to factionalism. Redford argues that collective organisations struggled ‘due largely to the friction and ill-feeling which existed between the different branches of the Lancashire textile industries’. He claims the fustian manufacturers and dyers and bleachers were at ‘loggerheads’ in 1784, and the CoT was divided over the General Chamber in 1787, concluding that cooperation was ‘patchy’ because of ‘dissatisfaction with the financial results of collective action’.1 Similarly, Bowden concluded that ‘the city’s industries early developed a diversity of interests as well as an excess of individualism’ that led to ‘difficulties of maintaining a general and harmonious organisation’.2 Part of the fragmentation has also been adduced to tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ manufacturers, and to tensions between those who exploited ‘new’ opportunities for foreign and