BOOK REVIEW: Roderick Floud.THE PEOPLE AND THE BRITISH ECONOMY, 1830-1914.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Abstract

Reviewed by: The People and the British Economy, 1830–1914 Trevor Griffiths (bio) The People and the British Economy, 1830–1914, by Roderick Floud; pp. x + 218. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, £14.95, $16.95. Of late, dedicated textbooks on the British economy in the nineteenth century have been few in number. This book by Roderick Floud is, therefore, most welcome, as it renders accessible the findings of the diverse body of research which has accumulated since the appearance almost two decades ago of The Victorian Economy (1982) by François Crouzet and The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (1969; 2nd ed. 1983) by Peter Mathias. In doing so, it also looks beyond the bounds of conventional economic history. Taking as its starting point Adam Smith’s dictum that consumption is the sole end of production, the book traces the principal implications of economic growth for the British people, both in the aggregate and in terms of the changing distribution of income and wealth. So, alongside chapters on sectoral performance and trade, familiar staples of the discipline, are passages which analyse changes in the quality of life, reflected in environmental improvements and educational advance, and the legislative and regulatory framework within which economic activity took place. The result is an illuminating overview of the period. The first chapter usefully outlines the principal developments in the seventy years covered here. These include marked growth in average incomes and significant structural change, both within and between sectors, along with broader social developments, encompassing the economic and legal status of women. Some of the claims made for the period are open to question. For example, the assertion that techniques of mass production were “normal” in British industry by 1914 would appear to fly in the face of detailed research on individual industries, which has stressed continued dependence on [End Page 529] short production runs in the search for market flexibility. Such doubts aside, Floud makes a good case for viewing the period as a whole as one of material improvement for the bulk of the population. Not that he fails to acknowledge the limitations of economic advance. This emerges most clearly in a valuable chapter on the economic uncertainties which continued to cloud everyday life, particularly for the poor, and the varied methods adopted to minimise insecurity, from insurance to informal assistance networks founded on individual neighbourhoods. The following chapter offers a neat summation of demographic trends in the period and offers Floud one of several opportunities in the book, none of which are overlooked, to incorporate findings from his work on changes in average heights. Although these are used to buttress important arguments on nutritional standards, they do give rise to certain organisational problems. Material presented in one section frequently recurs, albeit in slightly different form, in others. Although some overlap in subject matter helps to point up connections between selected themes, a tendency for the discussion to range rather freely over particular topics leads, on occasion, to undue repetition. The chapter on “Households and Communities” thus includes a section on technical education, while the role of international trade is allowed to intrude into the chapter on “Changing Workplaces.” Both points are treated at length elsewhere in the book. In the more conventional chapters that trace the fortunes of individual sectors, a principal concern is to rescue the service sector from the condescension of posterity by pointing up its contribution to economic growth and development. In this view, Britain was as much the servitor as it was the workshop of the world. Less successful is the section on extractive industries, which is too brief to carry real weight and which could have been extracted from the text without any loss to the whole. Two final chapters on the impact of free trade and the regulations governing economic activity help to broaden the book’s analysis and thereby to fulfill its remit. The latter offers useful comments on the areas in which state activity was deemed legitimate, but gives excessive space to the benefits accruing to the legal profession from the operation of the law at the expense of more central concerns, such as...