The Output of the British Iron Industry before 1870

Abstract

INCE the pioneer studies of Gayer, Rostow, and Schwartz and of Deane and S Cole on British economic growth in the long run, efforts have been made to refine the quantitative base on which work of this kind must rest.2 In the case of the iron industry, there has yet to be a thorough reappraisal of early statistics, although both C. K. Hyde and George Hammersley have looked at aspects of the problem.3 This article seeks to reassess contemporary evidence for the scale of iron-making in Great Britain before the last quarter of the nineteenth century; to present a new series of estimates of output in the long run, but especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and to discuss very briefly how such a series throws new light on problems of economic growth in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. Although iron has been made in Great Britain since prehistoric times, no serious attempt can be made to measure the size of the industry before the sixteenth century, when the relatively large number of often short-lived bloomery ironworks gave way to a small number of more permanent blast furnaces.4 Since the number of furnaces in use at a given date can be established fairly precisely, as can their average output, it is possible to make rough estimates of total output. For the period from the early sixteenth century to the first decade of the eighteenth, 1 I am very grateful to Dr R. M. Hartwell for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.