“The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences”: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts ed. by D. G. C. Allan, John L. Abbott

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 411 extrapolating back into the 18th century by using other forms of evidence, such as insurance registers. This is successful enough as far as individual numbers and occupations are concerned but lacks any sense of the coherence of London as an industrial center. What does emerge, however, is how limited technological change was in London, with both the steam engine and the factory little in evidence in manufacturing throughout the period. Once its economy has been established, Schwarz tries to analyze London’s social structure, especially the hierarchies present in indi­ vidual trades. It is clear that in London most manufacturing activity employed little capital and generated low incomes, and it was very difficult for the average producer to alter this situation. The London manufacturer who accumulated vast wealth was a rarity during the Industrial Revolution. Instead, the tendency was either a proliferation of small-scale but increasingly specialized producers or the death of industry in the face of more technologically advanced mass production elsewhere in Britain. Despite attempts to isolate themselves from competition, as with the guilds, London manufacturers were unable to alter the forces for economic change in their favor. This can be seen both generally and in the case studies of tailors, shoemakers, furniture makers, and silk weavers. Finally, the book devotes a chapter each to the influence of economic cycles/wars and the seasons on economic and social conditions in London, and one chapter on its demography. Interesting as these are, they do illustrate the problems of this book: they are more a series of essays on London’s economic and social structure, with a heavy reliance on population data, than an attempt to examine what happened to London as a whole. Perhaps that is not possible yet, not until the completion ofmuch more work of the kind that Schwarz has undertaken. Generally, this is a very worthwhile study that took years in the research and the writing. Not least among its merits is its demonstration of how economic change can take the form of organizational rather than technological change, and that this can, in turn, induce important social change. Ranald Michie Dr. Michie is a senior lecturer in economic history at the University of Durham and author of The City ofLondon: Continuity and Change since 1850 (London, 1992). “The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences": Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts. Edited by D. G. C. Allan and John L. Abbott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. xxvi+447; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, index. $65.00. The Royal Society for the Encouragement ofArts, Manufactures and Commerce (not to be confused with its older scientific counterpart, the 412 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Royal Society of London) began its work in 1754 with energy and enthusiasm. By 1764 it boasted a fantastically large membership of nearly 2,500 and was encouraging innovation by offering a bewildering variety of premiums—380 in all—in the fields of agriculture, chemistry, colonies and trade, manufactures, mechanics, and the “polite arts.” Cobalt mining, madder cultivation, tinning, American silk cultivation, papermaking, saltpeter, varnishes, dyeing, preservation of ships’ hulls, soils and manures, carpets, sculpture, borax, verdigris, bismuth, and mechanical methods for cleaning chimneys—these werejust a few of the manifold subjects encouraged at one time or another by the society’s premiums, which yielded not merely cash prizes for inventors, artisans, and artists but also a measure of prestige and, with luck, financial backing. Such a frenetic pace could not be sustained for long. In the second decade of its existence, the society fell out of fashion: membership plummeted, dues fell into arrears, and the number of premiums was radically reduced. Despite this false spring, the Society ofArts did go on to have an impact on British technology and culture, though how much of an impact is still not terribly clear. Some historians have noted a coincidence between the society’s founding and the growth of British imperial power, but others have been more skeptical. T. S. Ashton, for instance, argued that the society’s premiums were “small bait” com­ pared with the incentives of the market. To historians...