Martin Daunton

Industrialisation and the city economy

This chapter reviews the impact of industrialisation on the modern city economy, and on the city itself, to an extent. Next, it highlights the ways in which the industrial city operated to promote and retain business. The chapter then discusses whether this role was maintained or undermined during the course of the twentieth century. Towns and cities were the information superhighways of the nineteenth century. The linkages between industrialisation, the growth of employment opportunities and the fortunes of British towns and cities are both obvious but yet difficult to disentangle, given the considerable variation in the trajectories and resulting profiles of urban-industrial development. Diversification can be regarded as a consequence either of an organic process of growth which derived from the demands placed on the economy by the growth of urban populations or of the increasingly complex and specialist needs of dominant sector industries.

The provision of social services

This chapter concentrates on the provision of urban social services concerning poverty and health, especially critical life situations associated with unemployment, low wages, life-cycle stages, illness and death. Britain as voluntarism became municipal and increasingly mutually interdependent with the local state of local government and the poor law. In the mid-nineteenth century the reliance on families for the provision of social welfare may have been even greater in urban industrial towns than rural areas and small towns. The chapter then focuses on the continuities and changes in the provision of social services with regard to poverty and health. It explores alternative sources of assistance and their interrelationships in the mixed economy of welfare. Finally, the chapter examines to what extent these changed during the period and paying particular attention to whether there were distinctive urban aspects and to variations among urban areas.

From Shillibeer to Buchanan: transport and the urban environment

This chapter looks at the interaction between changes in methods of transport and the growth of the urban environment. It takes essentially a functional approach, explaining in what ways developments in transport enabled towns and cities to grow in size, scale and function and hence the roles which transport systems played in these urban centres. In early Victorian Britain most towns and cities were small by subsequent standards, although to contemporaries they seemed gross and overblown. Transport developments played two different functional roles in facilitating the growth and maintenance of urban centres: the internal and external needs. Next, the chapter discusses transport as a network of which cities were the nodal points and where the lines were often symbolic as well as physical boundaries. Finally, it examines the growth of transport facilities as specific loci within the city.

Playing and praying

In earlier centuries leisure activities had more often appeared to grow out of the religious sphere. That very large numbers of the employed population increasingly enjoyed approved leisure was one of the many important innovations of the Victorian period, and the overall increase in their leisure time underlay key leisure innovations like railway excursions and Association football. However, Charlie Chaplin aside, the most popular films probably contributed more to the formation of a sense of national than of urban identity. Although the middle-classes included some of the most serious critics of mass leisure, their young were among its enthusiastic aficionados. The Scottish burgh councils had owned their churches since the Reformation, and were the earliest in Britain to develop a religious response to the new urban problems, playing an important role in coordinating educational, philanthropic and medical agencies.

Cambridge and Economic History

Michael Moissey Postan, who was appointed Professor of Economic History at Cambridge in 1938, rejected the notion of the Middle Ages as pre-capitalist, and adopted a Malthusian approach to medieval economic history which stressed the pressure of population on resources. The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP) similarly applied a Malthusian approach to the balance of population and resources, stressing the role of stocks of energy in removing the barriers of organic flows. This approach has been supplemented by a concern for intellectual history, institutions, and imperialism which has created a distinctive Cambridge approach to economic history.

John Harold Clapham (1873–1946)

John Harold Clapham was appointed to the first Professorship of Economic History in Cambridge in 1928. He was taught economics by Marshall, with whom he had much in common in terms of his liberal, rationalist approach. He was also taught economic history by William Cunningham, and sympathised with some of Cunningham’s stress on historical specificity and deduction, without accepting his political support for tariff reform. Clapham rejected historical economics but was not interested in the development of economic theory after Marshall, and turned instead to a study of economic history that largely ignored major analytical questions and policy implications.