Pat Hudson

Two textile townships, c. 1660-1820: a comparative demographic analysis

S ince Wrigley and Schofields classic work of 1981, it has been generally accepted that the sustained population acceleration in England and Wales in the eighteenth century resulted from earlier and more universal marriage. This was in turn taken to reflect a response to rising income levels coupled with social changes, such as the decline of live-in farm service and apprenticeships which had delayed the setting up of new households.2 Our subsequent understanding has been enriched by historians who have placed stress upon European-wide stimuli to earlier courtship and marriage, and hence to increases in fertility, especially the greater mobility and economic and sexual freedoms of young people resulting from the processes of proletarianization and proto-industrialization.3 Such causal analysis and model building at national and supranational levels have been invaluable but they pose fundamental questions about the dynamics of population change in varied regional and local environments.4 Understanding the diversity of experience behind aggregate indices and averages of vital variables calls for complementary research looking at regional and local patterns, at the distributions (as well as the means) of demographic variables, and at individual experiences. By digging beneath the surface of aggregate indicators, and by making more direct and immediate connections between the processes of economic, social, cultural, and demographic change, it is possible to uncover worlds of cause and effect very different from those which satisfy the aggregated variables and which dominate the large-scale causal analyses. In western Europe as a whole, geographical variations in demographic

The Bourgeois Era: Culture, Ideology, and History

Deirdre McCloskey is almost half way through her six-volume project The Bourgeois Era. Two books are published and a third is partly drafted on her website: It is thus a good time to take stock. Her aim is to rehabilitate the bourgeoisie: to save bourgeois culture and ideals from their critics past and present, to emphasize the range of bourgeois virtues, and to persuade readers of the primacy of bourgeois liberty and dignity, historically and contemporaneously, in generating and sustaining modern economic growth. Even the severest critics of her thesis should applaud this venture. The current volumes are a treasure trove of analysis and asides alluding to a vast range of authors and works in economics, history, broader social science, literature, philosophy, and cinema. Her writing and the content are erudite and witty, thought provoking, compelling, sometimes bizarre. Some po-faced academics may object to a style that by turns patronizes and then (sometimes savagely) destroys those whose ideas do not stand the McCloskey test. But I like the rampant iconoclasm and applaud what Joel Mokyr has called a “gem of disputatious revisionism.” This is the sort of book that gets the blood flowing and the historiography developing. I agree with McCloskey’s starting points: It is high time that culture and ideas were reassigned their rightful place as central in economic behavior and economic development; it is vital that economic analysis should appreciate the importance of shifting ideologies; and economics should extend well beyond utility-maximizing models. I agree that the British industrial revolution needs again to be seen as a fundamental discontinuity that involved shifting ideas and culture as well as a step change in the nature of economic

The Luddite Rebellion. By Brian Bailey. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 182.

The story of the Luddite risings has all the ingredients for an excellent popular history: drama and excitement, poverty and exploitation, youthful resistance, violence and murder, romance and repression. Thanks to legal, Home Office, and newspaper evidence, and thanks especially to the work of earlier historians, Brian Bailey is able to convey a lively narrative of events which includes many telling details about the major protagonists. The book is at its best in the short chapters on the major attacks on properties and persons in Yorkshire and elsewhere, and in sensitively discussing the reaction of the authorities, the trials, and the punishments of offenders. There are however many weaknesses and trouble-some aspects to this book. Most historians would wish to challenge the value of a book that aims at a comprehensive account of the sequence of events, free from detailed interpretation of the sort that Bailey sees as clouding other works (p. iv). They will also be troubled by the many assertions that are unsupported by evidence, from rejection of the conventional account of the origin of the term “Luddite†(p. xi), to assessment of George Mellors motivation (p. 142), to the notion that Midland framework knitters were “dull and unimaginative†(p. 15)! There are also many overblown statements and assumptions, which would immediately be questioned by any historian of the period, such as the development of “a class war†(p. xvii), and the narrow definition of “political†in discussion of communities which were, after all, engaged in a struggle over control of the means of production. Some would argue that this is inherently “political.†And if the “small, dark people of Celtic origin†(sic, p. 15) who comprised the Midlands workforce were so apolitical, one might ask why news of the prime ministers assassination in May 1812 was greeted in Nottingham with great joy, exultation, bonfires, flags, and drums (E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 2d ed. Harmonsdsworth: Penguin, 1968: 932). It is a pity that Bailey appears to draw so little from Thompsons research (and particularly from his debates with Church and Chapman), except where he is rejecting Thompsons interpretation of Luddite motivations. Others will be unhappy with Baileys superficial tin-pot psychology in attempting to rehabilitate the role and meaning of “mob behaviour†(pp. 148–51), and with the sparse footnoting and limited bibliography (no journal articles, few books published since 1990), which make it difficult to gauge exactly what has been drawn from primary sources and what has been derived from other secondary literature.

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This is a useful and interesting collection of essays with an ambitious goal. By focusing on a single, but centrally important industry, the aim is to explore interdisciplinary approaches to Irish history more generally. Linen was indeed central to the economy and society of Ulster for two centuries. Developments in the industry—the spread of rural and urban domestic production, the growth of international trade, the mechanization of spinning and the rise of the factory—were conditioned by and had major impact upon farming, the decline of subsistence, the rise of market culture, household structure and family life, demography, and gender relations. Study of the industry thus creates the opportunity to break down the boundaries between historical, anthropological, economic, and sociological approaches, and Cohens introduction emphasizes that contributors have all “contextualised their individual analyses within broader theoretical and comparative frameworks.”