Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 334

The pen of Eric Jones, over the several decades of his career, has never been less than stimulating. This volume is no exception. He takes an important look at a currently neglected aspect of the British industrial revolution: its regionally differential impact. Specifically he is concerned to explain the de-industrialization of large swathes of southern England at the very time that the North took off. It has long been recognized that de-industrialization was the obverse of the coin of industrialization and that there were casualties of the regional and sectorial concentration and specialization of industry that was a hallmark of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, as Jones rightly points out, well before the North was growing fast, southern England was shedding its manufacturing industries. ‘The south’s decline began too early for it to have been the straightforward victim of a superior north’ (p. 39). And only in the late stages of industrialization did the use of coal and steam power become decisive locationally. Jones argues that, by asking what caused the de-industrialization of the south, and by considering inter-regional competition, especially in the non-mechanized sectors, the underlying forces in the transition to modern economic growth are more clearly revealed.

Leaning heavily on local and regional industrial histories to illustrate his general arguments with detailed examples, Jones looks carefully at some of the south’s industrial regions of the early modern period, taking Kent, Hampshire and Gloucestershire as particular case studies. He emphasizes that relatively new manufacturing as well as old centres were disappearing, ‘punctiform’ as well as cottage industries: there were chronic disadvantages in the whole area south of the Severn/Wash, and few exceptions to the decline of manufacturing outside London and Portsmouth. As possible explanations Jones dismisses the response to differential factor supplies and relative factor prices as excessively a priori. Worker resistance and lack of inventiveness were also unimportant. Conservatism about shifting to lower quality and mass production or to different product mixes, and inadequate supplies of capital are similarly found wanting as explanations. Jones makes a particularly strong argument against the idea that the quality of southern rural labour was inherently poor. Although often the response to decline rather than its initial cause, weaker networks of producers and ancillary traders may have played a part, as may have guilds and trade restrictions, but the Achilles heel of southern industry lay in deficient innovation, the result of a failure to invest in manufacturing.

Blanket genetic or cultural theses such as those (respectively) of Greg Clark and Deirdre McCloskey are examined and found wanting as explanations for this failure to invest and for regionally differentiated growth. In a rather unorthodox chapter Jones brings evidence from his own family tree to counter Clark’s argument as applied to southern England. Yet he has some sympathy for Clark in suggesting that it was not enterprise that was snuffed out in the south but risk taking and entrepreneurship as applied to manufacturing. Instead these qualities shifted into farming, agricultural processing, communications and services. The rural south had geological and topographical advantages over the North for arable and other farming. It also had the massive locational advantage of proximity to the London food market. However, the decline of southern industry was a result neither of comparative advantage in farming nor of the success of that sector, which inevitably occurred at the expense of industry. Jones puts major emphasis upon that fact that ‘Capital obtained from political favours, court offices, government sinecures, the law and trade entered the southern countryside, as successful men sought to fix their position by buying estates’ (p. 149). Fortunes made in public finance, empire and the slave trade sometimes went into urban development but the majority went into southern estates that were generally used unproductively and wastefully, for leisure and blood sports rather than pecuniary gain. Jones does not mince his words in describing the ‘laundering of metropolitan money’ (p. 159) in the economy of the south. Such ‘landed proprietorship created a milieu in which manufactures were disapproved and new industries unwelcome’ (p. 161).

There were some southern industries that experienced longer-lived success. Jones puts their eventual demise down to falling transport costs, inter-urban commercial competition and the growing integration of the national market that exposed them first to other southern producers and then to the now more efficient manufacturers of the North. Regional concentration of industrial sectors (cottons largely in Lancashire, wool in Yorkshire, iron in the North East and South Wales, metalwares in South Yorkshire and the Black Country, for example) generated significant economies of agglomeration and the scattered industries of a earlier era could not compete.

Jones offers some interesting critiques and asides about aggregate statistical analysis as a key to causal explanation and he address a wide range of competing literature on Britain’s industrial revolution. That some passages have a text-book or survey feel should not detract from the important central argument. Indeed, the accessibility and the range of the volume will make it attractive to students.