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From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-faire State, 1760–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Philip Harling  and
Peter Mandler
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Extract

The recent historiographical revolution in our understanding of the eighteenth-century state has broad implications, analytical as well as empirical, that are only beginning to be plumbed. Due largely to the work of Patrick O'Brien and John Brewer, the old picture—of a small, amateurish, corrupt central apparatus largely maintained (between sporadic wars) to dignify the crown and assist gentlemanly (i.e., parliamentary) plunder—has been pretty completely effaced. We now see that by the end of the French wars the British state was one of the largest and most efficient in Europe; certainly it engorged the largest proportion of national product by means of a ruthlessly regressive tax system. The French wars were the climax, not the sole begetters of this system, which had been spawned by a chain of wars mounting in scope and sophistication since the late seventeenth century and requiring commensurate improvements in fiscal policy: thus Brewer's memorable naming of the system as the “fiscal-military state.”

For historians of the early nineteenth century, this revision raises a host of questions about the relationship of social change and social class to government growth. Particularly, it casts doubt on the customary association made between growth in the size or scope of government and the rise in the Industrial Revolution of new social and economic questions and a bourgeoisie to answer them; that is, it casts doubt on the implicit “modernization” model that hitches together economic growth, government growth, bureaucracy, professionalism, and embourgeoisement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , January 1993 , pp. 44 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1993

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References

1 Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London and Boston, 1989), p. xviiGoogle Scholar. Brewer's treatment of the growth of indirect taxes in the eighteenth century owes much to Mathias, Peter and O'Brien, Patrick, “Taxation in Great Britain and France, 1715–1810,” Journal of European Economic History 5 (1976): 601–50Google Scholar; and to O'Brien, Patrick, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 41, no. 1 (1988): 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Jupp, Peter J., “The Landed Elite and Political Authority in Britain, ca. 1760–1850,” Journal of British Studies 29 (1990): 53–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thorne, R. G., ed., The House of Commons, 1790–1820, 5 vols. (London, 1986)Google Scholar. For the origins of the modernization model, and a cautious restatement of them, see also Schremmer, D. E., “Taxation and Public Finance: Britain, France, and Germany,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. Mathias, Peter and Pollard, Sidney (Cambridge, 1989), esp. 8:360–63Google Scholar, though Schremmer elsewhere grants that the model has only dubious applicability to the British case—cf. pp. 356–57. As we will be arguing, much depends on what time periods and criteria of growth are considered.

3 Jupp, pp. 55, 65.

4 Ibid., pp. 58–64.

5 Ibid., p. 63.

6 Ibid., p. 66.

7 Ibid., p. 65.

8 Ibid., p. 69.

9 Ibid., pp. 68–69.

10 Ibid., p. 72.

11 Ibid., pp. 74–75.

12 Ibid., p. 73.

13 Ibid., p. 69.

14 See Brewer (n. 1 above), pts. 2 and 4. It is precisely against such a picture of the eighteenth-century state as Jupp has provided—limited, casual, clubby—that Brewer is writing. See also Mathias and O'Brien (n. 1 above); and O'Brien (n. 1 above).

15 This is not to imply that it was a model of bureaucratic rationality. As we shall see below, administrative and financial reforms preoccupied British ministries well into the 1840s precisely because it was not. The eighteenth-century state is best described as “an extraordinary patchwork” that brought together old and new procedures, useless and efficient offices, and corrupt and honest officials (Aylmer, G. E., “From Office-holding to Civil Service: The Genesis of Modern Bureaucracy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 [1980]: 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Auditing procedures were cumber-some and wasteful; the other revenue departments were not nearly as efficient as the Excise, and sinecures and other “irregular” emoluments abounded, especially in the older departments of state.

16 Figures based on Mitchell, B. R., British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 580, 587Google Scholar. The percentage for the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is somewhat anomalous because it does not include the net cost of tax collection.

17 Figures based on ibid.

18 Prices adjusted according to the deflator provided in O'Brien, p. 3.

19 Jupp acknowledges the centrality of warfare in the growth of state activity toward the end of the eighteenth century, but he takes the management of traditional wartime business to indicate the extension of government influence in social and economic relations; see Jupp (n. 2 above), pp. 58–59, 69. As we argue, the retraction of government in peacetime indicates that primarily the former and not the latter process is operating.

20 The volume of private and local/personal statute making roughly parallels that of public statute making throughout this period, peaking in the last five years of the Napoleonic War. Enclosures, turnpikes, general town improvements, and private property transactions such as charters, leases, and wills, account for the vast majority of such legislation. This sort of statute making kept M.P.s very busy in committee, but since it was initiated by private citizens and local agencies, it is a better index of entrepreneurial and local regulatory activity than of central government growth.

21 This is the subject of a 1992 Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation by Philip Harling, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Old Corruption’: Economical Reform and British Political Culture, 1779–1846.”

22 Seventh report of the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts, June 18, 1782, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Lambert, Sheila, 145 vols. (Wilmington, Del., 1975–1976), 41:430Google Scholar.

23 “Return of Persons Employed [in the Public Service],” December 30, 1830, Parliamentary Papers, 1830–31, 7:299Google Scholar, no. 92.

24 In the decades after 1780, the central government did indeed increase “the quality and range of its social statistics,” improve its information-gathering techniques, and “deploy its new resources of information to considerable political effect,” as Eastwood, David points out (“‘Amplifying the Province of the Legislature’: The Flow of Information and the English State in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Historical Research 62 [1989]: 284)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But it is telling that he should take as his point of departure for these trends the appointment of the Public Accounts Commission in 1780. Lord North appointed the Commission in order to quiet criticisms of the expense and (ostensible) mismanagement of the American War.

25 Eleventh report of the Commissioners for Examining the Public Accounts, December 5, 1783, Lambert, ed., 43:35–36.

26 Based on Mitchell, , British Historical Statistics (n. 16 above), p. 587Google Scholar. If historians have neglected a “revolution in government” before 1830, the fact of declining state expenditures may have given them good reason.

27 From £76 million in 1815 to £51 million in 1834 (monthly average of 1821–25 equals 100). Figures based on the price index in Gayer, A. D., Rostow, W. W., and Schwartz, A. J., The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy, 1790–1850, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1953), 1:468–70Google Scholar.

28 Mitchell, , British Historical Statistics, p. 605Google Scholar.

29 Figures based on ibid., pp. 587–89.

30 Adjusted figures for per capita spending on civil government in the postwar decades would show a slight increase to the early 1820s (reflecting the stickiness of expenditure levels in a period of sharp deflation), a gradual decrease through the 1830s, and a sharp increase in the 1840s. In other words, adjusted spending figures strengthen the argument for a Victorian revolution in government.

31 These rough estimates are drawn from expenditure series in Flora, Peteret al., State, Economy and Society in Western Europe, 1815–1975, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, vol. 1, chap. 8, augmented by similar series in Mitchell, B. R., European Historical Statistics, 1750–1975, 2d ed. (New York, 1981), pp. 733–41Google Scholar. Making the comparisons on the basis of public expenditure as a proportion of gross national product gives somewhat different results, but the general trends between 1820 and 1914—downward for Britain, upward for France and Germany—are the same. See Schremmer (n. 2 above), p. 362. Note also that Schremmer's figures include military expenditure; among other distortions, the Crimean War lends an upward bias to what would otherwise be a steadily declining British graph at midcentury.

32 Though it is not the case that the pattern differs much if local government or social insurance expenditures are taken into account; compare the figures for “central government” and “general government” in Flora et al.

33 Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), p. 169Google Scholar.

34 The biographical information on M.P.s in the following pages comes from the relevant entries in Thorne, ed., (n. 2 above), vols. 3–5, supplemented by the Dictionary of National Biography and Burke's Peerage and Burke's Landed Gentry, unless otherwise noted.

35 “There were many more members who might be described as self-made in this period than in the preceding one,” says Thorne (1:290), but this may well be an artifact of the way in which Thorne defines “self-made.” Among other objections, we would point to the inclusion in the category of many who inherited substantial trading fortunes. In any case, we are still only concerned with something over 100 of 2,100 M.P.s. In general, we feel that “statistical” surveys based on House of Commons biographies tend to be hazardous, for the biographies are not compiled with a keen eye for socioeconomic status.

36 In addition to his deployment by Thorne and Jupp, see the typical reference to Huskisson as a “bourgeois radical” in Ingham, Geoffrey, Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development (New York, 1984), pp. 106–7, 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Huskisson's family holdings are identified in Fay, C. R., Huskisson and His Age (London, 1951)Google Scholar, chap. 10.

38 Men like these appear as “most active” because they held legal offices, necessary for carrying on the business of the crown. Thorne calls them, on the whole, “plodding, if conscientious, professionals.” See Thorne, ed., 1:302.

39 Ibid., 1:290. Interestingly, neither of the two exceptions cited by Thorne—Canning and Huskisson—can in any case be considered truly self-made.

40 The Parliaments of 1715–54 included 198 merchants plus twelve “nabobs” who made fortunes in the East Indies. See Sedgwick, Romney, The House of Commons, 1715–1754, 4 vols. (New York, 1970), 1:136–55Google Scholar.

41 Lawrence, and Stone, Jeanne C. Fawtier, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1986), p. 221Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., p. 197.

43 W. O. Aydelotte, “On the Business Interests of the Gentry in the Parliament of 1841–47,” appendix to Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England (Oxford, 1962), pp. 290–305Google Scholar.

44 Boyd Hilton argues that “the social basis of the Pitt/Liverpool/Peel regime” is best described as “rentier,” a description that may undervalue the centrality of landowners in the rentier interest as well as the continuing social and political prestige to be derived from landowners hip, but which incorporates the notion of common interest between land and finance that we wish to emphasize here. See Hilton, Boyd, “The Political Arts of Lord Liverpool,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 38 (1988): 153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 The list of thirty-two “best-known individuals” provided by Jupp includes many known for all these qualities, including a high station in landed society.

46 See, for example, on combinations, Berg, Maxine, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 9; on poor laws, Mandler, Peter, “The Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus,” Past and Present, no. 117 (November 1987), pp. 131–57Google Scholar, “Tories and Paupers: Christian Political Economy and the Making of the New Poor Law,” Historical Journal, 33 (1990): 81–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hilton, Boyd, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 3; on education, Paz, D. G., The Politics of Working-Class Education in Britain, 1830–50 (Manchester, 1986)Google Scholar; Brent, Richard, Liberal Anglican Politics (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 6; on penal reform, Storch, Robert D., “Policing Rural Southern England before the Police,” in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850, ed. Hay, D. and Snyder, F. (Oxford, 1989), pp. 211–66Google Scholar.

47 This was certainly true of the Canningite and Huskissonite groups, and the Alfred and Weekly Clubs; Grillions was very socially exclusive, as its origin at Christ Church suggests: “self-made men” need not apply!

48 Jupp's claim (n. 2 above) that “the natural aristocratic leaders” of the Whig party, in whose number he includes Althorp, “virtually gave up the ghost in the 1820s, while Brougham and the philosophic radicals stole the show” (p. 74) would surprise almost any student of the Whig party in this period. See Mitchell, Austin, The Whigs in Opposition, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar; Wasson, Ellis A., Whig Renaissance: Lord Althorp and the Whig Party, 1782–1845 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Brent, chap. 1; Mandler, Peter, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chaps. 1–3. Jupp's mention of the Westminster Review confuses the matter; Brougham's journal was the highly respectable Edinburgh, which was influential, while the more bourgeois Westminster made little political impact.

49 Here we have conflated Aydelotte's category of “businessmen,” i.e., practicing bankers and merchants, with his category of “business connections,” i.e., company directors and owners of docks, canals, mines, etc., to accord more closely with the loose categories used in the History of Parliament volumes. Aydelotte stresses that he makes no attempt to assess the penetration of business investments, which must have been more widespread still. How many landowners passed up the chance to invest in railway shares?

50 See esp. Woodcock, George, ed., Rural Rides (1830; New York: Penguin Classics ed., 1985), pp. 115–20, 159–62, 200–220Google Scholar.

51 Jones, Gareth Stedman, “Rethinking Chartism” (1982) in his Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.

52 Hilton, Boyd, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar, chaps. 4–5.

53 Norris, J. M., “Samuel Garbett and the Early Development of Industrial Lobbying in Great Britain,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 10 (1957–1958): 450–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dietz, Vivien, “Before the Age of Capital: Manufacturing Interests and the British State, 1780–1800” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1990), chap. 3Google Scholar. The point here is that landed gentlemen were not systematically prone to “corruption,” nor merchants and manufacturers to “disinterestedness”—often to the contrary.

54 See Brown, Lucy, The Board of Trade and the Free Trade Movement, 1830–42 (Oxford, 1958), chaps. 10–11Google Scholar.

55 Cookson, J. E., The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 9.

56 Flick, Carlos, The Birmingham Political Union and the Movements for Reform in Britain, 1830–1839 (Hamden, Conn., 1978)Google Scholar.

57 McCord, Norman, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Longmate, Norman, The Breadstealers (New York and London, 1984)Google Scholar.

58 Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce, chap. 2; Fetter, F. W., The Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy, 1797–1875 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar, chaps. 2 and 3; Gordon, Barry, Political Economy in Parliament, 1819–1823 (London, 1976), chaps. 3–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 See Ingham (n. 36 above), p. 107.

60 John Brewer has pointed out to us another: the internal pressure exerted by bureaucratic dynasties for professionalization and reform. Certainly more research needs to be done into the personnel of the government machine. Here we would only emphasize, again, that bureaucratic professionalization had evidently only a limited impact in multiplying the functions and size of the bureaucracy.

61 Of course, it was not always possible for them to avoid activist policies. The Liverpool ministry could not afford to ignore the clamor of special interests for protection during the postwar slump, as Boyd Hilton has shown (“The Political Arts of Lord Liverpool” [n. 44 above], pp. 150–53). But the ministers were grudging interventionists, and they justified intervention as a means of returning society to the status quo ante.

62 Here, we must distinguish between the notion of laissez-faire held by many members of the Liverpool cabinet—“not yet an intellectual ideal so much as a political tactic of doing nothing … indicating] an unwillingness to interfere with established restrictions on trade, rather than an active desire to release trade from such trammels”—as Hilton puts it (Corn, Cash, Commerce [n. 52 above], p. 74), and the heightened rhetoric and ideological commitment of Peelites such as Gladstone. See H. C. G. Matthew [n. 33 above], p. 115.

63 The Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Sir Robert Peel, Bart., delivered in the House of Commons, 4 vols. (London, 1853), 4:581 (January 22, 1846)Google Scholar.