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The Coming of the Railway and United Kingdom Economic Growth*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

B. R. Mitchell
B. R. Mitchell
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Economics, Cambridge; and University of Colorado
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Extract

According to W. W. Rostow, “the introduction of the railroad has been historically the most powerful single initiator of take-offs,” having “three major kinds of impact on economic growth during the take-off period,” namely, lowering transport costs and bringing new areas and products into the market; developing a major new export sector; and leading on to the development of modern coal, iron, and engineering industries. But though all these three can be traced in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the railways are not accorded the role of initiator in that country since, in the Rostow schema, the take-off had already occurred before the invention of the locomotive. The size of the investment in Britain's railways is such, however, that it is worth examining their impact, even if this was not so overwhelming as in some other countries.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1964 , pp. 315 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1964

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References

1 Rostow, , The Process of Economic Growth (Oxford: Clarendon Press; 2d ed., 1960), pp. 302–3Google Scholar.

2 I do not wish to imply that I agree with Rostow's reasoning about the impact of new industries. As more than one critic has pointed out, economic growth results from rising productivity, not from newness as such.

3 Jenks, L. H., “Railroads as an Economic Force in American Development,” Journal of Economic History, IV, No. 1 (May 1944), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

5 Cootner, Paul H., “The Role of the Railroads in American Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History, XXIII, No. 4 (Dec. 1963), 477–521CrossRefGoogle Scholar, questions whether this is a correct interpretation of even the American experience.

6 Many of these are contained in the collections of Reports and Accounts at the three offices of the British Transport Commission Historical Records. I am extremely grateful to Mr. L. C. Johnson (the former Archivist), Mr. Atkinson, and the staff in London, and to Mr. R. M. Hogg and Mr. E. H. Fowkes and their staffs in Edinburgh and York respectively, for the great help I have received from them.

7 See, for example, Francis, J., A History of the English Railway (2 vols.; London, 1851), I, 203Google Scholar. The tendency to exaggerate was not generally true of the successful promotions of the 1840's.

8 As in Durham in the 1830's, for instance—see R. Matthews, C. O., A Study in Trade Cycle History (Cambridge, Engl.: The University Press, 1954), p. 212Google Scholar—or in the Rhondda valleys in the 1850's—see Morris, J. H. and Williams, L. J., The South Wales Coal Industry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1958), p. 98Google Scholar.

9 Sessional Papers of Parliament (hereafter cited as S. P.) 1844, XI, appendix 2.

10 See Fogel, Robert W., “A Quantitative Approach to the Study of Railroads in American Economic Growth: A Report of Some Preliminary Findings,” Journal of Economic History, XXII, No. 2 (June 1962), 163–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a controversial analysis which questions the traditional view about the impact of railways on costs in America.

11 Lardner, D., Railway Economy (London, 1850), p. 203Google Scholar.

12 S. P. 1844, XI, appendix 2.

13 Estimated by adding the figures for individual railways in the Returns (as published in Sessional Papers) and making an allowance for omissions.

14 Jenks, “Railroads as an Economic Force,” p. 12.

15 Clapham, J. H., An Economic History of Modern Britain (3 vols.; Cambridge, Engl.: The University Press, 1926–1938), I, 399Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., II, 199.

17 S. P. 1867, XXXVIII, lxv. It is perhaps worth noting that the social impact of the new form of transport was much more immediately powerful, as the rapid growth of passenger traffic indicates. This would surely repay more study than has yet been made.

18 Mitchell, B. R. and Deane, Phyllis, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, Engl.: The University Press, 1962), p. 113Google Scholar.

19 A table in Gayer, Rostow, and Schwartz, The Growth and Fluctuation of British Economy, 1790–1850 (2 vols; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953), I, 254Google Scholar, seems to indicate that it exceeded £10 million in 1833 and 1835, but it is completely misleading. The cost of railways referred to there is the ultimate cost of, lines authorized in those years.

20 The large size of this figure seems to call for some comment, though it will come as no surprise to anyone who has read carefully the pages of the Economist for the 1840's. The very high temporary expenditure on railway building was achieved partly by a genuine increase in savings (mainly by people who in 1845 had been anxious to be in on what they felt to be a good thing), partly by a falling off in investment in other types of capital formation (probably in inventories more than anything else), and partly by repatriation of funds previously invested overseas.

21 S. P. 1857–8, LI. In the immediate aftermath of the great mania, when contractors were trying to keep together their staffs, the average rose above 60 men per mile.

22 Census Report, 1841.

23 Wage rates for various types of railway construction laborer are given in the “Report of the Select Committee on Railway Labourers” (S. P. 1846, XIII); in SirHelps, Arthur, Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey (London, 1872)Google Scholar; and in Brassey, Earl, Work and Wages (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916)Google Scholar.

24 Clapham, Modem Britain, I, 405–7, summarizes most of the published evidence on this question.

25 The London & Birmingham Company, for example, had great difficulty over its Kilsby Tunnel, several contractors failing to fulfill their undertakings.

26 S. P. 1847, LXIII.

27 One witness before the Select Committee on Railway Labourers (S. P. 1846, XIII) reckoned that there were no recent Irish immigrants on the Caledonian or Hawick lines, but that about two fifths of the workers were Glasgow-Irish or Edinburgh-Irish (Q. 460–62). According to another witness, most of the remainder were Highlanders (Q. 73).

28 Railway Returns up to 1860. Allowance has to be made for men employed in completing lines already opened.

29 Economic growth induced in this way operated mainly through the provision of economies of scale and partly, perhaps, through increased regularity of employment in the coal mines.

30 Clapham, Modem Britain, I, 427.

31 Hamilton, H., The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 184Google Scholar.

32 Scrivenor, H., A History of the Iron Trade (London, 1854), pp. 290–91Google Scholar.

33 The sample consists of all the large and several small companies in Great Britain. The annual expenditure of these was multiplied by a factor based (up to 1861) on their proportion of total expenditure on rolling stock to December 1857 (as given in S. P. 1857–8, LI) or (after 1861) on their proportionate contribution to the annual increase in the total number of vehicles, allowing for amalgamations (as given in Railway Returns). The figure for 1835–43 is taken from S. P. 1847, LXIII (return of 14 April 1847) corrected for omissions.

34 Also based on the accounts of a sample group of companies up to 1860, when figures first appeared in “Railway Returns.”

35 Approximately 50,000 workers were employed at an average wage of £1 a week. This gives a wage bill of roughly £2.5 million. If the proportion of wages to gross output in the engineering trades at the 1907 Census of Production is assumed to hold good for the mid-nineteenth century, namely 1 to 3, a figure for gross output of £7.5 million is obtained.

36 See Clapham, Modern Britain, I, 447–48.

37 From H. A. Shannon, “Bricks—A Trade Index, 1785–1849,” Economica, New Series, No. 1 (Aug. 1934), 300–18.

38 Ibid., p. 309.

39 See Cooney, E. W., “Long Waves in Building in the British Economy of the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2d Series, XIII, No. 2 (Dec. 1960), 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the comment on it by A. R. Hall in Ibid., XIV, No. 2 (Dec. 1961), 330–32.

40 For example, Gayer, Rostow, and Schwartz, Growth and Fluctuation, I, 242–76.

41 Matthews, R. C. O., A Study in Trade Cycle History (Cambridge, Engl.: The University Press, 1954), p. 212Google Scholar.

42 Tooke, T., A History of Prices, IV (London,. 1848), 63–64Google Scholar.

43 Hughes, J. R. T., Fluctuations in Trade, Industry arid Finance, 1850–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 206Google Scholar.

44 Shannon, H. A., “The Coming of General Limited Liability,” in Carus-Wilson, E. M., ed., Essays in Economic History, I (London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1954), 376Google Scholar.

45 Gayer et al., Growth and Fluctuation, I, 409.

46 Hunt, B. C., The Development of the Business Corporation in England, 1800–1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 107–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Evans, G. H., British Corporation Finance, 1775–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936), p. 149Google Scholar.

48 Hunt, Business Corporation, p. 106.

49 Spackman, W. F., Statistical Tables of the United Kingdom and its Dependencies (London, 1843), p. 157Google Scholar.

50 S. P. 1854–5, XLVIII (“Report of Railway Department,” xvii).

51 Deane, Phyllis, “Capital Formation in Britain before the Railway Age,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, IX, No. 3 (Apr. 1961), 368Google Scholar.

52 Feinstein, “Income and Investment” (cited in Table 1).

53 Economist (1845), p. 310.

54 Endymion (London, 1881), ch. lviii.

55 This statement is based on analysis of some of the (comparatively few) surviving shareholders' registers at British Transport Commission Historical Records.

56 Clapham, Modem Britain, II, 357.

57 See Jenks, L. H., The Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1927)Google Scholar, especially ch. v.

58 Postan, , “Recent Trends in the Accumulation of Capital,” Economic History Review, VI (Oct. 1935), 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.