Von Thünen's The isolated state provides a telling analysis of the constraints imposed by transport costs on economic activity in an organic economy. Von Thünen had personal experience of these constraints since as a young man he bought the estate of Tellow in Mecklenburg. He describes, for example, the transfer of a load of grain weighing 2,400 pounds by a wagon drawn by four horses from the estate to the town of Rostock, a distance of 23 miles. In hauling the wagon to Rostock the horses consumed 150 pounds of grain so that only 2,250 pounds of grain was delivered. The energy needed to transfer the product reduced its value by 6 per cent, illustrating the way in which the energy consumed in effecting a transfer gradually reduced the net value of the goods delivered. The heavier and bulkier the product, the more severely the accessible market area was limited.

One of the central issues examined in The isolated state is the way in which transport cost strongly influenced land use in an area surrounding a town. In approaching this topic, von Thünen was influenced by his reading of The wealth of nations. Adam Smith stressed the significance of transport costs in relation to the size of an accessible market. In an assessment of the importance of good transport facilities, he asserted that: ‘Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements. They encourage the cultivation of the remote, which must always be the most extensive circle of the country.’ Von Thünen's book is an examination of the characteristic pattern of land use in the countryside surrounding a market town in an organic economy. To simplify his exposition he assumed that the surrounding countryside was a uniform flat plain. In these circumstances, the type of crop that will be found in any given area will be a function of its value to weight ratio and its distance from the town. Jointly, these two factors will give rise to a series of concentric bands of land use providing the food and fuel needs of the town.

For those living in the centuries after an event that changed the nature of their society fundamentally, achieving an understanding of how the world appeared to their ancestors living at the time of its occurrence is apt to be challenging. That the industrial revolution changed societies fundamentally is evident to people today, but not to contemporaries. The very fact that the term ‘industrial revolution’ only came into common usage towards the end of the nineteenth century is indirect evidence of this. To those living in the decades during which the industrial revolution was long supposed to have reached its climax, the possibility of prolonged, rapid growth appeared an idle fancy. It may be difficult today to appreciate the weight of arguments that had once carried conviction. But the very fact that the significance of some aspects of the changes taking place during the industrial revolution were so difficult for contemporaries to appreciate can itself be helpful in investigating its character.

Partly for this reason, the reflections of the classical economists, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, are instructive when seeking to understand the nature of organic economies. They were eloquent in stressing the benefits of market economies in which the state ensured the operation of a legal system that enabled entrepreneurs when assessing risk to have confidence in the enforcement of contracts. They identified the scope for the increase in productivity that could flow from specialisation of function if the size of the accessible market was enlarged, and in turn the connection between this and improvements in transport. They were conscious that developments of this sort had brought about substantial economic advance in England during the two preceding centuries. They demonstrated the economic benefits associated with what has subsequently come to be described conventionally as a capitalist economy. They are even sometimes portrayed as demonstrating the possibility of what came to be termed exponential economic growth. Yet they were explicit in rejecting such a possibility. They saw no reason indeed to suppose that the lot of the bulk of the population would be any better at the end of an expansionary cycle than it had been at its beginning. In short, they saw clearly that, unhappily, the very nature of growth in what has recently come to be termed an organic economy must eventually entail a loss of momentum and probable decline. Negative feedback must always eventually prevail.

During three centuries from the mid sixteenth to the mid nineteenth century the English economy changed from being a laggard compared to the most advanced economies on the continent to being the leader of the pack by a substantial margin. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the wheel turned again, and England ceased to be either a laggard or a leader. Consideration both of the circumstances that gave rise to the divergence between English experience and that of the bulk of the continent, and to the subsequent convergence which took place, is the subject matter of this chapter. Reviewing these changes also throws light on the timing of the completion of an industrial revolution in England. That its completion promoted further change whose character severely affected the regions of England closely identified with the initial accomplishment of an industrial revolution is briefly discussed in the final section of the chapter.

The concomitants of urban growth

A first topic to consider in relation to the period of divergence between England and her continental neighbours is the extent of the contrast in the scale and character of urban growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was both striking and significant. It offers an opportunity to explore the developments which gradually weakened the constraints on growth which were universal in organic economies, strengthening the prospect of securing prolonged growth and a sustained rise in the real incomes of the mass of the population: in short, of bringing about an industrial revolution. It also exemplifies the scale of the difference between changes on either side of the Channel, and suggests why comparable development was inhibited on the continent.

An increase in the proportion of the population living in towns is a reliable measure of the level of productivity in the agricultural sector (assuming, for convenience, that urban food supplies are locally produced rather than imported). Since those living both in towns and in the countryside must be fed, only if productivity is high enough to produce an increasing surplus above local rural requirements is urban growth possible. Bairoch concluded that in early modern Europe the maximum proportion of the population that could live in towns with 5,000 or more inhabitants was 13–15 per cent.

Before the industrial revolution all human societies laboured under a common constraint in attempting to increase their ability to produce even the basic necessities of life. Their degree of success in this regard varied enormously. It might seem ridiculous to regard those living in Renaissance Italy as similarly placed to the early tribes of hunter-gatherers. In many contexts such an assertion is indeed ridiculous; but in seeking to put into perspective the radical nature of the change implied by the occurrence of an industrial revolution, it is instructive to explore the sense in which the assertion is justified. All life on earth is dependent on the process of plant photosynthesis, by which a fraction of the energy reaching the surface of the earth from the sun is captured by plants. The energy thus captured creates the base of the pyramid comprising all life forms as, for example, in providing food for herbivores and therefore also indirectly for carnivores. Plant photosynthesis, however, captures only a tiny fraction of the energy contained in incident sunlight. One estimate suggests that 400,000 kilocalories of solar radiation reach each square metre of soil annually, of which 4,000 kilocalories, or 1 per cent of the energy involved, is translated into vegetable matter. Other estimates suggest a lower figure. Pimentel indicates the wide range of efficiency with which different crops capture the energy from sunlight: maize captures 0.5 per cent, wheat only 0.2 per cent. White and Plaskett calculate that the total of solar energy arriving on the surface of the United Kingdom from the sun each year translates into the equivalent of the energy contained in c. 26 billion tons of coal, an enormous figure, many times greater than current national energy consumption, implying that a total for England and Wales alone the figure would be perhaps c. 16 billion tons. Assuming an average efficiency of energy capture of 0.35 per cent, this suggests that the equivalent of the energy in 56 million tons of coal might have been secured from the products of plant photosynthesis in early modern England and Wales.

There are wide bands of uncertainty round any estimates of this kind. It is clear, however, that in reality the energy limit imposed by plant photosynthesis on the English economy was very much lower than any suggested in the last paragraph.

In 1831 England was entering the last phase of the long process of change that came to be termed an ‘industrial revolution’. Following the invention and steady improvement of the efficiency of the steam engine, coal was able to transform the supply of mechanical energy as it had already transformed the supply of heat energy, but this second advance was in its early stages in 1831. Land transport, for example, still remained almost exclusively dependent on the traditional sources of energy in organic economies, but in 1830 the dawn of a new transport era was symbolised by the opening of the first commercially successful railway line between Liverpool and Manchester, providing both passenger and freight facilities, and depending exclusively on the traction power of the steam engine. The country was on the eve of the construction of a railway network on which the steam engine could transport both goods and passengers on a scale and at a speed that greatly exceeded anything previously achieved. In the following year the fourth national census was taken. It provides a revealing insight into several aspects of the English economy as it was about to enter the period when the supply of mechanical energy was transformed in a fashion that paralleled what had happened earlier with heat energy. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, roughly between the 1830s and 1870s, the use of steam engines as the source of mechanical energy became general in all branches of industrial production. With the supply of both energy types freed from dependence on plant photosynthesis, a prolonged period of exponential growth became possible – an industrial revolution.

The unusual character of the 1831 census

The 1831 census was the fourth and last census that Rickman directed. Like all earlier and later censuses it provided counts of the totals of men and women alive at the time but it had a number of features which distinguish it from other censuses, features which are at once frustrating in that there is often no directly comparable information in later censuses and illuminating in that it provides an insight into aspects of the structure of the economy which might otherwise have remained largely invisible.

Adding access to a vast stock of energy in the shape of coal to the flow of energy derived from plant photosynthesis was central to many of the changes that transformed the English economy from the mid sixteenth century onwards. The history of the changing balance between new and traditional energy sources in this period therefore deserves attention. It provides a background to many aspects of the economic and social changes that are the subject of the subsequent chapters of this book. There was a major increase in energy consumption per head of population due almost entirely to the increasing use of coal, but it is important to note that until the end of the eighteenth century coal was almost exclusively a source of heat energy. The principal traditional sources of mechanical energy, animal and human muscle, remained dominant until the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was only when the development of the steam engine made coal a convenient source of both types of energy, and it had proved possible to harness the steam engine to a very wide range of productive tasks, that the industrial revolution could be regarded as accomplished. If mechanical energy had continued to be provided almost exclusively by human and animal muscle, the constraints of an organic economy would have continued to limit growth. Because draught animals were the most important single source of mechanical energy in early modern England, increasing use of mechanical energy would only have been possible by devoting a larger and larger acreage to animal fodder, thus experiencing once again the constraint on growth that afflicted all organic economies. As Sieferle remarked, ‘The history of energy is the secret history of industrialisation’.

The growth of coal production

Table 3.1 provides coal production estimates and population totals for England over a period of three centuries. Coal production rose massively. In the mid nineteenth century, it was 270 times larger than it had been in the 1560s, and 20 times larger than in 1700. Over the three centuries in question, however, the population more than quintupled, rising from 3.04 million in 1561 to 16.73 million in 1851. Rather than considering only absolute totals of coal production, it is therefore also helpful to consider consumption per head of population in assessing change over time, and the growth rates for each of them.