INTRODUCTION

Although the British nation is a political entity that is bound by the rule of a particular law or set of laws, is governed by a national parliament, is subject to a single foreign policy, and is organised within the parameters of centrally directed economic and social policies and regulations, it remains a place of great variety and complexity; arguably that variety and complexity was more marked in previous centuries than it is today. To begin to comprehend that complexity, the historian is obliged to focus upon the composite parts of the nation, and not simply upon the aggregate that makes up the whole.

This truth is reflected in changing approaches to an understanding of the ‘industrial revolution’ in recent years. The national accounts approach, championed in particular by Crafts, emphasised the slow rate of economic growth apparent through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when measured at national (or macro) level. The Lancashire cotton industry, which was indeed revolutionised, was thus atypical, operating within a wider context of traditionalism and backwardness (Crafts 1985).

In a crucial intervention, Berg and Hudson argued not only that the manner in which national accounts data were calculated left much room for uncertainty and possessed inbuilt bias, but also that dividing the traditional sector from the modern obscures as much as it reveals in attempting to understand the industrial revolution, for they often operated in tandem. What is more, a key element excluded from such calculations was the contribution of women and children, which was of crucial – and in some sectors increasing – importance during the early industrial years. Above all, the national accounting approach obscures the diversity of experience across the nation, for expanding and industrialising regions existed alongside regions of industrial stagnation and decline. As such, the industrial revolution ‘was an economic and social process which added up to much more than the sum of its measurable parts’, requiring us to ‘rebuild the national picture of economic and social change from new research at regional and local level’ (Berg and Hudson 1992: 44).

These two volumes of The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain follow their predecessors, published in 1981, 1994 and 2003, in bringing together experts in economic history from across the world to reflect on our current understanding of British economic history since 1700 and to describe and explain the most recent views of important historical controversies. As in those earlier volumes, the intention is to provide a text which is comprehensible to an intelligent lay audience, both at universities and more widely, but which does not avoid the sometimes difficult task of explaining economic theory and statistical methodologies as they have been used to assist in historical interpretation.

In the preface to the edition of 2003, these words appeared: ‘change is always with us, a lesson which needs to be learned by each generation. It should be learned particularly by those eminent economic commentators who, at each stage of the business cycle, confidently predict that that stage, whether of boom or bust, will go on forever.’ As this new edition is written, in the midst of the worst ‘bust’ since the 1930s, those words possibly give grounds for some optimism. Historians usually reject any notion that one can ‘learn from history’, but it is a matter of observation – as described in these volumes – that economies, including the British economy, are resilient, that invention and innovation continue and that economic growth resumes after periods of decline.

We also trust that recent economic events will raise the profile of historical analysis. The Queen is reputed to have asked a group of economists at the London School of Economics: ‘Why did no one see this coming?’ As she implied, economic theorists failed to predict, forestall or even – after the event – very clearly explain the factors that contributed to the global economic meltdown and subsequent recession. Indeed, many economists believed between 2000 and 2008 that we had entered a new economic age incorporating, as the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, unwisely suggested, ‘the end of boom and bust’.

INTRODUCTION

Households play key roles in consumption, savings, production, reproduction and human capital formation. They coordinate the activities of individuals – pooling and distributing resources, engaging in joint consumption and investment activities, and developing strategies to achieve various short-term and long-term goals. Interest in the microeconomics of household behaviour has been stimulated by Becker's ‘new household economics’, which views families as entities seeking to maximise their own well-being by making rational choices given their economic environment. The household thus becomes ‘a “small factory” … [combining] capital goods, raw materials and labour to clean, feed, procreate and otherwise produce useful commodities’ (Becker 1965: 496).

Yet there are serious limitations to assessing household behaviour using simple neoclassical models. Households do not compete with each other in the same way as firms and their behaviour is not as straightforwardly governed by financial considerations (Mokyr 2000: 4). Non-economic factors are probably of even greater importance in the less mobile working-class communities of pre-1939 Britain where, as Johnson (1985: 6) has shown, households operated ‘as part of a larger community or work group with its own customs, conventions, and codes of conduct, and an important aspect of many financial decisions was the potential social integration or alienation that might result’. Moreover, Becker's approach neglects the influence of power asymmetries within the family, which might bias decision-making in ways not predicted in neoclassical models.

Analysing household behaviour presents formidable empirical problems. Prior to the Second World War there is only a limited amount of social survey data, which is generally confined to the working classes. Even when data are available, analysis is complicated by the fact that decisions regarding housing, spending priorities, family size and the allocation of family members between market labour and other activities (such as housework or education) are endogenous, being taken jointly in the context of long-and short-term aspirations and constraints.

INTRODUCTION

The years between 1870 and 2010 witnessed dramatic changes in the health of the British population and the organisation of welfare provision. At the start of this period, the average life expectancy of a newborn boy was 39.4 years and that of a newborn girl was 42.4 years, but by 2009 these figures had risen to 78.36 and 82.49 years respectively (www.mortality.org/hmd/gbrtenw/stats/E0per.txt). In 1890, public expenditure on the social services of health, education, housing and social security amounted to less than 2 % of the country's Gross Domestic Product, whereas 120 years later this figure was equivalent to more than 30 % (Harris 2009: 92; HM Treasury 2011: 62, 200). The fact that these developments have occurred in tandem raises some tantalising questions about the relationship between them.

The first section of this chapter considers these questions by examining the main changes in different health indicators since the 1870s. Section 2 examines the main proximate causes of changes in health standards and section 3 looks at some of the major developments in welfare provision. The final section explores the role which state provision in particular has played in helping to raise health standards.

HEALTH, HEIGHT AND MORTALITY

Historians have often used mortality rates to measure the health of populations, but this method suffers from two significant limitations. In the first place, it is at best an indirect method of measuring health because it does so by measuring something which is assumed to be its opposite (Oddy 1982: 121). Moreover, as the World Health Organisation (1978) has argued, health ‘is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. During the last three decades, economic and social historians have attempted to overcome this problem by using height, and to a lesser extent weight, to examine the extent to which the ‘human organism’ can be said to thrive in either childhood or adulthood (Steckel 2009). They have also used other types of health record, including sickness insurance statistics, to measure different aspects of positive health and non-fatal illness.