The growth of industrial capitalism in the 19th century created a new group within the middle class. Of course, the middle class had existed since the growth of towns during the Middle Ages and originally consisted of townsmen who were craftsmen and artisans engaged in mercantile activity or held a professional position such as a lawyer or scholar. The designation evolved to include a wider variety of individuals who participated in commercial activities, banking, medicine, and government. By the late 18th century the new industrial entrepreneurs were those who actually built the factories and mills, controlled the mines, bought the new machine technology, and determined the scope of markets. These men displayed traits such as forward-thinking, determination, ambition, sense of purpose, and naturally a certain lust for money. In the initial phase of the Industrial Revolution, the tasks were not well delineated and the industrialists tended to have a hand in every aspect of their operations—raising money, building factories, supervising labor, and training managers. Nonetheless, this growing class of industrial capitalists did not engage directly in labor themselves, and their workers, unknown to them, by name became mere cogs in the operation. The ancient relationship of master to worker disappeared, as making money became the overarching goal. Because competition was fierce, these men tended to be hard-nosed and ruthless in order to expand their interests. At times, success was only marginal, and the difference between making a profit and going bankrupt was not significant. Most industrial firms remained relatively small until the 1840s, with only about 10% employing more than 5,000 workers and less than half fewer than 100 workers.
The industrial entrepreneurs emerged from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Of course many had mercantile origins, but there was also a marriage of land and industrial interests. Sheep farmers might earn enough capital to establish working looms on their estates. Other prominent aristocratic families began mining operations, constructed mills, supported canal building efforts, developed ports, and often leased properties for building purposes. Rarely did all sons survive until adulthood, and thus the transition of large numbers of landed families into these new industrial enterprises was small but steady and influential. In addition, religious minority groups such as the Quakers and others that were prohibited by law from entering public office, channeled their energies into enterprises such as banking, mining, brewing, etc. Finally, there were numerous examples of persons with pluck who saw the new opportunities, saved money from agriculture and domestic spinning, and set out to establish their own larger scale businesses. This intercourse between landed interests and industrial enterprise was distinctly a British characteristic attendant with few barriers. The noted British traveler, Arthur Young (see Document 13), observed while traveling in France in the late 18th century that such contact and exchange between economic interests was virtually nonexistent, whereas in Great Britain representatives of the
Nobility and bourgeoisie frequently dined together formally in order to transact business.
For nearly a century the rise of these industrial entrepreneurs sustained the dramatic economic growth in Great Britain. By the 1830s and 1840s, the roles of these men shifted as a business aristocracy began to emerge as sons inherited their fathers’ mills and mines and moved into larger banking and commercial enterprises. As they accumulated great wealth, these capitalists slowly gained a measure of political control of local and municipal governments and as a result had an increasing influence on local and regional policy. While the aristocratic land-owning classes still dominated the government at the national level, these men began to exert pressure for local social and political reform, which eventually resulted in the passage of new poor law legislation, suffrage extension, and the establishment of free trade. These wealthy industrialists set the stage for the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism by the end of the 19th century.
World History
