Succession became the least of the Hanover dynasties challenges as the 17th century progressed. The imposition of a Stamp Tax upon tea imported by British East India Company, proved a huge misjudgement. American colonists, fearing that Britain was about to unleash the depredations of the East India Company upon them. A company with a reputation for unprincipled and corrupt trading practices. Proud in their independent non-conformist origin, Americans were not going to accept being preyed upon or penalised in this way. A delivery of the equivalent today of a million pounds worth of Indian tea was thrown into Boston Harbour. In short order, such righteous indignation quickly accelerated into an all out revolutionary war. America declared its independence in 1776, and the ensuing seven years of war ended in an ignominious British defeat. By 1783, America was a nation permanently separated from the auspices of British control.
Six years later, revolution came closer to home, across the English Channel in France. Where economic and political crisis was tearing that country apart. As ever, it was the imposition of taxes upon its citizens by a high handed insensitive monarchy, that triggered the initial revolt, stirring demands for representative people's democracy. That this ended in the monarchy being sent to the guillotine, spread alarm across all the other monarchies of Europe. As France descended into anarchy, the government of privileged landowners and nobility that ran the recently launched capitalist economy of Great Britain, feared a copy cat revolution erupting here.
Back in the leafy green rural countryside of England, there were simmering resentments, but mostly of a different origin. A revolution was brewing, but a technological one. For many centuries England had a vibrant trading economy within Europe, mostly through the superiority of its wool and weaving industries. The working backbone of this industry depended upon a vast army of compliant peasant spinners and weavers working in there own small holdings, or doing piecework for local farmers. This was labour intensive, poorly paid, but nevertheless integral to the functioning of a local, and distinctly rural based economy.
In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, a machine that could spin multiple threads of yarn simultaneously. Vastly increasing production and reducing costs, this one single technological innovation had dramatic consequences. A huge increase in the production of spun yarn, led to increasing demand for any remaining 'common land' to be enclosed. Enclosure of common land, as we have documented in earlier episodes in this series, had been a long running sore of discontent amongst rural peasantry. This process had, until now, been executed in an illegal ad-hoc way for centuries, as common land was stolen by powerful influential landowners simply performing a land grab. The difference in the eighteenth century, was that you could legally apply to Parliament to enclose the land. And, as Parliament was literally stuffed to the gills with self serving landowners, thousands of such appeals were easily granted over the 18th and 19th centuries. All in order to meet the burgeoning demand for more profitable grazing and arable land.
Besides technological there were procedural innovations like crop rotation systems. Further enabling enclosure, these processes revolutionised the effectiveness of the wider arable agriculture economy. Putting additional economic pressures on rural peasant workers as they fought to keep their poorly paid jobs, in the face of a rapidly declining need for them as a workforce. What started as the 18th century Agricultural Revolution evolved into the 19th century Industrial Revolution. It then became easier to relocate the entire spinning and weaving industries into the innovative large manufacturing factories, based near or in towns. Where access to energy and transport was easier to obtain. And the poorly paid cheap labour would simply have to follow.
All of these 'revolutions' in agriculture and production led to the collapse of the rural economy in the late 18th century. Poor people gave up the fight over enclosures and left the countryside in huge numbers for the towns, simply in order to survive. In the early decades of the 19th century, these former rural farm workers were further disaffected by the conditions they found were expected to work in, in these new factories. They formed themselves into gangs that went around destroying the spinning and weaving factories that had sprung up. The new machinery being literally smashed to bits or incinerated. Was this the begining of a similar revolution kicking off in England, to those in France?
These weaving machine wreckers were referred to as 'Luddites'. Used at the time and ever since as a pejorative term, for someone mindlessly destroying the machines of human progress. But that was far from the whole truth of the matter. A large section of society, the newly urbanised working class, were being routinely mistreated. Their former rural lives had already been ruined, their lifestyle destroyed by the juggernaut of technological progress rolling over them. The Luddite revolts were driven by a demand for their contemporary plight to be taken notice of. Truly atrocious working and living conditions, low poverty wages and the erosion of any skilled workmanship, was rife. Rather than being anti progress, they were anti the wilful degradation of their humanity in the pursuit of this progress. But the greedy desire for increased profit and efficiency in this newly industrialised capitalist economy, was not going to be so easily derailed.
It simply exacerbated centuries old inequalities, long held resentments over how ordinary working class people had no real say in what happened to them. Not allowed to vote, they found they had little option but to take to the streets in protest and these could easily tip over into violent affray. In the aftermath of the Luddite rebellions, a campaign for democratic representation did step up. An economic slump after the end of the Napoleonic war, the failure of the harvest in 1815, made worse by the Corn Laws artificially keeping the price of bread high, and anger over less than 2% of the population having the right to vote, lay festering at its core. A large rally was organised, attended by 60,000 people in Manchester, on St Peter's Field. Local authorities, nervous at such an unusually large number of protesters, sent in the military to break up what had actually been a largely peaceful gathering. In the ensuing panic, as soldiers charged through the crowd on horseback, eighteen people were killed and up to seven hundred injured. This was the infamous Peterloo Massacre.
This level of fatalities and the disproportionate nature of the response, caused a public outcry. Fearful of giving further credence, and hence purpose, to such large protests and rallies, the Tory government simply cracked down harder. Banning all unauthorised gatherings, plus manufacturing an alleged insurrection, in order to justify this suppression. Stoked up fears of revolution being on the edge of breaking out. The Peterloo Massacre was to become a truly potent symbol for the injustice and plight of ordinary peoples lives. It clearly highlighted what was truly rotten and morally indefensible in how the governing elites ran Great Britain. Voting reform slowly developed an inevitable momentum, that had its totemic beginnings in what happened in St Peter's Field, Manchester on the 16th August 1819.
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