Chapter Four Industrial Capital and Road Improvement1 Definition: As soon as manufacture gains sufficient strength, and particularly large-scale indus- try, it creates in its turns a market for itself, by capturing it through its commodi- ties.2 The English empire became the leading workshop of the world long before nineteenth-century machines replaced tools in the making of commodities. From the 1650s, an Atlantic community of English agrarian and manufacturing capitalists, under the aegis of Cromwellian Parliaments, produced merchandise for widening markets of domestic and nearby-continental customers. Sixty years later this commercial ensemble of English, Irish, Scottish, West Indian, and American entrepreneurs manufactured and deliv- ered, in English made ships, an ever more complex assortment of homemade manufactures to increasingly distant markets. By 1722, England's Atlantic business fraternity harnessed the labor power of native Americans, African slaves, English, Irish, and Scottish workers to hunt, grow, mine, manufacture, and sell English goods worldwide. England lacked machines in 1689, but it was hardly feudal, pre-industrial, or pre-capitalist. Units of production were small, manufacturing was labor intensive, and an economy of scale was nonexistent: it was, nevertheless, a capitalist society. The life of the state and of its three great classes revolved around relationships that advanced through the making and selling of commodities. After 1689, Parliament paid interest to owners of the National Debt from taxes it levied on everything from coal to beaver hats. Landlords derived ground-rents from tenant farmers who grew corn, raised cattle, and processed cheese. Capitalists realized profits from financing, mining, raising, growing, cut- ting, manufacturing, building, and selling coal, cattle, sugar, timber, bricks, and ships. The working class earned wages by planting corn, mining coal, brewing beer, and making nails, cutlery, hats, and clothing. By 1722, England's three classes gained their wealth by producing English commodities within the largest free trade area in world history and marketing those goods globally. Manufacturing was so successful at the time of the Glorious Revolution that market gluts vied with wartime interruptions as the entrepreneur's single greatest obstacle to economic well being. From 1689 to 1722, overabundant inventories and falling profits threatened planters, farmers, and manufacturers through- out the empire. The central contradiction shaping English eco- nomic life during this era of capitalism was that the empire produced enough corn, tobacco, sugar, coal, textiles, and ships to glut contemporary markets.3 Persistent problems of surpluses--existing for decades before wars with France inter- rupted trade--challenged planters, manufacturers, and merchants to cheapen production costs and to find new markets for their goods. When they could no longer remove economic barriers to successful enterprise on their own, businessmen petitioned the state for help. However, it was only after the Glorious Revolu- tion that their Parliamentary representatives captured enough uncontested authority to legislate solutions for their uniquely modern problem of market surpluses. This second, and central, part of the book follows Parlia- ment's post-Revolutionary endeavors to enhance market opportuni- ties for England's business classes from 1689 to 1722. It con- centrates on the principal source of eighteenth-century English wealth: industrial capital's ability to manufacture cheap, reli- able, and necessary commodities at home and in the colonies. To illustrate England's productivity, it examines Parliament's approach to transport systems, corn production, the shipping industry, and international sugar factories. It concludes first that the production of goods--not simply the financing or trading of them--was the fundamental source of English wealth after 1689. It also concludes that resolving the crisis of market surpluses was, along with fighting France and streamlining post- Revolutionary political institutions, a central concern of Par- liament from the Glorious Revolution to the South Sea Bubble. Parliament and Turnpike Roads: 1689-1722 Shortening the transportation time necessary to circulate commodities was one method that seventeenth century businessmen invented for cutting costs to maintain incomes even in the face of declining profits. Virginia planters, for example, experi- mented with packaging tobacco more compactly, and Newcastle coal factors tested less costly ways to ship coal to distant markets.4 As seventeenth century roads became more crowded with merchan- dise, particularly with goods headed for London, other business- men began to concentrate on the savings that they might realize from a more efficient state promoted highway system. Even before 1689, they petitioned Parliament for more rapid thoroughfares, but it was not until after the Glorious Revolution that Parlia- ment legislated with any consistency to speed manufacturer's goods along better roads to increasingly distant markets. The English state had initiated a nationwide highways im- provement program only once before 1689. During the Interregnum, it passed a comprehensive ordinance for "the better amending and keeping in repair the Common High-ways within the Nation."5 The Restoration of Charles II put a quick end to this Cromwellian road building experiment. Although Restoration Parliaments passed updated versions of many Protectorate statutes, such as the 1651 Navigation Act, they wrote only one short-lived toll road bill from 1660 to 1689, and that affected but a short stretch of England's roadways before it lapsed in the 1680s. The political struggles surrounding the governments of Charles and James II thwarted any serious development of a Parliament-managed national road system. Before the Glorious Revolution, the state left highway maintenance mostly to the whims of local parishes.6 Parliament's victory in 1689 enabled it to legislate an ongoing, regulated, and national highway system for the first time. In 1691, Members inaugurated their program by ordering all parishes to keep roadways in good repair. In the preamble to this first road bill, Parliament declared that good highways were essential because "free and easie intercourse and means of con- veying and carrying Goode and Merchandizes from one Markett Towne to another contributes very much to the advancement of Trade increase of Wealth and raiseing the value of Lande."7 Reaching back to the Cromwellian Ordinance of 1654 for their inspiration, legislators instructed the nation's Justices of the Peace to nominate local "Surveyors of the Highways," and to hold those surveyors responsible for regular renovation of England's most heavily traveled roads.8 The statute mandated that surveyors inspect all major thoroughfares triennially, and that they col- lect funds for timely road repairs wherever necessary.9 What was new about this act? From the days of Philip and Mary, highway statutes had compelled local communities to main- tain roads.10 These earlier Parliamentary acts mobilized parish- ioners to labor from four to six days annually to repair high- ways. They too required magistrates to see that townspeople carried out repairs. Monarchs even granted individuals or corpo- rations patents to collect tolls or to assess rates when repairs or widening expenses were too dear for any one community. Howev- er, nowhere did citizens obey these acts with any consistency before 1689. Patents for collecting tolls lapsed from reign to reign, and, in many places, road repair remained incomplete or unattended for lack of adequate funds or supervision. In this, its first post-Revolutionary 1691 Highway Act, Parliament an- nounced its guardianship over national thoroughfares, and it reproached all parishes and their magistrates for circumventing previous road laws. It asserted that impassable highways existed everywhere in England, "Not only by reason of some ambiguities in the said Laws but by want of a sufficient Provision to compel the execution of the same."11 The Highway Act of 1691 was designed to remedy this situation. Parliament continued to hold parishes responsible for repair, but it made England's Justices of the Peace accountable to itself for supervising renovations and for collecting adequate taxes to pay for timely upkeep. With fresh liability for highway maintenance in place, Parliament took a further, and more radical, step toward trans- forming highway construction when it passed another statute transferring the costs of road upkeep from local parishioners to highway consumers.12 Members of Parliament were at once rate payers and the representatives of rate payers, and many came to Parliament determined to reduce the portion of parish taxes that their constituents paid for road repair on the nation's most traveled roads. Within four years of ordering Justices of the Peace to maintain roads through local rates, Parliament reversed course. It began the process of making highway travelers toll- responsible for the cost of road maintenance along England's major highways. An "Act for repairing the Highways betweene the City of London and the Towne of Harwich" in 1695 cast the matrix for England's eighteenth-century turnpike toll road system.13 As with the Highway Act of 1691, this statute also had one precursor in a temporary turnpike toll statue passed in 1663 to alleviate problems caused by the increasing volume of goods transported along roads that ran through several English parishes. By the 1660s, this additional traffic had raised road repair costs beyond local capacity (and willingness) to labor or to pay. Parishes complained bitterly to Parliament about road damage done by merchants from distant communities who contributed nothing for highway repair on these national roads.14 The state responded by passing an act that placed tariffs on those who traveled a busy section of the Great North road leading to London.15 It still held parishes responsible for administering repairs on this unit of a national highway, but tolls, not taxes, provided maintenance funds.16 This statute was ground breaking, but it was the only toll act that a Restoration Parliament passed. It lapsed in the early 1680s, perhaps another victim of the rupture between late Stuart monarchs and their Parliaments. The London to Harwich Toll Bill of 1695 reintroduced and made permanent the idea that consumers should pay for national road repairs, and Parliament added five more such acts from 1695 to 1705. This practice of shifting road repair costs from local tax payers to the nation at large began gradually, but it became England's ordinary way of financing highway maintenance in the eighteenth century.17 In much the same way that Parliament slowly transferred repayment of England's National Debt from land taxes to excise taxes--from landlords to consumers--it now trans- ferred road maintenance costs from local elites to travelers along stretches of most frequently used national routes. The new acts listed tolls for persons using the roads, and charges for commodities shipped along them. They also included instructions to surveyors about how to spend toll receipts. In the 1695 bill, for example, Members authorized toll charges on traffic along a section of highway that connected London to Harwich, and they reproached merchants from outside local parishes for carrying heavy loads that ruined these roads and made them "almost impass- able."18 The act instructed Justices of the Peace to name a "fitt Person or Persons" to collect tolls for highway repair from all road patrons, and it specified charges on traffic: horses using this route paid a penny; hackneys, stage coaches, calashes, and chariots six pence; wagons one shilling; and, each cart eight pence; and "For every Score of Sheep or Lambs One Penny," and for "every Score of Calves Three pence."19 The statute set amounts for hogs, oxen, and placed tolls on all "Persons who shall travel with Horse Coach Cart or Waggon or shall lead or drive any Oxen Sheep or other Cattle before mentioned."20 The commodities of England themselves were to pay for highway maintenance. The toll road acts made England's Justices of the Peace responsible for overseeing surveyor accounts of revenues collect- ed.21 However, neither the Justices nor the surveyors were to delay repair for lack of sufficient funds. Parliament directed surveyors to borrow money, using approximated toll receipts as collateral, to expedite highway maintenance.22 All highway statutes passed from 1695 to 1705 contained stipulations calling on surveyors to offer six percent interest to "any Person or Persons that shall or will upon that Security [of tolls] advance any present Sum or Sums of Money so lent."23 The toll road stat- utes thus drew a form of direct-interest bearing capital to the field of English highway repair and construction. Any landlord or capitalist with surplus funds could now buy stock, and later annuities, in these Parliamentary-mandated municipal road-im- provement ventures. With little opposition, Parliament passed 32 more turnpike toll road acts from 1705 to 1722.24 Many of these bills retained Justices of the Peace as overseers of road repair, but others called for the establishment of "Turnpike Trusts" to administer the new toll roads.25 A major difference between the Justice and Trustee statutes--they existed side by side after 1706--is that these new Trustee bills identified the men who oversaw the main- tenance of specific sections of England's developing turnpike system. These statutes, that often read like a "Who's Who" of English county political, social, and economic life, specified those members of England's elite most involved in English highway upkeep. As with the first owners of the National Debt, these early trustees were well known, multiple-investors in the post- Revolutionary English economy. The first trustee turnpike stat- ute, which connected Fornhill in Bedfordshire with Stony Strat- ford in Buckinghamshire, for example, named more than 30 trustees as overseers.26 All were members of prominent Southeastern families, such as Sir Richard Temple and Richard Hampden, who owned land in the region served by the improved roadway.27 Edmund and Alexander Denton of Buckinghamshire both sat in Par- liament and rented lands to yeomen farmers in the district.28 Trustee Charles Duncombe, holder of numerous shares in the East India Company, was a London Alderman, and banker to the Earl of Shaftesbury as well as a Wiltshire landowner.29 Typical of most turnpike trustees was Charles Leigh of Leighton Buzzard, Bedford- shire: a landlord, a Member of Parliament, an owner of East India Stock, and a South Sea Company shareholder in 1719.30 Many of these trustees profited directly as turnpike creditors by buying shares of Turnpike debt. According to the historian of English Turnpikes, most of the capital raised for these roadways came from "local gentlemen or landowners, who were often also trus- tees."31 Even when there is no evidence that specific trustees held toll road mortgages or annuities, land owners and manufacturers still profited from well-maintained national roads. Many of the more than 50 men who acted as trustees for the building of a 1709 toll road connecting Seven Oaks and Tunbridge Wells held invest- ments that linked road maintenance directly either to their or to their tenants' commercial ventures in Kent.32 This toll road statute freed families such as the Comptons, Fanes, Pelhams, and Ashburnhams from the costs of repairing these sections of their local highways. It also freed their tenants who carted bricks and "heavy Carriages of Goods Timber and other Things," such as the great numbers of "Oxen Sheep and other Cattle which are drawn and pass" from the effects of "ruinous and impassable" roads.33 The turnpike toll road from Seven Oaks to Tunbridge increased trade between London, Rye, Hastings and other Eastern seaport towns, and it encouraged greater use of farmlands, forests, and mines. However, Parliament placed the financial burden for this speedier trade on those who paid tolls for taking their commodi- ties to market. Although these toll roads boosted land values generally, those between London and inland cities or those surrounding port cities appreciated most rapidly. In all likelihood Pelhams and Ashburnhams profited when toll payments improved the Southeastern roads close-by their estates. Smaller farmers sold their cattle within their own communities, but the "larger Wealden fatterners such as the Pelhams or Ashburnhams sold further afield."34 Both families had already grown wealthy by diversifying their invest- ments when transportation from their estates to London improved. The Ashburnhams leased and owned Sussex iron works, improved agricultural production on their estate at Ampthill, and in- creased the number of cattle raised for London markets. The Pelhams, shareholders in East India, Bank of England, and South Sea stock, like so many Southeastern rentiers, left records of other wealth derived from mineral rights, farms, ranches, and forests. When better roads linked Sussex ports and London, they added to the value of Ashburnham and Pelham farm rental income just as they facilitated the transportation of their sheep, cattle, and timber to urban customers. Parliament made do with a two-pronged program of the tradi- tional parish maintenance system and the gradual extension of the new toll roads along its principal highways until farmers and manufacturers found their economy of scale. Markets were slug- gish during the early eighteenth century, but the continuous rise in highway use prompted Parliament to pass more toll road bills. From 1722 to 1730, as the economy revived after the South Sea Bubble, legislators wrote 40 such statutes, equaling the entire number written from 1689 to 1721.35 The avalanche of new custom- ers for English commodities at mid-century started a toll road mania that made these highways a commonplace by 1800. By that date, the Parliamentary-inspired capital investment program for road building had reduced manufacturers' transport costs and speeded English commodities to urban and international industri- alists and their customers. Capitalism and Rivers before 1660 From the earliest days of English capitalism, rivers were more important to manufacturers than roads. If England was to capture global markets, it required more open harbors and naviga- ble inland rivers than existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The heavier industrial raw materials essential for expanding new businesses, such as bricks, coal, and timber, were difficult (if not impossible) to deliver along conventional roadways; only rivers could facilitate their widespread use in manufacturing commodities. Although these raw materials reached port cities through coast-wide shipping, their reexport to inland towns demanded the clearing and widening of even the narrowest of English waterways. Only when barges, lighters, frigates, wher- ries, and scows carried corn, iron, coal, glass, tobacco, and timber to the most out of the way inland ports, would provincial manufacturers be able expand their industries. Although many estuaries had replaced highways as commercial thoroughfares by 1650, most inland rivers remained ill-suited for carrying forward extensive industrial development or long-range trade until after 1689. Parliament wrote more legislation to clear harbors and to widen river channels after the Glorious Revolution than ever before, but this legislation was not universally popular. To the despair of many "progressive" members of Parliament and the businessmen they represented, waterway improvement acts unleashed political storms that slowed, limited, or even stopped passage of many proposed river improvement statutes between 1689 and 1722. These legislative controversies underscore the conflicts of interest that still separated members of England's ruling class even after the Glorious Revolution. English legislators agreed "ideologically" about the virtues of private enterprise after 1689, but they quarreled incessantly over which "programs" prom- ised the fastest means for realizing the rewards of that enter- prise. A variety of national issues divided property owners in and out of Parliament: Should England have a species bank or a land bank? Should the Royal African Company have a monopoly on the slave trade? Should the Old or the New East India Company oversee the India trade? These and similar questions produced intraclass struggles from 1689 to 1722, and Parliamentary strug- gles over modernizing England's waterways illustrates this point as well as any other. The battles over waterways resulted from the dual functions of England's rivers. From the earliest days of English capital- ism, merchants relied on unobstructed rivers to transport their goods to market. However, at the same time, manufacturers re- quired blocked rivers as an energy source for producing textiles and grinding corn. Cloth makers and farmers, for example, em- ployed water-produced power to make commodities for customers living in the 800 English and Welsh market towns near those rivers.36 During most of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, England's landlords sided with corn farmers and textile producers when debating the most rewarding use of England's waterways. Landowners clogged rivers with mills, mill dams, weirs, and rented these facilities to grinders, fullers, and fisherman. Any plan to make these wet roads navigable would have required cutting channels through fields, widening rivers, and clearing mills. Such improvements threatened to transform the traditional way that landlords got their rents and local manufac- turers got their profits.37 While landlords, farmers, and manu- facturers remained satisfied with revenues arising from mills and weirs, river-improving entrepreneurs made little progress in transforming English waterways. Other material forces added to river projector woes. With- out careful monitoring, harbors silted, river banks eroded, tree trunks blocked the streams, and "banks of earth impeded and deflected the course of water."38 Even if rivers had been free of these natural impediments to trade, merchants everywhere added to navigation problems by emptying ballast when moving ships through shallows. By the early 1600s, river improvers understood that programs to widen, clear, or even maintain English waterways as swift wet roads, relied on a reversal of local economic prac- tices, expert engineering, extensive funding, and especially state willingness to interfere with landlord river rights. Neither businessmen nor kings accomplished these tasks before the Glorious Revolution. Early Stuart proclamations gave Commissioners of Sewers paper-power to compel parishes to clear rivers when they became impassable, but these Commissioners rarely ordered landowners to raze mills or weirs.39 For the most part, landlords sat as sewer commissioners for their own parishes and resisted, or ignored, orders that interfered with their river prerogatives. If, on occasion, a James or Charles I aligned himself with river clearance projects, he did so more to raise revenue than to improve transport: Stuart Kings routinely sold letters patent for river clearing projects to monopolists when they were short of funds. These patentees faced daunting compli- cations that only began with landowner negotiation for the remov- al of weirs and mills. If they did persuade landlords to sell their river titles, projectors went on to the difficult tasks of raising money, destroying dams, and opening waterways for commer- cial traffic. These capitalist adventurers hoped to recoup their costs and to profit by taxing local areas or by charging tolls along the improved rivers.40 No seventeenth-century patentee rehabilitated many rivers before 1689. The principal drama of river improvement history thus re- volved around a battle between two ways of extracting profit from waterways.41 Rural landlords and capitalists, who benefited from traditional ways of doing business, defended their dams and resisted their more urban and imperialist counterparts who wished to see a radical transformation in England's river transport systems. Slowly, however, the growth of Parliamentary power, and the state's decision to support opportunities for England's more outward looking manufacturers, produced victories for those wishing to open England's rivers to world trade. Parliament and River Legislation from 1660-1722: Studies in Intraclass struggle The spread of commodity production, the rise of surpluses, and the need for fresh markets during the Interregnum unleashed a new breed of ambitious landlords and capitalists in the 1650s. Lured by fresh opportunities for profit they, and their post- Restoration counterparts, continued to seek letters patent to clear English rivers for long distance trading. Meanwhile, Parliament, which had passed only two river improvement statutes before 1660, spurred on this new movement by approving seven and debating three others bills between 1660 and 1665.42 Converts among sewer commissioners, landlords, manufacturers, and mer- chants supported these river clearance projects and statutes because they wished to make transporting such materials as "iron ordnance, balls, timber, and other materials" faster.43 Even more remarkable than the increased support for river reforms by a growing number and variety of business men in the 1660s was Parliament's interest in river improvement schemes that went beyond merely restoring or clearing already navigable riv- ers. Statutes to make previously unnavigable rivers seaworthy appeared for the first time in the 1660s. Many Members now dreamt of the "possibility of making a navigation where none had existed before," and of finding "benefits and advantages that would greatly increase the wealth of" inland cities that would be served by new rivers.44 Promising as they seemed on paper, these post-Restoration river statutes made little progress in practice against entrenched interests before 1689. They permitted under- takers to negotiate with local corporations and landlords, but they did not force landlords to tear down dams and weirs. The anti-river navigation opposition remained powerful into the 1670s, and few of the new river statutes accomplished their objectives. Undertakers, who had expected to profit from patents or river improvement statutes, left many projects under-funded or unfinished until after the Glorious Revolution.45 The emergence of Parliament as the location of England's sovereign power after 1689 acted as a catalyst for river promoter schemes. Parliament enacted 43 such statutes from 1662 to 1721, and 31 of these were passed after 1689.46 The war with France initially absorbed Parliamentary attention, but legislators returned regularly to write river improvement acts after 1696, and the number of navigable river miles grew from 685 in 1660 to 1160 in 1722.47 Ideas for river navigation improvement usually originated in petitions made to Parliament by potential investors who argued that their unnavigable rivers hindered the growth of their city or county's economy. As the inhabitants of Leominster explained, their commerce suffered "by reason of several Mills and Weirs upon the" Rivers Wye and Lugg. The petitioners stated that the county of Hereford had an abundance of "useful Commodi- ties, which might be communicated to other Parts of this Kingdom" if Parliament permitted these rivers to be made navigable. They complained, however, that now "Land-carriage is so excessive dear, . . . that their Commodities are scarcely worth propagat- ing."48 Similar concerns about the expense of river trade were expressed by the "Mayor, Aldermen, and Burgesses, of the Borough of Doncaster" in alliance with gentlemen, freeholders, and others who reported that the corn trade along the river Don was consid- erable in 1704. However, "rocks, shallows, and Banks of Sand and Gravel" made the passage of grains "uncertain and hazardous." They claimed that the Don was "capable of being made more naviga- ble, which will very much preserve the Highways, and promote [the corn] Trade in these parts."49 They promised cheaper food prices and to prove their point they lobbied London's corn merchants to petition for them. London's dealers were willing, and they too swore that River Don corn, grain, and "particularly Wheat," would be less expensive once the act passed.50 No river improvement statute passed Parliament after 1689 without a political skirmish. Parliamentary papers bristle with evidence of legislative battles between the supporters and foes of river navigation projects. The petitioners for navigation improvements campaigned harder after 1689 than ever before, but their enemies responded in kind: anti-river reform coalitions filed almost as many petitions as did the pro-river clearance confederations during these years. The two groups faced-off against one another yearly over the future of the Don, the Cam, the Kennet, and the Douglas. Their debates, and the legislation that followed, reveals the contrasting economic concerns that divided parliament during this post-Revolutionary stage of capi- talist development. Depending on their local concerns, landlords and capitalists stood on either side of the issue. The Don land owning undertakers, for example, needed London support because counter-petitioners financed a lively anti-Don improvement cam- paign. Ship captains, owners "of the Ships and Keels, Ropemak- ers, Sail-makers, Mariners, and other Inhabitants" from East and West Stockwith, Misserton, Kennall Ferry, and Butterwick de- nounced the project. They declared that making the Don navigable would only increase competition and ruin the malt and mill stone businesses for those who used the competing River Trent as their highway. What was good for Yorkshire businessmen, they claimed, would destroy Derbyshire farmers.51 The anti-Don improvement petitioners answered by underlining local landlord and manufac- turer fears that wider market competition would ruin their estab- lished businesses. Surpluses, they declared, already limited markets for their corn, and they protested against the additional commercial rivalry that an improved Don would create.52 A 1695 petition against clearing the Avon revealed what most frightened farmer's if river improvements increased competition in their bailiwick. It argued that if the Avon statute passed the counties of Wiltshire, Somerset, and Gloucester would supply English markets with corn, butter, cheese, and other commodities that presently came from the "more remote Parts" peopled by the petitioners. If that happened, prices "of the like Commodities, brought to such Markets by the Petitioners will be much lessened." That would lead to discouragement of "Husbandry and Tillage." Next, they predicted, "The Rents of Land must fall." When river traffic replaced land transport "many Carriers, Inn- keepers, and others," along the highways would lose incomes. This would affect "the Breeding of Horses." Finally, passage of this Act would increase lawbreaking: The "Servants employed in Husbandry, the Carriers, and Innkeepers, who now comfortably subsist in their several Employments, will be utterly ruined, and inclinable to take ill Courses."53 For these farmers, a navigable Avon meant vacant farms, unemployment, and crime. Navigation projects pitted farmers in distant as well as adjacent areas against one another. The clothiers and inhabi- tants of Bradford, for example, claimed that making the Aire and Calder navigable would benefit nearby Leeds, Wakefield, and all northern cloth producing towns by cheapening transport costs. However, Francis Nevill, a Yorkshire mill owner, saw it differ- ently, and he swore that the cleared Aire and Calder would de- stroy his enterprises. He was the "Proprietor of several Corn, Fulling, and Rape, Mills, and Dams, upon River Calder, [and] the same will not only be weakened by the immense Weight of Water thereon; but, by Back-waters, his Mills will be inevitably stopped from going at all, to his great Prejudice."54 Nevill, like so many other petitioners, predicted that river improvement schemes would reduce land values, cause unemployment, and in- crease parish poor rates for all in the neighborhood. New river or harbor improvement plans often arose from competitive struggles among businessmen in the same industry. Newcastle coal merchants on the River Tyne often battled Sunder- land dealers over a River Wear project and, in 1705, Sir John Lowther clashed with Cumberland's coal producers over competing harbor facilities on England's West Coast. The Lowther contest began in the late seventeenth century when smaller Cumberland coal producers proposed to escape Lowther's monopoly control of Whitehaven harbor by opening a rival port at nearby Parton.55 Lowther negotiated with some of the opposition coal mine produc- ers, but, in 1705, Thomas Fletcher, William Ferryes, Rowland Jackson, Robert Blachlock, Clement Nicholson, and Thomas Ludwidge petitioned Parliament to approve a new harbor at Parton.56 Lowther denounced his competitors, and he insisted that there was not enough trade for two competing harbors in the area. He also counter-petitioned Parliament on behalf of himself and the "Inhabitants of Whitehaven" declaring that the Parton statute was unjust to himself, his family, and to Whitehaven, because his ancestors had "at their sole Charges, made a considerable Har- bour, which already is better, than Parton can be made."57 He asked instead that Parliament pass a statute to improve Whiteha- ven's harbor rather than permit a new one at Parton. Indeed, he offered to "assist in the most effectual Manner" if Members passed a Whitehaven renewal act.58 Despite Lowther family objec- tions, the twenty-nine Parton undertakers got their statute. The Act said that they could enlarge Parton Harbor with funds raised by mortgaging anticipated coal duties. The competition between Whitehaven and Parton intensified after Parliament passed the Parton Harbor act that listed among its promoters all John Lowther's rivals.59 In 1706, these mine owning Parton Harbor improvers cut loading prices and tried to ship more coal from their harbor than their Lowther opponent did from Whitehaven. The Lowthers responded by repairing and improv- ing Whitehaven harbor service, and they also gathered signatures for a Parliamentary petition to "make several new Works, for securing the [Whitehaven] Harbour, and making it more commo- dious."60 In 1708, Parliament passed a Whitehaven Act that stipu- lated that James Lowther, his father Sir John had died in 1706, and eleven trustees, could collect duties for harbor improve- ments.61 Competition, however, had made strange bed fellows: included within the new group of trustees were former Parton supporters, William Ferryes, Clement Nicholson, Thomas Ludwidge, and Robert Blachlock.62 Overproduction, falling prices, and cutthroat competition led the two factions to compromise. By the late 1720s, the Lowther family and its Parton rivals found that combination was more profitable than competition.63 However, such consolidations were not always possible and many waterway bills destroyed the prosperity of one group of capitalists so that another might thrive. This was particularly true when river navigation projects set an outward looking eco- nomic sector against a more inward looking one.64 In most cases, this meant that newly developing rural or urban manufacturers opposed landlords with riparian rights or consumers living at a distance from rivers. The struggle between Tone manufacturers and hinterland farmers illustrates this type of battle. The story began in 1698 when River Tone projectors won an almost uncontested suit for a Parliamentary statute making the Somerset river navigable from Bridgewater to Taunton.65 The act's pream- ble promised that clearing the river for "Barges, Boats and other Vessells" would increase trade and provide work for the poor. It would bring coal and other heavy goods to markets without their carriages, carts, wagons, and wains ruining the highways.66 The Tone undertakers were, as usual, named in the bill but, less typically, the act identified some of their trades. Besides gentlemen, there were seven clothiers, five merchants, and sever- al vintners, grocers, and fullers. The list also included one ironmonger, dyer, mercer, malster, and "Doctor of Physick."67 All were inhabitants of Somerset. The statute permitted Tone improvers to buy a Charles II patent for making the river navigable from Bridgwater to Taunton.68 John Mallet had originally bought the patent from Charles II, and he had negotiated terms with local landlords to clean the river, dig the banks, cut away trees, build bridges, and erect locks. The projectors bought these rights, and their new statute permitted them to negotiate with area owners who had not yet compounded. Once they brought all landlords into line with their project, the statute permitted them to collect speci- fied tolls until the enterprise returned all costs plus six percent profit on their investment. The undertakers thus became project directors, direct-interest taking municipal bond holders, and the principal manufacturers and merchants who expected to benefit most from a cleared river Tone.69 The work began in 1698, but excessive costs and delays pro- duced mounting fiscal problems by 1706. Needing statutory per- mission to raise additional funds, the projectors appealed to Parliament for an explanatory bill. They announced that they had spent L3,800 on the project, and they claimed that, unless "some further considerable Sum be expended, in building a half Lock below Knap bridge, and doing other necessary Works in cleansing a great Shaol, called Broad Shaol, the said river will never be completely navigable from Bridgwater to Taunton."70 The inves- tors wanted permission to increase the tolls they could charge for use of the river.71 The mayor, aldermen, and common council of Bridgwater supported their petitions and said that completion of the project would make "the Carriage of Coals, and other heavy Goods, much cheaper, and be a Means to preserve their Highways, and much promote their Western Trade."72 The merchants, grocers, dyers, and other traders in "Tonnage Goods in the town of Taun- ton," claimed that the improvements already accomplished had reduced their costs of carriage by half. If Parliament passed a new bill, they promised even greater savings from a completed project.73 Tone river improvers lost their bid to raise more revenue. The anti-Tone, anti-undertakers, and anti-toll petitioners over- whelmed Parliament with counter-petitions from landlords, consum- ers, farmers, and other members of Somerset's agricultural commu- nities. They claimed that the tolls were already too high and that new costs would "ruin the Traders at Coal Harbour and Ham Mills."74 The gentlemen, freeholders, and "other capital inhabi- tants" of Sandford, Morchard-Bishop, and Crews-morchard predicted that the extra tolls would destroy the lime trade.75 The "Gen- tlemen, Lime-burners, Farmers, and Workers in the Lime-Trade, within the Parishes of Holcome Regis and Burliscombe" agreed.76 They claimed that the new duties would increase the cost of all agricultural enterprises and raise prices for their commodities. If Parliament granted these additional tolls, they said that it would "be very prejudicial to their Tillage, [and lead to] a great Fall" in estate profits and rents. They predicted that it would destroy pastures, end horse rearing, and raise unemployment amongst lime laborers.77 The minister, churchwardens, and over- seers of the poor from the parishes of "Thurlbeare and St. Mary Stoke" joined the lime industrialists' protest. They insisted that additional tolls would burden salt, coal, and lime consumers with higher prices.78 Parliament refused the second River Tone petitioners' re- quest for a new statute, and the projectors had to look elsewhere for funds. Here, the more provincial forces triumphed, but this was not generally true for the period after 1689. Although Parliament did not pass all river improvement acts from 1696 to 1722, manufacturers, merchants, and urban developers won more times than did their opponents. The logic of English commodity making and selling gradually convinced Parliament and rate payers that the "poorer Sort of People" would find more employment if rivers such as the Trent became navigable.79 As time went by, landlords and manufacturers supported navigation acts for Rivers such as the Kennett because river improvement promised to promote trade, to increase the numbers of ships, and to supply "the Country with Coals, and other Commodities" at cheaper rates than ever before.80 By 1722, more and more Members of Parliament voted for bills that improved other rivers because they saw them as the means to advance manufacturing, to increase trade, and to open wide England's river roads to new customers. Sir Paul Foley, Speaker of the House of Commons, for example, owned iron forges and furnaces on the river Wye and his name appears second on the list of undertakers for making the Rivers Wye and Lugg navigable.81 That project included Edward Harley, father of a future prime minister and Member of Parliament for Leominster, and John Dutton Colt, "The Mayor of the Citty of Hereford."82 In another statute, Parliament authorized the gentlemen and aldermen of the Corporation of Leeds to "make and keep" the Rivers Aire and Calder navigable for "a publick good by advanceing the Trade and Commerce" of Yorkshire.83 On yet another occasion, Parlia- ment asked William, Lord Paget, to raise money for making the River Trent navigable and to "compound and agree with Owner or Owners" of dams and weirs for their removal.84 Still another statute charged the Mayor and Aldermen of Sudbury to make the River Stower navigable and to negotiate compensation for those damaged by such improvements.85 The statutes on river navigation and harbor improvements provide a wide range of information: names of affluent undertak- ers, lists of commodities that English industries produced and carried up and down rivers and into coastal cities, and data on the vast geographical trading areas reached by English manufac- turers and merchants. Even more interesting is the way in which these statutes integrated interest-taking capitalists who were also landlords in community projects. The project for repairing the harbor and key of Watchett in 1707 illustrates all these points. Parliament chose Sir William Wyndham, Sir Thomas Wroth, and Sir John Travellyan, and ten others as trustees to collect duties to repair the harbor and key of Watchett in 1707.86 The act permitted the collection of tolls on the following commodi- ties: coal, oil, salt, iron, lead, mather, alum, fish, mill- stones, grinding stones, groceries, corn, grain, sheep, lambs, hogs, bottles, horses, mares, bullocks, calf skins, and butter. The statute called for special taxes on ships trading to Asia, Africa, America, Ireland, France, Spain, and the plantations. Finally, the bill granted trustees the right to offer as yet unspecified interest-bearing bonds to themselves and other lend- ers who invested funds to clear the harbor. The new duties would, of course, serve as loan collateral to pay for the project. In this act, as in so many others written during this period, Parliament united the collective interests of landlords, merchants, industrialists, and financiers. Conclusions Armed with administrative knowledge, previous legislative experience, and a strong sense of self-interest, Parliaments composed of landlords and capitalists wrote fresh legislation after 1689 to reduce the transportation costs of trade, and to open new markets. None of it was revolutionary or rushed: Eng- lish roads and rivers already served the needs of a capitalist commodity producing state. Nevertheless, Parliament played both a more directing and supportive role in the field of infrastruc- ture improvement and expansion after the Glorious Revolution than ever before in English history. It did so because its elites requested state help to sustain what they considered reasonable profits from their investments. Legislators received petitions from the local citizens most affected by either rising costs of road repair or the need for well maintained highways. Debates followed, more petitioners arrived, and committees studied the implications of transformed roads and rivers before Parliament wrote fresh statutes. At this primitive stage in English capitalist history, the state still lacked the leadership or wherewithal to build new roads or clear rivers on its own. Legislators, nevertheless, intended to follow a course of action that improved England's infrastructure for the benefit of those it represented. Their statutes reflected a contemporary belief that local elites familiar with the needs of developing farming and manufacturing communities should adminis- ter and finance road and river projects. These enterprises began only after local landlords and industrialists debated the wisdom of each venture. If local leaders decided to go forward, they chose individuals from their own class to oversee the creation of these thoroughfares in the countryside, on the rivers, and within the coastal cities. However, it was Parliament that ultimately mandated their privilege to transform roads and rivers, and its statutes rewarded interest-takers for investing in these munici- pal projects. Legislators also commanded road and river consum- ers to shoulder the costs of these transportation improvements. Parliamentary acts enhanced England's infrastructure after 1689, but this legislation did not cure the crisis of satiated markets. The new roads bills cheapened some transportation costs, and they gave direct interest-taking capitalists a chance to profit from an equivalent of today's municipal bonds. Howev- er, even if statutes left England's modern economic dilemma of glutted markets unsolved, these acts--written by Foleys, Harleys, Walpoles, Pagets, Wyndhams--spoke loudly of legislator concern that England should discover fresh markets for its farm goods, minerals, and textiles. They also always expressed their anxie- ties over declining rents and diminished profits. Chapter Four: Endnotes (1) This chapter is based on the following secondary works: William Albert, The Turnpike Road System in England, 1663-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); J. A. Chartres, "Road Carrying in England in the Seventeenth Century: Myth and Reality," Economic Historical Review 30 (1977); Internal Trade in England, 1500-1700 (London: Macmillan, 1977); "The Marketing of Agricultural Produce," in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5, 1640-1750, 2, Agrarian Change, Joan Thirsk, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 406-503; W. T. Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England (1916: re- printed, with a new introduction by W. H. Chaloner, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970); Eric Pawson, Transport and Economy: The Turnpike Roads of Eighteenth Century Britain (London: Academ- ic Press, 1977); Thomas Stuart Willan, River Navigation in Eng- land (1936; reprinted, London: Frank Cass and Company, 1964); The English Coasting Trade, 1600-1750 (1938; reprinted, New York: Augustus Kelley, 1967); The Early History of the Don Navigation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965); and, The Inland Trade: Studies in English Internal Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976). (2) Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Pro- duction, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, 3 vols. (1887; reprinted, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985), 3:331. (3) It may be well to remind readers of some citation from Chapter Two that emphasized glutted and stagnant markets as central concerns of English farmers, mine owners, manufacturers, and merchants during this era. See, Donald Grove Barnes, A History of the Corn Laws from 1660-1846 (1930; reprinted, New York: August M. Kelley, 1956), 15, Joyce M. Ellis, A Study of the Business Fortunes of William Cotesworth, c1668-1726 (New York: Arno Press, 1981), 86-87, Russell R. Menard, "The Tobacco Indus- try in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617-1730: An Interpretation," in Paul Uselding, ed., Research in Economic History: A Research Annual, 5: 109-177 (Greenwich, Connecticut: Jai Press, 1980), 140-143, Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) 390-411, Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962), 22-23, and Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1962), 214-215. (4) Menard, "The Tobacco Industry," 148, and David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9. (5) C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, 3 vols. (1911; reprinted, Holmes Beach, Florida: William W. Gaunt and Sons, 1972), 2:861. (6) Albert, Turnpike Road, 16. (7) 3 W. & M., c. 12. (8) Ibid., section 2. (9) Ibid., section 7. (10) Parliament passed the first statute requiring parishes to repair their roads in 1555: 2 & 3 Phil. & M., c. 8. For a sum- mary of the early statutes and Privy Council orders on maintain- ing inland roads in good repair see, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government: The Story of the King's Highway (Lon- don: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1913), 14-18, and Albert, Turnpike Road, 18-19. (11) 3 W. & M., c. 3, section 1. (12) 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 9. (13) Ibid. (14) Pawson, Transport and Economy, 69. (15) 15. Car. II, c. 1. For the story of this act, see Albert, Turnpike Road, 17-20. (16) Albert, Turnpike Road, 20. (17) For a survey of statutes passed before and after 1691 see Albert, Turnpike Road, 14-16 and 21-23. For complete lists of statutes passed from 1663-1722 see Albert, above, appendix B, 202-203 and Pawson, Transport and Economy, appendix 1, 341-342. (18) 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 9. (19) Ibid, section 4. (20) 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 9, section 4. (21) Ibid., section 5. (22) Ibid., section 4. (23) 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 9, section 6. (24) Pawson, Transport and Economy, 78. For an analysis of the "Turnpike Petitions," during this era, see 79-85, 117-122. (25) Pawson, Transport and Economy, 92-94. (26) 6 Anne, c. 4. (27) for Sir Richard Temple, see Sir Egerton Brydges, Collins's Peerage of England: Genealogical, Biographical, and Historical, Greatly Augmented and Continued to the Present Time, 6 vols. (1812; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1970), 2:414. For Richard Hampden, see Romney Sedgwick, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715-1754, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2:104-105. (28) Sedgwick, House of Commons, 1:610-11. (29) For Duncombe, see Gary Stuart De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 160-161, and D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 330. (30) Journals of the House of Commons, 19:447; Sedgwick, House of Commons, 2:209; East India ledgers A-Z:423, 1715-19. (31) Albert, Turnpike Road, 98. (32) 8 Anne, c. 20, "An Act for repairing and amending the High- ways leading from Seven Oaks to Woodsgate and Tunbridge Wells in the County of Kent." (33) Ibid. (34) Brian Short, "The South-East: Kent, Surrey, and Sussex," in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5, 1640-1750, 1, Regional Farming Systems, Joan Thirsk, ed. (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1984), 272). For the Ashburnham family holdings see G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the Eight- eenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 41, 61- 66. For Henry Pelham holdings in stock, see Bank ledgers I- Z:4900, 1711-1720; and, East India ledgers A-Z:539, 1719-23. For more on the Pelham family holdings, see Ray A. Kelch, Newcastle, A Duke without Money: Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1693-1768 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 28-65. (35) Albert, Turnpike Roads, 203. (36) Alan Everitt, "The Marketing of Agricultural Produce," in The Agrarian History of England Wales, 1500-1640, vol. 4, Joan Thirsk, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 495. (37) Willan, River Navigation, 20-21. (38) Jackman, Transportation in Modern England, 170. (39) Willan, River Navigation, 21. (40) Arnold Spencer, for example paid five pounds into the ex- chequer for each river that he hoped to make navigable, and, in exchange, the crown permitted him to collect toll charges for 80 years (Willan, River Navigation, 25-26). In 1634, Thomas Skip- with received a similar patent to clear the river Soar. He agreed to pay Charles I ten percent of his profits, and Charles allowed him to charge tolls for the years of his patent (Jackman, Trans- portation in Modern England, 181). (41) H. J. Habakkuk, "Economic Functions of English Landowners in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in, W. E. Minchin- ton, ed. Essays in Agrarian History: Reprints Edited for The British Agricultural History Society, 2 vols. [New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968], 1:195. (42) Willan, River Navigation, 28-29. See Private Acts 14 Car. II, c. 14 and 15, and 16 & 17 Car. II, c. 6, 11, 12, 13. (43) Jackman, Transportation In Modern England, 171 fn. (44) Ibid., 183. (45) Jackman cites the case of the Medway, for example, for which Parliament passed an improvement act in 1665. It would take seven decades and another act (1739) before engineers made the river navigable. See Jackman, Transportation in Modern England, 171, and Private Act Number 12, 16 & 17 Car. II, and 13 Geo. II, c. 26. (46) Willan, River Navigation, 133. (47) Ibid. (48) Journals of the House of Commons, 11:390. (49) Ibid., 12:437. (50) Ibid., 12:467. (51) Ibid., 12:462. (52) Ibid. (53) Ibid., 11:495. (54) Ibid., 12:486. (55) J. V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 159-161. (56) Journals of the House of Commons, 15:71. (57) Ibid., 79. (58) Journals of the House of Commons, 15:79. (59) 4 & 5 Anne, c. 5. (60) Journals of the House of Commons, 16:28. (61) 7 Anne, c. 9. (62) 7 Anne, c. 9, section 10. (63) Beckett, Coal and Tobacco, 164-167. (64) "The consumer and merchant might favour improved river navigation, but the farmer seems rarely to have supported it" (Willan, River Navigation, 137). (65) I have found few early anti-Tone petitions in the Journals of the House of Commons: for supporting petitions, see 12:423, 441. (66) 10 Will. III, c. 8. (67) Ibid. (68) Ibid. (69) Ibid., sections 3-4. (70) Journals of the House of Commons, 17:461-462. (71) Ibid., 17:462. (72) Ibid., 17:461-462. (73) Ibid., 17:509. (74) Ibid., 17:462. (75) Ibid., 17:486. (76) Ibid. (77) Ibid. (78) Ibid., 17:494. (79) Ibid., 14:71 (80) Ibid., 16:75. (81) 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 14. Marie B. Rowlands, Masters and Men in the West Midland Metalware Trade before the Industrial Revolu- tion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 56. (82) 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 14. For more on the Foleys, the Har- leys, and Colt family interest in this project, see Willan, River Navigation, 55. (83) 10 Will. III, c. 25. (84) 10 Will. III, c. 26. (85) 4 & 5 Anne, c. 2, sections 1-3. (86) 6 Anne, c. 69.