"The Weirdest of all Undertakings": The Land and the Early Industrial Revolution in Oldham, England

Matthew Osborn

IN MANY WAYS the history of humankind, of civilization, has been a history of distancing ourselves from the natural environment. Until relatively recently the most significant development in this process was the expansion of settled agrarian societies. This "Neolithic revolution," while making us less dependent upon nature's bounty, was still intimately connected to natural processes and had to work with and accommodate them. Soil fertility, rainfall, wind, insect invasions, flooding, and other natural factors made manifest the limits to expansion and humanity's dependence upon the natural world. However, the next major revolution in this process of distancing ourselves from our natural context was much less accommodating. This industrial revolution in production was based upon both the conquest of nature and the subordination of social concerns to economic concerns.

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Despite the obvious importance to environmental history of understanding the change from pre-industrial to industrial, environmental historians have written little about the subject. That is especially true for the first industrialized nation, Great Britain. Within social and economic history, however, some important work has been done on this topic. Well before the emergence of environmental history as a distinct sub-field, Karl Polanyi included the land in his analysis of industrialization, The Great Transformation (1944). He argued that at the heart of the multitude of changes associated with industrialization in Britain was the establishment of a market economy and the philosophy that landscapes and traditional societies should be subordinated to it.1 This classic work in political and economic history did not explore any one community in any detail, so it does not allow us to understand this process in specific environmental and social contexts. At this level, the best example to date is David Levine and Keith Wrightson's The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560–1765 (1991). The emphasis of Levine and Wrightson on the development of the earliest coal-based export economy (the oft-mentioned coals from Newcastle) allowed them to explore in detail the subordination of the land and society to the demands of a distant market. Initially the concerns of the more locally oriented agrarian economy dominated, and the terms of coal leases were restrictive and favored agriculture over mining. However, the growing London market for "sea-coal" and the "timber crisis" of the later sixteenth century led to an increased demand that tilted the terms in favor of the coalmasters. As the coalmasters gained more power over their leases, the terms of their leases were less prohibitive, and there was a fundamental alteration of the economy, society, and environment of Whickham. While it may be debated that the outcome in Whickham was an industrial society, it is clear that what resulted was based on capital investment and wage-labor, and the agrarian economy was thoroughly subordinated to the demands of the new system.2 This work addresses the strong need for case studies exploring this transformation, especially in the context of the enormous growth in productivity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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