The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [87]
The profitable exchange of African slaves for Caribbean sugar and American tobacco founded many of Britain’s great families. Even the apostle of liberty, John Locke, approved of slavery.
A ‘well-designed’ slave ship could carry as many as six hundred bodies, packed in the hold much as any other commodity would be. It is small wonder so many did not survive the journey.
The British had massive investments in the slave business. They even contracted to supply slaves for the entire Spanish South American empire. In 1730 Parliament voted £10,000 to build forts on the Gold Coast to protect the slavers in Africa. Fortunes were made out of slavery: Liverpool and Bristol became major cities because of it. Much of the stimulus to the future growth of industry in Lancashire was due to its proximity to the port of Liverpool, with its ships ready to sail to Africa with all the textiles they could load.
The riches of India were almost as rewarding as slavery. The East India Company regularly made up to £400,000 profit a year, and in one decade, between 1757 and 1766, it was rumoured that the company and its employees amassed no less than £6,000,000 in ‘gifts’ from India. Tea imports soared, causing the price to fall to within the reach of most of the population of England and giving the country its characteristic taste for the beverage. Imports during the eighteenth century rose to over £4,000,000 a year.
The stimulus to manufacturers by this growth of the domestic market was tremendous. Moreover, at the beginning of the century a way had been found to produce iron without having to rely on the dwindling supply of wood. A Quaker called Abraham Darby, looking for opportunities in the household utensils market, started to use coke as a fuel in his copper and brass works in a village in Shropshire, on the river Severn. There the local coal was soft and relatively free from impurities, and the coke Darby used in his new furnaces produced clean, high-quality metal.
Darby soon switched to producing iron because it was cheaper. In 1707 one of his workers, a certain John Thomas, passed over the secret of making iron cheaper still and better by using coke from which most of the impurities had been burned. This meant that even coal high -in impurities could be used.
In 1712 the first of Darby’s iron was cast into a cylinder to power the new pumping engine designed by an ironmonger from Devon called Thomas Newcomen. The pump was needed in the mines which were increasingly being flooded as miners went deeper to find more metal in order to satisfy the rise in demand. Darby’s technique solved one of the major problems that had been facing industry. Fuel became available in abundance because England was an island of coal. There was an equally large problem to be faced, however, and that was how to transport the coal from the coalfields which, almost without exception, were a long way from the ports. Transporting heavy loads of coal along the roads was slow and ruinously expensive.
The situation was exacerbated still further by the movement of the workforce. Many people, mainly young single men, were leaving their villages and flocking to the towns in search of work offered by small manufacturers and the public services. The town of Manchester grew from 9000 at the beginning of the century to 70,000 in the second half; Glasgow went from 12,000 to 84,000; Liverpool from 5000 to 30,000; Bristol from 45,000 to 90,000. The new towns needed sewerage, lighting, paving and policing. Above all, their industries and their houses needed fuel, and in the absence of wood the only alternative was coal.
In mid-century the transportation problem was solved by canals. These were financed by surplus money from trading profits and from agricultural improvements, and by landowners with mineral deposits on their estates. In 1757 the first major canal was built, between the Mersey and St Helen’s in Lancashire, to transport Cheshire salt and Lancashire