The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [89]
A Quaker meeting. The Friends formed a tightly knit community stretching from Birmingham in England to Pennsylvania. They were also the best clock- and instrument-makers in Britain.
The first of these provincial banks was in Bristol, the country’s second largest commercial centre. By 1750 there were ten such banks in the provinces; at the end of the century there were 370. By 1810 the number had risen to 700. It was no coincidence that Barclays, one of the major British banks to begin its life in the provinces, was a Quaker foundation. Indeed, as will be seen, the extraordinary change which was about to overtake England and eventually the entire Western world was due very largely to the position in which the Nonconformists found themselves.
After Cromwell, the Clarendon Codes had forbidden any member of a non-Anglican religion to hold a position in local government, the civil service or the universities. Nonconformists were however permitted to engage in trade, where they rapidly prospered. Once the Presbyterians had been supplanted by the Unitarians at the end of the seventeenth century, the more violent of the religious reformers disappeared. Hellfire was no longer preached. Believers could work to make their lives more comfortable without a sense of guilt.
The Anglican Church, meanwhile, was increasingly identified with the country gentry, and under their influence slowly sank into bucolic torpor. Toleration spread as the monarchy became less absolute. When the Hanoverian George I came to the throne in 1714, there were fifty-seven people with a more direct claim to the crown. The dissenting Nonconformists thrived in the world of finance and industry. They formed a close-knit, effective network of coreligionists all over the country. The Quaker Barclays, for instance, had ‘friendly’ connections in London, Norwich, the Midlands and Philadelphia.
The Dissenters, and in particular the Quakers and Unitarians, advocated systems of education with a strong motivation towards excellence and success. At the Dissenting Academies, where Nonconformists were permitted to teach, the curriculum was modern, aimed at providing the best preparation for industry. It was in these academies that the first truly scientific education was taught. According to a random survey of successful entrepreneurs taken at the end of the eighteenth century, 49 per cent were Dissenters.
The safest city for Dissenters to live was Birmingham, which had grown to urban size only after the Clarendon Codes had forbidden Nonconformist preaching within five miles of the centre of any town. Birmingham was a Dissenter city, with the highest population of Nonconformists in the country.
By 1770, with surplus finance, new fuel sources, expanding credit systems and a highly motivated business class, Britain was poised for the great leap. The final spur came from India. The increasing amount of cotton imports from that country were beginning to worry the English textile manufacturers. In mid-century fighting broke out on the sub-continent and the buyers switched to the Caribbean and the southern colonies of America. The raw cotton came in through Liverpool and went to the hills of Lancashire to be spun in the cottages beside the sheepfolds.
The textile workers did not remain in the hills for long. By the 1760s a new weaving technique had been developed by a Lancashire clock-maker called John Kay, who put the loom shuttle on wheels and used a hammer to strike it through the warp threads. The device made it possible for one man to produce a double-width weave. Seven years later another invention appeared which permitted the yarn-spinners to keep up with the new loom. Invented by James Hargreaves, it was called a spinning jenny, and was driven by hand to produce multiple yarns. By 1788 there would be twenty thousand in use. The jenny made only the soft yarn for the weft, or crossing threads. The warp, coarser and stronger, was still produced by hand on spinning wheels.
Hargreaves’ spinning jenny,