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By Root 583 0

unusually free, compared with both European and Asian equivalents, to invest, invent, expand and reap the profits. His huge capital city was unusual in being dominated by merchants, not the government, and always had been. He also had a world market thanks to the British ships that were plying the tropics of the world. His rural hinterland was filled with people free to sell their labour to the highest bidder. Most of the continent was still dominated by change-resistant lords and serfs neither of whom had an incentive to be more productive. In much of central and eastern Europe, serfdom gained a new lease of life in the eighteenth century following the wars and famines of the 1600s. Peasants owed much of their labour or their produce to seigneurs (plus a tithe to the Church) and had little freedom to move, so they had little incentive to be more productive or commercial. Lords, meanwhile, fiercely resisted the attempts by reforming monarchs to free their vassals. ‘The landlord looks on the serf as a tool necessary to cultivate his lands,’ explained one Hungarian liberal, ‘and as a chattel which he inherited from his parents, or purchased, or acquired as a reward.’

Even where freedom to trade and prosper were obtained – around Toulouse, in Silesia, in Bohemia – enforcers of rules and extorters of bribes were legion, while frequent wars played havoc with commerce. Seventeen tolls were exacted in sixteen leagues in the Limousin valley. France, three times as populous as England, was ‘cut up by internal customs barriers into three major trade areas and by informal custom, obsolete tolls and charges, and above all poor communications into a mosaic of semi-autarkic cells’. Internal smuggling was rife. Spain was ‘an archipelago, islands of local production and consumption, isolated from each other by centuries of internal tariffs’. The Englishman, by contrast, did not have to answer to petty bureaucrats and pesky tax collectors to the same extent. For this he could partly thank the upheavals of the previous century, including a civil war and a ‘glorious revolution’ against James II’s arbitrary government. The latter event was more than a king-swap; it was in effect a semi-hostile management buy-in of the entire country by Dutch venture capitalists, which resulted in a rush of Dutch capital investment, a lurch towards foreign trade as the engine of state policy in emulation of Holland, and a constitutional shake-up that empowered a parliament of merchants. William III had to settle for respecting his people’s property rights if he was to keep the throne. Add in that Britain did not support a standing army, that a heavily indented coastline allowed seaborne trade to reach most parts of the country, and that the administrative capital of the country was also its commercial capital, and it becomes clear that this was not a bad place to start or expand a business in say 1700. ‘Nowhere else,’ says David Landes, ‘was the countryside so infused with manufacture; nowhere else, the pressures and incentives to change greater, the forces of tradition weaker.’

The small town of Birmingham, with no restrictive guilds and no civic charter, had begun to thrive as a centre of the metalworking trade in the early 1600s. By 1683 it had over 200 forges producing iron using coal. The heady combination of available skills and freedom of enterprise created a boom in an industry known as the ‘toy trade’, though the items made were mostly buckles, pins, nails, buttons and small utensils, rather than toys themselves. More patents were issued in Birmingham than in any other city than London in the eighteenth century, though few would count as major ‘inventions’: this was incremental exploration of the possibilities of iron, brass, tinplate and copper. The work was done in small workshops, with little new-fangled machinery, but it was split into skilled, specialised trades and organised along increasingly sophisticated lines. Manufacturers spun out of each other’s firms and started business on their own account, just as they would do around San Francisco