I MPLEMENTACIÓN DEL M ÓDULO DE T RANSFORMADORES DE DISTRIBUCIÓN

This section looks at the London economy in order to think about how we might begin using calculative agency to probe claims about the coincidence of economic practices and ideas concerning the market. In particular, it draws attention to a phenomenon known as ‘clustering’, prevalent in the literature on industrialisation, the work of Alfred Marshall and historically minded economic network theorists like

158 _{See also my discussions of the West India Dock Compensation scheme in Chapter 3 and}

Mark Casson. Clusters form a platform to interpret data harvested from insurance records, which are seen as markers of growing economy agency and as spatially bounded. Even within London, regional specialisation did create benefits for

manufacturers and retailers. However, it is argued that certain firms were often fairly limited in their business outlook, albeit for different reasons. While this left City merchants to play an intermediary role between regions, it also created pockets of radically different calculating agencies, which can be crudely compared using the insurance policies. As we will see, economic growth was not necessarily matched by a decline in parochialism because economic calculations had more or less fixed material constituents.

! Leonard Schwarz’s analysis of the capital during the period of

industrialisation provides an excellent description of London’s economic structures. London’s two ‘heroic’ periods of demographic expansion occurred in the centuries before 1660 and after 1850.159 _{The thrusting dynamism of the provinces evoked by} Berg is rather lacking and the picture is murkier: ‘Under the apparently stable surface, however, change was constant.’160 _{Trade, trafficking, finance and legal and} government services made London distinctive and were highly lucrative.161

However, as Schwartz stresses, London also remained the biggest manufacturing centre in Britain, its strength lying in extensively integrating traditional workshop manufacture. Industries requiring larger plant simply found London too expensive to undergo expansions in scale, except on the peripheries. Instead, London comprised sets of interlocking businesses, where production, finishing and marketing were undertaken by a series of sub-contractors, as in Clerkenwell watchmaking or Fleet Street engraving, publishing and printing.162 _{The standing and wealth of retailers} and wholesalers grew into to ‘a shopocracy’ as a result of the productive gains caused by linking highly specialised craft processes with the ‘Court’ in the West End taking finer goods and the port in the City servicing the export trade.163

! David Barnett has re-iterated this analysis in his exhaustive study of London’s economy using insurance records from between 1770 and 1825. In his view, London supported an extraordinary and increasing variety of businesses, with

159 _{Schwarz, London, pp. 2-3.} 160 _{Schwarz, London, p. 4.}

161 _{Schwarz, London, pp. 11-14; Ball and Davidson, London, 1800-1914, pp. 74-5.}

162 _{See Schwarz, London, pp. 32-3; Ball and Sunderland, London, 1800-1914, pp. 166, 179.} 163 _{Schwarz, London, pp. 29-30, 60-73.}

the capital’s strength founded on diversity and finishing trades but not necessarily on large-scale works. He, too, points towards the retailers and wholesalers who made up a culturally significant and wealthy portion of his sample.164 _{Again, this} proliferation in the diversity and size of firms was based on existing structures rather than the creation of an ostensibly new one built on extensive coal-powered

machinery. Even by the seventeenth century, London dwarfed provincial towns, but it was not ‘homogenous’, consisting of ‘distinct but interdependent economic districts’.165

! The emphasis on specialisation evident in all the secondary literature concerned with industrialisation can be clarified by reference to Alfred Marshall’s concept of industrial ‘clusters’. His Industry and Trade suggested that while heavy industries need to be located near sources of power and material, and whereas plant cannot be economically accommodated in towns, smaller workshop-style production could still flourish. ‘An industry which does not use massive material, and needs skill that cannot be quickly acquired remains as of yore loth to quit a good market for its labour.’166 _{Drawing an example from cutlery, precisely the consumer} durables Berg sees as constitutive of enlightened production, Marshall wrote: ‘Sheffield and Solingen have acquired industrial atmospheres of their own; which yield gratis to manufacturers great advantages, that are not easily to be had elsewhere: and an atmosphere cannot be moved.’ Clusters of firms need not be provincial towns per se, but simply bunched in areas that allowed them to exploit relative advantages they had over other neighbourhoods, regions or nations. Their capabilities are also well suited to flexible production, in that,

! their industrial specialities are mainly of two kinds. They do nearly the whole of the ! finest manual work, and especially the artistic element; while of course they use ! subtle mechanical appliances, where these are serviceable. They also make goods ! of all kinds, and especially clothes to the order of rich customers, that are conveyed ! to the producers through a special class of shopkeeper; who themselves do much of

164 _{David Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution. A Revisionary History,}

1775-1825 (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies,1998), Ch. 6, esp. pp. 131-9

165 _{Charles Harvey, Edmund Green and P.J. Corfield, ‘Continuity, Change, and}

Specialization Within Metropolitan London: The Economy of Westminster, 1750-1820’, Economic History Review, 52, 3, (1999), p. 490.

166 _{Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business}

Organsiation; and Their Influence on the Conditions and Various Classes and Nations (London: MacMillan & Co., 1919), pp. 284-5.

! the constructive work in designing; pay very highly for the work they put out; and at ! the same time make extraordinarily high profits and turnover.167

The emphasis on materiality underpinning craft skills prompts Marshall’s opinion that ‘a man can generally pass easily from one machine to another; but that the manual handling of a material often requires fine skill that is not easily acquired in middle-age: for that is the characteristic of an industrial atmosphere.’168 _Firms concentrating, thus, in a small area gain from more efficient marketing, competition between small firms, pooling of information and the relatively easy transmission of design practices.

! Clustering creates benefits for those close by, especially in marketing. Marketing is the type of information about goods available to consumers, and necessarily these forms have a spatial aspect. A sign or shop front requires people to walk past it; a newspaper advert is mobile but limited by the distribution network; lists of prices are adequate when contracts are relatively secure across distances. Physical or cultural distance are registered by the forms of information economic agents choose to pursue or generate and, as Mark Casson argues with Marshall in mind, the quality of this information implies access to specific networks.169 _The further up the supply chain one is, the greater the likely investment in impersonal marketing, like branding, in order to benefit from economies of scale, as opposed to cultivating trusted patrons or clients through direct contact.170

! How, then, might clusters in eighteenth-century London be mapped? First, one might look in trade directories like Kent’s, published throughout the century, which list the names of firms, the trades they pursued and their addresses in order to build up a picture of where different industries gathered. Second, one might examine insurance policies and follow roughly the same procedure. The Sun Policies, running continuously from 1710 onwards, provide an excellent resource. Typically fire insurance policies contained a date, the name and address of the

167 _{Marshall, Industry, p. 284.} 168 _{Marshal, Industry, p. 285-7.}

169 _{Marshall, Industry, pp. 7-13; M.C. Casson, ‘An Economic Approach to Regional Business}

Networks’, Wilson and Popp eds., Industrial Clusters, pp. 19-43; Walter W. Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr, ‘Networks and Economic Life’, Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg eds., Handbook of Economic Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 370. For a discussion of clustering from an ahistorical vantage see Michael E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (London & Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1990), pp. 131-175.

170 _{Mark Casson, Enterprise and Leadership (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000), ‘Marshall}

policyholder, their occupation and the sum covered. This last feature is of signal importance in that it gives a gauge of how much capital each business insured. Thus, richer clusters can be distinguished from poorer ones. Moreover, later policies even break down the capitals insured into the categories of real estate, household goods, stock and utensils, books, plate, apparel and china and glass, which gives unrivalled insights into the priorities of policyholders. Buildings or pieces of industrial equipment that were considered outlandish or rare like mills were also noted on the policies.171_!

! The policies permit an insight into the relative calculative agency of the policyholder. This is especially apparent in terms of retail and marketing. Whereas in productive sectors a large policy might signify a high investment in fixed plant, in sales-orientated sectors this implies consumers had a large choice of products and a wider knowledge of the market. It also suggests whether they were able to sell expensive goods in that district or not. Clearly overlaps existed between

wholesaling and retailing, and it is not suggested here that wholesalers strictly abstained from shopkeeping or vice versa.172 _{Nevertheless, given that stock in trade} represented 70-90% of the total capital insured by the firms studied here, focusing on shops gives us at least some measure of how “the market” was territorialised in different districts of London, in terms of the density of retail or wholesale outlets and the abundance of goods in them.

! Insurance policies are not without their problems as a source, as the detailed technical discussion in Appendix 1 shows. However, they do offer the opportunity to start thinking about the choices facing businesses and their customers in a manner different to those suggested by other kinds of business records, like account books or journals. Their combination of location with the sums covered highlights the existence of clusters in London and helps us to identify relatively affluent ones, thereby signalling areas with distinct cultures of production and consumption. In doing so, insurance records can be used to corroborate insights found in the extensive secondary literature on London trade, but also draw our attention to what made particular environments lucrative or not. This pushes further a preoccupation of this thesis, where close attention to insurance strategies over time, the use of

171 _{D.T. Jenkins, ‘The Practice of Insurance Against Fire, 1750-1840, and Historical}

Research’, Oliver M. Westall ed., The Historian and the Business of Insurance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 28-34.

172 _{Hoh Cheung Mui and Lorna Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England}

buildings and the information provided by sources including advertisements, criminal depositions and business records have been used to explore business models that are largely absent from existing secondary literatures, especially with reference to the wholesaling and distribution sectors. It is these patterns which made the Docks so highly contested.