Steve Caunce focuses a welcome critical gaze on my
study of north-west England in the years leading up to the classic
period of industrial revolution. In reading his review, I found
there was very little with which I would disagree. I might take
issue with one or two points of detail (the portrayal of Chester as
“never particularly successful” belies its prosperity and importance
as a regional administrative and retail centre), but would generally
agree with what Caunce writes. However, in concentrating on specific
places, on problems of definition, and on wider issues of economic
development in a more broadly defined North, I feel that many of my
central arguments have been overlooked.
Part of the purpose of the book was, of course, to communicate
something of the historical geographical details of development in
the region, but I was more concerned with exploring regional
specialisation and inter-dependence, and with understanding them as
mutually formative processes which encouraged and shaped economic
development in early-industrial north-west England. This involved an
attempt to reconstruct the complex geographies of the regional space
economy, highlighting the very different spatial and functional
organisation of two sets of industries (textiles and coal-using
industries), plus the service sector – the latter too often
overlooked in analyses of economic change. It also involved
sustained and critical engagement with a variety of models of
economic development, spatial integration and urban systems. These
included Wrigley’s notion of organic and mineral-based energy
economies; Mendels’s proto-industrialisation theory; Krugman’s
arguments concerning path-dependency; Christaller’s central place
theory; Vance’s ‘gateway cities’, and Simmons’s model of long-term
development of urban systems. None of these are exactly novel ideas,
but their comparative and critical application to the historical
development of a British region is new and, I would argue, helpful
in understanding processes of industrialisation.
What this
analysis reveals is the complexity of the space economy of
north-west England. As an industrialising region, it was
characterised by detailed local specialisation, but also by strong
internal linkages and a clear cohesion. This was, in short, a
real region. As Caunce suggests, we can debate its precise
delimitation (boundaries could, of course, be differently drawn to
include Lancaster and even exclude places like Malpas or even the
whole of south Cheshire), but even a superficial analysis of the
inter-personal linkages of people living within the defined region
confirms its essential integrity. This is not to suggest that the
region was isolated – far from it. However, internal linkages were
much stronger than those linking the North West to places elsewhere.
The study also shows that towns, and the linkages between towns and
townspeople, were central to processes of spatial integration.
Moreover, this integration and the urban system upon which it was
based was not only essential to the ‘modern’ industrialisation that
characterised the North West from the second half of the eighteenth
century; it also served to shape the pace and geography of that
development. This is an area with which Caunce does not engage in
his review, yet it forms both the central thesis of the book and a
potential blue-print for (comparative) analyses of other regions. In
arguing this, I am not implying, as Caunce suggests, that “there is
no point in treating this region as a special case”; but rather that
the analysis undertaken forms a ‘methodological and historical
exemplar’ (p. 5).
Clearly, there are evidential, definitional and conceptual
problems in achieving the kind of systematic region-wide analysis
attempted here, and Caunce rightly highlights a number of these. The
coverage of the main source of occupational information certainly
under-represents the poorer sections of society, and especially what
might be termed ‘proletarianised’ industries. That said, about 40
per cent of the adult population left probate records and it would
be wrong to see these as being drawn only from “middling and upper
income groups”. Furthermore, while probate records represent
individuals at the end of their lives, the possibility that they
would be “winding down their business activities” seems overplayed:
internal evidence from probate inventories suggests that many
remained extremely active and, in any case, winding down a business
would rarely involve changing one’s occupation. There is some
evidence that the title ‘gentleman’ was occasionally adopted in
these cases, but such status titles could just as readily be
affected by those in their prime.
Similarly, the definition of towns is always a highly contentious
issue. The thirty towns included in my analysis are those places
identified by contemporaries as towns. The bases for their
definitions are not always apparent, and it would be wrong to
suggest unanimity of opinion: Newton, for example, was certainly of
questionable status. It is clear, however, that for those compilers
of gazetteers, there was a discernible difference between those
places which they listed as towns and the dozens of others which
were thoughts of as villages. Their criteria were not exclusively
commercial, though the presence of a market appears to have been
critical. Population thresholds were and remain pretty meaningless:
de Vries might fix a minimum of 3000 inhabitants, but this has
little relevance to the English experience of urbanisation. Taking
this figure would mean that the only towns in north-west England in
1664 were Chester and Manchester. Even by 1775, places that were
clearly towns (Congleton, Bury and Ormskirk, for instance) fell well
below this threshold. Nor can we readily list a number of key
functions which were essentially urban. Leisure activities tended to
be concentrated in towns, but, as Caunce argues, they were far from
ubiquitous and several, such as horse-racing, were also found in
rural areas.
Lengthy discussion of definitions and methodologies might be
academically intriguing, but it is, I feel, an essentially sterile
debate. What mattered much more – and what I attempt to show in my
analysis – is that these towns had a collective impact far greater
than their individual size or economic significance might suggest.
Through their integrative functions, they helped to structure the
regional space economy and thus shaped both the geography and pace
of subsequent development. Others might disagree with this
interpretation of the role of towns in regional development: reading
between the lines, I suspect that Caunce would argue that other
factors were more important. Disagreement over the nature of the
development process is inevitable: what is much more significant,
and where I hope my book makes an important contribution, is opening
up the debate to new ideas and concepts. To judge from Caunce’s
comments, that process has already begun.
November 2004
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