Empire, the Economy, and Immigration Britain 1850–2000

To survey the changes in British population between 1850 and 2000 requires some large-scale generalizations. At the beginning of my period, Britain had an empire that held a quarter of the world’s population, but by the end of the period Britain had become part of the European Union and contained one-sixth of the Union’s population. For the first hundred years of the period, Britain was exporting its population to the empire; for the last fifty years, the empire had struck back. The last 150 years have seen huge transformations of the British economy. There has been a shift from agriculture to industry and from industry to services. Coal production rose from 50 million tons in the middle of the nineteenth century to 300 million tons in 1913. By 1999 it had returned to below its 1851 level. Mining scarred the landscape of all the coalfields. Oil production rose from none in 1970 to about 128 million tonnes in 1997, but left hardly a mark on settlement. The steel industry rose and fell. In 1860 there was no crude steel produced (Mitchell 1975: 399). By 1960 25 million tons were produced and now it is down to about half that level. The United Kingdom has undergone the demographic transition. The population rose from 10 million in 1801 to 38 million in 1901 to 59 million now. Six million more people have left the United Kingdom than have entered it since 1851. A tide, from the beginning of the twentieth century, has swept the rural population into the biggest cities until the post-1950 backwash has scattered it out to suburbia, exurbia, and market towns. Urbanization has been followed by suburbanization; suburbanization by counter-urbanization. The Fordist system of mass production produced the Fordist city of mass-produced housing design, the Victorian, terraced inner city. The post-Fordist era hollowed out the inner cities and produced the green belts, the new towns, and the scatter of light industry. The new international division of labour squeezed the manufacturing employment of the country out to the third world.

Country and Town: The Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Peopling of England in the Early Modern Period

There are many ways of depicting the constitution of a given society and of defining and measuring the changes within it. They reflect the interests and purposes of the scholars concerned, tempered by the source materials available to them. This chapter reflects the conviction that the occupational structure of a society and the changes therein offer the opportunity to gain an insight into much else about that society and its development. The way in which men and women earned a living reveals much about them and their communities. Though true of all societies, this was perhaps especially true of societies before the industrial revolution. It is instructive to consider why this should be so. At bottom it follows from the fact that occupational structure in pre-industrial societies reflected the hierarchical nature of human needs, which produced some notable and readily observable regularities. The thinking and terminology of the classical economists reflected their appreciation of this point. They frequently referred to what they termed the necessities of life, of which there were four: food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. These they distinguished both from what they characterized as comforts, other material products which were less central to life than the necessities but eagerly sought after when circumstances permitted; and from luxuries, goods or services to which only the affluent could aspire. If circumstances are sufficiently bleak people will favour spending on necessities above all other forms of expenditure, so that a very high proportion of the total spending of the poor will be devoted solely to necessities and above all to food. It was not uncommon for an impoverished household in early modern England to spend as much as three-quarters of its income on food alone and a still higher proportion, of course, on the four necessities taken together. But when income rises the proportion spent on necessities declines. If a poor man’s income suddenly doubles, he and his family will spend more thereafter on food but their expenditure on food will not double.

Plagues and Peoples The Long Demographic Cycle, 1250–1670

The following discussion is focused around a consideration of what will be termed a ‘long population cycle’ from the late thirteenth century through to the late seventeenth century. In so far as this consideration is directed towards a society that may be unambiguously categorized as ‘preindustrial’ throughout this era, it is unavoidable that at various stages of the argument it will be necessary to engage with the classical Malthusian model of the relationship between living standards and population growth rates, although some assessment will be made of the role played by epidemic disease in determining both the width and depth of the cycle. In addition an attempt will be made to chart the principal changes to the economy and society relating to shifting numbers and geographical distribution of persons on the land during the extensive phases of demographic decline and recovery. Before engaging with theory and explanations of long-term trends some mundanely empirical steps will be taken so that the broad dimensions of the ‘cycle’ might be established. Empiricism is no straightforward endeavour in the absence of serial census records of any kind, let alone individual census counts for randomly distributed moments, over this extensive fourcentury period. It is at least fortunate that the final 150 years of the cycle yield evidence from parish registers, which in recent years have been exploited by historical demographers in ways that make it possible to establish annual population totals and vital rates from 1541. In attempting to establish population trends and totals before a system of parochial registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials was in place, historians succumb to what Sir Michael Postan (1966: 561) once termed the ‘lure of aggregates’ by engaging in decidedly problematic, although unavoidable, exercises. In this present discussion we are in danger of incurring Postan’s wrath since we employ one central and vital source that relates to demographic conditions in one year only, around which a key argument in this discussion revolves.

Tribes and Empires c.1500 bc–ad 500

The period of two thousand years or so which we set out to cover here— roughly 1500 bc to ad 500—begins at a time when the evidence available to us is purely archaeological, untainted by the vagaries of history, and ends when the gleanings from archaeology have to be reconciled with a rich historical tradition and the varied interpretations of linguists. Thus, in spanning the millennia, we bridge the disciplines. The first historian to consider the tribes of the British Isles from a truly informed position was Tacitus. Writing towards the end of the first century ad he had access not only to the vague and anecdotal writings of the Posidonian tradition and the observations of Julius Caesar on the tribal situation in the south-east, but he was also able to draw upon the reminiscences of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola, who had spent many seasons campaigning in Britain first as a legionary commander and later as governor of the province. Agricola travelled from one end of the island to the other and, incidentally, was probably responsible for killing more Britons than any other Roman. Assessing the varied array of evidence available to him in an attempt to characterize the British population, Tacitus showed the commendable restraint of an historian in his famous summation . . .who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether native or immigrant remains obscure: one must remember, we are dealing with barbarians. (Agricola, 11). . . After several centuries of hard archaeological endeavour the situation has changed little. Forty years ago, in considering the formation of the British people, we would have been much more confident. We would have talked of a series of ‘invasions’ bringing in successive waves of new people from the Continent— Deverel-Rimbury folk in the Late Bronze Age about 1000 bc, Hallstatt overlords resplendent on their horses and wielding long slashing swords in the seventh century, invaders from the Marne region around 400 bc and Belgae first raiding and then settling in the south-east in the first century bc (Hawkes and Dunning 1931).

The Coming of Agriculture People, Landscapes, and Change c.4000 –1500 bc

This chapter reviews the development of agriculture in Britain and Ireland from the Neolithic period to the middle of the Bronze Age (approximately 4000 to 1500 bc in calendar years), and the associated questions of the identity of the people involved, the density of populations, and their effect on the landscape. This brief account is set in the context of the wider development of an agricultural way of life on the adjacent continental mainland, going as far back as 6000 bc in central Europe. I hope to raise questions as much as to answer them, and to concentrate wherever possible on new evidence and approaches. I should like to frame my discussion by setting out four hypotheses: 1. Overall, change was slow, but punctuated by spurts or accelerations (notably around 5500 bc, 4000 bc, and 1500 bc), whose nature is still poorly understood. This hypothesis stands in opposition to a general tendency to envisage a steadily intensifying evolution of subsistence methods, population levels, and landscapes. 2. There was much continuity of population both in continental Europe and in Britain and Ireland, but the role of colonization still needs seriously to be considered. This hypothesis seeks to re-examine both the assumption in continental research of major colonization with the onset of the Neolithic and the recent British consensus that the beginnings of the Neolithic were essentially to do with the acculturation of an indigenous population. 3. Although some landscapes had been cleared of substantial tracts of woodland by about 2500–2000 bc, population levels in most parts of Britain and Ireland remained relatively low at least until the middle of the Bronze Age, and the lifestyle can be characterized by continuing mobility and/or short-term sedentism. This hypothesis restates recent opposition to the notion that the introduction of agriculture entailed sedentary existence, rapidly growing population, and intensifying production right from the start. The coming of agriculture in a more familiar guise, although preceded in Britain and Ireland by herding and piecemeal cultivation from about 4000 bc, was not seen till as late as about 1500 bc onwards.

Early Beginnings 500,000–35,000 Years Ago

Our understanding of the first peopling of Britain has recently undergone a transformation. On the one hand there have been fundamental advances in the investigation of Pleistocene environments and chronology, while on the other exceptionally well preserved archaeological sites of the period have now been investigated. These data are allowing us to reinterpret the society and palaeo-ecology of the people who inhabited this small corner of north-west Europe between 500,000 and 35,000 years ago. In order to put these findings into their proper context I will, however, need to roam more widely across the Palaeolithic world and consider the evolutionary changes and geographical processes that were involved over such long time-spans. One aspect I will concentrate upon in this contribution is that, although these earliest inhabitants did not dramatically transform the landscape, in the manner that either prehistoric farmers did with fields and ritual monuments (see Whittle in this volume) or, later, more complex societies achieved through trade, cities and the military machine (see Cunliffe and Härke in this volume), we can, none the less, see the beginnings of such shaping in the way they went about their daily and lifetime routines. My point is that these early hominids (a term which includes ourselves and all our fossil ancestors) were not slaves to nature, ecological creatures determined in everything by the environment, but rather creative builders of social networks that linked their daily landscapes of habit into very different social worlds. Their act of living in the worlds of half a million years ago was every bit as transformative for those environments as our acts of living are today. In other words, the idea that our earliest ancestors lived solely in a natural landscape because they had very simple technologies, smaller brains, and tiny social groupings, while we by contrast create and inhabit a complex cultural world, needs to be revised. Moreover, the second theme of this volume, population diversity and movement, is also illustrated in these early beginnings.

Introduction

From the beginnings of human settlement the small marginal fringe of western Europe that eventually became the British Isles has represented a final frontier for successive waves of colonists—each bringing its own set of cultural adaptations and its own ethos into the landscape. Over time both landscape and culture have matured from raw frontier to settled centre, moulded by the advent of agriculture, towns, and industry, and by streams of migration both within Britain and from outside. The chapters in this book, together with some of the comments which followed their original delivery as lectures, trace the various phases of that process, showing how much of the story has only recently been unearthed, and how much remains to be discovered. The period surveyed is necessarily a very long one, and it is significant that successive chapters cover an increasingly narrow span of time, from the half a million years of the first chapter to the 150 of the last. That is partly a function of the historical record, which shifts from the scattered evidence of archaeology to the plentiful records of modern social surveys. But it is also a reflection of the accelerating pace of change, particularly in the past millennium, as increasing density of population, urbanization, and the manipulation of new sources of energy and wealth reshaped both culture and environment. In the process Britain shifted from being marginal, on the outer edge of human developments whose focus lay elsewhere, to being central: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain was the originator of changes which have transformed the globe since then. That is one story, familiar enough in outline, but examined from new perspectives in the later chapters of this book. But there is also a second story, completed very much earlier, and forming the theme of the early chapters of this collection. It lies in the initial peopling of Britain by humans, and the stages by which biological evolution was replaced by cultural evolution as the main motor of change.

The Homo Sapiens Peopling of Europe

The origin of our own species, Homo sapiens, has sometimes been described as ‘the hottest topic in palaeoanthropology’ (Shreeve 1995). Lively debate has surrounded this issue throughout this century and the debate continues, if in a slightly more muted form, down to the present. Indeed in some ways recent discoveries have tended to fuel the debate. Needless to say the issues extend far beyond the realms of Europe, but the evidence from Europe itself remains critical to many aspects of these debates, owing to the exceptional detail and clarity of the relevant archaeological and human skeletal records in many parts of the continent. The approach I wish to adopt here is to look first at the evidence for the initial appearance of fully Homo sapiens populations in Europe generally, and then to extend this focus, more briefly, to other regions. As we shall see, the evidence from Britain itself inevitably forms only a small part of this picture, but one which adds some important elements to the wider international perspective. The long-running debates over modern human origins reduce essentially to two sharply polarized perspectives (Stringer and Gamble 1993; Stringer and McKie 1996; Wolpoff and Caspari 1997). On the one hand is the so-called ‘multi-regional evolution’ or ‘regional continuity’ model, which asserts that in effectively all parts of the old world there was an essentially continuous, gradual process of both biological and cultural evolution from the various Homo erectus-like populations which first spread from Africa over a million years ago, and which eventually led to the emergence of fully modern populations within each region—though with a good deal of peripheral gene flow between the different regional populations throughout this period (Wolpoff and Caspari 1997). On the other hand there is the more dramatic population dispersal or ‘Garden of Eden’ hypothesis.

Kings and Warriors Population and Landscape from Post-Roman to Norman Britain

Moving our story forward into the first millennium AD, we are able, for the first time in Britain’s past, clearly to identify populations and estimate their sizes, and we begin to see not just some details of the cultural landscape and its uses, but also changing patterns of landownership and other determinant factors. The full elucidation of the processes and interactions requires the combined use of historical, archaeological, and environmental data, and while the emphasis here will be on archaeological approaches, historical and environmental evidence will be drawn on. The regional emphasis is on the south and east of the island, but parallel developments in the west and north will be referred to. The period covered in this contribution can be divided into three distinct phases, each with its own characteristics: the ‘Dark Ages’ of the fifth to early seventh centuries ad; the phase of urbanization and agricultural expansion of the later seventh to eleventh centuries; and the Norman period from ad 1066 onwards. While their differences make a chronological treatment by phases necessary, there are a number of common themes which have all been subject to intense ideological pressures, and which have undergone profound changes in thinking over the last several decades. The cultural landscape is not usually thought of as an ideological battlefield. But as early as 1890, Seebohm wrote in the introduction to his weighty tome on The EnglishVillage Community that the question of land management and ownership tackled in his book is fundamental to the ‘experiment . . . of freedom and democracy’ undertaken by the Englishspeaking nations (Seebohm 1890: pp. vii–viii). More recent work has highlighted this ideological link between the cultural landscape and identity (e.g. Schama 1995). The earlier part of the period covered in this chapter is crucial to the question of identity because many regional or national identities in Europe go back, or are believed to go back, to the middle centuries of the first millennium AD.