and therefore if the wants for which they make provision increase in proportion to our general wealth, it is only to be expected that they should absorb a constantly growing proportion of the industrial population.Domestic servants increased rapidly for some years; and the total amount of work which used to fall to them is now increasing faster than ever.But much of it is now done, often with the aid of machinery, by persons in the employment of clothiers of all kinds, of hotel proprietors, confectioners, and even by various messengers from grocers, fishmongers and others who call for orders, unless they are sent by telephone.These changes have tended to increase the specialization and the localization of industries.
Passing away from this illustration of the action of modern forces on the geographical distribution of industries, we will resume our inquiry as to how far the full economies of division of labour can be obtained by the concentration of large numbers of small businesses of a similar kind in the same locality; and how far they are attainable only by the aggregation of a large part of the business of the country into the hands of a comparatively small number of rich and powerful firms, or, as is commonly said, by production on a large scale; or, in other words, how far the economies of production on a large scale must needs be internal, and how far they can be external.(8*)NOTES:
1.Thus in the records of the Stourbridge Fair held near Cambridge we find an endless variety of light and precious goods from the older seats of civilization in the East and on the Mediterranean; some having been brought in Italian ships, and others having travelled by land as far as the shores of the North Sea.
2.Not very long ago travellers in western Tyrol could find a strange and characteristic relic of this habit in a village called Imst.The villagers had somehow acquired a special art in breeding canaries: and their young men started for a tour to distant parts of Europe each with about fifty small cages hung from a pole over his shoulder, and walked on till they had sold all.
3.There are for instance over 500 villages devoted to various branches of woodwork; one village makes nothing but spokes for the wheels of vehicles, another nothing but the bodies and so on;and indications of a like state of things are found in the histories of oriental civilizations and in the chronicles of medieval Europe.Thus for instance we read (Rogers' Six Centuries of Work and Wages, ch.IV) of a lawyer's handy book written about 1250, which makes note of scarlet at Lincoln; blanket at Bligh;burnet at Beverley; russet at Colchester; linen fabrics at Shaftesbury, Lewes, and Aylsham; cord at Warwick and Bridport;knives at Marstead; needles at Wilton; razors at Leicester; soap at Coventry; horse girths at Doncaster; skins and furs at Chester and Shrewsbury and so on.
The localization of trades in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century is well described by Defoe, Plan of English Commerce, 85-7; English Tradesman, II, 282-3.
4.The later wanderings of the iron industry from Wales, Staffordshire and Shropshire to Scotland and the North of England are well shown in the tables submitted by Sir Lowthian Bell to the recent Commission on the Depression of Trade and Industry.
See their Second Report, Part I, p.320.
5.Fuller says that Flemings started manufactures of cloths and fustians in Norwich, of baizes in Sudbury, of serges in Colchester and Taunton, of cloths in Kent, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Hants, Berks and Sussex, of kerseys in Devonshire and of Levant cottons in Lancashire.
Smiles' Huguenots in England and Ireland, p.109.See also Lecky's History of England in the eighteenth century, ch.II.
6.The movement has been specially conspicuous in the case of the textile manufacturers.Manchester, Leeds and Lyons are still chief centres of the trade in cotton, woollen and silk stuffs, but they do not now themselves produce any great part of the goods to which they owe their chief fame.On the other hand London and Paris retain their positions as the two largest manufacturing towns of the world, Philadelphia coming third.The mutual influences of the localization of industry, the growth of towns and habits of town life, and the development of machinery are well discussed in Hobson's Evolution of Capitalism.
7.Comp.Hobson, l.c.p.114.
8.The percentage of the population occupied in the textile industries in the United Kingdom fell from 3.13 in 1881 to 2.43in 1901; partly because much of the work done by them has been rendered so simple by semi-automatic machinery that it can be done fairly well by peoples that are in a relatively backward industrial condition; and partly because the chief textile goods retain nearly the same simple character as they had thirty or even three thousand years ago.On the other hand manufactures of iron and steel (including shipbuilding) have increased so greatly in complexity as well as in volume of output, that the percentage of the population occupied in them rose from 2.39 in 1881 to 3.01in 1901; although much greater advance has been meanwhile made in the machinery and methods employed in them than in the textile group.The remaining manufacturing industries employed about the same percentage of the people in 1901 as in 1881.In the same time the tonnage of British shipping cleared from British ports increased by one half; and the number of dock labourers doubled, but that of seamen has slightly diminished.These facts are to be explained partly by vast improvements in the construction of ships and all appliances connected with them, and partly by the transference to dock labourers of nearly all tasks connected with handling the cargo some of which were even recently performed by the crew.Another marked change is the increased aggregate occupation of women in manufactures, though that of married women appears to have diminished, and that of children has certainly diminished greatly.
The Summary Tables of the Census of 1911, published in 1915, show so many changes in classification since 1991 that no general view of recent developments can be safely made.But Table 64 of that Report and Prof.D.Caradog Jones' paper read before the Royal Statistical Society in December 1914 show that the developments of 1901-11 differ from their predecessors in detail rather than in general character.
