Setting the stage

Was city growth too fast or too slow during the First Industrial Revolution? Such questions are rarely posed of British historical experience, even though implicit judgments are being made all the time. Answers hinge on an assessment of the behavior of private labor and capital markets, on the one hand, and the provision of public social overhead, on the other.

Most historians have taken the view that fast city growth was a Good Thing. After all, Britain underwent the industrial revolution first and was also more urbanized than her competitors. That historical correlation implies for most historians that Britain's fast-city-growth regime must have been optimal, that slower city growth would have been a mistake, and that faster city growth would have been infeasible.

Anthony Wohl (1983) takes the contrary view. He argues that British authorities were unprepared for and surprised by the rapid city growth that carried the industrial revolution, with disastrous results. City governments didn't plan for the event, public-health officials were unprepared for the event, and city social overhead technologies were too backward to deal with the event. Furthermore, entrepreneurial and technological failure in the public sector, and rising land scarcity in the private sector, both served to breed levels of crowding, density, mortality, morbidity, and disamenities that were high even by the standards of the poorest Third World cities. Britain was simply unable or unwilling to house itself properly during the First Industrial Revolution. So much so that the 1830s and 1840s are seen by Michael Flinn (1965, p. 14) as a Malthusian retribution by disease.