Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Circulation
- Part II Governance
- 9 Central goverment and the towns
- 10 The changing functions of urban government: councillors, officials and pressure groups
- 11 The political economy of urban utilities
- 12 The provision of social services
- 13 Structure, culture and society in British towns
- Part III Construction
- Part IV Getting and spending
- Part V Images
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Plates 1-7
- Plates 8-14
- Plates 15-20
- Plates 21-27
- Plates 28-34
- Plates 35-41
- Plates 42-48>
- Plates 49-53
- References
11 - The political economy of urban utilities
from Part II - Governance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Circulation
- Part II Governance
- 9 Central goverment and the towns
- 10 The changing functions of urban government: councillors, officials and pressure groups
- 11 The political economy of urban utilities
- 12 The provision of social services
- 13 Structure, culture and society in British towns
- Part III Construction
- Part IV Getting and spending
- Part V Images
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Plates 1-7
- Plates 8-14
- Plates 15-20
- Plates 21-27
- Plates 28-34
- Plates 35-41
- Plates 42-48>
- Plates 49-53
- References
Summary
AN OVERALL PERSPECTIVE: FROM INVIOLATE PROPERTY TO NATIONALISATION
The growth of the urban infrastructure was the most dynamic element in the British economy from the 1870s to the 1930s. Even if one ignores housing, the investment in public health, local transport, policing, water, electricity and gas was accounting, by the early 1900s, for one quarter of all capital formation in Britain and the local government component of that was nearly as large as the annual investment by the whole of manufacturing industry. The mushrooming of electricity systems, waterworks, tramways, harbours and gasworks was a key element, and the interplay between their economic development and the interests of parliament and town councils is the subject of this chapter. Superficially it appears to be about ideology, and municipal socialism in particular. In practice this had a limited role. Certainly there were fears about the growth of government. In 1900 Lord Avebury listed his objections to municipal trading as:
1) The enormous increase in debt …;
2) The check to industrial progress;
3) The demand on the time of municipal councillors …;
4) The undesirability of involving Governments and Municipalities …in labour questions;
5) The fact that the interference with natural laws …[defeats] …the very object aimed at;
6) The risk, not to say, certainty of loss.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Urban History of Britain , pp. 315 - 350Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
References
, ‘Hard choices: supplying water to New England Towns’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 15 (1984).Google Scholar
, ‘Glasgow trams and American politics, 1894–1914’, Scottish Historical Review, 56 (1976)Google Scholar
, ‘The introduction of gas lighting to Preston’, Transactions of the History Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 125 (1975)Google Scholar
, ‘Government grants in aid of the rates in England and Wales, 1889–1990’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research (now Historical Research), 65 (1992)Google Scholar
, ‘Comparative productivity in British and American manufacturing during the nineteenth century’, Explorations in Economic History, 31 (1994).Google Scholar
, ‘Coping with crisis: the diffusion of water works in the late nineteenth century German towns’, Journal of Economic History, 48 (1988).Google Scholar
, The British Electrical Industry, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1978).
, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy 1945–51 (London, 1985), p..
, ‘State control of public utilities in the nineteenth century: the London gas industry’, Business History, 14 (1972)Google Scholar
, ‘Competition, competitiveness and nationalisation’, in and , ed., Competitiveness and the State: Government and Industry in Twentieth Century Britain (Manchester, 1991).Google Scholar
, The Economic History of Britain, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1964), p..
, ‘Glasgow’s experience with municipal ownership and operation’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 27 (1906).Google Scholar
, ‘Urban Britain’, in and , eds., Later Victorian Britain, 1867–1900 (Basingstoke, 1988)Google Scholar
, Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge, 1994)
, ‘Success of municipal ownership in Great Britain’, Street Railway Journal, 21 (1903) and 72–6.Google Scholar
, ‘The development of municipal trading in the nineteenth century’, Business History, 19 (1977)Google Scholar
, Municipal Trading (London, 1941)
and , ‘The comparative efficiency of public and private enterprise in Britain: electricity generation between the world wars’, Economic Journal, 95, Supplement (1985).Google Scholar
, Manual of Electrical Undertakings and Directory of Officials, vol. 1: 1896 (London, 1896)
, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns 1830–80 (Manchester, 1983)
, ‘The opposition to municipal socialism in England’, Journal of Political Economy, 9 (1901).Google Scholar
, ‘Muddling in bumbledom: on the enormity of large sanitary improvements in four British towns, 1855–1885’, Victorian Studies, 33 (1988–9)Google Scholar
, ‘A pioneer of public enterprise: the Central Electricity Generating Board and the National Grid’, in , ed., Essays in British Business History (Oxford, 1977).Google Scholar
, Electricity before Nationalisation: A Study of the Development of the Electricity Supply Industry in Britain to 1948 (London, 1979)
, Private Lives and Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (London, 1991), p..
, ‘The growth and impact of the British water industry in the nineteenth century’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 38 (1985)Google Scholar
, ‘Finance and politics in urban local government in England, 1835–1900’, Historical Journal, 6 (1963)Google Scholar
, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (London, 1973)
, ‘The municipalities and the electricity supplies industry in Birmingham’, West Midlands Studies, 13 (1980).Google Scholar
, ‘Public pursuit of private profit? Liberal businessmen and municipal politics in Birmingham, 1845–1900’, Business History, 25 (1983)Google Scholar
, ‘Municipal socialism, enterprise and trading in the Victorian city’, Urban History Yearbook (1978)Google Scholar
, The British Coal Mining Industry 1870–1946 (London, 1977), p..
, Principles and Methods of Municipal Trading (London, 1912).
, ‘A multiplicity of instruments: the 1946 decision to create a separate British European airline and its effects on airline productivity’, Journal of Transport History, 11 (1990).Google Scholar
, ‘Rogues, speculators and competing monopolies: the early London gas companies, 1812–1860’, London Journal, 2 (1985).Google Scholar
, ‘Laissez-faire and the London gas industry in the nineteenth century: another look’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 39 (1986)Google Scholar
, Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton, 1976)
, ‘The emergence of gas and water monopolies in nineteenth-century Britain: contested markets and public control’, in , ed., New Perspectives on the Late Victorian Economy: Essays in Quantitative Economic History: 1860–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar
, and , ‘The urban fiscal problem, 1870–1914: government expenditure and finances in England and Wales’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 48 (1995)Google Scholar
, and , ‘From private to public ownership of gas undertakings in England and Wales, 1851–1947: chronology, incidence and causes’, Business History, 35 (1993)Google Scholar
, and , eds., The Political Economy of Nationalisation, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, 1995)
, ‘Labour and the development of the public corporation’, Manchester School, 22 (1954)Google Scholar
, ‘The failure of municipal ownership in England’, Street Railway Journal, 20 (1902), 216–20.Google Scholar
, ‘The public utility services’, in , and , eds., A Century of Municipal Progress: The Last One Hundred Years (London, 1935).Google Scholar
, ‘Planning, water supplies and ministerial power in inter-war Britain’, Public Administration, 61 (1983)Google Scholar
, ‘Water supply to large towns’, Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society, 4 (1888).Google Scholar
, London and Provincial Water Supplies (London, 1884), 12, 38.
, ‘“No bloody revolutions but for obstinate reactions”?: British coal owners in their context 1919–1920’, in and , eds., Enterprise and History: Essays in Honour of Charles Wilson (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar
, Town, City and Nation: England, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1983)
, Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1990)
, and , ‘Trends in local authority loan expenditure in England and Wales, 1870–1914’, University of Manchester Working Papers in Economic and Social History, 22 (1993).Google Scholar
, ‘Competition between electricity and gas in Britain, 1880–1980’, International Economic History Association, Pre-Conference on the Development of Electrical Energy (Paris, 1993).Google Scholar
, ‘Competition in the early gas industry: the case of Chester Gas Light Company 1817–1856’, Transactions of the Antiquarian Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 86 (1990).Google Scholar
,. ‘The origins of American industrial success, 1879–1940’, American Economic Review, 80 (1990)Google Scholar
- 7
- Cited by