An Edible History of Humanity (14 page)

“I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature,” he gloomily concluded.
“No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century.
And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live
in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and
families.” He anticipated a future of food shortages, starvation, and misery. The potato, Malthus believed, was partly to
blame. Having been championed as a remedy for starvation, it now seemed to be hastening the onset of an apparently inevitable
crisis. And even if it provided enough food to go around, Malthus argued, the potato caused the population to increase far
beyond the opportunities for employment. With hindsight, of course, we can appreciate the irony that Malthus pointed out the
biological constraints on population and economic growth just at the moment when Britain was about to demonstrate, for the
first time in human history, that they no longer applied.

From the dawn of prehistory to the beginning of the nineteenth century, almost all of the necessities of life had been provided
by things that grew on the land. The land supplied food crops of various kinds; wood for fuel and construction; fibers with
which to make clothing; and fodder for animals, which in turn provided more food, along with other useful materials such as
wool and leather. Butchers, bakers, shoemakers, weavers, carpenters, and shipbuilders depended on animal or vegetable raw
materials, all of which were the products, directly or indirectly, of photosynthesis—the capture of the sun’s energy by growing
plants. Since all these things came from the land, and since the supply of land was limited, Thomas Malthus concluded that
there was an ecological limit that growing populations and economies would eventually run into. He first made this prediction
on the eve of the nineteenth century, and he refined his argument in the following years.

Yet Britain did not hit the ecological wall that Malthus anticipated. Instead, it vaulted over it and broke free of the constraints
of the “biological old regime” in which everything was derived from the produce of the land. Rather than growing most of its
own food, Britain concentrated on manfacturing industrial goods, notably cotton textiles, which could then be traded for food
from overseas. During the nineteenth century the population more than tripled, but the economy grew faster still, so that
the average standard of living increased—an outcome that would have astonished Malthus. Britain had dealt with the looming
shortage of food by reorganizing its economy. By switching from agriculture to manufacturing, Britain became the first industrialized
nation in the world.

To be fair, Malthus could hardly have been expected to see this coming, since nothing like it had ever happened before. And
none of it was planned: It was the accidental result of the convergence of several independent trends. Three of the most important
related to changes in food production: greater specialization in handicrafts, prompted by rising agricultural productivity;
the growing use of fossil fuels, initially as a land-saving measure; and an increasing emphasis on importing rather than growing
food.

The first step along the road from a farm-based to a factory-based economy was the growth of rural industry, in the form of
home-based manufacturing and handicrafts. This happened throughout Europe, but it was particularly notable in England because
of the unusually rapid growth in English agricultural productivity. By 1800 only 40 percent of the male labor force worked
on the land, compared with 65 to 80 percent in continental Europe. The number of men working in agriculture in 1800 was about
the same as it had been two hundred years earlier, but the introduction of new crops and improved farming techniques meant
that each one was producing twice as much food. This high productivity liberated ever more workers from the land and prompted
people to move into rural manufacturing, as Adam Smith explained:

An inland country naturally fertile and easily cultivated produces a great surplus of provisions beyond what is necessary
for maintaining the cultivators . . . Abundance, therefore, renders provisions cheap, and encourages a great number of workmen
to settle in the neighbourhood, who find that their industry there can procure them more of the necessities and conveniences
of life than in other places. They work up the material of manufacture which the land produces, and exchange their finished
work, or what is the same thing the price of it, for more materials and provisions. They give a new value to the surplus part
of the rude produce . . . and they furnish the cultivators with something in exchange for it that is either useful or agreeable
to them. The cultivators get a better price for their surplus produce, and can purchase cheaper other conveniences which they
have occasion for . . . The manufacturers first supply the neighbourhood, and afterwards, as their work improves and refines,
more distant markets . . . In this manner have grown up naturally the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham
and Wolverhampton. Such manufactures are the offspring of agriculture.

Once rural manufacturing had established itself in En gland, it intensified in the northern half of the country during the
eighteenth century in response to the adoption of new agricultural techniques in the south. The use of clover and turnips
in rotation with wheat and barley to increase cereal yields was less efficient on the heavy clay soils of the north and west
of En gland, so people in those regions concentrated instead on livestock farming and manufacturing, and used the proceeds
to buy grain from the south of the country. The result, by chance, was a concentration of manufacturing in just the regions
of England where there were rich deposits of coal.

The shift to using coal rather than wood as a fuel was a second trend that contributed to Britain’s industrialization. People
much preferred burning wood rather than coal in their homes, but as land became more sought after for agricultural use, areas
that had previously provided firewood were cleared to make way for farming. The price of firewood shot up—it increased threefold
in western European cities between 1700 and 1800—and people turned to coal as a cheaper fuel. (It was cheap in England, at
least, since there were plentiful deposits near the surface.) One ton of coal provides the same amount of heat as the wood
that can be sustainably harvested each year from one acre of land. In England and Wales, some seven million acres of land
that had previously provided wood, or around one fifth of the total surface area, were taken under cultivation between 1700
and 1800. This ensured that the growth of the food supply could continue to keep pace with the population—but required everybody
to switch to burning coal.

And switch they did: The actual consumption of coal by 1800 was about ten million tons a year, providing as much energy as
would otherwise have required ten million acres to be set aside for fuel production. At this point Britain accounted for 90
percent of world coal output, by some estimates. When it came to fuel, at least, Britain had already escaped from the constraints
of the biological old regime. Rather than relying on living plants to trap sunlight to produce fuel, coal provided a way to
tap vast reserves of past sunlight, accumulated millions of years ago and stored underground in the form of dead plants.

Although it was originally exploited as an alternative to wood for domestic heating, the abundance of coal meant that it was
soon being put to other uses. Arthur Young, an English agricultural writer and social observer, was struck by the relative
scarcity of glass in windows while traveling in France in the 1780s; it was far more widespread in England by this time because
coal provided cheap energy for glass-making. (French glassmakers, meanwhile, were so desperate for fuel that they had resorted
to burning olive pits.) Coal was also heavily used by the textile industry, to warm the liquids used in bleaching, dyeing,
and printing and to heat drying rooms and presses. Coal enabled a rapid expansion in the production of iron and steel, which
had previously been smelted using wood. And, of course, coal was used to power steam engines, a technology that emerged from
the coal industry itself.

Once England’s outcropping surface deposits of coal had been depleted, it was necessary to sink mine shafts, and to ever greater
depths—but the deeper they went, the more likely they were to flood with water. The steam engine invented by Thomas Newcomen
in 1712, building on the work of previous experimenters, was built specifically to pump water out of flooded mines. Early
steam engines were very inefficient, but this did not matter very much since they were powered by coal—and in a coal mine
the fuel was, in effect, free. Hundreds of Newcomen engines had been installed in mines around England by 1800. The next step
was taken by James Watt, a Scottish inventor who was asked to repair a Newcomen engine in 1763 and quickly realized how its
wasteful design could be improved upon. His design, completed in 1775, was much more efficient and was also better suited
to driving machinery.

This meant steam power could be applied to the various laborsaving devices that had been devised in the textile industry,
providing an enormous increase in productivity. In 1790 the first steam-powered version of Samuel Crompton’s “mule,” a machine
that spun cotton into yarn, increased the output of thread per worker 100-fold over a manual spinning wheel, for example.
So much thread could be produced that looms also had to be automated to make use of it. By putting these various machines
together in a single factory, so that the product of one stage of processing could be passed on to the next stage, as on a
sugar plantation, it was possible to achieve further improvements in productivity. By the end of the eighteenth century Britain
could produce textiles so cheaply and in such abundance that it began exporting them to India, devastating that country’s
traditional weaving trade in the process.

The third shift that underpinned Britain’s Industrial Revolution was a far greater reliance on food imports. Just as it used
coal from underground to power its new steam engines, Britain used food from overseas to provide energy for its workers. From
its possessions in the West Indies, it brought in vast quantities of sugar, which provided an astonishing proportion of Britain’s
caloric intake during the nineteenth century, increasing from 4 percent of all calories consumed in 1800 to 22 percent by
1900. Sugar flowed eastward across the Atlantic, paying for manufactured goods that traveled in the opposite direction. Since
an acre of sugar produces as many calories as nine to twelve acres of wheat, imported sugar provided the caloric equivalent
of the produce of 1.3 million “ghost acres” of wheat-farming land in 1800, rising to 2.5 million acres in 1830 and around
20 million acres by 1900. Britain had clearly escaped the constraints of its limited land area by producing industrial goods,
which did not require much land to manufacture, and trading them for food, which did.

Sugar was of course used to sweeten tea, the favored drink of industrial workers, which helpfully delivered energy (from the
sugar) and kept them alert during long shifts (since tea contains caffeine). Sugar was also consumed as a foodstuff, to enliven
an otherwise monotonous diet: It could be added to porridge in the form of treacle or molasses, and eaten as jam (containing
50 to 65 percent sugar) in sandwiches. Treacle or jam spread on bread was favored by working families in the industrial cities
because it was a cheap source of calories and could be prepared quickly without the need to cook anything. Many women were
now working in factories, and they no longer had time to prepare soup. The price of sugar fell and the availability of jam
shot up after 1874, when Britain abolished its tariffs on sugar imports, which dated all the way back to Charles II and his
pineapple in 1661.

It was not just the sugar in the jam that was imported; so too, increasingly, was the wheat used to make the bread. As the
prospect of food shortages loomed in the late eighteenth century, Britain began to import more food from Ireland. Following
the Act of Union of 1801, Ireland was technically part of the United Kingdom, but in practice it was treated as an agricultural
colony by the English. Laws which had forbidden the importing of Irish animal products into England had been repealed in 1766,
and by the end of the 18th century imports of Irish beef had gone up threefold, butter sixfold, and pork sevenfold. By the
early 1840s, imports from Ireland were supplying one sixth of England’s food. This food was produced by men who worked on
the best, most easily cultivated land and were typically given small patches of inferior land on which they grew potatoes
to support themselves and their families. The English could only keep eating bread, in short, because the Irish were eating
potatoes. By sustaining Irish farm workers, the potato helped to fuel the first few decades of British industrialization.