London Before the Industrial Revolution

Start on the river.

It is sometime in the 1690s, near the end of the century, and the best place to understand London is not yet a road.

It is the Thames.

The river is crowded. Small boats dart between larger vessels. Barges move low in the water beneath loads of coal, grain and timber. Ships that have come down the English coast lie beside others that have crossed seas. Along the banks are wharves and stairs, warehouses and cranes, piles of goods waiting to be shifted again.

Almost everything is in motion, and almost everything moves slowly.

A sailor hauls a rope. A porter bends beneath a load. A horse strains against a cart somewhere beyond the quay. Men wait for the tide, or for space at a wharf. Cargo that has travelled hundreds or thousands of miles can still be stopped by a muddy street, a missing labourer or a change in the wind.

London Bridge stands across the river, thick with buildings, less a modern bridge than a narrow piece of city laid over the water. Beyond it rises a London that would have astonished someone who had known the place forty years earlier. Much of the old City has been rebuilt after the Great Fire, and brick and tile have replaced vast stretches of timber. Church towers rise above the roofs. Christopher Wren's new St Paul's Cathedral is taking shape, enormous and improbable above the dense streets. To the west, London reaches toward Westminster; to the north and east, it has already escaped the boundaries of the old City.

By 1700, depending on where one draws the line, roughly half a million people or more live in the metropolis. One historical reconstruction puts the population near 575,000. It is an estimate, not a census count, and fewer than 100,000 of those people lived under the jurisdiction of the City of London itself.

The rest were elsewhere: in Westminster, in Southwark, and in the great northern suburbs that had once been peripheral and were now becoming towns in their own right. The familiar old City—the walled place of guilds, church towers and crooked streets—was no longer London so much as one part of it.

This matters because seventeenth-century London is easily misunderstood. We tend to picture a medieval city enlarged: timber houses leaning over alleys, apprentices in doorways, taverns, markets, horses, church bells. Those things were there. But by the 1690s, they no longer explain the place.

London was coordinating coal from northeastern England, grain from the coast, migrants from the provinces, tobacco and sugar from Atlantic plantations, textiles and luxuries from Asia, taxes for a European war, loans to the government, news of ships at sea and food for hundreds of thousands of people who would need to eat again the following morning.

The scale was becoming extraordinary. The machinery was not.

There were no railways, no steamships, no refrigeration, no electrical grid, no motor transport, and no mechanized network invisibly moving food, water, fuel and information through the city. The work was done instead by people, animals, wind, sails, tides, gravity and fire. London had begun to acquire the complexity of a modern metropolis, but if you followed almost any object far enough—from the hold of a ship to the table where it was consumed—you eventually found a human hand.

That is the London worth looking at closely. Not medieval London, not yet industrial London: the city in between.

Rewind to 1660.

Charles II has returned to England, and the monarchy has been restored after civil war, regicide and republican government. London still appears to be governed by institutions of great age. There are wards and parishes, guilds and livery companies, aldermen, and markets operating under charters and customs accumulated over centuries. Masters take apprentices into their households. Servants sleep beneath the same roofs as their employers. Church bells divide the day, and the City guards its privileges closely.

But beneath these old structures, a more unsettling process is under way. London is growing faster than births among its existing population could sustain, because people die too quickly. Infant and child mortality is severe. Disease moves easily through crowded neighbourhoods. The city is repeatedly replenished not simply by births but by arrivals.

London needs migrants.

Year after year, young people come down the roads toward the capital. Some are sent by families who see opportunity there. Some have arrangements waiting for them. Others arrive because the alternatives at home are worse.

For many young men, one formal route into the city is apprenticeship. A boy may be bound to a London master for years, entering a trade but also a household, where his employer may feed him, house him, discipline him and teach him. The arrangement connects provincial families to the capital through chains of recommendation, money and obligation.

The surviving indentures are unusually revealing.

They are also deceptive. They show us boys better than girls, regulated trades better than informal ones, and the City better than the enormous and less orderly labour market spreading beyond its boundaries.

Women enter London through different routes, and one of the most important is domestic service. A young woman may live in the house where she works, and her employer may control not only her wages but her food, lodging, movements and reputation. She can leave one place and find another. Some servants bargain, some move repeatedly, some return to service later in adulthood.

There is mobility in this world. There is also dependence.

Losing a position may mean losing a bed, and a damaged reputation can follow a woman from household to household. The city offers possibilities, but not evenly, and rarely without conditions.

There is therefore no useful "typical Londoner." A prosperous freeman with a shop in the City inhabits one London; the apprentice sleeping above or behind that shop inhabits another; the servant working in the household occupies another still. Near the river is the casual labourer waiting to see whether anyone will hire him that day. Elsewhere is a brewer, a waterman, a seamstress, a widow keeping a shop, a migrant who arrived last week, a wealthy merchant whose business reaches across the Atlantic. They live within miles of one another, and their worlds may barely resemble each other.

Increasingly, many of them do not live in the City at all. London is expanding beyond its traditional jurisdiction because that is where there is room to expand.

The suburb is not an appendage to the story.

It is the story.

Then, in 1665, people begin to die.

Plague is not new to London; the city has known epidemics before. This one becomes the Great Plague. The Bills of Mortality—the weekly parish reports that attempted to count the dead—record 68,596 plague deaths during 1665, and the true number was probably higher. In one week in September, the official tally records 7,165 deaths from plague.

Those who can leave begin leaving. The royal court goes. Merchants and professionals depart when they have somewhere else to go.

The poor are less fortunate.

Samuel Pepys remains in and around London for much of the epidemic, and in October he records an eerie impression:

“Lord! how empty the streets are, and melancholy.”

It is a memorable line, partly because the city he knew was so rarely empty. But London's emptiness was incomplete. Someone still had to bring food in, and someone had to carry away the dead. Parish officers continued working. Watchmen stood outside infected houses. Gravediggers dug. People bought and sold what they could, and households improvised. The systems keeping London alive became thinner and more frightened, but they did not vanish.

That is one of the recurring facts of the city. Its size makes catastrophe more dangerous, and its size also means that catastrophe cannot simply stop it. Too many people depend on too many other people.

By early 1666 the epidemic has receded. People return, businesses reopen, and the population begins repairing itself.

Then, before London has fully recovered, another disaster begins in a bakery on Pudding Lane.

The fire starts shortly after midnight on 2 September 1666, and it spreads quickly. London's old City is dangerously combustible: narrow streets, crowded buildings, timber construction, warehouses full of flammable goods. A dry summer has left material ready to burn, and wind drives the flames.

For days, the fire moves through the City. People flee carrying whatever they can. Goods are dragged into streets, and buildings are demolished in desperate attempts to make firebreaks. The flames consume churches, shops, warehouses and houses.

By the time the fire is over, most of the old City has been destroyed. Around 13,000 houses are gone, and roughly 100,000 people have been displaced. The scale is so vast that later memory tends to enlarge it further.

We say London burned. Strictly speaking, it did not. The City burned.

That distinction matters. Westminster survived. Much of Southwark survived. The northern suburbs survived. Large numbers of Londoners had watched the destruction from parts of the metropolis the flames never reached. It is also why the persistent story that the Fire somehow burned away the plague is misleading: places outside the burned City had suffered badly from plague too.

What the fire did create was something different: an opportunity. The old City could be redesigned, and plans appeared almost immediately. Some were beautiful. Christopher Wren imagined broad streets and rational spaces, and others proposed geometrical avenues, squares and a city reordered according to principles that would have been impossible before the flames.

On paper, the old maze could be erased. On the ground, the problem was harder, because a city is not only buildings. It is ownership. A burned house may have disappeared, but the claim to the ground beneath it has not.

There are landlords and tenants, leases and rents, boundaries, debts, inheritances and competing rights. Thousands of people want to rebuild, and they want to rebuild quickly. Changing the entire street plan would mean changing thousands of private arrangements at once.

So the elegant plans stall, and London goes back onto its old footprint. Streets are widened in places, building rules change, brick and stone become more important, and public spaces and churches are reconstructed. But much of the medieval geography survives.

You can burn a building faster than you can extinguish a property right.

Within roughly a decade, much of the damaged City has been rebuilt, and hidden inside that achievement is another story. It is about money.

The Corporation of London borrows heavily to finance public rebuilding. Revenue connected to taxes on coal helps support parts of the programme, and investors lend on the expectation that future income will repay present expenditure.

It is sophisticated. It is also risky.

In 1683, the Corporation defaults.

The rebuilding of London, usually remembered as a story of architecture, is also a story about credit. A city has been physically reconstructed with borrowed money secured against the future, and London is beginning to discover that streets, buildings and finance can become difficult to separate.

There is a question about London that becomes more interesting the larger the city gets.

How do you feed it? Not in theory. Tomorrow morning.

Hundreds of thousands of people wake up needing bread, meat, fish, beer and vegetables. Horses need fodder. Bakers need flour. Brewers need grain and fuel. Households need coal, workshops need materials, ships need provisions, and everyone needs water.

Then the day ends, and the entire problem resets.

There is no central metropolitan authority directing all this. No trucks arrive during the night from distribution centres. No refrigeration allows vast quantities of food to sit safely for weeks. Road travel is slow and expensive, especially for heavy goods.

London survives instead through a complicated system that no single person controls. Merchants buy and wholesalers aggregate. Farmers bring produce, carters haul it, porters carry it, watermen ferry it, shopkeepers retail it. Warehouses hold what they can. Markets specialize. Relationships are repeated until they become dependable enough to function as infrastructure.

The markets themselves are far from obsolete. There are many of them, scattered across the metropolis and increasingly specialized. Meat moves through one set of spaces, grain through another, fish through others, while hay, vegetables, coal and livestock follow their own paths.

The most important artery is the river, because anything bulky becomes easier to move by water. Grain can arrive along the coast. Timber can float toward the city. Coal can be carried hundreds of miles by ship more efficiently than it could ever be dragged overland in equivalent quantities.

And coal matters enormously. By the late seventeenth century, London has become one of the world's great coal-consuming cities, and ships bring it south from the Newcastle region in extraordinary quantities.

The coal is unloaded. Then begins the harder part, which is moving it through London: into breweries, into workshops, into houses, up streets, through alleys, into cellars and storage spaces.

The city is hungry for heat.

But almost none of this coal is doing the thing for which coal will later become famous. It is not driving steam engines. Most of it is being burned domestically. Some industries consume very large quantities, breweries among them, but London can burn enormous volumes of coal without becoming a mechanized industrial city.

This is one of the century's odder surprises. The energy transition has begun. The machine revolution has not.

London already possesses the appetite for fossil fuel that we tend to associate with industrial modernity, and what it mostly does with that fuel is keep people warm, boil liquid and heat furnaces. The coal smoke hangs over a city still powered primarily by muscle.

Water reveals the same contradiction, because London does have infrastructure. The New River, built earlier in the century, brings fresh water from Hertfordshire toward the city, and it is an impressive undertaking. Water travels by gravity for miles, and at New River Head in Clerkenwell it enters a distribution system that feeds wooden pipes and local reservoirs.

From a distance, this sounds almost modern: piped water, a network, subscribers, engineered supply.

Then look closer.

Water does not necessarily arrive whenever a householder turns something. Supply can be intermittent and pressure is low, so people may store water when it is available. A household may have access to a pipe while another nearby does not. Wells remain important, pumps remain important, and water carriers remain useful. The infrastructure exists, but people constantly fill its gaps.

The pattern can be found everywhere. A crane can lift a heavy load, but men must operate it. A pump can move water, but someone still has to carry the water onward. A printing press can reproduce a page hundreds of times, and someone sets every piece of type, someone inks the form, someone pulls the press. A sailing ship can move astonishing quantities of cargo across an ocean without an engine, and it does so because crews continuously adjust rope and canvas to wind and sea.

This is not a technologically primitive city. London is full of machines. They are simply not yet doing most of the work.

The phrase pre-industrial London can create another misconception, because it sounds like London before industry. But London is full of production, and things are being made almost everywhere. Clothing is cut and stitched. Metal is worked, leather is processed, books are printed, beer is brewed. Food is prepared commercially, furniture is made, ships are supplied and repaired, imported sugar is refined, and goods are finished, repackaged, altered and sold.

Work is embedded in the city. A household may also be a workshop. A shop may be both place of sale and place of production. A street may become a labour market. A market is a workplace, and the Thames is a workplace on a colossal scale.

What has not yet appeared in dominant form is the later factory system: large numbers of workers concentrated around power-driven machines, producing goods at a pace increasingly determined by machinery. London has industry. It does not yet have industrialization as the nineteenth century will understand it.

This distinction also changes whom we notice, because formal occupational records can make work appear more male than it was.

Women worked constantly. Some ran shops, some traded, some stitched clothing, some worked as outworkers, some helped operate family businesses, and many entered domestic service. Much of this labour leaves a weaker paper trail than the formal records of male apprenticeship or company membership.

The city contains another enormous workforce that is still harder to see: casual labourers, porters, carriers, people hired for a day, a task, a load, a journey. Men whose labour is essential, but whose names may enter the surviving record only when something goes wrong. An accident. A dispute. A theft. A trial.

London is not waiting for work to arrive with the Industrial Revolution. It is already saturated with work. What it has not yet learned is how to remove very many bodies from the process.

Consider a spoonful of sugar. By the late seventeenth century, Londoners encounter sugar more often than earlier generations did. To the consumer it is a substance; to the merchant, a cargo; to the customs official, an entry; to the refiner, raw material; to an investor, possibly a return.

The closer one looks, the longer the chain becomes.

The sugar reaches London on ships that have crossed the Atlantic. The cargo comes largely from plantation colonies in the Caribbean, and those plantations depend upon the coerced labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

What appears in London as sweetness has violence embedded in its price.

The connection is not incidental to the city's rise. Between 1660 and 1700, London becomes the coordinating centre of much of England's colonial trade. Historian Nuala Zahedieh estimates that the city handled about three quarters of the country's colonial commerce during the period. The estimate concerns colonial commerce, not all English overseas trade. Ships arrive, customs are paid, cargoes are warehoused, merchants extend credit, risks are shared, and goods are refined and redistributed.

London sits in the middle.

Sugar is one commodity and tobacco is another, and across a much larger geographical system come Asian textiles, spices and other goods that are changing habits of consumption. The metropolis is becoming global long before ordinary movement within the city becomes easy. A merchant can have financial interests thousands of miles away while a porter struggles to move his cargo the final few hundred yards.

At the centre of the Atlantic system is another London institution: the Royal African Company. Reconstituted in 1672 and backed by powerful political and commercial figures, the company participates directly in the transportation and sale of enslaved Africans. Its investors include men of status, and its business is embedded in respectable metropolitan commerce.

Political conflict later weakens its monopoly. That does not end English participation in the slave trade. It helps open the trade to more participants.

The violence of the system also reaches London physically. Black people live and work in the metropolis. Some are free, some are servants, and some are enslaved or treated as property. Often the archival record refuses to tell us enough to say with confidence which. Occasionally someone becomes visible because he or she runs.

In 1693, a ten-year-old boy called Quamy appears in a notice placed by the merchant Richard Tudway after the child has escaped from Tudway's house on Distaff Lane. Quamy was enslaved. Tudway was trying to recover possession of him. The advertisement describes Quamy and his clothing, but it does not tell us what he thought when he left or where he went. The record is built from the perspective of the person who wanted possession restored.

Then Quamy disappears from the surviving record. The silence is part of the evidence.

We know enough to understand that empire was not confined to ships offshore or plantations across an ocean. It was in London houses, in counting rooms, in warehouses, in shops, on tables. And sometimes in the people trying to escape.

London is also becoming politically difficult to control. The problem is not merely that large crowds can gather there. The problem is that London possesses institutions of its own. The City has officers, elections, companies, courts, juries, corporate rights, traditions of self-government and money.

It also has printers.

During the later years of Charles II's reign, political and religious tensions intensify. The question of whether the king's Catholic brother James should eventually inherit the throne helps produce the Exclusion Crisis, and London becomes one of the places where the conflict is organized. Religious identity overlaps with neighbourhood loyalty and civic politics, and groups begin behaving in ways later recognizable as party organization.

Whig. Tory. The terms are still unstable.

These are not modern political parties, and there are no professional national campaign organisations in the later sense. But something is hardening. Networks become more durable, political identities become more recognizable, and London becomes a centre of opposition to the Crown.

The monarchy notices.

In 1683, Charles II's government succeeds in a legal attack on the City charter through a quo warranto judgment. The legal language can make the episode seem obscure. Its implications are not. Control the civic constitution and you influence who governs the City: who holds office, how companies operate, how elections work, who sits on juries, and which political networks possess institutional power.

London is not simply a large town beneath the Crown. It is a rival concentration of authority.

Then Charles dies. James II becomes king in 1685, and his reign lasts three years. In 1688, William of Orange lands in England, James's support collapses, and William and Mary eventually take the throne in the settlement known as the Glorious Revolution.

Again, the familiar national story can obscure what this means inside London. People must decide whose authority they recognize. Officeholders must swear new oaths. Civic rights have to be settled, institutions change allegiance, and credit follows politics.

In 1689–90, Parliament reverses the earlier judgment against the City, calling it “illegal and arbitrary” and restoring corporate liberties, companies, markets and elections.

This does not make London democratic. Political participation remains restricted, and status, wealth and religion all matter. But the monarchy's attempt to subordinate the City's old constitution has failed, and a new political arrangement is taking shape.

That arrangement has a problem: war.

And war requires money, a great deal of it.

In the 1690s, someone trying to understand what is happening in London has a relatively new place to go: a coffeehouse.

The room might be crowded. Men come and leave, and conversation shifts from politics to prices, shipping, scandal and war. Printed material circulates. News is repeated, corrected, exaggerated, contradicted. A letter from one port may matter to a man awaiting a ship from another. Reputation matters, and information can be worth money.

Coffeehouses have sometimes been described as an early version of the internet, but the comparison makes them sound more modern than they were. They are licensed businesses. Authorities regulate them, political surveillance is possible, and their clientele is not universal. Old hierarchies do not dissolve when someone buys a cup of coffee.

But some coffeehouses begin acquiring specialties, and one of them belongs to Edward Lloyd. By the 1690s, people with interests in shipping are gathering there. A ship has sailed. Another is overdue. A vessel has been sighted, a cargo has been lost, and a merchant wants to know whether a report is reliable. The questions matter because ships carry fortunes.

In 1696, Lloyd begins publishing Lloyd's News. The later insurance institution that will carry his name does not suddenly appear complete, but the coffeehouse exposes an important need. London's commercial world has become so large, and its risks so geographically distant, that people will pay close attention to anyone who can gather trustworthy information about what is happening elsewhere. The city is developing a market not only in goods but in knowledge.

Print is changing too. In 1695, the statutory system requiring pre-publication licensing expires. Censorship does not vanish: printers can still be prosecuted, political pressure remains, restrictions remain. But the mechanics of controlling publication have changed. More material can circulate, more arguments appear, more claims compete.

London has always been noisy. Now the noise is increasingly printed.

In 1694, a new institution opens in Mercers' Hall. At first, it is surprisingly small: seventeen clerks and two gatekeepers. There is nothing about the scene to suggest that one of the most consequential financial institutions in British history has just been created.

The Bank of England is established because the government needs money. England is at war with France, and war consumes cash faster than traditional systems of royal finance can reliably provide it. The state needs people to lend. Investors subscribe capital, and the new Bank lends to the government and receives privileges in return.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to encounter the words Bank of England without importing what the institution later becomes: a central bank, a pillar of the financial system, a body capable of moving markets by changing an interest rate. None of that should be projected backward into Mercers' Hall.

At the beginning there are clerks and ledgers. Deposits, notes, government obligations, promises about future payments. Trust.

The innovation lies partly in making promises useful. Money need not always mean a particular silver coin sitting in a particular chest, because credit can move value across time. A government can borrow today against revenues expected tomorrow. A merchant can transact through paper claims. An investor can possess an interest in a debt. London is becoming increasingly skilled at converting future income into present power.

Then the physical money begins to fail.

English silver coinage has a problem. Many coins are still hammered, their edges are irregular, and that makes clipping possible: someone can shave silver from the edge of a coin and pass the diminished coin onward at its nominal value.

Clip enough coins, and the currency begins telling a lie. The markings say one thing and the amount of silver says another. Good coins disappear from circulation, bad ones remain, and merchants become wary. The problem becomes severe enough that the government decides on a radical solution, the Great Recoinage.

In 1696, old hammered silver is withdrawn so that it can be melted and replaced with milled coins that are much harder to clip unnoticed.

The logic is straightforward. The execution is brutal.

The old currency disappears faster than the Mint can supply the new, and there is suddenly not enough usable silver money. Payments become difficult, credit tightens, trade suffers.

People who live close to subsistence do not experience the crisis as a debate about monetary policy. They experience it when buying food, or fuel, or trying to be paid.

The timing is striking. London has just founded the Bank of England, its merchants have developed elaborate systems of credit, the government is experimenting with unprecedented forms of public borrowing, and paper claims and promises are proliferating. And yet everyday exchange can still be thrown into confusion because there are not enough reliable pieces of silver.

The 1690s are difficult for other reasons too. England is at war and shipping suffers losses. Taxes increase. Food and fuel prices rise, poor harvests contribute to distress, and hunger becomes widespread. The new Bank itself comes under pressure.

It is tempting, looking backward, to turn these years into the opening chapter of an inevitable financial triumph. The people living through them would have had little reason to do so. To them, innovation and crisis arrived together.

Return to the Thames. It is close to 1700, and the rebuilt City rises beyond the water.

Somewhere beyond the wharves, clerks are recording debts and printers are setting type. Servants are carrying water, brewers are burning coal, shopkeepers are selling sugar. Merchants are waiting for ships and labourers are waiting for work. A woman is stitching cloth by hand. A porter is carrying something that has crossed an ocean.

London has become one of the largest cities in Europe. It consumes enormous quantities of coal, draws food from an expanding hinterland, and coordinates much of England's colonial commerce. Its prosperity is connected to plantation slavery and the trade in enslaved people. Its political institutions have survived an attempt by the Crown to break their independence. Its coffeehouses circulate news and its printers multiply political argument. Its financiers lend to the state, its government borrows against future taxes, its population is continually replenished by migrants, and its economy extends across oceans.

Many of the institutions we associate with modern commercial society are already visible. But the thing we most readily associate with modern economic life is largely absent.

The machine.

The major breakthroughs in mechanized textiles, steam power, ironmaking and factory production mostly lie ahead. They will emerge during the eighteenth century, and often far from London: Manchester, Birmingham, the Midlands, the coalfields, places where different combinations of energy, resources, skills and machinery begin transforming production.

There is no reason someone standing beside the Thames in 1700 should know that this will happen. History has not yet revealed its direction, and London itself demonstrates why the outcome was not obvious.

Here is a city that uses coal on a tremendous scale without steam engines. A city with global commerce but no steamships, and sophisticated credit but recurring shortages of coin. A city capable of feeding half a million people without railways, and of building a water network without supplying every house with running water. A city capable of coordinating extraordinary complexity while still depending on innumerable acts of physical labour.

That is the revealing fact about London at the end of the seventeenth century. It is not an old world simply waiting to be replaced, nor an industrial world in embryonic form, mechanically destined to become ours. It is something stranger.

London has developed scale before mechanization, demand before mass production, global commercial networks before steam transport, a huge coal economy before steam power, public credit before modern banking, and an information market before telecommunications. Again and again, the city has found ways to coordinate more people, more goods, more money and more distant places without removing the human body from the centre of the system.

Follow almost any transaction far enough and there it is. A sailor pulls the rope. A waterman judges the tide. A horse pulls the cart. A servant carries the water. A woman guides a needle through cloth. A printer sets a letter of type. A clerk dips a pen. A porter bends, lifts, and begins walking.

The goods may have come from Barbados. The money may exist partly as a promise. The news may concern a ship hundreds of miles away. The coal may have travelled down the coast from Newcastle, and the sugar may have begun its journey in a plantation worked by enslaved people across the Atlantic. But somewhere, at the final point of contact, someone still has to pick the thing up.

From the river, London can already look like the future.

Look closer.

The future is being carried by hand.