Clapham and Politics

Clapham accepted Marshall’s point that economic history could not be entirely separated from an interest in contemporary social problems, but wished to keep his distance from immediate political or policy aims. Clark remarked that ‘His purpose was scientific: he wanted to make available the information which economists, statesmen and general historians needed, and in the form which would be useful to them’ (Clark 1946: 348). Clapham was a free trade liberal and supporter of social reforms, but he did not use economic history for immediate political ends as did Cunningham

(in arguing for protection) or the Hammonds, Tawney, and Cole in arguing for social reform or socialism. Thus, Clapham took a balanced—or complacent—view of the economic policies of the early nineteenth century when judged by the standards of the time. There were faults of debt, taxation, commercial policy, unregulated town growth, and the Poor Law, but there was also a limit to the amount of creative legislation that could be implemented by any government, and Britain did better than other countries. He pointed out that George IV’s London was insanitary but nothing like as bad as Charles X’s Paris, and the French death rate in the 1820s was 50% higher. He concluded that ‘the over-governed continentals of the early nineteenth century rightly gave credit to governments which knew when to hold their hand, to laisser faire—laisser passer, and to governments which had been able to preserve a good inheritance reasonably intact’ (Clapham 1926: 317).

One of Clapham’s few contributions to current policy debates was an article on ‘Protection and the Wool Trade’ in 1904, in which he criticised tariff reformers as ‘amateurs in economic pathology’ (Clapham 1904: 641), warning that retaliation would lead to tariff war, disorganisation of trade, and no prospect of a reduction of duties after the war (Kadish 1994: 227). But he did not adopt a dogmatic position. He was careful, rejecting overly assertive generalisations: policies should pay regard to the different contexts and circumstances of each country. In an article on the French economy in 1907, he remarked that tariffs would not create full employment—but that without them, French industries would have suffered more than they had. His book on the woollen trade took a balanced view, arguing that the case rested on comparative economic research rather than categorical assertion:

In Germany protection is associated with rising, in France with falling exports.

If any fiscal moral were to be extracted from the facts it might run somewhat as follows: that at times of fiscal controversy there is a tendency to exaggerate the importance of government action, both positive and negative, and to underrate the effects of those deep working economic forces for which Acts of Parliament have but a limited and an indirect control. That this is a moral distasteful to the controversialists cannot be helped (Clapham 1907: 203—214).

The implication was that such topics should be removed from theoreticians and passed to political economists and their successors—economic historians (Kadish 1994: 228). It was not a challenge to which he was to turn.

Although the debates over tariff reform and free trade were fierce, and set Clapham’s two mentors against each other, the third volume of his economic history of modern Britain was largely silent on the issue. There were only two references: to a full-dress discussion of imperial and commercial policies in 1903-1905; and to the fact that free traders won the British general election with a ‘monstrous majority’ and ‘were content almost to complacency’ (Clapham 1938: 41, 51). He did not assess the case on each side, or set out their counterarguments, let alone subject them to any statistical scrutiny. His general conclusion was that Britain was as fully occupied as any country could have hoped to be in 1910-1913—a further example of his willingness to assert rather than analyse—but was not ‘stirring’ (ibid.: 71) as were Germany and the USA or as she herself had been in the past. Nevertheless, Clapham felt that ‘her conservatism had been shaken and that she was preparing, at her own pace, in those last years, to prove that she was not decadent, though both enemies and desponding friends often said that she was’ (ibid.).

He came to a similarly bland view on the return to the gold standard after the war, where Foxwell and Marshall took different views. He pointed out that Britain had gone back to gold after the Napoleonic Wars and did so again in 1925. He merely noted that the Committee on the Currency did not discuss other options of a devalued sovereign or managed currency as a way of avoiding the discomforts of returning to gold as a result of sterling prices being out of line. Clapham pointed out that everyone knew there would be discomforts, and critics anticipated many—a nod to his colleague Maynard Keynes’s critique of the decision. But his conclusion was even-handed. Although the case of the critics seemed to be proven when Britain came off gold in 1931, ‘it is far from certain that the ultimate distress was inherent in the original decision’. He left the matter there, without explaining why the return to gold might not have been the main reason for the economic difficulties of the late 1920s, or what share it might bear (ibid.: 538). As in the case of free trade, controversial areas of economic policy were treated briefly without engaging with the arguments on either side.

Unlike the work of many other economic historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Clapham’s interest in economic history did not emerge from the ‘pursuit of some external ideology’ (Kadish 1994: 223). However, there was a strong implicit ideology. His emphasis on economic forces as natural and superior to government action could lead to accusations that his work was an apologia for free-market capitalism. As Postan pointed out, Clapham had ‘an admiring appreciation of the self-adjusting action of the economic mechanism, and a horror of sudden and dramatic change’ (Postan 1946: 56). His account of the development of the British economy in the nineteenth century avoided the moral outrage at capitalism that had been expressed by Engels, Toynbee, or the Hammonds, and left-wing critics found him to be complacent. Clark offered a defence, arguing that Clapham accepted the need for Liberal reforms designed to remove the imperfections in the market; he believed that ‘great inequalities of wealth are a danger and an evil’; he supported gradual reform to prevent casual employment and to make towns healthy, to control dangerous and unhealthy work, and to remove the worst inequalities in wealth so that ‘trade and classes will have learnt to work better together than they now do’ (Clark 1946: 347-348). These changes rested, in Clapham’s words, on the growth of Christian virtues of ‘self-restraint, selfdenial, an honest attempt on the part of all classes to understand and help one another ... A Christian nation in the real sense of the word would certainly come very near to the socialist ideal’ (Clapham 1909: 101).

Clapham was aware of the criticism of his work. In the Preface to the reissue of The Railway Age in 1939, he noted the complaints of John Hammond that he gave a ‘happy impression’ (Clapham 1939: ix) of the period. He pointed out that he did not mean that everything was getting better, only that recent historians stressed ‘worsenings’ and ignored the ‘betterings’. He argued that excessive concentration on shadow led historians to miss patches of sunlight:

It is very easy to do this unawares. Thirty years ago I read and marked Arthur Young’s Travels in France, and taught from the marked passages. Five years ago I went through it again, to find that whenever Young spoke of a wretched Frenchman I had marked him, but that many of his references to happy or prosperous Frenchmen remained unmarked. Sympathy with wretchedness is the sign of a generous mind. Let us hope that the attempt to record other things, in their due proportion, does not denote an ageing heart hardened by statistics (ibid.: x).

Perhaps the most explicit expression of Clapham’s views came in the Epilogue to his economic history of modern Britain, when he reflected on the outbreak of the First World War in a way that he did not attempt in the book on France and Germany. He now asked whether industrial and capitalist civilisation, the private control of the means of production, led to war. He recognised that mercantilist belief that the volume of trade was limited could lead to tensions, but he argued that there was ‘no essential connection with capitalism . The search for markets and the desire to retain them, with all the frictions which they may set up in a world of expanding national economies, were not vicious products of capitalist greed’ (Clapham 1938: 514). Sometimes trade might entail immorally pushing goods into reluctant markets and then demanding State support, but Clapham took a more benign view of trade that had more in common with Richard Cobden:

Merchants and manufacturers of the nineteenth century thought of themselves as lovers of Peace, which they certainly were, and of their work as a fosterer of Peace, which has not yet been proved false in spite of secondary trade wars. The charge most often brought against them then was that they loved Peace too well, for their pockets’ sake, Peace without Honour ... At least, during the generations which these economic men had most power, the world for ninety-nine years was free from that ‘general war’ with which the statesmen of the eighteenth century had been thoroughly familiar (ibid.: 515).

This interpretation was close to the implications of Clapham’s account of French and German economic history up to 1914. He accepted that industrialists produced ‘terrible engines of war’ (ibid.), yet he was not convinced that the arms trade had anything to do with the outbreak of war in 1914. For industrialists, war was likely to mean loss of trade, high taxes, and death in the family—that it brought high profits did not prove they wanted war, any more than the high wages secured by workers meant that they wanted war: ‘Industrialists as a class were everywhere pacific; merchants and money- handlers even more so’ (ibid.: 516). Clapham’s conclusion was that the civilisation of the Victorian era was less warlike than any that came before: ‘[T]he individual selfishness to which it gave scope, in the ownership of property and other ways, was not more threatening to the peace of the world than that centralised, impersonal, property-controlling or property-owning state selfishness which shows signs of succeeding it for a time’ (ibid.: 518).

It is easy to see Clapham as unquestioning of the values of the late nineteenth century in which he grew up. Yet the final words of the economic history of modern Britain showed some of the virtues of that culture. He reflected on the desire for greater equality in claims to resources—something that ‘all men of good will and good sense were bound to share’, with differences only of method and degree concerning what other values are to be surrendered, and what degree of equality is to be wished:

Hanging behind all thought and discussion of such matters were—or should have been—the reflections that almost the least propertied of their countrymen was already a privileged member of the human race; that the talk of a world of plenty which needed only to be organised, a way of speech then coming into fashion among social experimentalists, was not yet relevant to a world some two-thirds of whose inhabitants had not, by Western standards, decent clothing for their backs or plain food enough to eat; and that the privileged position of Britain, and indeed of the white races, though much less insecure than some pessimists maintained, was not quite certainly a part of the permanent divine order of things (ibid.: 554).