From town to town: how commercial travel connected manufacturers and markets during the industrial revolution

Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009) 642–667 www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

From town to town: how commercial travel connected manufacturers and markets during the industrial revolution Andrew Popp University of Liverpool Management School, Chatham Street, Liverpool, L69 7ZH, United Kingdom

Abstract Positioning itself with regards to debates on the role of regionalization in the industrial revolution and on consumer and retailing revolutions, this paper uses the records of John Shaw, hardware factor of Wolverhampton, to examine how commercial travel created real spatial interactions across the industrializing economy of northern England in the period 1810–15. The paper argues that by integrating production and consumption, commercial travel played a vital part in advancing and reconciling the concurrent but apparently conflicting processes of economic regionalization and economic integration that characterized the period. Empirically, the paper contributes original data indicating concrete patterns of interaction across the space economy of early nineteenth century northern England in terms of both ‘routes’ and the intensity of interactions. The empirical material also allows for discussion of customer identities, the structure of geographically dispersed commodity chains and regional variations, if any, the nature of customer relationships. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Commercial travel; Regionalization; Specialization; Integration; Wolverhampton

Introduction How, and by whom, were economic and spatial integration created across the British economy as it underwent rapid growth and development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? The conjunction of several strands of enquiry in British history – economic, business, social, and urban – as well as in historical geography, has highlighted this relatively neglected E-mail address: [email protected] 0305-7488/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.01.019

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question in our understanding of the industrial revolution. At the macro-level, Crafts and Mulatu have demonstrated that the location of manufacturing industry, particularly its regionalization, was to a large degree fixed prior to the development of the railway system.1 This implies that relatively nationally integrated product (and, perhaps, factor) markets existed during the era of canal and coach transport. This chimes with an increasing volume of studies from business historians focused on micro-level processes in the regionalization of industry during and beyond the industrial revolution period.2 Similarly, economic, social, and urban historians have emphasized the extent to which any industrial revolution was accompanied, or even preceded, by revolutions in consumption and retailing that reshaped practices and patterns of consumption and the structures of markets at national, regional, and sub-regional levels. Berg has celebrated the transformation of luxury, fashion and consumption in the eighteenth century, emphasizing how this was a process in which manufacturers, merchants, retailers and consumers all played important roles.3 Adopting a regional perspective, Stobart and Hann, note how much recent work on the history of retailing has, in ‘[r]eflecting broader analyses of production and consumption . emphasised the transformation of retailing from traditionally organised, local and primitive, to large-scale, nationally integrated and ‘modern’ systems’.4 Crucially, Stobart and Hann argue that his shift to a recognizably ‘modern,’ integrated structure in retailing occurred not in the late nineteenth century but instead at least one hundred years earlier. An important element of this general story of retail change is the increasingly dominant role of London as a site of taste-making and innovation in consumption practice.5 However, the important linkages between the near simultaneous emergence of a regionalized pattern of industrial location and a modern, nationally integrated retailing sector are obvious. Somewhat paradoxically, social and urban historians have been uncovering patterns of localized cultures of consumption, not least in those northern towns and cities – be it Manchester, Sheffield or Leeds – that played such a prominent role in the regionalization of industry.6 Thus, like economic and business historians, they emphasize the persistence, perhaps deepening, of regionally differentiated practices and consumer identities occurring in step with processes of modernization and integration. As Hudson has remarked, the period saw regions become both more ‘similar to and different from other areas’.7 At the same time, however, deepening integration across greater geographical spans distanciated economic relations, possibly leading to a reordering that eroded their customary bases in familiarity and obligation, as charted by Muldrew and Finn, replacing these with a more marketized system rooted in individuality, anonymity, and the cash nexus. Market expansion and integration bought with it then not just a logistical challenge but also one of 1 N. Crafts and A. Mulatu, How did the location of industry respond to falling transport costs in Britain before World War One?, Working paper No. 05/04, Department of Economic History, London School of Economics. 2 P. Hudson (Ed.), Regions and Industries: Perspectives on the Industrial Revolution, Cambridge, 1989. 3 M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Oxford, 2005. 4 J. Stobart and A. Hann, Retailing revolution in the eighteenth century: evidence from north-west England, Business History 26 (2004) 171. 5 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure (note 3), 182. 6 H. Barker, ‘Smoke cities’: northern industrial towns in late Georgian England, Urban History 31 (2004) 175–190. 7 P. Hudson, Review of H. Berry and J. Gregory, Creating and Consuming Culture in North East England, 1660–1830, Business History 47 (2005) 60–602.

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renegotiating roles and relationships, for example in relation to the central issue of credit. Credit was both a near universal component of economic exchange in this period and a representation of the social embedding of economic relationships.8 However, considered together, these literatures reveal not only this apparent paradox but also a complementary lacunae; a deficit in our understanding of how the interdependent processes of integration and specialization unfolded on the ground. This paper attempts to address that deficit by focusing on the work of commercial travellers in the late industrial revolution period, concentrating on the way in which functional integration between production and consumption was accompanied by spatial integration between regions that were increasingly differentiated in terms of their economic and social structures.9 Conceptually, whilst acknowledging the importance of the wider structures within which these processes were set, we highlight the foundational role of individual human agency. The inter-spatial was inter-personal, even as geographical reordering was accompanied by alterations in the social contexts of economic exchange. This raises important questions about the relationships between spatiality and sociability, networks, and trust, relationships made manifest in the economic exchanges occurring within distribution systems. The paper will draw on detailed archival evidence relating to the commercial travels undertaken by John Shaw, hardware factor of Wolverhampton, primarily in the period 1810–15. Questions addressed include; how were processes of regionalization, specialization, and integration effected and reconciled through the spatial and functional interaction involved in commercial travel; what degree of penetration could travellers achieve and how did this relate to existing urban and retail hierarchies; who were the key agents in these interactions and how were their relationships structured; and to what extent can we discern meaningful differences in practice in commercial exchanges across different localities? The paper is structured thus; first a review of the literatures sketched above will be developed in order to isolate more clearly an important lacuna in our understanding of developments in the period. Next we will outline the existing literature on commercial travel in this period and introduce the firm, the archive, and the industrial context provided by the Black Country. Subsequent sections will deal in turn with the patterns of integration effected by the firm before turning to the question of commercial practices and relationships from place to place, including the use of credit.

Regionalization, specialization, and integration Renewed attention to the importance of regions in British business and economic history has focused on the concept of the industrial district; geographically clustered populations of firms specializing in interdependent products and processes. Following Marshall, the advantages of clustering are thought to derive from the generation of external economies of scale and scope 8

C. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England, Basingstoke, 1998; M. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914, Cambridge, 2003. 9 R. Church, New perspectives on the history of products, firms, marketing and consumers in Britain and the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, Economic History Review 52 (1999) 405; M. French, Commercials, careers and culture: travelling salesmen in Britain, 1890s–1930s, Economic History Review 58 (2005) 352.

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underpinned by the pooling of resources, by processes of organizational and technological spillover and cross-fertilization, and by the emergence of a supportive milieu or ‘industrial atmosphere’.10 Adopting such a framework, recent works have explored English industrial districts in a range of contexts, producing a literature that acknowledges the spatially uneven and differentiated nature of industrialization.11 However, many of these studies have been inward looking and overwhelming concerned with the contents of the ‘black box’ represented by the district itself. Relatively scant attention has been paid to how districts sat within wider economic and spatial contexts and, in particular, the links between districts, markets and distribution.12 Symptomatically, in the introduction to the pathbreaking Regions and industry, Hudson makes little reference to issues of markets and demand and none of the questions she frames in relation to ‘regions and economic change’ are concerned with these issues.13 Conversely, studies of the merchanting system have tended to focus on its more elite dimensions and connections to overseas markets.14 If it was true in 1994 that we ‘know very little about the business world of . ‘the hordes of little men who helped to boost the demand side’ of the economy during the Industrial Revolution’ then it remains broadly true today, particularly with regard to the wider distribution system.15 How a jigsaw of industrial districts and regions fitted into a wider picture of national development remains then open to dispute. Hudson, justifying a regional approach to the study of industrialization, characterizes Craft’s argument in favour of the existence of well-integrated national product markets by the early nineteenth century as ‘an act of faith rather than informed judgement’.16 Drawing on the work of historical geographers, Hudson goes on to claim that the regional patterns seen in the construction of the canal system actually led regions to become ‘more insular for a time than before’.17 As this reference suggests, historical geographers have for some time been alive to the difficulties of theorizing the ‘production of regions’ as differentiated yet integrated phenomena within evolving systems of capitalist accumulation; most prominently in the debate between Gregory and Langton in the pages of this journal in the late 1980s.18 This paper does not aspire to the meta-theory aimed at by Gregory; nonetheless elements of that debate remain pertinent to our purpose here. Certainly, it seems now that Gregory’s claim that Langton implied ‘that 10

A. Marshall, Trade and Industry, Basingstoke, 1919, 284–287. Hudson, Regions and Industry (note 2); J. Wilson and A. Popp, Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks in England, 1750–1970, Aldershot, 2003. 12 See though, S. Broadberry and A. Marrison, External economies of scale in the Lancashire cotton industry, Economic History Review 55 (2002) 51–57; A. Popp, Barriers to innovation in marketing in the mid-nineteenth century: merchant–manufacturer relationships, Business History 44 (2002) 19–39. 13 Hudson, Regional perspective, in: P. Hudson (Ed.), Regions and Industries (note 2), 20–21. 14 S.D. Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain: from the Industrial Revolution to World War 1, Cambridge, 1992; Popp, Barriers to innovation in marketing in the mid-nineteenth century (note 12). 15 D.A. Kent, Small businessmen and their credit transactions in early nineteenth-century Britain, Business History 36 (1994) 47. 16 Hudson, Regional perspective (note 13), 14. 17 Hudson, Regional perspective (note 13), 15. 18 D. Gregory, The production of regions in England’s Industrial Revolution, Journal of Historical Geography 14 (1988) 50–58; J. Langton, The production of regions in England’s industrial revolution: a response, Journal of Historical Geography 14 (1988) 170–174; D. Gregory, Reply, Journal of Historical Geography 14 (1988) 174–176. 11

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differentiation and integration are opposing processes’ was little more than a straw man and that we would find little disagreement with the assertion that the two processes ‘can often produce and, for that matter, sustain [each] other.’19 Nor is it necessary to accept Gregory’s ‘historico-geographical materialism’ to acknowledge the ‘extraordinary volatility of the landscapes of the early Industrial Revolution.’20 Instead, our concern is with those working to order that volatility – to make sense of and use it at the same time as they were engaged in producing it. In this perhaps modest but still important aim we draw support both from Gregory’s emphasis on the ‘salience of social action, . the sense in which . people make their own history (and, yes, geography)’ and Langton’s plea for the quotidian, for those actions away from ‘those brief shining moments’ of struggle and crisis, and his reclamation of the materiality of the process of production, a process of the production of regions as much as of commodities.21 In the end, in Langton’s words, we are ‘straight back to the distribution of natural resources, labour and capitalists with particular cultural characteristics, and patterns of movements of goods and people.’22 As both Gregory and Langton finally appear to agree, regional specialization or differentiation and increasing national integration are not dichotomous. Smithian economics suggest that the increase in the division of labour, simultaneously organizational and spatial, that occurs under conditions of increasing clustering will necessarily be accompanied by an expansion in the scale and geographical scope of markets. Certainly it is the case that: [a]s they developed on the basis of their comparative advantages and the external economies of scale available to particular industries within them the canal-based economies became more specialised, more differentiated from one another and more internally unified.23 However, it does not necessarily follow that regions developed ‘largely separate from one another’.24 As McKendrick has noted, ‘the prosperity of Lancashire cotton manufacturers, London brewers, Sheffield cutlers, Staffordshire potters, the toy makers of Birmingham . were based on sales to a mass market’.25 More recently Berg has explicitly criticized the insularity that sometimes accompanies adoption of a regional perspective, complaining that ‘regional analysis alone misconstrues the organization of these consumer industries. For they were by no means self-enclosed. The manufacturers were networked over the whole country’.26 However, whilst Berg celebrates peddlers as ‘innovative, aggressive, and pushing salesmen and women . modern commercial salesmen,’ she does not reconstruct in detail their activities.27 19

Gregory, The production of regions (note 18), 51. Gregory, The production of regions, 51. 21 Gregory, The production of regions, 54; Langton, The production of regions (note 18), 171. 22 Langton, The production of regions, 172. Emphasis added. 23 J. Langton, The industrial revolution and the regional geography of England, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 9 (1988) 126. 24 Langton, The industrial revolution (note 23), 126. 25 N. McKendrick, The consumer revolution of eighteenth-century England, in: N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. Plumb (Eds), The Birth of the Consumer Society: the Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England, London, 1982, 21. 26 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure (note 3), 171. 27 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 258–259. 20

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Stobart, extending these insights by focusing on the place of regions and urban systems in the process of industrialization, has argued that the increasing specialization typical of industrial districts depends on concomitant processes of intra and inter-regional integration: If regions command our attention because they were becoming increasingly differentiated . in terms of their economic and social character, then the inter- and intra-regional links which facilitated this specialisation must also be central to any spatially informed analysis or regional and national development.28 In examining how this integration was effected Stobart concentrates on the role of towns. Crucially, he goes on to note how: Spatial integration was achieved through many different channels, but especially via the servicing and trading activities of towns and the information, credit and capital networks and transport systems which focused on them. Services and trade were the quintessential roles of towns . Ultimately, of course, spatial integration was dependent upon the movement of goods, people, ideas and capital29 This approach highlights the making of physical connections and we can see clearly the essential link between the service functions carried out by travellers and wider patterns of integration.30 Thus, Stobart’s work is a reminder to students of industrial districts of the importance of integrated analyses of supply and demand, of patterns of specialization both within and beyond the production oriented district, of services and manufacturing and, most importantly, of the spatiality of systems of production and consumption. These links, we contend, have been under-studied.31 Approaching these issues from the direction of the site of final distribution and consumption, we find similar concerns. Stobart warns of a fetishization of material goods and commodities and notes that whilst there has been a welcome exploration of the ‘processes and practices that structured the end stages of supply, that is, retailing’ there have, regrettably, been few studies which have ‘attempted to trace the full length of commodity chains’.32 Thus, just as business histories of industrial districts have tended to ignore what happens to the multitude of diverse specialty goods produced in them, so the new historiographies of consumption and retailing have paid relatively scant attention to supply. It is also worth noting that just as district studies naturally privilege urban locations as the most powerful sites for the generation of external economies so the town is also identified as a key location by historians of retailing and consumption. Towns provided not only the vital physical infrastructure of transport and communication necessary 28

J. Stobart, The First Industrial Region: North-west England c.1700–60, Manchester, 2004, 3. Stobart, The First Industrial Region (note 28), 46. 30 Stobart describes how, ‘[t]he coaches carried prices lists, orders and invoices, samples and patterns, banknotes and bills . They provided commerce across the country with current market information and often the means to act on it, and were thus crucial to the integration of the national space economy,’ underlying how macro patterns are built on the minutiae of thousands physical acts and interchanges. Stobart, The First Industrial Region, 48. 31 Miller has similarly noted of the twentieth century, that vital movements of both people and commodities have been ‘more presumed that delineated by historians’. M.B. Miller, The business trip: maritime networks in the twentieth century, Business History Review 77 (2003) 2. 32 J. Stobart, Leisure and shopping in the small towns of Georgian England: a regional approach, Journal of Urban History 31 (2005) 481. 29

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to integration but also functioned as important sites for the exchange and dissemination of information, practices, and tastes.33 The plotting of patterns of spatial interaction and integration is then important to improving our understanding of both economic and social change during the industrial revolution. However, doing so involves considerable challenges. Whilst the ‘activities of individuals, localities and regions were integrated through real spatial interaction’, it is also the case that ‘integration and interaction are often difficult to define and measure in real historical contexts’.34 One potential set of measures is that relating to transport and communication systems; ‘specifically, the volume and type of traffic between centres directly demonstrates the nature and strength of interactions. Which centres were privileged in the flow of goods, people, information and capital that moved around the network’?35 Similarly, Weatherill argues that it is ‘not easy to trace the internal trade in any commodity because things could be manufactured, transported and sold in quite complex ways without any official notice being taken of them’. However, whilst Weatherill expertly pieces together the network that distributed pottery around Britain in the period before 1780, her evidence does not permit her to reconstruct in detail either the specific routes or volumes of commodities flowing through particular systems. We would argue that Shaw’s journey books provide very good access to such flows and thus to spatial interactions in the early nineteenth century, rescuing the vital role of the ‘rider’ celebrated by contemporaries but relatively neglected by history.36 However, at its foundation, integration was built through purposive, individual human action and relationships, particularly as expressed through the act of exchange. To what extent though did economic exchanges involved in spatial integration remain inter-personal even as the distances involved increased? Economic exchange in the early nineteenth century: distance and sociability In his classic study of the ‘economy of obligation,’ Muldrew claims that ‘In order to understand marketing as a social process it is necessary to examine its spatial organization because, at its most basic level, marketing is simply the means by which goods produced by a person or a group of people are transferred to others for consumption.’ In other words, the social is also spatial and vice versa.37 Muldrew identifies the market square as the traditional unit of spatial organization for the conduct of buying and selling in the pre- and early-modern economy, not least ‘because people still needed to congregate to communicate information about supply and demand so that bargaining could be competitive and just prices reached.’38 Thus is emphasized the importance of spatial immediacy in facilitating exchange. However, it was not simply information as to price, supply, and demand that was exchanged in the market place 33 As Langton has noted, one area of focus in attempts to understand regionalism and industrialization might be the ‘links between groups of regions without the interposition of London’. Langton, The production of regions (note 18), 172. 34 Stobart, The First Industrial Region (note 28), 175. 35 Stobart, The First Industrial Region, 176. 36 Stobart says that the ‘integrating function and corresponding sphere of influence reached their peak in the business networks controlled by individuals engaged in long-distance trade.’ Stobart, The First Industrial Region, 183. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure (note 3), 183. 37 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation (note 8), 37. Emphases added. 38 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 40–41.

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but also that relating to the ‘characters of buyers and sellers.’39 Exchange took place then within social as well as spatial systems, with the most ‘visible’ and perhaps powerful manifestation of both being found at the level of the local, captured in commonsense understandings of notions of community. At the same time, Muldrew detects in the early-modern period a ‘reordering of notions of community towards a highly mobile and circulating language of judgement – what I have chosen to term the ‘currency of reputation’ – about the creditworthiness of households attempting both to cooperate and compete within communities increasingly permeated by market relations.’40 The question is whether the social element of exchange survives the distanciation and marketization necessarily occurring during processes of increasing spatial integration. Muldrew suggests there is an almost inevitable erosion of the socio-spatial foundations of exchange as ‘abstract monetary valuation allows more and more goods to be transferred bilaterally between strangers, and over longer distances to many different areas.’ Crucially, for our purposes, he argues that this process was ‘facilitated by the increasing numbers of people acting as middlemen and retailers of goods produced elsewhere,’ and that by the late eighteenth century a ‘new more absolute utilitarian ideology of free-trade . to which a new breed of middlemen subscribed’ is identifiable.41 In contrast, however, Finn asserts that ‘the growth in itinerant peddling witnessed by the nineteenth century further reinforced the personal character of consumer relations in the modern period, reducing contemporaries exposure to the anonymous cash nexus and purely contractual understandings of exchange.’42 Above all else ‘it was trade credit . that limited autonomy and anonymity in the modern English consumer market.’43 As the work of both Muldrew and Finn suggest, the sociability of economic exchange is very commonly expressed through the giving of credit. For Muldrew, during the seventeenth century, credit was ‘extended between individual emotional agents.’44 Shaw’s relatively long-distance trade was heavily reliant on credit but to what extent did he extend it as an emotional or a calculative agent? Shaw’s private correspondence will allow us at least partial access to these issues and thus to the extent that a spatial reordering of distribution was accompanied by a social reordering of exchange.

John Shaw of Wolverhampton John Shaw commenced business as a hardware factor around 1805. Shaw was sole proprietor of his business until 1815 (and thus for the whole period covered by the principal sources used here), at which time he took a partner, Henry Crane.45 A directory of 1818 shows Shaw and Crane as trading 39

Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation (note 8), 41–42. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 2–3. 41 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 37 and 51. Emphases added. 42 Finn, The Character of Credit (note 8), 93. 43 Finn, The Character of Credit, 95. 44 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 3. 45 Administrative history, Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies (WALS). Certainly Shaw and Crane were known to each other before this date though, Crane possibly working for Shaw given the existence of a letter from Crane, in Wolverhampton, to Shaw, presumably on a journey, in Lancaster in early 1810. DB 24/A/46. Letter from H. Crane to J. Shaw, 12 March 1810. 40

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from premises on Worcester Street, Wolverhampton.46 This partnership was dissolved in 1848, Crane continuing in business on his own account. Throughout this period, the firm remained a classic example of ‘personal capitalism’, with unified ownership and management and the involvement of multiple generations of Shaw’s family. Shaw died in 1858. Shaw’s surviving sons died in quick succession of one another in the mid-1880s, precipitating a potential crisis in the firm’s history. This challenge was resolved in 1887 with the formation of John Shaw and Sons, Wolverhampton, Ltd, to acquire the English operations, and T.E. Thompson and Co. Ltd to acquire the overseas businesses that had been established from 1834 onwards. Both of these firms were private limited liability concerns in which all share were held by the families of the late partners. The firm maintained its independent status until acquired in 1970 by James Neill Holdings PLC of Sheffield.47 As an historical figure the commercial traveller has been relatively neglected. The peddler or bagman has long occupied a picturesque position in economic history, but we must be careful to distinguish the peddler from the ‘modern’ commercial traveller.48 For commercial travellers specifically, a literature has recently begun to emerge and is strongest for the United States, with book length studies from Spear and Friedman.49 For Britain, work by Hosgood, French and Church has explored the cultural, social and economic history of the commercial traveller, but for the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Scattered references suggest a rough periodization. Amongst the earliest manufacturers known to have directly employed travellers is Josiah Wedgwood, from the late 1770s onwards.50 Fellow Thomas Minton was certainly employing travellers by the 1830s and Somerset shoe manufacturers C. & J. Clark in the 1840s.51 The direct employment of travellers by manufacturers was probably rare before 1850 and most common in industries where travellers, selling from sample and pattern book, were supported by strong, established brands and innovations in other aspects of marketing, such as advertising.52 The use of travellers was much more fully developed at an early stage amongst various types of middleman. Even here the weight evidence as to the use of travellers is not overwhelming. Industries for which there is evidence of the use of travellers by middlemen include; pottery, textiles, tea and other groceries.53 46

Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory for 1818, Manchester, 1818. Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory (note 46). 48 L. Fontaine, A History of Pedlars in Europe, Cambridge, 1996; R.P.T. Davenport-Hines, Markets and Bagmen: Studies in the History of Marketing and British Industrial Performance, 1830–1939, Aldershot, 1986; G.R. Rubin, From packmen, tallymen and ‘perambulating Scotchmen’ to Credit Drapers Associations, c. 1840–1914, Business History 28 (1986) 206–225; Finn, The Character of Credit (note 8); Berg, Luxury and Pleasure (note 3). See A. Popp, Building the market: John Shaw of Wolverhampton and commercial travelling in early nineteenth-century England, Business History 49 (2007) 321–347, for arguments with regard to the distinction between peddlers and travelers and the modernity of Shaw’s travelers. 49 T. Spears, One Hundred Years On the Road: the Travelling Salesman in American Culture, New Haven, 1995; W. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: the Transformation of Selling in America, Cambridge, MA, 2004. 50 McKendrick, The Consumer revolution (note 25); J. Thomas, Rise of the Staffordshire Potteries, Bath, 1971. 51 McKendrick, The Consumer revolution; Thomas, Rise of the Staffordshire Potteries (note 50); G.B. Sutton, The marketing of ready made footwear in the nineteenth century: a study of the firm of C. & J. Clark, Business History 6 (1964) 93–112. 52 See also Jones, The country trade, 40. 53 Weatherill, The business of middleman; C. Fowler, Changes in provincial retail practice during the eighteenth century with particular reference to central-southern England, Business History 40 (1998) 37–54; H.-C. Mui and L.H. Mui, Andrew Melrose tea dealer and grocer of Edinburgh, 1812–1833, Business History 9 (1967) 30–48. 47

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However, these various works say relatively little about detailed aspects of travellers’ life and work; such as terms of employment, patterns and methods of work, the culture that they inhabited, and the scope and pattern of their travels. Perhaps the most significant work on commercial travel during the industrial revolution is Jones’ study of Worcestershire pin manufacturer and factor John English in the period 1786–1807.54 There are many points of comparison between English and Shaw, not least because both distributed hardware to an extensive provincial market from bases in the West Midlands, and this paper thus both complements and supplements Jones’ work. Detailed points of comparison and contrast will be noted throughout but it is worth indicating here important parallels between the two firms, including the scope of their travels, seasonal regularity, the function of travellers, the use of credit and the firms’ customer bases. However, Jones’ purpose in examining English, to explain the ‘failure of hardware manufacturers to enter the country trade in significant numbers,’ is quite different to that pursued here – namely a focus on patterns and processes of geographical integration.55 Shaw operated from the heart of the Black Country industrial district; where, in the period under study, a myriad of towns were already locked into a developmental pattern of emerging and interdependent metal-using specialisms. Displaying many of the characteristics associated with the ‘classic’ industrial district, the Black Country comprised a large population of mainly small firms displaying extensive external economies of scale and scope.56 The products flowing from the district, though related by processes and materials, were incredibly diverse and truly warranted the term ‘endless novelty,’ coined by Scranton to encapsulate specialty manufacturing in the US.57 In these respect, the Black Country resembled many other industrial districts in the English Midlands and north and stands representative of an important aspect of English industrialization. These regions represented sites of deepening functional specialization occurring at both a regional level, that is between different regions, and a sub-regional level, that is between different firms within a region. Specialization was spatial and functional. Deeply embedded in this web of manufacturing capacity – devoted to the production of a diverse portfolio of specialty consumer goods from buckles to coffee mills and from nails to locks – was a growing corps of middlemen. A directory of 1818 lists twenty-nine factors and merchants, including Shaw and Crane, in Wolverhampton.58 The greatest concentration of factors and merchants in the region was in Birmingham, where a directory of 1815 listed 175.59 Chapman ascribes the growth of this thriving local commercial structure to the region’s manufacturers ‘shaking off’ their dependence on London houses in the second half of the eighteenth century, indicating how increased specialization combined with greater integration did not need to centre on or be driven from the metropolis.60

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Jones, The country trade (note 52). Jones, The country trade, 40. 56 There is surprisingly little modern economic and business history on the Black Country. However an invaluable source of information is to be found in S. Timmins (Ed.), The Resources, Products and Industrial History of Birmingham and the Midlands Hardware District, London, 1866. 57 P. Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925, Princeton, N.J., 1997. 58 Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory (note 46). 59 Wrightson’s New Triennial Directory of Birmingham, Birmingham, 1815. 60 Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain (note 14), 61. 55

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Tellingly, Chapman remarks that the provincial houses in Birmingham and the Black Country were often relatively small in scale because ‘the industry they served was a conglomerate of small workshops’.61 This should not be understood as implying that smallness denoted a weakness but rather that the scale of Midlands factoring businesses reflected the context within which they worked. At the same time, Jones has commented on how the numbers of merchants and factors in the Midlands increased ‘substantially’ during the industrial revolution, suggesting that ‘entry into the factoring business was easy and that scale economies were largely absent’.62 Further, in the mid-nineteenth century, Timmins remarked on how the ‘large numbers of small manufacturers are practically independent of the numerous factors and merchants they supply’.63 Thus, the easy proliferation of both manufacturers and merchants seems to have created an equality in the relationships between manufacturer and middleman and facilitated that coordination ‘fostered without conscious effort’ so famously observed by Marshall in Lancashire.64 Finally, it is helpful to describe the sources used in this paper. These comprise, first, seventeen ‘journey books’ from the period 1810 to 1815. On the evidence of the extant journey books, the firm undertook four journeys a year, following one of two routes; the ‘Kendal’ journey, covering north Staffordshire, parts of North-east Cheshire (such as the so-called Silk Triangle), much of Lancashire, Cumbria, West and South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, took place in late winter/early spring and again in late summer, and the ‘Salop’ journey, covering south Staffordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, South-east Lancashire and returning via North Staffordshire, in early summer and early winter.65 Jones describes the travellers working for English as following a very similar seasonal pattern, making ‘four regular journeys each year’, to the north in summer and early winter and the west in spring and summer.66 Seasonality may have played an important part in cementing relationships with customers but also reflected the use of credit, in the form of delayed payment; one of the functions of both Shaw’s and English’s travellers being to collect outstanding accounts. During the course of the period under study, the ‘Salop’ journey came to be known as the ‘Liverpool’ journey, reflecting a significant growth over time in the value of accounts held in that location. Journeys combined two functions; the soliciting of new orders and the collection of debts. However, these journeys must also have involved considerable exchanges of information, not only that related to commercial factors but also on fashion and taste as consumption was shaped through feedback processes. Seasonality again played an important role, for, as Berg stresses, ‘manufacturers and merchants reached consumers not through a disembodied idea of novelty, but through careful connection, packaging, and a product cycle . products were not sold on caprice, but in the regular framework of the fashion cycle’. These cycles were ‘planned and programmed by merchants and manufacturers in advance’.67 The journey books record customer names, locations and date visited. They also record the value of a customer’s account, payments received from them on that visit and, in many cases,

61

Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain (note 14), 73. Jones, The country trade (note 52), 24. 63 Timmins, Industrial History (note 56), 223. 64 Marshall, Industry and Trade (note 10), 601–603. 65 It is important to note the archive does contain some gaps, thus for 1810 three books are extant, for 1811 two, for 1812 four, for 1813 three, for 1814 four, and for 1815 just one. 66 Jones, The country trade (note 52), 29. 67 Berg, Luxury and Pleasure (note 3), 252–253. 62

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details of discounts, abatements, allowances, returns, errors and when further remittances are expected.68 Later journey books also carry some more qualitative annotations. Unfortunately, the archive does not provide us with the material to calculate total values of business done with customers, for it records neither new orders received nor remittances made between journeys (normally made via the use of bills of exchange). What we have then is a sequence of discrete records of the value of customers’ accounts at specific points in time. The value of accounts shown for specific customers in different journey books cannot be aggregated because they are in effect running totals to which now unknown additions (new orders) and subtractions (payments) were made between journeys. Thus it is not possible to construct continuous series showing the total value of business done over time and this has impacted the way in which the archive has been interpreted and utilised. In particular, in calculating the value of accounts held in different locations, it has been decided to compare two benchmark years. The most robust point of comparison is between the value of accounts held at the same point in the calendar for each year. It was necessary to utilise two books (‘Kendal’ in late summer and ‘Salop/ Liverpool’ in early winter were chosen) for each year in order to ensure the capture of data for all customers. 1812 and 1814 were selected as the only years for which such a comparison was possible given the (random) distribution of extant books. As explained above, data for individual accounts from different journeys cannot be added together and so it is not possible to compare 1812 as a whole with 1814 as a whole. It would have been possible to have instead or also compared the two earlier journeys in those two years with each other but preliminary analysis suggests this would have only have multiplied the sheer volume of data presented without generating significant new insights. Although 1812 and 1814 have been chosen as benchmark years for comparison, for reasons entirely to do with the pattern of survival of journey books, the analysis as a whole depends on a reading of all seventeen books and throughout reference is made to data extracted from the full collection. In addition, material of a more qualitative nature is available from the extensive private correspondence of John Shaw (and the much more limited correspondence of his employee and later partner Henry Crane) held at the University of Birmingham. Not all of this correspondence corresponds in time with the journey books but is nonetheless useful, particularly for exploring the issues of credit, distance, and sociability. It is acknowledged that our ability to generalize from a single case study covering a relatively short period of time (and one of some exceptionalism given that the years covered represent the climax of the Napoleonic wars) must be limited. However, we would also contend that the relative richness of the data and its novelty, when carefully contextualized, recommend it to our attention. Patterns of integration and interaction We begin our analysis of the patterns of integration created by Shawn by capturing the scope of the journeys through the presentation of representative itineraries. These are mapped in Figs. 1 and 2 (the raw data being available in the online version of this paper). Immediately apparent is the remarkable work-rate of the traveller(s). This must have been grindingly hard work, given the state of transport systems available in this period and Jones details the very high turnover of travellers experienced by Worcester pin factor John English in the late eighteenth 68 English’s travelers, like Shaw’s, ‘rode out with samples and stock, lists of customers and outstanding accounts’, suggestive of strong commonalities in practices. Jones, The country trade (note 52), 28.

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Fig. 1. Itinerary, Kendal Journey: February/March 1812.

and early nineteenth centuries.69 Certainly, Shaw’s own letters home frequently allude the physical hardships and personal costs involved in travelling, representative is the lament that ‘travelling in these times is certainly one of the most irksome and disagreeable callings I think a man can follow.’70 Equally striking is the diversity of places visited in terms of their size and economic function; Shaw’s network reached throughout the urban hierarchy of large swathes of northern England. On the industrial side, these ranged from the North Staffordshire Potteries and the ‘silk triangle’ (comprising Leek, Macclesfield and Congleton) spanning the Staffordshire/Cheshire Border to ‘Cottonopolis’ and its satellites in South-east Lancashire, long-established as coherent economic sub-region, then across the Pennines to the woollen textile districts, where Leeds served a similar hub function to Manchester, and finally back down through the metal-making and working districts centred on Sheffield in South Yorkshire. Non-industrial regions served were equally varied, from the rich lands of North Shropshire (where pockets of industry were also to be found in locations such Bridgnorth or Coalbrookdale) and the Cheshire plain, to the more rugged upland farming of North Lancashire (again with industrial pockets, as in Lancaster itself, an important seat of furniture manufactures and thus of demand for iron products such as locks, hinges and handles) and, in particular, Cumbria. Non-industrial towns were as varied, with only the smallest towns, villages and hamlets ignored. Stobart categorizes non-industrial towns as either ‘servicing’ centres, such as Middlewich, or ‘gentry’ towns, such as Nantwich, and Shaw visited both types equally, Wolverhampton’s manufactures probably reached the truly rural population through retailers in this layer of the urban system.71 Shaw’s expeditions 69

Jones, The country trade (note 52). At a slightly later date John Boyle, working as a traveler for pottery manufacturer Thomas Minton, lamented in his diary that ‘Most assuredly this mode of life is to me the most uncomfortable that can be imagined’. Thomas, Rise of the Staffordshire Potteries (note 50), 122. 70 Shaw Letters, No. 16, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, Middlewich, 28 October 1819, University of Birmingham Library. 71 Stobart, The First Industrial Region (note 28).

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Fig. 2. Itinerary, Liverpool Journey: November 1814.

penetrated a good way down the region’s urban hierarchy as mapped by Stobart. Of the thirty towns and cities showing the fastest growth in the urban hierarchy of North-west England during the late eighteenth century, Shaw visited twenty-seven (ninety per cent). The three not visited, Malpas, Frodsham and Clitheroe, were amongst those that had shown the lowest levels of percentage growth across the preceding period.72 Thus, it is clear from the records of just one factor that the manufacturers of the Black Country depended on a demand and markets that were very widespread. Regional differentiation, including both industrial-to-industrial and industrial-to-non-industrial, did not preclude interaction. The wealth spent on Wolverhampton’s manufactures was earned in many different ways and in many different places. In comparison, English, selling a very similar range of goods, covered an even greater part of the country, including not only the north but also the west country, the south-east and eastern counties.73 Given this evidence from just two of the many factors found in the west Midlands in this period, it seems at least possible that this system of distribution was able to create effectively national (English) coverage. However, simple patterns of dealing tell us relatively little. More significant are indications of the intensity of the interaction between the Black Country and other regions and markets, as expressed in the volume and value of business done. It is unfortunate that, as already noted, the archive does not allow us to calculate total business done for either individual customers or locations. However, examination of the value of accounts being run at particular points in time still has much to tell us and, with some caveats, may stand as a proxy for the intensity of interaction with particular locations. One obvious flaw in using the value of accounts in this way is that a large account may represent 72

Stobart, The First Industrial Region, 37. Jones, The country trade (note 52). It is not known why, in comparison to English, Shaw concentrated on Northern England. We may posit that resources constraints – particularly the need to find sufficient numbers of reliable and trustworthy travelers – may have played its part. 73

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a prolonged failure to settle as much as it does a large volume of business transacted. Similarly a prompt payer might, given the regularity with which Shaw visited many locations (those in Lancashire and Staffordshire, for example, being visited on all four journeys each year), conduct a large business whilst running quite small accounts. There are reasons though to think these problems might not be too serious. First, as for all merchants, Shaw’s business depended crucially on maintaining close control over credit. Scattered notes in the journey books suggest that the travellers extended credit on the basis of a set of relatively clear decision rules. It is unlikely that lines of credit would be extended indefinitely to, or new orders taken from, persistent defaulters. Thus, just outside our principal period of study, Henry Crane wrote home of one North-east customer: I receive’d the acc’t of R. Young’s first bill but did not get the last package paid for . he is getting goods from almost all his old connections upon twelve months credit and he did expect us to do the same, the order sent home yesterday is to be paid for in Banker’s Bill next journey . I have no doubt but he will pay just at present – it may be a means at some future date of giving him longer credit and perhaps be again drawn in by him. If this order is executed he must have no more from us until he has paid for it.74 Second, there was a high degree of consistency in credit practice from location to location. Thus any bias in using the value of accounts as a proxy for intensity of interactions is likely to be random rather than systematic. As outlined above, data on the value of accounts by location has been collated for late 1812 and late 1814.75 Fig. 3 presents the 1812 data for the twenty most important locations by value of accounts, based on an index with Manchester having the highest value of 100. (The raw data are available as supplementary tables, classified by type of location - industrial and non-industrial in the online version of this paper). It is immediately apparent that whilst Manchester dominates and that the value of accounts held in different locations could vary enormously Shaw’s trade was far from dependent on a few large locations. Taking the top twenty locations by value of accounts we see that they are not drawn exclusively from the highest ranks of the regional urban hierarchy or from those emerging manufacturing towns, such as Blackburn and Rochdale, which had since the late eighteenth century been moving most rapidly up through the rankings in terms of retail provision.76 Instead, there is a wide range of inclusions, such as Ulverston and Kendal, ranked fifth and sixth in terms of value of accounts in 1812, and further down but still relatively important, Oswestry, Ellesmere and Wrexham. The non-industrial ‘periphery’ was far from marginal. If there are surprising inclusions amongst the twenty most important locations by value of accounts then there are also some surprising omissions, particularly Liverpool, Chester, Warrington, which sat atop the urban and retail hierarchies of the North-west, and, from amongst the industrial locations, Leeds and the wider West Yorkshire woollen textile district. This raises questions in relation to two issues, first in the area of firm strategy and second in that of market conditions. Liverpool, Chester and Warrington figured little in the data for 1812 because Shaw 74

Shaw Letters, No. 114, Henry Crane to John Shaw, Darlington, 3 October 1818. Records of John Shaw and Sons, Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies. DB 24/A/159, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1812; DB 24/A/160, Liverpool Journey, Nov. 1812. 76 Stobart and Hann, Retailing revolution in the eighteenth century (note 4), 186. 75

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Fig. 3. Index of value of accounts by location, 1812: top twenty.

appears to have done little to target these locations, which were visited in a desultory way or not at all. We shall see that by 1814 this position had changed significantly. Conducting the same exercise for 1814 reveals both important changes and significant continuities.77 The relevant data are presented in the same format in Fig. 4, again with an index based on Manchester as 100. (The raw data are available in supplementary tables in the online version of this paper). Shaw’s customer base remains as diverse and as widespread as before. Indeed, the net was being cast even wider in terms of the number of places visited and between 1812 and 1814 there had been a considerable intensification of the traveller’s work. Journeys had become longer in duration and involved many more visits, both in terms of locations and customer visited in particular locations. Journeys undertaken in the period 1810–12 were on average of 34.7 days duration but of 47 days in the period 1813–14.78 The result was a marked increase in the value of accounts, from an average of £3,247 per journey in 1812 to £5,223 in 1814, an increase of some 60 per cent.79 Locations visited for the first time in the period 1813–14 were again both industrial and non-industrial and included; 77

DB 24/A/167, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1814; DB 24/A/168, Liverpool Journey, Nov. 1814. DB 24/A/153, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1810; DB 24/A/154, Salop Journey, June 1810; DB 24/A/155, Salop Journey, Dec. 1810; DB 24/A/156, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1811; BD 24/A/157, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1811; DB 24/A/158, Kendal Journey, Jan. 1812; DB 24/A/161, Salop Journey, May 1812; DB 24/A/159; DB 24/A/160; DB 24/A/162, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1813; DB 24/A/163, Salop Journey, May 1813; DB 24/A/164, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1813; DB 24/A/165, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1814; DB 24/A/166, Liverpool Journey, June 1814; DB 24/A/167; DB 24/A/168. 79 DB 24/A/153, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1810; DB 24/A/154, Salop Journey, June 1810; DB 24/A/155, Salop Journey, Dec. 1810; DB 24/A/156, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1811; BD 24/A/157, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1811; DB 24/A/158, Kendal Journey, Jan. 1812; DB 24/A/161, Salop Journey, May 1812; DB 24/A/159; DB 24/A/160; DB 24/A/162, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1813; DB 24/A/163, Salop Journey, May 1813; DB 24/A/164, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1813; DB 24/A/165, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1814; DB 24/A/166, Liverpool Journey, June 1814; DB 24/A/167; DB 24/A/168. 78

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Fig. 4. Index of value of accounts by location, 1814: top twenty.

Colne, Pontefract, Chesterfield, Warrington, Cartmel, Garstang, Keighley, Skipton, Cheadle Wilmslow, Altrincham, Shifnal and Paddiam.80 Other locations previously visited but hitherto relatively under-exploited included, most strikingly, Liverpool. It is tentatively suggested that this evidence of intensification and growth is perhaps best interpreted as reflecting strategic intent. As already noted, the growing importance of Liverpool to Shaw raises questions of firm strategy and market conditions, particularly when contrasted with the example of Leeds, in which market Shaw had been unable to build a significant presence. The expansion of trade with Liverpool did not come about overnight. Shaw did not visit Liverpool at all during the relevant journeys in 1810 but by June 1812 the journey book lists twelve customers, by November of that year fourteen, by June 1813 sixteen, and by June 1814 twenty-three. Significantly, in June 1812 only five of those listed had active accounts whereas by June 1814 that number had risen to fourteen. This pattern suggests the solicitation of new customers. As an example, in November 1814 the traveller records against the name Taylor and Pratt, who were not running an active account, that he ‘could not do anything with them’. Taylor and Pratt do not appear in the journey books before June 1814, when they again did not have an active account.81 The contrast with the lack of growth in Leeds is very marked. Leeds was at this time a very rapidly growing and prosperous city that must have offered good prospects to a factor such as 80 DB 24/A/153, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1810; DB 24/A/154, Salop Journey, June 1810; DB 24/A/155, Salop Journey, Dec. 1810; DB 24/A/156, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1811; BD 24/A/157, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1811; DB 24/A/158, Kendal Journey, Jan. 1812; DB 24/A/161, Salop Journey, May 1812; DB 24/A/159; DB 24/A/160; DB 24/A/162, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1813; DB 24/A/163, Salop Journey, May 1813; DB 24/A/164, Kendal Journey, Aug. 1813; DB 24/A/165, Kendal Journey, Feb. 1814; DB 24/A/166, Liverpool Journey, June 1814; DB 24/A/167; DB 24/A/168. 81 DB 24/A/161; DB 24/A/162; DB 24/A/163; DB 24/A/166; DB 24/A/168.

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Shaw and the manufacturers who supplied him. Why did he do so poorly there? First, increasing competition would be an expected outcome of increasing levels of product market integration and Leeds’ proximity to Sheffield may be significant in this respect. Certainly the correspondence of both Shaw and Crane allude to the reality of competitive pressures across all locations. Crane wrote in 1823 to caution that ‘I would not care so much about Liverpool orders if to be at such low prices. I expect there was some close shaving going on there.’82 Shaw later wrote from Liverpool that we ‘have got our new and strong opponents here and many others also [so] that we are continuously in each other’s way.’83 However, whilst patterns of interaction were certainly structured by competition and by factors such as the distribution of wealth, by transport systems, and by the differing service functions available in different towns, from the presence of banks and attorneys to the provisions of inns, they also reflect the entrepreneurial function performed by individual agents. In this context it is relevant to note Jones’ argument that English faced serious constraints when trying to expand his markets and, in particular, that ‘the necessity of calling on established customers . meant that major diversions were simply not possible in the time available’ with the result that ‘as the business grew . freedom to alter and extend . journeys became increasingly circumscribed’.84 The routine of travelling, in combination with the realities of travel in this period, seem to have placed a natural upper limit of businesses conducted in this way. In this sense, lack of success in Leeds may have been also a result of growth achieved in Liverpool and elsewhere. The dramatically increased number of accounts held in Liverpool, and of the typical value of those accounts, undoubtedly represents the biggest change in the patterns of Shaw’s business between 1812 and 1814. Liverpool was by 1814 clearly Shaw’s most important market, but this does not imply an atrophying of other parts of his network. The twenty most important locations by value of accounts are as diverse in 1814 as in 1812. It is true that the top ten is now more firmly industrial, with Kendal being the only exception, but the next ten still also includes Ulverston, Oswestry, Wrexham and Lancaster. Thus we reiterate the broader point made in relation to 1812, Shaw drew demand from markets that were highly diverse in spatial and functional terms. The increasingly differentiated industrial and non-industrial regions of northern England generated through industrialization were then, at the same time, increasingly integrated through the interactions generated by factors such as Shaw. At the heart of these interactions was the act of physical travel itself and the many transactions and face-to-face meetings it generated, which in turn triggered flows of physical commodities and financial settlements. Interactions and flows were not abstract, but real and concrete. They involved people and relationships. Who were the key actors in this process? It is not possible to identity all of the traveller(s) who worked for Shaw in this period.85 We know from personal correspondence that Shaw undertook a significant amount of the travelling 82

Shaw Letters, No. 116, Henry Crane to John Shaw, Wolverhampton, 30 June 1823. Shaw Letters, No. 30, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, Liverpool, 20 July 1828. 84 Jones, The country trade (note 52), 30. 85 Administrative history. Shaw certainly undertook much of the traveling at this time, and for many years after. It is also possible that Henry Crane worked for Shaw as a traveler before being made a partner in 1815. T.E. Thomson was working for Shaw and Crane by 1825 at the latest. DB24/A/35, Agreement for five years service between John Shaw and Henry Crane and Thomas Edward Thomson, 1825. 83

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during this period and, indeed, for many years to come. In 1823 Shaw’s wife Elizabeth estimated that, due largely to John’s work, they had spent only six of the first ten years of their marriage together.86 Crane also undertook journeys, both before and after he entered into partnership with Shaw in 1815. A change of hand in some of the journey books during 1814 suggests that at least two travellers were employed in this period. In December 1814 George Fairclough, an ironmonger of St Helens, complained that he not yet received any discount, the traveller involved recorded: ‘I told him 5% of the whole [he] says William Shaw told him 15%’. This probably refers to Shaw’s youngest brother.87 As Jones has shown, controlling travellers in the field in this period presented factors with considerable principal-agent problems.88 Travellers might (and did) steal from employees, act unwisely, for example in giving credit, or behave disreputably, being notorious for excessive drinking. Employers needed to be able to trust their representatives and employing a close relation was one of the more reliable methods for securing such trust. Much more is known about the identity of customers. In particular, identifying customer occupations will provide important insights into the structure of the commodity chains through which spatial and functional integration were enacted. A number of questions follow. Were distribution networks structured differently in different regions and locations, for example small versus large conurbations or industrial as against non-industrial? Did customer identity or occupation impact on issues such as the value of accounts run, the methods of payment used or the giving of credit? Did these remain social as well as economic exchanges as the geographical scope of trade increased?

Customers, relationships and sociability During the period under study Shaw visited a total of 525 customers, all of them businesses rather than private customers, the majority under sole proprietorship. A small number consisted of partnerships and larger companies. Of these 525 customers occupations have been identified for a total of 338 or seventy-four per cent, justifying reasonable confidence that the results are representative of the total population. Non-identifications are spatially randomly distributed, with the exception of Bridgnorth, where we have no identifications. Customers have been identified using two methods. First, some of the journey books contain annotations indicating occupations for some customers. Second, trade directories have been utilised.89 It is well known that caution has to be exercised in using often incomplete and inaccurate commercial directories from this period.90 However, a large number of corroborations between the annotated journey books

86

Shaw Letters, No. 58, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, Wolverhampton, 11 January 1823. DB 24/A/168. William Edward Shaw was apprenticed to Pooley and Walker, merchants, of Liverpool in 1801. DB/ 24/A/29, Indenture of Apprenticeship. 88 Jones, The Country trade (note 52). 89 Wrightson’s Triennial Directory of Birmingham, 1815; Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory (note 46); Pigot’s Commercial Directory, 1818–20, Manchester, 1820; Pigot and Co.’s Commercial Directory, Cheshire and Staffordshire, 1822, Manchester, 1802. 90 S. Maenpaa, Instruments of commerce: trade directories as a source for business history, www.liv.ac.uk/merchant/ instruments%of20%20Commerce.htm. 87

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and trade directories, plus the level of detail about customer identities included in journey books (normally first as well as surnames and more rarely addresses) inspires confidence in the robustness of identifications. Uncertain identifications have been discarded. The breakdown of customer occupations is presented in Table 1, with occupations presented individually and under four broad heads; retail, trade, manufacturing, and commercial. A very small residual group could not be included under these heads and are presented as ‘other’. Shaw’s customers were overwhelmingly involved in retail trade and in ironmongery in particular. Sixty-three per cent of those identified were retailers selling direct to final consumers. 231 customers were identified as ironmongers, very nearly sixty per cent of those identified. Many of those involved in artisanal trades also performed a retail function, selling their products or services, whether guns, clocks, shoes or construction skills, direct to final consumers. Similarly the eleven wholesale ironmongers included under commerce head normally also fulfilled a retail function and were often recorded as doing so in directories. If these assumptions are accepted more than eighty per cent of Shaw’s customers performed either a primary or secondary retail function. This profile of customer occupations is hardly surprising given the products manufactured in the Black Country industrial district and sold by Shaw. But it is significant in that it shows that in the majority of cases the commodity chains through which spatial and functional integration were enacted were relatively short, involving the manufacturer, Shaw, a retailer, and the final consumer (though, of course, these chains were also supported by important ancillary actors, particularly banks and carriers). This finding matches very closely that for John English’s trade.91 Relatively intense, sustained and widespread patterns of integration were not dependent on either large-scale organization or highly sophisticated infrastructures but instead were achievable under the conditions that obtained in the early nineteenth century. Moreover, echoing the earlier argument that geographically peripheral regions were not marginal to this trade, ‘petty’ retailers and tradesmen should not necessarily be equated with ‘petty’ levels of business. Thus, in Liverpool in November 1814 for example, Hassall and Overton, Harrison, Wilson and Co., and Ashcroft, all retail ironmongers, were running accounts valued at £172, £162, £261, and £215, respectively.92 The role played by retailers in Shaw’s networks is consistent with claims that the late eighteenth century witnessed a ‘retail revolution’ based a widespread distribution of fixed shops across the urban hierarchy.93 Thus, for example, Stobart and Hann present evidence that nearly eighty-five per cent of towns in North-west England contained at least one ironmonger by the 1790s.94 Study of the travels undertaken by factors such as such Shaw demonstrates how this very widespread specialization in retailing was supplied with commodities. Regionalization of industry, modernization in retailing and spatial integration were concurrent, interlinked processes. Customer occupations show, with one exception, no significant regional variation. The predominance of retail customers, and thus a particular structure for commodity chains, was not more typical of small rather than large conurbations or of non-industrial rather than industrial. Thus in Liverpool, twenty-two out of a total of thirty-seven customers were ironmongers, just as 7 91 92 93 94

Jones, The country trade (note 52), 32–33. DB 24/A/168. Fowler, Changes in provincial retail practice (note 53). Stobart and Hann, Retailing revolution in the eighteenth century (note 4), 188.

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Table 1 Customer occupations No.

Retail Ironmongers Grocers Toy shops

231 7 6

44 1.3 1.1

59.5 1.8 1.5

244

46.5

63

29 10 8 7 4 4 3 2 1 1

5.5 2.0 1.5 1.3 0.8 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.2

7.5 2.6 2.0 1.8 1.0 1.0 0.8 0.5 0.2 0.2

69

13.1

17.8

23 8 3

4.4 1.5 0.6

6.0 2.0 0.8

34

6.5

8.7

22 11

4.2 2.1

5.7 2.8

33

6.3

8.5

Other

8

1.5

2.0

Totals

388

e

100

Trades Brazier/Glazier White/Tinsmiths Builders Clock & gun makers Saddlers Coopers/trunks Cabinet makers Shoemakers Shipbuilders Pattern makers

Manufacturing Iron founders Machine makers Cutlers

Commerce Merchants/factors Wholesale Ironmongers

)

% of total

% of those identified*

Occupation

Total population of customers, 525. Those identified, 388 (74%).

out of eighteen were in Salop (Shrewsbury), fourteen out of thirty-eight in Manchester, three out of four in Keighley, eleven out of twelve in Lancaster, 6 out of ten in Kendal, or 5 out of ten in Leeds.95 Thus, returning to an issue touched on earlier, it does not seem that any difference in the structure of distribution networks can account for the relative unimportance of Leeds to Shaw as against its most obvious comparator, Manchester. The one exception to the homogeneity of Shaw’s customer base across locations was Sheffield, which was home to seventeen of the twenty-two customers identified as merchants or factors

95

The journey books variously.

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(an identification distinct from that of ‘wholesale ironmonger’). It is striking that this set of customers, quite different from all others, was to be found in a city showing marked similarity to the Black Country in terms of economic specialization and structure. This is suggestive of quite different processes of economic interaction and integration than those implied by the majority of Shaw’s relationships, which involved very direct links between production and final consumption. This impression is reinforced by further materials in the Shaw archive. Of particular interest are two letters, dated 1815 and 1819, concerning bills of exchange drawn on Shaw and payable to Hodgson and Co. merchants of Sheffield (Hodgson also appeared in the journey books as customer).96 The sums involved are considerable; the bills payable to Hodgson were to the value of £356 and £500, respectively.97 The implication is that Shaw was buying from as well as selling to Sheffield. This does not suggest that the development and specialization of the Black Country and South Yorkshire metal-working regions was occurring ‘largely separate from one another.’98 If there was little variation in customer occupations across regions then this is also true of business practices, particularly methods of payment and the use of credit. If we can posit the development of a coherent national system of business practice as denoting a process of ‘modernization’ then we can again see how modernization and regional economic specialization were not mutually exclusive but instead intimately related and actively promoted through interaction and integration. Smail has described how the historiography of commercial credit in the eighteenth century is: [b]uilt around a narrative that describes how the system of credit became more complex, more sophisticated, and more comprehensive during the course of the century, a process that culminated in the early nineteenth century in the widespread articulation of a system of country banking . [and] the growing prominence of the domestic bill of exchange as the preferred way to settle debts.99 One outcome was that a ‘more commoditized system of credit began to link together the smaller face-to-face money markets of provincial communities’.100 This was in marked contrast to the ‘important differences’ that had marked ‘attitudes about and understandings of credit’ in different English regions in the eighteenth century.101 Whilst Smail rightly wishes to add complexity to this picture by examining regionally differentiated ‘cultures of credit’ the archive studied here nonetheless supports the broad narrative outlined above. Important in understanding the use of trade credit between Shaw and his retail customers is the ubiquity of retail credit between retailers and final customers, as explored by Finn and Kent.102 96

DB 24/A/47, Letter from Hodgson and Co., merchants, Sheffield. 1815; DB 24/A/49, Letter from John Merrick, notary, London, 1819. 97 Though the value of Hodgson’s account with Shaw was typically much smaller, normally in the region of £30–35. 98 Langton, The industrial revolution (note 23), 126. The relationship between Shaw and Sheffield based merchants was absolutely central to Shaw and Crane commencing an export trade to India in 1827 and the subsequent establishment of T.E. Thomson and Co. in Calcutta in Liverpool in 1834, see; Anonymous, From Wolverhampton to Calcutta: the low origins of merchant enterprise (forthcoming). 99 J. Smail, The culture of credit in the eighteenth century: the English textile industry, Enterprise and Society 4 (2003) 300. 100 Smail, The culture of credit in the eighteenth century (note 99), 300. 101 Smail, The culture of credit in the eighteenth century, 303. 102 Finn, The Character of Credit (note 8), Kent, Small businessmen and their credit transactions (note 15).

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Kent, studying the credit transactions of small businessmen (largely retailers) in the first decades of the nineteenth century, argues that they faced an ‘unavoidable reliance’ on credit, both in their dealings with retail customers of all classes and with distributors, and that ‘[r]etailers in the early nineteenth century had no difficulty in obtaining commercial credit’.103 Retailers, forced by custom and obligation to offer often extremely long credit terms to customers would have of necessity looked to enjoy similar arrangements with their own suppliers.104 These relationships are quite different to those studied by Smail, who focused more on larger clothiers and merchants. It may be then that relative homogeneity of credit practices suggested here was specific to the commercial relationships between petty shopkeepers and smaller factors such as Shaw and had its roots in the ubiquity of consumer credit. It is suggestive, though not conclusive, that both Finn and Kent make little mention of significant regional variations in practice in this period. The most common forms of payment used by Shaw’s customers were cash and the bill of exchange. At the same time, however, this did not prevent transactions being deeply enmeshed in an extensive system of credit, typically in the form of delayed payment, and the giving of discounts, abatements, and allowances. All of these practices were used extremely frequently regardless of either customer location of occupation. Thus, to give just one example, in August 1814 both J. and C. Shaw, ironmongers and merchants of Newcastle-under-Lyme, running an account to the value of £143 and Wood, ironmonger of Congleton, running an account to the value of £18, were permitted to ‘remit in a fortnight’.105 To reiterate, in terms the extending of credit and the granting of discounts and allowances, this archive shows considerable uniformity of business practice across space, across economically differentiated regions, and from one individual customer to another.106 Can the growing uniformity of credit practices across an increasingly spatially integrated market be equated, however, with a growing anonymity of exchanges and a decline in their sociability? First, we can detect clearly the circulation of information about the reliability, the ‘character,’ of individual customers. We have glimpses of this in annotations, such as when the traveller is instructed, when calling on a Macclesfield ironmonger in August 1814, to ‘Enquire of S. Lounds who makes a dividend’.107 The availability of such information to Shaw depended upon his ability to penetrate localized networks. Thus, in 1818, Crane wrote to Wolverhampton from Darlington to urge: Hindmarsh of Alnwick should be charged as low as possible as all depends on this first order. If Welford of Bishop Auckland should write us he is a good chap, also Bayles of Barnard Castle and there are two more there who may do with if his goods please and get off quick he will mention us to the rest as they all go hand in hand.108 103 Kent, Small businessmen and their credit transactions (note 15), 51 and 58. Kent also notes that ‘it has been suggested that the credit relationship between substantial shopkeepers and their suppliers was beginning to change in the 1820 . [but that] there is not enough evidence to demonstrate conclusively whether or not such practices regulated the dealings of petty shopkeepers and craftsmen’, 58. 104 Kent describes trade and retail credit as ‘an inseparable part of business activity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’. Kent, Small businessmen and their credit transactions (note 15), 61. 105 DB 24/A/167. 106 For further details of Shaw’s credit practices, see Popp, Building the market (note 48). 107 DB 24/A/167. 108 Shaw Letters, No. 114, Henry Crane to John Shaw, Darlington, 3 October 1818.

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To an extent, this ability was a function not of trust and sociability but of mere efficiency. In the same letter Crane hoped that ‘Brown and Huntington’s orders are nearly ready – we shall have the preference there if quick dispatch.’109 It is however around the issue of credit and payment that we find the most revealing insights. It should be stressed that Shaw’s letters home from his travels are full of complaints as to the difficulty of extracting payments from customers; ‘not one (letter from Crane) have I had from him but what announces some heavy bad debt,’ ‘nothing at all to do nor any money to be laid hold of,’ or ‘things are most exceedingly flat and bad which makes folks twice as tedious to do with.’110 This latter comment reflects the strain credit could place on commercial relationships. But that relationships did survive such strains reveals that they were not purely calculative but instead reflected a degree of reciprocity and mutual understanding. Partly this was a result of a disposition not to see all commercial failings as representing a failure of character, even in the case of manifestly ill-advised dealings. Thus in early 1816 Elizabeth Shaw wrote to tell her husband of a local business failure: I am truly sorry that you will sustain this loss . It is very trying to toil and fag for another to run away with it . I am sorry because men . speculate beyond their own capital – which is the case with Wilsons – their losses are estimated at twenty thousand pounds. Everybody is sorry for them and think them very worthy honest men and yet perhaps they will be ruin of many an honest man.111 Similarly, Shaw was moved to ask ‘how is it possible people can pay when they have their money locked up . in dead unsaleable stock?’112 At the same time, however, we are afforded glimpses of the extent to which commercial relationships, despite the distances often involved, continued to embody social as well as economic exchanges. Relationships interwove transactions with care, time, family, and affective attention. For example Crane wrote to Shaw in June 1813 to explain how: Mr Threllfall’s son of Lancaster has been here [Wolverhampton] who has taken Bennett’s shop of Blackburn. I had him here on Thursday evening last and most of the day on Friday. I took a pretty good order from him.113 Tellingly, Elizabeth, visiting her family in Lancashire, took care to tell her husband that ‘I have called upon your customers here,’ cementing the commercial with the familiar.114 Most touchingly, at a much later date, Shaw related in a letter home from Liverpool, how:

109

Shaw Letters, No. 114, Crane to Shaw (note 108). Shaw Letters, No. 14, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, Manchester, 3 July 1817; Shaw Letters, No. 11, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, Wolverhampton, 3 April 1813; Shaw Letters, No. 30 (note 83). 111 Shaw Letters, No. 49a, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, Wolverhampton, 10 April 1816. 112 Shaw Letters, No. 9, John Shaw to Elizabeth Wilkinson, Wolverhampton, 12 November 1812. 113 Shaw Letters, No. 40b, Henry Crane to John Shaw, Wolverhampton, 8 June 1813. 114 Shaw Letters, No. 54, Elizabeth Shaw to John Shaw, Colne, 22 May 1822. In other comment revealing the intermingling of the social and the commercial in a local setting, Elizabeth wrote to John shortly after their marriage to relate how ‘Father says all the tradesmen [in her home town of Colne, Lancashire] know that I was married and it was advertised in a great many papers. Shaw Letters, No. 40a. 110

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I went last evening to take supper with Mr Holgate [a customer] . and had quite a treat – with his daughters playing – three of them sat down to the pianoforte and another to the Welsh harp and most delightfully they performed – he has a fine family of nine children all at home.115 Even amidst ‘merely’ commercial travels, space could be created for domesticity and warmth.

Conclusions This paper has argued that analysis of the patterns of spatial and functional interaction effected through commercial travel can provide important insights into how simultaneous processes of increasing regional differentiation and deepening economic integration occurred in step with each other during the industrial revolution. Commercial travel permitted and facilitated functional specialization at the level of both the Black Country industrial district and its constituent firms by building connections to diverse and increasingly dispersed extra-regional markets. Through commercial travelling, John Shaw built a network that penetrated far and wide across northern England, putting Midlands hardware manufacturers in touch with Staffordshire potters and Cheshire gentry, Mancunian spinners and weavers, Cumbrian hill farmers and cutlers in Sheffield. The geographical periphery was far from economically marginal to this trade. Too often studies of the process of regional industrialization, choosing to concentrate on the elaboration of those factors of production that form the basis of externalized economies of scale and scope, neglect demand and, in turn, the integrative role of services. The analysis presented here portrays the development of the Wolverhampton metal-working industrial district as emphatically not taking place ‘largely separate’ from changes occurring elsewhere. Regionalization and integration were two sides of the same coin during the process of industrialization. In this period at least, it was the merchant or factor who could best and most effectively match supply with demand through the demanding task of achieving integration across space and through time. If the literature on industrial districts has also typically emphasized their diverse, specialty production portfolios then it is equally necessary to take account of the way in which, as shown, here demand was equally diverse and, perhaps yet more importantly, dispersed across an increasingly large market. Thus, study of the connections made by travellers links regionalization to changes in patterns and processes of both retailing and consumption, and in particular to the timing of any ‘retail revolution’. Shaw’s business both helped to build and depended on the presence of a wide distribution of ‘modern’ fixed retail units. The crucible of this retail revolution was the town. Towns played a central role in the processes examined here. Towns not only hosted the shops that were Shaw’s principal customers, but they also provided the necessary infrastructure, inns and hotels, coaching houses and stabling, canals, wharves, and depots, for the support of the traveller and the flows of physical commodities that

115

Shaw Letters, No. 31, John Shaw to Elizabeth Shaw, Liverpool, 30 January 1831. Sociability does not seem to have come easily to John, before they were married he wrote to Elizabeth, telling her ‘I do very much dislike it [making social calls]. I have made very few acquaintances in town – my whole time has been spent in my business.’ Shaw Letters, No. 11.

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resulted from his work. Here there is very clear evidence of Shaw’s ability to penetrate down through many layers of the urban hierarchy. However, it is also clear that though structured by the urban hierarchy these spatial and functional interactions, between regions, between towns, and between production, retailing and consumption, were created by individual actors; by Shaw, his travellers, and his customers. As Miller has noted of global flows of goods, people, and ideas ‘[t]hose movements . did not just happen. Rather, they resulted because businessmen constructed a . world to organize, coordinate, and process them’.116 As already indicated, the overwhelmingly majority of Shaw’s customers were retail shopkeepers, and ironmongers in particular, creating remarkably compact commodity chains. Importantly, neither customer occupations nor the structures of commodity chains showed any significant variation across locations, with the single exception of the importance of other factors and merchants as customers in Sheffield. A similar uniformity in commercial practice across locations, particularly as it related to methods of payment, the use of credit, and the granting of discounts and other allowances, is also discernable, suggesting that integration of markets was increasingly accompanied by integration of further aspects of the business system. In this and many other ways then, the factor and his travellers played a powerful integrative and modernizing role across the industrializing space economy of early nineteenth-century England. Conceptually, our case study based approach highlights human agency. For Shaw the interspatial remained intensely inter-personal. Increasing integration of the space economy led to no necessary primacy for anonymized, calculative persona and relationships, no dominance for the cash nexus. The sociability characteristic of economic exchange in the early-modern period survived the spatial reordering witnessed under the process of industrialization. Supplementary data Supplementary material for this article may be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/ j.jhg.2009.01.019.

116

Miller, The business trip (note 31), 2.