Extensive Beer
The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830. By Peter Mathias. (C.U.P., 85s.) IT is time to boast a little; time to blow one's own trumpet, for in this harsh and hard world no one else will. For depth of scholarship, literary crafts- manship and vigour and energy of production, Cambridge historians have outdistanced their rivals at other universities at almost all levels. Nowhere is this more marked than amongst the young historians of thirty or under. There has been a steady stream of first-rate books since 1954 of the highest quality, and now comes Peter Mathias's history of brewing. Of course, it is monumental—over 600 pages of closely written and closely argued text, based on tens of thousands of documents and myriads of ledger entries. This huge array of material, most of which has never seen the light of day, is excel- lently organised; indeed the construction is so good that the book seems nowhere so vast as it is. The style is clear; adequate rather than bril- liant, which is not entirely a disadvantage in a book which is so full of acute analysis. The reader is not distracted by meretricious literary skill from the high intellectual quality of the book's content. This content is of major importance to anyone who is concerned with the factors which have led to the growth of the modern technolo- gical and industrial world. The one glaring fault of the book is its price.
The subject is fascinating: the invention of porter gave the London brewers a splendid tech- nical advantage; their vast market enabled them to exploit it. Mr. Mathias shows how many of the concomitants of modern large-scale industry developed in the brewing industry long before the Industrial Revolution was under way. Huge breweries, many of which still exist—Whitbreads, Trumans, Barclays, Perkins—demanded a dis- ciplined labour force, skilful organisation of production (in essence it has scarcely changed), considerable capital resources, a managerial class, a complex sales and distribuiive organisation, an awareness of the need for technological improve- ment and a scientific attitude to production. Most of the factors which economic historians regard as essential features of the Industrial Revolution had been developed in this industry long before that revolution had come about, The eighteenth- century organisation of this industry was quite capable of meeting the demands which the rapidly growing population of the nineteenth cen- tury and subsequent technological development made on it without any fundamental changes of importance. The mainsprings of the industry's growth from small-scale to large-scale industry appear to be the technological jump—the capacity to brew on a very large scale due to the inven- tion of porter—and the presence of a large mar- ket. The rest followed, pre-dating steam or improved communications or growth of popula- tion, although these developments naturally pro- pelted the industry into greater production still. Such golden opportunities for gain which brew- ing provided threw up characters of exceptional force like Samuel Whitbread I and Benjamin Truman. The latter, whose splendid portrait by Gainsborough forms one of the many admirable illustrations of this book, told his grandson, bluntly enough, the secret of economic growth : 'there can be no other way of raising a great For- tune but by carrying on an Extensive Trade.' This book proves it.
J. H. PLUMB
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