Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

parents and the inventor of the famous train “The Rocket,” who began work as an engineman at a coal mine.
    New men also drove the critical cotton textile industry. Some of the pioneers of this new industry were people who had previously been heavily involved in the production and trade of woolen cloths. John Foster, for example, employed seven hundred handloom weavers in the woolen industry at the time he switched to cotton and opened Black Dyke Mills in 1835. But men such as Foster were a minority. Only about one-fifth of the leading industrialists at this time had previously been involved in anything like manufacturing activities. This is not surprising. For one, the cotton industry developed in new towns in the north of England. Factories were a completely new way of organizing production. The woolen industry had been organized in a very different way, by “putting out” materials to individuals in their homes, who spun and wove on their own. Most of those in the woolen industry were therefore ill equipped to switch to cotton, as Foster did. Newcomers were needed to develop and use the new technologies. The rapid expansion of cotton decimated the wool industry—creative destruction in action.
    Creative destruction redistributes not simply income and wealth, but also political power, as William Lee learned when he found the authorities so unreceptive to his invention because they feared its political consequences. As the industrial economy expanded in Manchester and Birmingham, the new factory owners and middle-class groups that emerged around them began to protest their disenfranchisement and the government policies opposed to their interests. Their prime candidate was the Corn Laws, which banned the import of “corn”—all grains and cereals, but principally wheat—if the price got too low, thus ensuring that the profits of large landowners were kept high. This policy was very good for big landowners who produced wheat, but bad for manufacturers, because they had to pay higher wages to compensate for the high price of bread.
    With workers concentrated into new factories and industrial centers,it became easier to organize and riot. By the 1820s, the political exclusion of the new manufacturers and manufacturing centers was becoming untenable. On August 16, 1819, a meeting to protest the political system and the policies of the government was planned to be held in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester. The organizer was Joseph Johnson, a local brush manufacturer and one of the founders of the radical newspaper the
Manchester Observer
. Other organizers included John Knight, a cotton manufacturer and reformer, and John Thacker Saxton, editor of the
Manchester Observer
. Sixty thousand protestors gathered, many holding banners such as “No Corn Laws,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “Vote by Ballot” (meaning voting should take place secretly, not openly, as it did in 1819). The authorities were very nervous about the meeting, and a force of six hundred cavalry of the Fifteenth Hussars had been assembled. As the speeches began, a local magistrate decided to issue a warrant for the arrest of the speakers. As police tried to enforce the warrant, they met with the opposition of the crowd, and fighting broke out. At this point the Hussars charged the crowd. Within a few chaotic minutes, eleven people were dead and probably six hundred wounded. The
Manchester Observer
called it the Peterloo Massacre.
    But given the changes that had already taken place in economic and political institutions, long-run repression was not a solution in England. The Peterloo Massacre would remain an isolated incident. Following the riot, the political institutions in England gave way to the pressure, and the destabilizing threat of much wider social unrest, particularly after the 1830 revolution in France against Charles X, who had tried to restore the absolutism destroyed by the French Revolution of 1789. In 1832 the government passed the First Reform Act. It enfranchised Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield, and broadened the base of voting so that manufacturers could be represented in Parliament. The consequent shift in political power moved policy in the direction favored by these newly represented interests; in 1846 they managed to get the hated Corn Laws repealed, demonstrating again that creative destruction meant a redistribution not just of income, but also of political power. And naturally, changes in the