After four hundred years of Spanish colonial rule Puerto Rico fell under the direct control of the United States in 1898. It has remained so ever since. Its status within the U.S. political system has always been uncertain and anomalous. Unlike Hawaii and Alaska – considered territories ‘incorporated’ into the United States and thereby candidates for future inclusion in the federal system as states of the Union – Puerto Rico was placed in the novel judicial category of an ‘unincorporated territory’. No one in political authority in the United States ever accepted that Puerto Rico, unlike Cuba and the Philippines, should be directed towards even nominal independence.

The island's colonial dependency continued, therefore, into the twentieth century under a new and culturally alien power. Indeed, as the century draws to a close dependency is still in issue. After ninety years under the U.S. flag, of participation of its youth in U.S. wars in Europe and Asia, large migrations to and from the northern metropolis, complete economic integration, and subjection to U.S. sponsored ‘modernization’ in all its forms – Puerto Rico remains a fundamentally Spanish-speaking ‘Latin American’ country with a clear sense of cultural and political seperateness from the system of which it is, for better or worse, part.

In 1940 on the eve of U.S entry into the Second World War the executive power on the island was still exercised by presidentially appointed governors; the educational system remained firmly committed to the imperial idea of ‘Americanization’; the major industry, sugar, hard-hit by the world depression of the 1930s, was in clear decline; unemployment, poverty and discontent were rampant; political violence was increasing; and a wave of nationalism and aggressive movements for Hispanic cultural affirmation were gathering force and influence.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century the economy of El Salvador became the most dynamic in Central America. Unlike the rest of the region, El Salvador had no banana enclave, but the success of its coffee economy was such that the country gained a reputation as ‘the Ruhr of Central America’. The efficiency of the coffee sector owed a great deal to the capacity of a new generation of landlords to exploit the comprehensive alienation of communal lands in El Salvador's central zone in the years which had followed the Liberal revolution of 1871. The altitude and fertility of these lands was particularly well suited to the crop, and because El Salvador is by far the smallest Central American state (21,040 square kilometers) while possessing a large population – even in 1930 it was approaching 1.5 million – the density of settlement was extremely high and the opportunities for peasant migration correspondingly low. As a result, large numbers of rural inhabitants were not so much physically displaced as deprived of their status as small freeholders or members of the municipal commune and converted into waged harvest labourers or colonos paying labour rent for subsistence plots on the edges of the new coffee fincas. Thus the Salvadorean agro-export sector was unique in the isthmus in that it was blessed with a high availability of local labour. Moreover, the remarkably rapid and all-encompassing alienation of common land – the Church, that other traditional target of nineteenth-century liberalism, possessed very little rural property – encouraged an early concentration of commercial estates and propelled the formation of one of the most compact and confident landed oligarchies in the world.

In 1930 Costa Rica, with a landmass of 50,000 square kilometers (more than twice the size of El Salvador), had a population of scarcely half a million inhabitants. The capital, San José, had 50,000 inhabitants; no other town had a population of more than 8,000. More than 60 per cent of the economically active population of some 150,000 worked in agriculture. Production revolved around the cultivation of coffee, which was exported principally to the United States and the United Kingdom. The cultivation of bananas, the second most important export product, was controlled by the United Fruit Company. The country also exported cocoa beans, although in smaller quantities, to practically all of Europe. These three crops accounted for 94.3 per cent of Costa Rica's total income.

The traditional coffee economy had produced a social pyramid with the plantation workers at the base and the growers and exporters, the latter primarily of German descent, at the apex. The coffee growers and merchants also controlled credit, directly or indirectly, through the private banking institutions. Between the two extremes of the pyramid was an important group of small and medium-sized producers who maintained a relative social and economic independence, which had great significance in the national political system.

The development of banana production from the end of the nineteenth century on the Atlantic coast, together with the economic impact of the First World War, had produced some social and economic differentiation, but this was still of a secondary order. A new stratum of waged labour clearly began to take shape during this period, although it remained diversified and could not be strictly described in terms like ‘working class’ or ‘proletariat’ more appropriate to developed societies.

During the half century from the 1930s to the 1980s, Haiti, the poorest country of Latin America, experienced a gradual decline in the standard of living, a deterioration in the condition of the land – with an alarming growth of soil erosion throughout the country – and a dramatic growth of its population, from 2.5 to approximately 6 million. Despite occasional efforts by Haitian governments and ambitious schemes sponsored by an endless procession of foreign missions, little was done to halt the country's decline. Indeed, very often the results of these foreign interventions was positively harmful. In most cases the improvements required were not in the individual interests of the peasants and would only work if undertaken as co-operative enterprises among all the landholders in a particular area. Haitian governments were generally unable or unwilling to give the kind of guarantees which would make such projects viable.

Throughout these years Haiti remained a largely agricultural economy, producing food for local consumption together with a few export crops. The principal cash crop was coffee. Efforts to encourage large-scale production of other crops such as sugar, cotton and sisal, met with only limited success. Most manufactured consumer goods were imported, principally from the United States. Attempts to develop copper and bauxite mining achieved no more than modest results. From the late 1960s there was a rapid growth in light manufacturing industries and assembly plants, situated mostly in and around the capital. These accounted for well over half the country's foreign earnings in 1985 when Haiti enjoyed the distinction of being the world's largest producer of baseballs.

No part of Cuba escaped the ravages of the war with Spain that ended in 1898. From the eastern mountains across the central plains to the western valleys, the scene of desolation and devastation was the same. It was a brutal conflict in which the opposing armies seemed determined more to punish the land than prosecute the war, practising pillage of every kind for almost four years. More than 100,000 small farms, 3,000 livestock ranches and 700 coffee fincas were destroyed. Of the estimated 1,100 sugar mills registered in 1894, only 207 survived. Property-owners, urban and rural, were in debt and lacked either access to capital or sources of credit.

This devastation was neither unforeseen nor unplanned. In fact, it was the principal purpose for which Cubans, who understood well the political economy of colonialism, had taken up arms. It was indeed a war against property, and by 1898 separatist tactics had vindicated the goal of separatist strategy: Spain was on the brink of collapse. But the success of the Cuban military campaign did not produce the desired political results. Rather, it precipitated United States intervention, and at this point all the Cubans' plans went awry. They had thrown everything into the campaign against Spain. Victory over Spain left them exhausted, weak and vulnerable.

Armed intervention led to military occupation, at the end of which, in May 1902, the United States had effectively reduced Cuban independence to a mere formality. The Platt Amendment denied the new republic treaty-making authority, established limits on the national debt and sanctioned North American intervention for ‘the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty’.

A regional approach to social history obviously works primarily within geographical boundaries, and it is the long accumulation of the effects of topography and its influence on patterns of settlement and administrative and economic structures which is at the root of those regional identities that can be observed though the many superimposed layers of national and international forces, religious and class divisions, and inward and outward migration. A simplified picture suggests that by the early seventeenth century Britain possessed a reasonably unified and integrated ruling class, predominantly landed, following on the union of the crowns and the Tudor development of central power. Although the eighteenth century was to be half over before many of the Scottish elements slotted firmly into place in this class, it was one which was broadly homogeneous in culture, in life style and aspirations; its members spoke the same language, if not always the same dialect, until the second half of the nineteenth century, they intermarried freely, and any surviving regional differences between them were romantic displays of custom rather than matters of serious social or political consequence. By the mid-eighteenth century the professional, financial, and mercantile middle class were similarly broadly unified, with value systems and social customs which transcended regional boundaries, although the marked differences between the legal systems of England and Scotland meant that professionally the British legal world has never become fully integrated. It is true that manufacturers and industrialists, who in any case were only beginning to rise above provincial obscurity in the early nineteenth century, stood apart from this bourgeois circle, and to some extent continued to do so into the twentieth century.

Conventional wisdom about the fortunes and significance of this region in the two centuries after 1750 comes trippingly off the tongue. Below a thin crust of banal generalisations, however, the questing historian uncovers shifting, unstable strata of diverging and conflicting accounts and interpretations, often venting as emissions of superheated debate which alarm and confuse the innocent bystander, obscuring the view with steam and volcanic gases and dispelling the illusion of clarity, security and control. Explanations of the social circumstances surrounding the spectacular rise, sustained heyday and precipitous decline of the cotton industry and its associated towns form a staple of historical debate, although the first two phases have received much more attention than the third. The early and intensive interaction of the steam engine, the factory system and an unprecedented rate of urban growth, concentrated within a narrow area of south Lancashire and north Cheshire, proved irresistible to social commentators then and has remained so for social historians ever since. Cotton Lancashire became ‘the first industrial society’ and ‘the cradle of the Industrial Revolution’. The cotton industry became a much debated ‘leading sector’ in British industrialisation, while at the same time its assumed characteristics tended to be misleadingly paraded as a surrogate for the more complex pattern of changes in British economy and society as a whole. The industrialising experience of a small corner of Lancashire and its adjoining counties became at once exciting exception and all-embracing norm in the treatment of Britain's industrial revolution. Moreover, there were political dimensions to the changes.

The historical study of the family has been fraught with difficulties, not least because many records are more informative of what people in the past thought the family should be, rather than giving us much information on how families were actually constituted or reporting the experience of family life. The fact, too, that everyone at some time lives in a family and that many of its features seem timeless, rooted in biology, makes it perplexing to grasp the great diversity of families over time.

Yet even the definition of who was part of the family has changed radically. At the beginning of the period, the family was often still conceived as a group of dependants: wife, children, lesser kin, servants and apprentices attached to the household of the masculine head, usually the master/husband/father. The male principal had only recently come to be regarded as part of that family unit. In political thought, theology and the common sense of daily life, this conception of the family was the template for most other organisations and was seen as the foundation of society.

Numerous recent studies have thrown some light on the many variations in the lived experience of individuals in families, kinship networks and households. The problem is, however, that, like a torch turned on particular items in a darkened but crowded room, such research can only illuminate what is caught in its beam, leaving the general picture still obscure.

THE REGION

Compared with many of the modern economic regions of Britain, which exist more for administrative than any organic reason, the north-east does appear to have some intrinsic merits and historical validity as a region. If we take as the basic region the old administrative counties of Northumberland and Durham, it has reasonably well-defined geographical boundaries with the North Sea, the Scottish border, the central uplands and the river valley of the Tees. It was, therefore, firmly distinguished to the east, to the north (if really only by the ancient antagonisms of race) and to the west by hills which restricted mobility. Only to the south was the region weakly bounded in a sparsely populated agricultural and metal-mining area between the south Durham coalfield and the developing West Riding towns. More than the simple boundaries of regional geography gave the area some unity, however. In an age when overland transport was very costly, the sea was the major highway for the movement of heavy or bulky goods. It was, therefore, inevitable that commercial activity looked to the nearest coast for other than local trade and that towns such as Bishop Auckland, Durham, Hexham, Morpeth (and their environs) should look to the east and the market powers of towns such as Newcastle, Sunderland and Stockton with their river access to the sea. Ultimately (but paradoxically since it covered only a minor part of the region) it was the coal industry which gave unity to the region. In an age when its population was sparse and its other attractions limited, the north-east was to all intents and purposes (and especially to south-eastern intents and purposes) the Great Northern coalfield.

This chapter does not provide a comprehensive survey of demographic change in Britain between 1750 and 1950. Its main purpose is to identify the principal changes in demographic behaviour which, in one way or another, set a context for, raised opportunities for, or constrained other aspects of social life in the 200 years covered by this volume.

POPULATION, ITS DISTRIBUTION AND MOVEMENT

In 1750, the population of England was about 5.75 million. Scotland had 1.25 million people, and Wales 0.5 million. A century later, in 1851, the numbers had more than doubled, to 16.7 million, 2.9 million and 1.2 million respectively; by 1951 they had reached 41.6 million, 5.1 million and 2.2 million.

In general, as is clear from Figure 1.1, Scotland's population grew more slowly than that of England and Wales, but in both countries the rate of growth, rapid in the mid-eighteenth century in comparison with the past, peaked in the early nineteenth century, remained high until the end of the century and subsequently declined. At its highest rate, in the years 1811–21, England added 18 per cent to its population in a decade and Scotland nearly 16 per cent. At its absolute peak, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Great Britain's population grew by almost 4 million: in just one decade there were 4 million more people to be fed, employed, amused and housed. In a long-term historical perspective, the most remarkable feature of demographic change in our period was the ability of the British society and economy to cope so well with this massive and unprecedented rise in population.

This chapter cannot hope to provide an exhaustive history of work over the period. Rather, it takes what is probably the major insight of recent scholarship on industrial capitalism, and attempts to work out some of the consequences of this insight. The realisation that the factory and the machine should form a part and not the whole of our picture of industrialisation is a relatively recent one. Coming to terms with the diversity and irregularity of capitalist development involves therefore a critical account of older notions of social and political change predicated on now questionable premises. It also necessitates the attempt in turn to relate such change to a more adequate notion of the economy and work experience, a relation that is itself revealed as problematic. The attempt to balance old and new accounts – for it may be a question of balance rather than simple substitution – must therefore be historiographical and theoretical, as well as empirical. In, broadly, the first half of the chapter an empirical approach predominates, as the principal features of work are delineated. Towards the close of section two, problems associated with newer perspectives are raised in a speculative manner, which steadily becomes more historiographical in approach. However, we shall begin at the beginning, namely what people worked at in the past.

Part 1: The policeman-state

INTRODUCTION

For centuries in Britain, stealing from and hurting other people have been pursuits as common and traditional as drinking and fornicating. All social classes have participated in them. Poorer and younger people have stolen to procure food or clothing, to demonstrate daring, or to relieve tedium. Affluent, older or upwardly mobile people have embezzled, evaded taxes, excise and currency regulations, defrauded each other and their clients under the guise of commercial or professional practice, and lifted from shops. They have done these things far more frequently than the courts have ever recognised, as self-report studies nowadays show. And in times past, for good measure, the rich no less than the poor used violence to assert prowess, relieve tension and settle disputes. ‘Crime’ in these many senses has been as much a part of our national heritage as has a taste for beer, politics and sex.

This makes the history of crime an unimaginably large subject. Commentators usually therefore take a short cut. They address themselves not to the ubiquity of law-breaking at all social levels, but to those actions, merely, which come to be labelled as crimes by the reactions of the law-enforcement and judicial systems. This in turn, however, puts them at the mercy of the prejudices and constraints which determine how the law selects some targets and ignores others. That is why no discussion of ‘crime’ can sensibly proceed which does not first discuss how, by whom and why attitudes and policies towards crime are formed, and what often covert purposes those policies serve.

‘England was early in the field with a productive, expansible agriculture.’ Among specialists in agrarian history there are diverse opinions concerning the extent of changes in farming practices and the rate at which increases in output were achieved before and during the eighteenth century, but no one disputes that England stood in the vanguard of agrarian progress. Moreover it is generally agreed that the agrarian sector was commercialised to an extent unmatched elsewhere, except in Holland. These advances had been accompanied and no doubt in some respects facilitated by changes in the composition of rural society. From the vantage point of the later eighteenth century a marked contrast with the position in contemporary Europe was discernible. English rural society in no way resembled that of territories east of the Elbe, characterised by enormous estates worked by hordes of unemancipated serfs; nor did it exhibit the pattern common to much of Western Europe, where much land continued to be held in relatively tiny units farmed by peasants. In England, through a lengthy process of evolution there had emerged a tripartite system, featuring landlords who were essentially rent receivers but who bore certain responsibilities for the provision of fixed capital; substantial tenant farmers, directly responsible for the working of the land through the application of their entrepreneurial energies and working capital; and landless or virtually landless wage earners whose contribution derived from their application of strength and skill and who were surprisingly numerous even in the sixteenth century.

TIME FOR LEISURE

The most obvious way of providing some parameters for the history of leisure is to regard leisure as time; it is the time which is left over after work and other obligations have been completed. Any hope, however, that such an approach will provide clear and unambiguous statistics of the changes in the amount of leisure time available to the population must, for a number of reasons, be discounted. First, there were always jobs in which working hours contained within them periods of leisure of an episodic or more or less regular character; examples include the workshop trades of the nineteenth century, such as printing, in which there was time for drinking and other workshop pranks, and in the twentieth century ship building where the scale of the enterprise made it impossible for supervisory staff to prevent card-playing at work. Secondly, there were jobs in which the working hours were never rigorously defined by the clock, and for which it is difficult to establish accurate figures for hours of work; such jobs, whose hours varied according to the day of the week and the season of the year, included agriculture, and all small workshop and domestic work. Significantly women were a large part of the workforce in many of these jobs. Thirdly, figures for hours of work exclude overtime, and until the 1920s there are no statistics to facilitate an accurate assessment of its extent; what is certain, however, is that overtime working has increased in the twentieth century and to that extent eaten into the apparent growth in leisure time.

As long as the state of domestic agriculture was the principal determinant of food consumption, the population of Britain depended on a limited range of food materials which were available on a markedly seasonal basis. While traditional forms of food preservation persisted, this meant that dietary patterns were circumscribed by the availability and durability of foodstuffs. Thus the predominant food material in all parts of Britain on the eve of the industrial revolution was some kind of bread-grain, either wheat, barley or oats, surpluses of which were processed to produce beer and spirits. Animal food was preserved by the liberal use of salt. Bacon or pickled meat, salt fish, butter and, to a lesser extent, cheese fell into this category. Green vegetables were seasonal in supply, as were pulses, roots or bulbs such as onions, though the latter were capable of storage for some time. Nevertheless, every year brought the ‘hungry gap’ of the late winter and early spring when supplies of vegetables were exhausted, a pattern which was not entirely eradicated in country districts on the eve of the Great War in 1914.

Even before the industrial revolution, there were growing differences in what people ate or drank which reflected changes in their style of life. In predominantly agricultural areas, where the majority of the population lived, it was still usual to process food in the home and the self-reliance of families which kept animals and brewed and baked for themselves made it appear that little change was in sight.

‘Modern Wales’ emerged in these years with the transition from a predominantly rural society at the outset to an increasingly industrial and urbanised one and the replacement of the old social and political dominance of the landed classes by freedom and democracy. This transformation from a traditional to an urban world was, of course, a British phenomenon but, for all that, Welsh society was to exhibit characteristics which were to contrast with its English counterpart. Accordingly, a principal aim of this chapter will be to explore and explain those distinctive aspects of Wales's culture and society. Nineteenth-century Welsh society was shaped above all by its pervading nonconformist ethos and, closely bound up with it, the Welsh language. Such separate traits as emerged were to be largely neglected by successive English governments down to the 1880s, not to mention the ill-natured ridicule of things Welsh by the London press, a state of affairs which, indeed, did so much to fuel the nationalist drive of the 1880s and 1890s for securing recognition of Wales's separate identity. This distinct nationality notwithstanding, increasing industrialisation locked Wales more and more into a ‘fated mutuality’ with the English, and another aim will be to show how growing English influence had profound implications for the survival of the traditional ‘Welsh way of life’. While declining everywhere from the 1920s, this traditional ‘Welsh’ culture, based on the language, chapel and class harmony was, indeed, from the opening decades of this century to be increasingly jettisoned by the vigorous, rapidly anglicising coalfield society of South Wales, and a further concern will be to analyse the equally distinctive culture that came to replace it, a culture characterised by its remarkable degree of class and community loyalty.

In spite of a continuing sense of national identity, Scotland in the eighteenth century was a country of marked regional and ethnic differences. The major division was between the English-speaking areas, all in what is called the Lowlands, and the area of Gaelic usage, the Highlands. The line dividing English from Gaelic speech had been narrowing down the Gaeltacht for centuries, and by the mid-eighteenth century lay very near to the great geological fault which makes the highland edge, though even so there were English-speaking areas to the north of the fault: most of the plain forming the southern coast of the Moray Firth, the town of Inverness, the triangle of Caithness lying beyond the county of Sutherland. The division was not simply one of speech, but of culture, social structure and the means of disseminating culture. There were, before the 1780s, practically no printed books in Gaelic: a translation of the psalms existed, but was not readily available, since it had never been properly distributed. The lack of an Old Testament in Gaelic meant that the imageries used in Scottish and in Gaelic literature were totally separate. Few even of educated men in the Highlands could express themselves in Gaelic on paper with accepted orthography. Gaelic culture was mostly conveyed in song, and usually by the physical presence of the singer. The poetic base of these songs might be the creation of either sex, though male assumptions have sometimes left the name of women poets unknown. The highland area was poor and economically backward, feeding itself marginally on its own grain and the erratic supply of milk and blood from its cattle. Difficulties in land transport perpetuated poverty.