The Arrow of the Canal Age

AWhen the Bridgewater Canal reached Manchester in 1761 it carried nothing more glamorous than coal, and it carried it slowly. Its significance lay in arithmetic. A packhorse on the rutted turnpikes of Lancashire could shift about a hundred and thirty kilograms; the same animal walking a towpath could draw a laden barge of thirty tonnes, and the price of coal at the Manchester wharf fell by roughly half within four years of the opening. Over the following seventy years some six thousand kilometres of artificial waterway were dug across England and Wales, almost all of it by hand, and by 1830 few manufacturing districts lay more than sixteen kilometres from a navigable line. Historians agree about the ditches and the tonnages. What they have argued over since the 1970s is the direction of the arrow: whether the canals summoned the industries that grew along them, or merely followed manufacturers who had already decided where to build.

BHester Quainton, an economic historian at the Ashfield Centre for Transport History, holds that the waterways did the summoning, and that the evidence has been sitting unread in the toll ledgers. Between 2009 and 2021 her group transcribed the surviving accounts of forty-six canal companies covering the years 1770 to 1838, recording every cargo by weight, origin and charge. The average cost of moving a tonne of coal ten miles fell from about nine shillings by road to one shilling and threepence by water, a reduction of some eighty-six per cent that no other change of the period comes close to matching. More telling, in her view, is what happened to goods nobody had previously thought worth moving: limestone, bricks, night soil and rough timber appear in the ledgers in quantities that had no road-borne precedent at all. A cheaper way of carrying old cargoes is an improvement; a way of carrying cargoes that had always stayed where they were is a different kind of event.

CThe claim yields a testable prediction, and Quainton has tested it. If cheap carriage created industry rather than serving it, parishes that acquired a wharf ought to have pulled away from otherwise comparable parishes that did not. Across 214 Midland and northern parishes her group found that those within five miles of navigable water grew by an average of 2.3 per cent a year between 1780 and 1830, against 0.9 per cent for the remainder. The gap, however, was confined to parishes with an established coal-using trade — brewing, glass, iron, pottery. Where the local economy was agricultural, nearness to a wharf made no measurable difference to population at all, and in a handful of grain districts the wharf appears to have hastened departure rather than settlement. Quainton therefore describes the canal as an amplifier rather than an origin: it multiplied whatever a district was already doing, and multiplying zero left zero.

DDouglas Reay-Marsh, who works on industrial archaeology at the University of Dundee, answers that the amplifier was bought and paid for by the very people it amplified. Canals in Britain were private ventures, each needing its own Act of Parliament and its own subscribers, and the subscription lists record who wanted them. Of eighty-seven Acts he examined for the period 1759 to 1795, sixty-one were promoted by men who already owned mills, mines or furnaces in the district the line was to serve. On this reading a waterway is not a cause standing outside the industry but a piece of equipment the industry ordered for itself. Reay-Marsh concedes two things. His lists survive best for companies that went on to pay dividends, so ventures that failed are thinly represented in his sample. And the speculative boom of 1793, when Parliament sanctioned more than twenty canals in a single session, produced several lines through districts with no manufacturing worth the name; most never paid, yet two of them, in the Welsh borders, were followed within a decade by ironworks that had not previously existed.

EThe disagreement is complicated by what survives. When the canal companies were bought out by the railways after 1845 their paperwork was treated as commercial waste, and perhaps a third of the ledgers Quainton would like to read no longer exist; those that do belong disproportionately to lines profitable enough to be worth acquiring. Reay-Marsh observes, awkwardly for his own case, that the same clearances consumed the subscription papers of the schemes that collapsed, so the evidence which best supports his argument is the evidence least likely to have reached an archive. Quainton replies that both distortions have a single parent, since a network remembered only through its successes will look well planned whichever side is doing the looking. What irritates the two of them equally is a habit still standard in general histories: measuring the canal age in miles of channel cut rather than in tonnes actually carried, a figure that flatters promoters and historians alike.

FA settlement of sorts is emerging in which the two accounts are assigned to different questions rather than ranked against each other. On the cost of shifting bulk goods the canals are decisive, and Reay-Marsh does not dispute it. On the location of industry the arrow runs mainly from the works to the water, and Quainton's parish figures are consistent with that reading once her own restriction concerning coal-using trades is respected. The question nobody has settled is what happened after 1845, when railway competition drove canal tolls lower still while volumes fell away: no run of accounts covers enough companies across those decades to show whether the waterways went on shaping prices once they had stopped shaping places. What both reject is the assumption of the older textbooks, that a technology which visibly rearranged a landscape must therefore have started what happened on it.