The economic structure of port cities in the mid-nineteenth century: Boston and Liverpool, 1840?1860

Journal of Historical Geography, 2, 2 (1976) 131-143

The economic structure of port cities in the mid-nineteenth century: Boston and Liverpool, 1840-1860 John B. Sharpless

This paper compares the economic structures of Boston, Massachusetts, and Liverpool, Lancashire, in the mid-nineteenth century. The two cities were selected for comparative analysis because of similarities in the commodity Bows through their ports, the functional status of each city in the urban hierarchies of the US and Britain and the industrial mix of each hinterland. An examination of the distribution of the labour force in each city (185X1-1851) supported the assumption of functional similarity. However, in standardising the data for relative differences in the level of regional and national economic development, Boston evidenced a greater dominance over regional and national markets than did Liverpool. This was particularly true in the case of industries not directly associated with the city’s port functions. The primary factor contributing to these differences was the proximity of alternative location sites in the hinterland.

Nineteenth-century city growth

Temporal and spatial differences in city growth in the early nineteenth century can be viewed not only in terms of the city’s spatial location but also in terms of the changing structure of the non-farm economy generally. It is useful, therefore, to think of the urbanisation process in both straightforward demographic terms (i.e. the changing rate of population concentration) as well as a general evolution in the economic character of urban areas. However, in moving to the economic or functional sources of variation of urban growth, we are immediately confronted with a host of theoretical, definitional and data problems. Even under the best of circumstances, with a relative comprehensive set of economic and demographic variables available, it is very difficult to unravel the complex set of interactions at work both within and without any given city.

However, a more serious problem is the difficulty we have in articulating a set of systematic propositions which might be subjected to confirmation or rejection. It is not that we are totally without theory in this area. Indeed, we now have a well-developed, but rather generalised view of how the process of industrial urbanisation proceeded in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, broad conceptual categories such as “commercial activity”, “industrial enterprise”, “factory system” and the like, while serving to elucidate so completely the complexity of the economic and social transformation we associate with urbanisation and industrial concentration, prove far too comprehensive for actual application in the study of specified urban settings. What is lacking is some specific notion of the structure of urban economy in the nineteenth century. In order to offer more precision to our general conception of urban-industrial development, it is necessary to increase the resolution of analysis, while at the same time partitioning the broad conceptual categories of commercial and manufacturing into the full range of local economic

132 J. B. SHARPLESS

activities. Such an effort requires direct comparison of the occupational structure of particular cities.

This discussion isolates Boston, Massachusetts, and Liverpool, Lancashire, for detailed examination of the patterns of local labour force allocations. The temporal focus of the analysis is the period between 1840 and the outbreak of the American Civil War. For both New England and Britain’s Northwest region, this period roughly demarks an era of transformation from a commercially oriented to an industrially based urban economy. Presumably, if there is a time in the overall process of urbanisation when we should be concerned with the character of urban occupational structure, it is during such periods of sectoral shift.[ll

Boston and Liverpool: test settings for comparative case study

The selection of these cities was determined by their compatibility as subjects for comparative analysis. In each case, the city formed the nucleus of a major region experiencing intensive economic growth in the early decades of the nineteenth century; each was a primary servicing port and distribution centre for a growing industrial hinterland. Both the Northwest in England and New England in the United States were major textile producing regions. The economies of each depended on the fortunes of the Southern cotton crop and the expanding demand for clothing and textile products. In fact, it was through the expansion of the textile industry in these regions that the basis of Western industrialisation was firmly established in this period. Therefore, during the period of analysis, both cities occupy similar positions in their respective urban hierarchies. Boston’s relationship to New York, for example, was very much like that of Liverpool to London. Moreover, there is considerable evidence to suggest that both cities were subject to the same set of variables at work in the developing trans-Atlantic economy.

The logic of this strategy is a variant of what Przeworski and Teune label the “most similar systems” approach to comparative studies.t2J It is a research design based on the assumption “. . . that systems as similar as possible with respect to as many features as possible constitute the optimal samples for comparative inquiry”.[31 Obviously, under the similar systems criteria, the selection of cases for analysis is not simply fortuitous. The goal is to maximise what Naroll has called “concomitant variation” between the test settings. t4r The researcher attempts to isolate cases for which it seems reasonable to assume certain phenomena or characteristics to be constants. In trying to maximise the utility of the comparative case-study approach, one strives as much as possible to approximate the controlled setting of the experimental situation in which the variation in the specific behaviour under study can be attributed to the introduction of an “external” stimulus (i.e. “all other factors held constant . . .“).

Unfortunately, in most social and economic research, it is impossible to establish with any regularity the systematic controls required by the canons of experimental

Ill

121 [31 [41

E. E. Lampard, The history of cities in economically advanced areas Economic development and cultural change 3 (1955) 81-136; D. Ward, Cities and immigrants (New York 1971) 32-9 A. Przeworski and H. Teune, The logic of comparative social inquiry (New York 1970) 32-4 Ibid. 32 R. Naroll, Some thoughts on comparative method in cultural anthropology, pp. 236-77 of H. M. Blalock and A. Blalock (Eds), Methodology in social research (New York 1968)

BOSTON AND LIVERPOOL 133

research. At best, we must be satisfied with a prima facie case for similarity of the test environments. For the cities of Boston and LiverpooI in the early nineteenth century, a strong case of this sort can be made. Both of these cities assumed a similar functional role in the urban economy of their respective nations. In other words, given any differences in the overall development of the British and American economies, both cities held equivalent positions in their evolving urban systems. Regionally, each city was a primary central place, clustering commercial and entrepot services for the nation’s major industrial hinterland. However, at the national level, both cities assumed a secondary role to a larger nationally dominant commercial centre.

As major Atlantic ports, the economies of both Liverpool and Boston were responsive fluctuations in the expanding Anglo-American economy. It is not surprising that, despite continuing differences in their absolute sizes, the growth rates of these two cities moved synchronously throughout the period 1800-1870. For most of the nineteenth century, resurgent flows of finished goods and raw materials, capital and labour moved across the Atlantic, carrying waves of pros- perity and recession to the cities of Britain and America.[ll British investment capital subsidised the construction of America’s canals and railways. English and Scottish artisans staffed the mills and shops of New England. Irish labourers toiled on the docks of London and Liverpool as well as those of New York and Boston.

From the standpoint of establishing a direct comparison between Boston and Liverpool, however, there are two aspects of this trans-Atlantic “connection” which require emphasis. The first is the expansion of the textile industries of both New England and Lancashire in response to the increased supplies of raw cotton from the American South. The second is the economic impact of the great lrish migration in the 1840s and 1850s. The effects of both factors were immediately felt by each of these cities. If the conventional histories of Liverpool and Boston can be used as a guide, the cotton trade and unskilled Irish labourers were the two most important ingredients in the changing economy of each locality.

For New England’s industrial sector in particular, “. . . it was cotton that initiated the concomitant expansion in income, in the size of domestic markets, and the creation of social overhead investment (in the course of its role in the marketing of cotton) in the Northeast which were to facilitate the subsequent rapid growth of manufacturers ” ~1 In this context, Robert Zevin has provided a . strong argument that cotton textile production was not only the initiating impetus but the dominant component in the “first” American industrial expansion which occurred in New England in the 1820s and 183Os, accounting for two-thirds of the value added in manufacturing.‘31

The initial surge of expansion in the textile industry (1820-l 835) occurred in the period of strongest demographic growth for the city of Boston. However, Boston did not have a major textile factory within the city until after the Civil War. Presumably, the growth of the industry in the city’s hinterland generated jobs and additional income within the city. We do know, for example, that the primary source for investment capital in the cotton textile industry in this period came from mercantile interests in Boston. In addition to the employment generated from the

[l] B. Thomas, Migration and urban development (London 1972) [2] D. North, The economic growth of the United States, 179&1860 (New York 1966) 68 [3] R. B. Zevin, The growth of cotton textile production after 1815, pp.122-5 of R. W. Fogel

and S. L. Engerman (Eds), The reinterpretation of American economic history (New York 1971)

134 J. B. SHARPLESS

movement of raw cotton through the port itself, there was also the concomitant growth of the clothing industry within the city resulting from the outward flow of yardgoods and shoddy. The statewide Manufacturing Census of 1837 reported 97 of Boston’s establishments engaged in cloth and clothing manufacture. With nearly 3,000 workers employed in the production of clothing, it can be counted among the largest industries in the city. The average number of employees per establishment was about 30.r11

On the British side, the cotton textile industry was no less pivotal in the process of industrial development. Through a complex series of backward and forward linkages, the impact of change and growth in the cotton industry was multiplied and diffused into the economy at large. ~1 Even more impressive is the impact of the cotton manufacture on the economy of the Northwest region, In the 1840s and 185Os, approximately one in every ten in the prime-age male labour force in Lancashire was engaged directly in the production of cotton cloth. Nearly a third of all females over twenty years of age who were reported as employed were in cotton manufacture. Young workers, both male and female, evidenced even higher participation rates in this industry.

The effect of this concentration of textile production within the hinterland was, for Liverpool, like Boston, primarily commercially oriented. The Liverpool port dominated the flow of England’s most important commodity. In these years, between 75 and 90% of the raw cotton moved through Liverpool. The effect of this movement of cotton at the port on local employment patterns is difficult to estimate. While the census statistics enumerate dock and warehouse labour, there is no distinction on the basis of the kind of materials handled. In the forties and fifties between 1,500 and 2,000 males were reported as directly employed in warehousing; an additional 2,300 were employed in carting and porterage. While it may be assumed that increases in local income were generated through activities of this sort, no precise estimate is possible. Again, like Boston, Liverpool never became a major production site for cotton cloth. The textile industry remained well established in interior cities such as Manchester, Bolton, Blackburn and Oldham.

The other primary collateral factor which simultaneously affected both cities was the massive migration of the Irish in the forties and fifties. In each case the Irish served to swell the ranks of the unskilled labour pool of the city. For each, the proportion of Irish-born residents reached a peak in the early fifties and subsequently declined (as did the overall stream of migrants out of Ireland).c3J By mid-century, Irish-born men, women and children constituted roughly a quarter of each city’s population. Generally, most of the Irish workers clustered in the low-paying jobs of manufacturing and transportation industries. It provides an instructive comparison to examine each city’s response to this sudden explosion in the supply of labour.

Surrounding both Liverpool and Boston were a group of smaller specialised industrial cities which produced manufactured goods for export and “consumed” the commercial services provided by the larger, mercantile city on the coast. It is

111

121

[31

L. Shattuck, Report to the City Council. . . [on the] . . . Census of Boston, 1945 (Boston 1846) Appendix Z P. Deane, The first industrial revolution (Cambridge 1969) 84-99; W. W. Rostow, Stages of economic growth (New York 1960) 54-5 J. B. Sharpless, A comparative analysis of urban economic structures: Boston and Liverpool, 1820-l 861, Table VI, a paper delivered at the Seventh Annual Conference in Socio-Political History (State University College, Brockport, New York; October 1974)


necessary, however, to acknowledge one of the major differences between these two cities in terms of their hinterland relationships. Liverpool had another major city within its region with which it shared metropolitan central place functions. Throughout these decades, cotton goods produced in the smaller Lancashire towns and cities were first gathered at Manchester before trans-shipment to Liver- pool for export. In addition to serving as a competing industrial site in Liverpool’s region, in terms of certain commercial functions, Manchester also served as an alternatiue central place.

These latter observations bring us to what is perhaps the most important intervening variable which would differentially affect external economic pressures faced by each of these two cities. Britain was by far the more urbanised of the two nations. In 1860, for example, about 20% of the US population resided in settlements of 2,500 persons or larger; in contrast, over half of the British population resided in similarly-sized settlements. Presumably, this meant a wider range of competing sites for the location of industries and, at the same time, many more alternative sources of employment for urban migrants. In selecting these particular cities for examination, therefore, we post the following juxtaposition of theoretical considerations : Boston and Liverpool were functionally equivalent cities in national urban systems of dzjfkring stages of maturity. Assuming a high level of “concomitant variation” in terms of demographic structure, growth performance and hinterland economy, differences in the economic activity structure of these two cities indicate the impact of the developmental dimension.

Some differences in both the quality as well as the organisation of the data partially erode the close experimental character of the comparative design. On the British side, 1841 marks the first year in which detailed information on occupation is available at the local level, and it is not until after 185 1 that the nomenclature and organisation of the occupational listings is fully determined. For the United States, the census of 1840 published occupational data only within the broad categories of commercial, manufacturing, professional and the like. The Census of Manu- facturing for that year enumerated a selected group of activities but excluded some important industries such as boot and shoe manufacture. In 1860, the published data were again limited to an enumeration of manufacturing employment. In these years we were forced to compromise the research goals given the obvious data constraints. Fortunately, at the mid-century mark, immediate and direct compari- sons can be made based on the published British census statistics and occupational data gleaned from the census manuscripts for the city of Boston.

The port city economy in an age of industry: some theoretical considerations

Although there is still considerable debate over the precise relationships between specific demographic and economic variables, it is now generally agreed that a primary manifestation of industrial urbanisation is the increased concentration and specialisation of productive activities in urban areas.nl This seems to have been the case both in terms of the organisation of economic institutions as well as in the spatial organisation of economic enterprise. Certain cities and regions increasingly came to dominate the production of certain types of goods and services. Firms operating elsewhere (i.e. outside of these regional concentrations) found it

[ 1 ] E. E. Lampard, The evolving system of cities in the United States : urbanization and economic development, pp. 1 l&34 of H. S. Perloff and L. Wingo, Jr (Eds), Issues in urban economics (Baltimore 1968)

136 J. B. SHARPLESS

difficult to compete in the expanding national and international commodity and capital markets. Developing transportation systems tended to reinforce and accelerate this bias. Within major urban centres, marginal industries were unable to compete with newer “growth industries” for land and labour. The capital investment, either within the city proper or in the city’s immediate environs, flowed into those industries which appeared to be able to meet the changing competitive demands of the external economy. Firms which produced subsidiary goods or institutions which provided collateral services for the “primary” industries clustered nearby, encouraging still further the trend toward specialisation and agglomeration at the local level. It is also clear, however, that as powerful and immediate as these national economic trends were in the early nineteenth century, the degree to which any particular urban centre experienced the effects of these forces depended upon the local configuration of demographic and economic conditions.

In the case of early nineteenth-century port cities, such as Boston and Liverpool, the role of commercial enterprise and international trade would appear of particular importance. Until very recently, in fact, the theoretical as well as historical literature on city development in this period has emphasised the commercial aspects of city economy as primary determinants not only of the local occupational structure but also of the total demographic growth of urban areas. In the “mercantile” economy, manufacturing enterprise is presumed to have had a supportive function; the industrial sector of the urban economy is the reactive component, dependent on the vicissitudes of commercial trade. Subsequently, as the regional and national economies of Britain and America moved toward a greater commitment to industrial activity, the influence of the commercial component of the urban sector diminished relative to the domestic (industrial) generation of capital and income.

Yet, in a recent monograph charting the economic development of Liverpool, F. E. Hyde suggests that as the city increased its role as a major British port, it shed much of its manufacturing enterprise. The watch-making and pottery industries serve as notable examples. rlJ In each case, these were local industries with considerable reputation throughout England in the eighteenth century which declined rapidly during the city’s commercial expansion in the nineteenth century. Hyde offers this brief observation as possible explanation:[21

The mercantile interests in the port were the primary source of wealth. These interests required increasing quantities of low-priced manufacturing goods. As communications with the hinterland increased, the flood of such goods poured into Liverpool from the factories of Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and the Midlands. Thus the demands for cargo, which no longer could be satisfied from the resources of Liverpool’s own industrial capital, were increasingly supplied at highly competitive rates from the outside. In this way Liverpool’s needs as a port turned her into a commercial rather than into an industrial centre.

Professor Hyde’s comments mask two interrelated processes. The first has to do with the changing state of regional, national and, often, international markets in which each industry competed. The earthenware industry, for example, “migrated”

[l] F. E. Hyde, Liuerpool and the Mersey: an economic history of a port, 1700-1970 (Newton Abbot 1971) 19-21

[2] Ibid. Also see F. A. Baily and T. C. Baker, The seventeenth century origins of watchmaking in south-west Lancashire, pp. 1-15 of J. R. Harris (Ed.), Liverpool and Merseyside: essays in the economic and social history of the port and its hinterland (Londor and New York 1969)


to Staffordshire largely because of changing pressures on the supply side of the market.[‘l A second cluster of considerations are to be found within the city itself. As the structure of the local economy responded to external demands, there was a reallocation of the city’s resources-land, labour and capital-away from certain industrial concerns toward more profitable commercial ventures.

Liverpool’s shipbuilding industry is a useful illustration in this instance. Although it was an enterprise which seemed to be vitally connected with the life of the port, the shipbuilding industry appears to have suffered a consistent decline throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century. Shipbuilding firms simply failed, or they moved to other cities with conditions more profitable to ship and boat construction. By the 183Os, Liverpool’s merchants regularly went elsewhere to contract their orders for ships. Izl Hull, Whitby, Scarborough and, later, Clydeside in Scotland, became centres for shipbuilding in Great Britain. There were also sub-urban movements in the face of growing congestion in the central Liverpool docks area. With the announcement in 1850 that Liverpool’s largest shipbuilding concern was moving across the Mersey to Birkenhead, a public hearing was held to assess the depressing state of the industry in Liverpool.t31 In addition to citing rising labour costs, local shipbuilders complained of high rents, lack of space and frequent relocation in the face of the growing dock and warehouse areas. All these factors were the direct result of a less than fully competitive position in local factor markets aggravated by an increasingly weaker position in the national and international shipbuilding trade. t41 Presumably the same sort of mechanisms were at work in other industries.

Perhaps the most systematic attempt to deal with the economic structure of the nineteenth-century “mercantile city” is the work of Allen Pred. Pred’s analysis focused primarily on the large coastal cities of America in the period from 1790 to 1840. He was particularly concerned with what he saw as a confluence of techno- logical and entrepreneural forces which “. . . militated against the location of. . . manufacturing activities in the larger commercial cities”.[51 He argued that prior to the financial panic and subsequent depression of the late thirties, “American manufacturing was characterized predominantly by an emphasis on consumer rather than capital goods, by handicraft rather than machine techniques, by household and workshop rather than factory organization, and by rural dispersion rather than concentration in major urban centers”.161 Only with the intercession of a series of external events such as the application of machine technology or the expansion of the railway network were these cities able to bring about a shift in economic structure to a more industrial orientation. What manufacturing one does find in the mercantile city tended to be “commerce-serving” rather than “commerce- generating”. In contrast to the industrial city of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was the expansion of the “wholesaling-trading” complex which gave rise to the multiplier effects which Pred found so essential for continued

[l] R. Muir, A history of Liverpool (Liverpool 1907, repr. 1971) 246 [2] F. Neal, Liverpool shipping in the early nineteenth century, in Harris, op. cit. 78-94 [3] Shipbuilding in Liverpool: euidence taken before the committee appointed by the Town Council

to consider the present state of the shipbuilding trade in Liverpool (Liverpool 1850); The Liverpool Courier, 2nd October 2 1850, p. 2

[4] Hyde, op. cit. 38-9 [5] A. R. Pred, The spatial dynamics of U.S. urban-industrial growth, 1800-1814 (Cambridge,

Mass. 1966) 145 [6] Ibid. 143

138 J. B. SHARPLESS

growth of urban areas. [11 It is important to note, however, that Pred’s analysis was limited to American commercial cities of the pre-1840 era.

In addition to those activities directly tied to the functioning of the docks and warehouse districts, both Liverpool and Boston had a major portion of the work force engaged in industries partially dependent on the agglomerative effects of a thriving port economy. This seems to have been the case in spatial terms as well. For example, the large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, which first surveyed Liverpool in the early forties, reveal that a sizable portion of the central city was given over to what might be called processing industries: soap manufacture, tanning, rope making and oil refining. r21 And, while the congested and constrained character of Boston’s geography made the rental of space for rope-works prohibitive, nearly 10-15x of the city’s manufacturing work force was engaged in some kind of processing industry in the 1840s and 1850s.

One would expect industries of this sort to be associated with the functioning of a major seaport at any time in the nineteenth century. A port city is not only a point at which goods change conveyance (e.g. ship-to-train, train-to-ship, ship-to- barge, etc.), but it is also a “break-in-bulk” point. The size of shipment packages are reduced for further distribution in the hinterland. Raw materials and semi- finished products are gathered at the port for assembly or finishing before shipment overseas. For many raw staple products-oils, leather, sugar, dyewoods, grains-a break in bulk means a certain level of processing of the product (primarily for weight reduction and reduced transport costs). Theoretically, through a variety of forward and backward linkages, this initial cluster of port-related industries could grow into a sizable, independent industrial sector (“agglomeration effect”).[31 Nonetheless, the question remains, to what extent do these industries speak for the city as a whole in this period? Was the industrial component declining or expanding?

The structure of port city economy: a mid-century comparison

As commercial ports primarily engaged in the cotton trade of the fifth and sixth decades of the nineteenth century, Boston and Liverpool faced a similar range of economic pressures. Presumably, the demand side of each city’s labour market was similar in structure. Therefore, regardless of differences in the absolute number of workers employed, we would anticipate that this functional similarity would be revealed in the labour force allocations across the primary employment sectors. When the local distribution is adjusted for the degree of urban and industrial development of their respective regional hinterlands as well as for the employment character of the national economic environment, the difference in developmental setting of these cities should emerge.

[l] Pred, op. cit. 177-86 [2] Great Britain, T/z Ordnance Survey (Liverpool), Series I (London 1842-1846). I wish to

thank the officials of The Planning Office, City of Liverpool, for making available to me a complete set of the large-scale maps. For a discussion of the spatial structure of Boston in this era, see D. Ward, Nineteenth century Boston: a study in the role of antecedent and adjacent considerations in the spatial aspects of urban growth (unpubl. Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin 1963) particularly chapter 5

[3] Lampard, The history of cities . . . op. cit. 90-3; W. Thompson, A preface to urban economics (Baltimore 1965) particularly chapters 1 and 2; also Pred, op. cit. 42-6


With this juxtaposition of considerations in mind, it seems appropriate to start with an examination of the economic structure of these cities using the basic data displayed in Table 1. The categories are those of the modern British industrial classification.[ll It is important to note that some of the variation in the data across these years must be attributed to variations in the effectiveness of the census.[21 However, given the usual qualifications, there is a remarkable similarity between the two cities in terms of the labour allocations throughout these broad functional groupings. In all years and across both cities, between a fourth and a third of the male labour force was engaged in manufacturing activities. The other dominant employment sectors were construction, transportation and local retail enterprise.

TABLE 1

Distribution of work force by industry group for Boston and Liverpool, 1841-1861

Boston LiverpooQ 1845* 1ssot 1841 1851 1861 (%) (%) (%) (%) (%)

Manufacturing Construction Transportation Retail Wholesale Professional

Services Personal

Services Finance

Insurance, Brokerage, etc.

Labourers (General)

23.9 18.0 19.4 20.0 21.6 11.4 10.0 10.5 8-9 9.0 11.0 9.0 15.9 19.3 22.8 21.7 12.0 15.2 15.0 12.4

5.4 6.5 5.6 6.2 6.3 3.3 3.4 2.1 2.6 2.5

2.8 6.2 3.7 2.4 2.8

3.4 4.3

11.2 18.0 20.0 11.0 7.6

1.0 1.0 1.0

* Estimates based on Shattuck’s enumeration of Boston in 1845; Census of Boston (Boston 1845). t Estimates based on totals derived from census manuscripts for Boston; U.S. Census, 1850. $ All Liverpool estimates are based on the published returns of the Census of Great Britain,

1841, 1851 and 1861.

The most striking difference in the distributions of the two cities is the high degree of local concentration in transport industries in Liverpool. The question of data accuracy enters here. It may be that many of the workers clustered in the general category of Labourer should have been reported more precisely in transport industries. Nonetheless, one could speculate that the difference is a true one and that it reflects the relatively greater success of Liverpool’s port function in the national context. It is relevant to note that Liverpool captured a greater share of

[l] General Register Office, Classification of Occupation, 1950 (London 1951) i-ii, x-xii (2) J. B. Sharpless and R. M. Shortridge, Biased underenumeration in census manuscripts;

methodological implications Journal of Urban History I (1975) 409-439; P. M. Tillott, Sources of inaccuracy in the 1851 and 1861 censuses, pp. 82-133 of E. A. Wrigley (Ed.), Nineteenth-century society: essay in the uses of quantitative methods for the study of social data (London 1972)

140 J. B. SHARPLESS

its nation’s total tonnage in these years than did Boston. Despite this exception, however, there is a high degree of consistency across the distributions in these two cities. Evaluated solely at the local level, then, the functional dimensions of urban economy would appear to outweigh developmental considerations.

The next step, therefore, is to evaluate local labour force allocations in terms of regional and national distributions. To accomplish this task, forty-eight major occupations were selected for examination. The sample was determined, first, by what appeared to be the relative importance of these industries in the local economies of Liverpool and Boston; and, secondly, on the basis of the compatibility of occupational nomenclature. The data are drawn from the US Census of 1850 and the Census of Great Britain for 1851. The published returns were used for the British statistics. For Boston, it was necessary to retrieve the totals from the manu- script census since city-level information on occupation was not published in 1850. In each case, regional and national data are taken from the published returns.

In order to evaluate the differential effects of the city’s external economic environment, location quotients for each of the occupations were calculated. Developed for use in export base analysis to provide rough estimates of the level of export (basic) activity, the primary virtue of this measure is its utility. Utilising the published occupational data in the census, the location quotient is defined as the percentage of the local labour force in a given industry (or occupation) divided by the percentage in that industry of some larger benchmark economy (usually, the nation that includes it). The index takes on a value of one if the proportions are equal. The measure can be used to index industrial concentration in given localities with no further restrictions. This is how the measure will be used here; no assumption about the exporting of goods or services is made.[ll

As it is conventionally calculated, then, the location quotient measures-on an industry or sectoral basis-the concentration of labour locally relative to all other external regions (i.e. the national per cent employed in a given industry is used as the denominator). It should be immediately clear that similar sets of values could be generated using a regional percentage as the benchmark values. (The denominator in each case must be adjusted for “double counting”, i.e. the sum of the values for each lower geographic unit must be subtracted from the base figure.) The resultant value could be read in much the same way as the national L.Q. values. The level of labour concentration is evaluated relative to alternative sites in the geographic area circumscribed by the regional definition. Because of the form of the published data for Boston, the region is defined as New England. For Liverpool, the region includes the counties of Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

By adjusting the local employment percentages on the basis of the labour force distribution in each city’s national and regional hinterland, the interaction between the city’s geographic location and the degree of national economic and urban development becomes more apparent. Not too surprisingly, an abrupt dissimilarity between Boston and Liverpool emerges. Boston, although a smaller city in absolute terms, exercised a considerably greater dominance over its regional and national hinterlands. In fact, despite the high degree of industrial development in the cities and towns surrounding Boston, the location quotients generated on an

[l] For a detailed discussion of this measure, see W. Isard et. al., Methods of regional analysis (Cambridge, Mass. 1960) 123-6; J. Hielbrun, Urban economics andpublic policy (New York 1974) 142-4


industry-by-industry basis generally exceed those of Liverpool. The summary statistics for these distributions support this impression :

Boston Regional L.Q. National L.Q.

Liverpool Regional L.Q. National L.Q.

Mean

7.484 4.916

3.522 1.732

Coefficient Standard of variation deviation (“b) Maximum Minimum

14.25 1.90 83.69 O-0223 4.49 0.91 17.19 0.0239

5.72 1.65 33.66 0.0326 1.93 l-11 lo-72 0.0494

The mean values for Boston exceed those for Liverpool at both the regional and national levels. The wider variance of the Boston distribution reflects the less settled character of the American economic environment.

Perhaps these differences reflect the rural orientation of the American labour force in this era. New England, which was the most urbanised region in the nation in 1850, had roughly 30% of its population in settlements of 2,500 population or larger; 28 % of the labour force was engaged in manufacturing enterprise. These percentages are less than half of those for Britain’s Northeast in the same year. In Liverpool’s hinterland, with its variety of employment sites, the “opportunity” for industrial concentration within the city was much reduced. Most important for Liverpool, however, was the pull of Manchester as an alternative site for the location of industry as well as a competing centre for urban migration.

Returning again to the question of port city economy in this era, it is useful to compare directly specific industries across these two cities, Table 2 displays the

TABLE 2 Regional and national location quotients for selected industries,

Boston and Liverpool, 1850

Region Nation Liverpool Boston Liverpool Boston

Port-associated occupations Banking, Insurance, etc. 0.51 28.63 0.72 12.51 Agents, Factors, Brokers 3.33 12.83 1.95 8.28 Merchants 9.24 2.14 4.02 1.23 Grocers, Tea Dealers 0.85 10.46 0.95 8.2 Clerks (miscehaneous) 6-89 6.76 3-86 4.47 Porters, Warehousemen 13.98 264 5.90 8.63 Carters, Draymen, etc. 3.33 6.21 2.40 6-36 Dock Labourers (miscellaneous) 7.80 6.24 6.28 3.15 Shipbuilding, repair 10.72 1.29 33.66 2.25

Independent manufacturing industries Musical Instrument Manufacture 1.13 29.47 0.65 9.23 Hat Manufacture 1.36 1.61 O-70 2.48 Glass Manufacture 0.98 1.99 0.50 2.35 Precious Metals Industries 2.54 3.69 0.46 6.02 Heavy Metals Industries 0.11 2.05 0.36 9.29 Furniture, Cabinet Manufacture 2.49 1.67 1.82 2.56 Candle, Soap and Tallow Manufacture 2.19 244 1.59 3.92 Mechanics (general) 0.57 1.16 0.89 1.31

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142 J. B. SHARPLESS

location quotients for a selected subset of the total sample. Here, a distinction is made between port-associated activities and exclusively industrial enterprise. Interestingly, in the port-associated industries the dominance of Liverpool’s economy within its region and nation is more clearly asserted. The concentration of the labour force in mercantile activities, porterage and warehousing services and shipbuilding is most striking. The relatively high degree of dominance in the shipbuilding and repair industry is somewhat surprising given the complaints of local officials in this period. Apparently, the growing competition within the industry, although strongly felt at the local level (perhaps affecting marginal producers most keenly), in the aggregate did not seriously erode Liverpool’s position in the national market.

In any event, what seems to distinguish Liverpool’s economy from that of Boston is the higher concentration of Boston’s labour force in independent manufacturing activities. In fact, scholars who have examined the internal geographic and demographic structure of Boston have argued that in the late forties and, particularly in the fifties, a series of demographic changes were manifest which served to shift the economy away from one based primarily on commerce to one of primarily industrial orientation .[ll Nonetheless, given the differences between Boston and Liverpool in terms of total labour force allocations, we can set aside Handlin’s suggestion that it was the arrival of the (unskilled) Irish which generated these changes in Boston’s economy.[21 Clearly, both cities had an equivalent stimulus in this regard. In one case, there was a general reorientation of the local economy; in the other, the expansion of the labour pool merely reinforced established patterns of resource allocation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Liverpool grew to be Great Britain’s largest port; Boston’s port function increasingly took on a regional orientation. Concurrently the role of manufacturing in Liverpool’s economy continued to decline until the turn of the century, while the expansion of Boston’s manufacturing sector continued even after the Civil War.

Perhaps the message is one of muddled complexity, but one can begin to see the range of economic forces which came to bear on the structure of employment patterns in nineteenth-century commercial cities. Measured solely in terms of the local occupational distributions, labour force allocations appear as relatively uniform across cities of similar functional orientation. However, when the local distribution is measured against the structure of economic activity in the city’s regional and national hinterlands, the variety of responses to changing market environment becomes apparent. And for Boston and Liverpool, in the economic environment of mid-nineteenth century industrial development, the differences were most striking on this score. More impressive, however, is that these differences persist despite the apparent similarity of economic and demographic forces affecting these cities.

These results would suggest that any simple taxonomy of cities based on aggregate “functional” characteristics is not likely to lead to the identification of the causal sequences which generated changes in total population or economic structure. Indeed, it may be that occupations or employment groups should be the units of analysis rather than the city, in developing causal models of urban economic growth. Regardless, the examination of other cities in the terms outlined here is necessary.

[l] Ward, op. cit. 9-46, 84-102; 0. Hand& Boston’s immigrants (Boston 1959) [2] Handlin, op. cit. 37


Cross-sectional and aggregate time series analysis of variations in city growth can show that as the national economies of the United States and Great Britain responded to the pressures of economic development, the relative commitment of the urban work force to manufacturing activities varied considerably across cities. Moreover, at least at the aggregate level, it appears that the traditional view of an urban economy, evolving from a commercial base to one primarily based on manufacturing, needs substantial revision. There is simply no clear-cut relationship between increases in the proportion of population engaged in manufacturing activity and the growth of cities as measured by population increases.[ll Since there were changes in census classification procedures and because in reality, there are many economic activities which could fall in either the “commercial” or the “manufacturing” category, the results of aggregate cross-city analysis should be viewed with some caution. We must acknowledge the “aggregation error” inherent in both the concepts we employ in our theory and the data used in the analysis. It is clear that these categories fail to take into account a set of complex interactions between industries and hinterland markets. This analysis indicates that the net result of these interactions can vary considerably on an industry-by-industry basis. It is perhaps for this reason that the use of “percent-employed-in-manufacturing” as a variable in regression models of urban growth in this period proves so unsatis- factory. To cluster occupations in this manner mutes whatever causal relationship there may have existed between employment, industrial development and overall demographic growth of urban centres in the nineteenth century.[31

Department of History Unil~ersity of Wisconsin--Madison

[l] This was a major tinding of a cross-sectional analysis of city growth in the American North- east conducted by J. G. Williamson and J. A. Swanson, The growth of cities in the American Northeast, 1820-1870 Explorations in entrepreneuriu~ history 4 2nd series (Supplement 1966) 3-101. In my analysis of British and American cities over 10,000 population, similar results obtain. For example, on the British side the correlation between city growth (1841-1861) and per cent of work force employed in manufacturing was -0.25 (n = 112); for the United States the correlation was - 0.20 (n = 100)

[2] This study was supported by funds from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor); The Council for European Studies (Pittsburgh); and the National Science Foundation (Washington, D.C.), Grant GS-30044

The economic structure of port cities in the mid-nineteenth century: Boston and Liverpool, 1840?1860

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