The statistical surveys of the British iron industry in 1797-98 and 1806

Abstract

A !ist of blast fumaces and forges was compiled in 1717-18, and of forges alone in 1736-37 and 1749-50. A further survey of the industry was made in 1788, possibly as a response to the wideranging debates over the future of the Navigation Laws after the Ioss of the American colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century the gathering and exchange of information within the trade had become habitual. lt was quite clear to ironmasters that their industry was in the throes of epochal change, and they were, accordingly, avid for news of further innovation and growth. A fresh survey of iron-producing sites in the early l 790s was exceptionally detailed, enumerating individual hearths within forges, specifying the precise means by which blast fumaces were blown, and giving, where possible, the dates at which items of plant had been erected. What store can be set by these surveys? They have been employed by historians to construct a statistical picture of the iron trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but can any confidence be placed in them? Were they nothing more than special pleading? Certainly, the lists of 1717 and 1736 can be shown to
have been seriously imperfect, underplaying the extent of bar iron production in Britain so as to support the contention of forgemasters that their trade was wasting away before the competitive advantage of Baltic iron. Given this, what reliance can be placed on the production surveys of 1796 and 1805, the first really systematic surveys of fumace sites and pig iron output?