Progress and providence in early nineteenth-century political economy.

New conventions in economic and social history have played down the extent of transformation in the classic period of Britain's Industrial Revolution. The history of nineteenth-century political economy has undergone a similar move to stress the pessimism of the classical economists and the politicians and economic policy-makers who relied on their judgements. Boyd Hilton's remarkable The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785-1865 (Oxford, 1988) takes up the pessimism not of the theorists, but of another level of political economy: the normative economics espoused by politicians, policy-makers and churchmen of mainly evangelical religious values. He discusses the economic attitudes of a section of the English middle and upper classes which was at the centre of political power for the first half of the nineteenth century. Politicians feared the consequences of industrialization, and preferred a return to the stability of agrarian society. Hilton traces the impact of evangelical religious beliefs in providence, punishment and redemption on key economic policies in the early nineteenth century': free trade, monetary policy, the Poor Laws and limited liability. A key exponent of this normative Christian economics was Thomas Chalmers, and Hilton invests him with great political and social significance. Hilton's book, while a powerful evocation of the thinking of the established political and economic elite, does, however, neglect other important counter-tendencies in political economy and middle-class opinion. One of these was the impact of the central political economists themselves; the other was that of the opinion of the provincial and industrial middle classes. The paper explores the significance of these alternative views which celebrated and reacted to economic growth, science and technological progress. Hilton believes the evangelical economics he uncovers to be central to national political power, and therefore to be the dominant economic ideology of the period. But his book is set within the framework of high political history, and cannot explain the relationship between political power and the pattern of social and intellectual change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]