Andy Burnham took office as UK prime minister this week promising to implement an economic plan he calls Manchesterism, which he introduced in his namesake city when he was mayor for the past nine years. But Humanism is a word with a long history—which in many ways represents the opposite of what Burnham claims it is today.
What exactly was the 19th century Manchester school of economics? How did the city of Manchester develop in the 20th century? And how has Burnham given Manchesterism new meaning today?
Those are just some of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics reporter Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Those and Tooze. Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, search Those and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And look at Adam Small storage journal.
Cameron Abadi: What was the first Manchester school of economics, and why did it develop in Manchester in the first place?
Adam Tooze: Manchester in the 19th century was a world historic site. If the secular consciousness was undoubtedly stimulated in its controversy in the 1750s by the earthquake in Lisbon, and the French Revolution has its center in Paris in 1789, Manchester is the capital of the Industrial Revolution, bar none. It is the cotton city in the world. It is the first unique modern industrial product, which we talk about a lot in this show and which now in the current generation, of course, is more represented by the cities of East Asia and China, in particular.
Thus, in 1717, Manchester in the north-west of England has a population of 10,000. By 1773, 25,000. By 1801, 70,000. By 1851, 300,000. This is explosive, economic-driven urbanization of the kind we now know as design but it was first produced in Manchester through the importation of raw cotton, which of course did not grow in England, and its spinning into yarn in Manchester’s spinning mills—where it produced the first modern industrial product, which is cotton clothing.
And so, it’s really a 19th-century horror city. That’s where a lot of early industrial development—the creation of modern chemistry to produce paint, the steam engine to drive machinery—and modern politics in its own right. It is no longer the politics of the 18th century but the politics of the distinctive classes of the 20th century. And so, in the 1830s, as British politics matures and we move further towards the expansion of franchise, Manchester becomes one of the important sites of struggle over the future of British politics.
And on the one hand, you have the chart, which is the original radical movement of the 19th century, the first real working class politics, which demands universal franchise. And out of that emerges the first political definition of the working class, literally in those words. And on the other hand, the bourgeoisie of Manchester, who are fighting their own war against what they see as the entrenched strongholds of aristocratic reaction, who of course focus on the interests of agriculture and after the Napoleonic Wars were able to impose heavy tariffs on the importation of corn, grain – in other words, on bread. This was a concern for industrialists because the level of wages they were paying workers depended on the cost of food. And if the cost of grain went up, then eventually the profit obtained for the production of industrial production would go to the limit of rates in the economic system, which was the supply of food.
And so this is a strategic struggle between the new emerging capitalism and the British aristocracy and the landed gentry. And this begins with the anti-corn law movement, which was created in 1837, based in Manchester. And for the first time, driven through a true free trade policy, between the last years of 1830 and 1848, this is the time when we can really describe the revival of a kind of liberal, anti-government, anti-protectionist, modern economic politics.
But it was in the 1860s that Ferdinand Lassalle, a German socialist, Honesty like the Dickensian type, the hard-faced type, the most severe form of free trade. And also, of course, against the national. So it moves from being the direct politics of the early 19th century to being the distorted formula of liberalism.
CA: When we think of England and the 20th century, it tends to be London that comes to mind. What is happening to other British cities, such as Manchester? What is their trajectory?
AT: Over the course of the 20th century, what was once a multi-pronged development system narrowed and centered around London. And that is the result of things in England, the nationalization of the British economy. I mean, something that most of our listeners might know is that Guardian newspaper, which people read as a kind of left-wing alternative to New York Timesit used to be Guardian of Manchester. It was Guardian of Manchester until the 1960s. It was a strong bastion of a kind of campaign liberalism based on an open part of being. Birmingham was likewise London’s main rival. Over the course of the 20th century, that breaks down.
Manchester’s population peaks in 1931 at 766,000 residents and then begins to decline rapidly as a result of the movement of industrial employment from northern textile manufacturers to the rest of the world. And so, by the 1970s and 1980s, Manchester is—a little like Liverpool but on a much larger scale—a classic case of British deindustrialization. A cultural product that people can relate to, certainly those of my generation, is pop culture, right? So, if Liverpool gave us the Beatles, Manchester gave us the Smiths. It gave us the Stone Roses, Happy Monday, the Manchester club scene of the ’80s and ’90s. Very addictive. Rave culture, as it spreads from the UK rather than the home scene in the US, is based in the city of Manchester. Then Manchester’s other big international thing is football, or soccer, right? The two dominant teams in the 1990s, 2000s, early 2010s, and then the 2010s to 2020s are all in Manchester: Man United and Man City. And that maps along with a kind of pop culture revival—Oasis being the most interesting kind of youth pop, during Cool Britannia—on the Manchester revival.
And in British politics itself—and this is something that people talk about a lot about the structure of Britain—Britain has a very unresolved relationship with devolution. But what started in the 1980s and 1990s was a conversation about how to devolve power, how to make cities and regions, indeed nations in the case of Scotland or Northern Ireland or Wales, into viable parts of the British Constitution. And what emerged in the 2010s was an emphasis on metropolitan areas—of which Manchester is one of the largest cities, with a total population in the metropolitan area pushing 3 million—along with London as a kind of economic development powerhouse in England.
And it’s not by accident now that we’ve had Boris Johnson, who was mayor of London, and Burnham, who was mayor of Manchester, emerge as prime ministers. This is a new thing, for the beginning of the 21st century. It would have been more common in the late 19th, early 20th century to see grassroots politicians moving in this powerful way. But it is a new thing. It is not by chance that Manchester should be the vehicle for this. Because if you’re looking for an alternative power base across the UK that isn’t in Scotland, Manchester would be your obvious choice.
CA: What does Burnham’s Manism have to do with all this history we have just discussed? It seems as if Burnham’s faith may be an evolution of Manchesterism’s capitalist capitalism—but is there a deeper link?
AT: On the one hand, you can describe him as a kind of naive, typical product of his generation, my generation, shaped very much by the shock of Thatcherism in the ’70s and ’80s. He went to Cambridge more or less at the same time I did. He (study) English. He then moved into a career in politics during the Tony Blair era in London. He was close to the Blair-Gordon Brown group. It’s all very familiar. And I think then the cynic will also say that he is a careerist. He is a person who is after the main position. And he has a chameleon-like quality that allows him to traverse several different registers, including embracing a Manchester inner-boy type of identity and roots, as well as the various other people he’s dealt with over the course of his career. So he is a very difficult person who plays politics really.
On the other hand, he is also not interesting from an ideological point of view. And reading a little bit about his biography, one of the things that really interested me and that makes him understandable also against the European situation but also can be interesting in the United States right now is that he comes from a Catholic family. So his family is from Liverpool, which makes sense because Liverpool is one of the main centers of Catholicism in England. So he went to a Catholic primary school, middle school, high school, I think. And he describes his own vision of the most fundamental aspects of his politics as being derived from Catholic social teaching. He seems like someone who sits within what you might call the Christian social tradition, which is also odd that he has a relationship with Blair.
And then within that, I saw an interesting comparison between Burnham and the contemporary social democratic, socialist politics of the Iberian Peninsula. In other words, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Portuguese allies. Not only because they are successful and charismatic and good-looking and modern social democrats but also in the sense that it is a kind of high-level pragmatism, rooted in fundamental principles such as anti-nationalism, for example.
But when it comes to these questions of the free market, he basically argues that the deal in Britain was broken by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s and 90s, Thatcher and her Tory successors, and the cost of living crisis in Britain today is ultimately traced back to the violent rupture with the social contract of the post-war period. And so he is deeply rooted in a politics that to some extent rejects the Thatcherite legacy, which makes him very different from Blair, who embraced it.
