He noticed, first, the neatness, the way sails and cannons and half pikes all had their own set place. The timberyards and mastyards did too, guarded by watchmen and storekeepers, each in “the utmost hurry” yet unerring in his work. It was, he said, like a “well-ordered city” — one which could rig and launch a ship of the line in a matter of hours. For as Daniel Defoe explains, this is Chatham, the chief arsenal of the Royal Navy and the largest shipyard in the world.
Spend time with A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain and you’ll find endless vignettes like this, tugging you to the restless 18th century. Published in three volumes, with the second appearing 300 years ago, Defoe the reporter shows us England skirting the peaks of mechanised modernity. The shipyards at Chatham are merely the start, as the author summons Geordie collieries and Lancashire clothworks, and a thousand other “projects enterpriz’d” by Whitehall clerks and grasping new tycoons.
All this matters, and not just for historians interested in how the Industrial Revolution first appeared. For alongside the millennial importance of London to Britain’s fortunes, Defoe brilliantly evokes the structural forces that shape our country’s fortunes. These deep trends can’t easily be overcome — especially not without years of planning — lesson enough for our flailing leaders now. But even more than Defoe the economist, I think A Tour endures for its lively vision of change. As the author makes clear, again and again, old and new will always rub along together, and amid chaos and decay another future is fighting to be born.
Britain in 1725 was an oasis of calm. Its religious schism had largely been solved: the Church of England reigned supreme, while Catholics and Puritans were purged from public life. Secular politics was also more secure. With the Glorious Revolution guaranteeing Parliament’s supremacy, and pampered by the Hanoverian kings, the Whigs effectively ran a one-party state. Their constituency mixed the newer aristocracy with the coming middle classes, the “flourishing merchants” Defoe so admired. The Tories, the traditional home of squires and clergymen, raged impotently in the shires for most of the century.
At base, the Whig coalition was built on prosperity. “Every man has his price,” said their leader Robert Walpole, and this was surely a time when fortunes could be made. Over the 18th century, GDP soared, partly by the burgeoning trade in sugar and slaves. Yet, though one 1745 book lauded “the Prospect of so great a Profit” in the sale of human beings, Defoe’s Britain wasn’t built on Barbados alone. Walpole kept land taxes low to stimulate growth, while engineers built the famous “turnpikes” which by mid-century had cut the trip from London to Manchester by a third.
Combined with advances in farming and mining, Defoe cheered, heralding the “vast trade” and “mighty wealth” of his native land. As well he might. A jobbing merchant himself, this son of a Cripplegate candlemaker was a born Whig. His faith helped too: a Presbyterian, and therefore a “dissenting” Protestant subject to legal discrimination, he was naturally wary of the landed Anglican establishment.
Little wonder, then, that A Tour is an ode to the country’s middling sorts. Every town Defoe sees is judged by the goods it makes or products it sells. Kidderminster is praised for its rugs, Maidstone for its cherries. Woodbridge, in Suffolk, “has nothing remarkable” save its vast trade in butter and corn. Approaching Cambridge, he spends far less time on the university than the market fair outside. Typical of a man who only added the “De” in Defoe as a patrician flourish, the writer also revels in the class implications of trade. In Wiltshire, for instance, he notes that wealthy clothiers who “now pass for gentry” were “built up by this truly noble manufacture.”
If that hints at the self-made class so admired by the Victorians, A Tour shows other ways the 19th century was fired in the age of the periwig. It only became famous as “Steel City” later, for instance, but Defoe already praises Sheffield for its “edg’d tools” and knives. Other northern heavyweights are augured too, from Manchester textiles to Nottingham lace to Newcastle coal. It all shows how gradually the economic winds build, how plantings in one age will only flower in the next. And if that’s a useful lesson for politicians who imagine change can be magicked by a tax here or a cut there, the same might be said of London too.
Look again to those Kentish cherries and Kidderminster carpets. Almost all are sent to the capital, with the Thames “conveying an infinite quantity of provisions from remote counties”. The scale here was truly vast. Coal came to Billingsgate on hundreds of ships, while Gloucestershire cheesemakers could barely fill demand. In one evocative aside, Defoe explains how Suffolk turkeys were shipped in quadruple-decker carts, so keen were London diners for their meat.
The turkeys now come by truck, and Britain imports almost half its food. But Defoe knew more than he said when he called London the “greatest city in the world” — with 650,000 people in 1725, it hosted roughly the same proportion of Britain’s population as today. To that extent, then, the North’s boom, presaged so vividly by Defoe, was merely a fleeting triumph over London’s epochal dominance. To be sure, deindustrialisation wasn’t destined to happen on crude Thatcherite lines. But if a tenth of England’s wealth was based in London around 1700, and the North-South divide was briefly bridged during the Industrial Revolution, we’re now back to the future. These days, a quarter of the nation’s GDP is made in the capital.
Not that policymakers are condemned to be jetsam on a sea of structural forces. As Defoe shows, they can find real success with durable planning. This is obvious at Chatham, and arsenals like Woolwich, which Defoe praises for their “publick service” at times of war. The point here is that these spots didn’t just appear. Chatham was founded back in 1567 and honed over centuries via thoughtful investment in specialised warehouses and housing for workers. Careful financial stewardship mattered too. The national debt, founded when Defoe was young, was largely there to fund frigates, part of what historians call the “fiscal-military” state of Georgian Britain.
Spots like Chatham have a message for modern statesmen: in the vital importance of panoramic thinking. Those busy shipyards show that national defence must be tended and developed, not just now but for generations still unborn. What they can’t be is conjured, promised into being when danger first appears. Defoe says this explicitly, arguing that the country’s future merchant trade would only thrive thanks to “her early care” before. As Britain scrambles to rearm without manufacturing skills, or a robust industrial base, it’s a lesson we may soon learn the hard way. Similar long-termism is clear throughout A Tour. Defoe is especially interested in making rivers navigable, achieved via Acts of Parliament. At one point, he even dons his futurist tricorn to suggest abolishing London’s “petty privileged places” and bringing the entire city, Southwark included, into a united whole. It’s testament to his foresight that the capital eventually followed Defoe’s advice — some 240 years after he first proposed the idea.
“London eventually followed Defoe’s advice — some 240 years after he first proposed the idea.”
A Tour doesn’t always feel like a blueprint for modernity. Before the Victorians swept away the Exchequer of Pleas, and the Court of Chancery, and Defoe’s “corporation-tyranny” of closed-shop guilds, English government was largely medieval. Crime was crushed with alien bluntness. At Guildford, the author says the gallows are up St Catherine’s Hill, so merchants can watch hangings from their stores. Entering London, he casually notes the heads of traitors by the gate. In its pastimes, too, Defoe’s England feels strange. There are cockpits, and bearpits, and a man of “gigantick strength” at Ramsgate who could beat a horse at tug of war. All this happened in a carnival mishmash of settings. Yes, the fine Georgian mansions are there, with their parks and orange groves. But so much of Defoe’s England is older, grizzled, a land of defunct castles, and cottages, and downcast city walls.
Taken together, then, this is Hogarth with semicolons. What it isn’t is a genteel stroll to a safe and ordered future. Yet this, I think, should comfort modern readers, as the international consensus stumbles, and our economic model crumbles, and tomorrow seems so unsure. “The fate of things,” Defoe tells us, “gives a new face to things” — and for every town that falls, or family that fails, or river that silts up and grows useless, others will rise to take their place. To explain what he means, the author shows us Dunwich. In the Middle Ages, this Suffolk port was about as rich as London. But when storms gobbled up the shore, and then the Americas dragged trade westwards, the town became a village, as sunk, A Tour says, as ancient Rome or Carthage.
And all the while, Defoe tells us not to fret. Cities “which antiquity knew nothing of” are grander than Dunwich ever was, and that later writers would find much to marvel in their own time too. In our anxious, cynical age, it’s a heartening reflection. More than that, Defoe once more shows the enduring value of historical perspective. If the New World damned Dunwich, we too should accept that past prosperity, in towns that thrived for their resources or location, can’t always inform future growth.
This isn’t an easy argument to make, either emotively or politically. But wallowing in nostalgia is a far worse sin. As Defoe says, “a finished account” of our island is impossible — and, besides, each age “will find an encrease of glory”. It may not feel like that, in 2025, as we wander down tired streets to jobs that don’t pay well. But amid the ruined castles of our own time, we might recall that past and future are natural fellows, and that even Dunwich was replaced.
