Rented Virtue

"Rented Virtue" - @WillManidis & @nabeelqu In January of 1709, in a steep gorge cut by the river Severn in the midlands of England, a 30-year-old Quaker named Abraham Darby fired a blast furnace for the first time. The furnace had been built decades earlier and blown up around 1703 by a previous operator. It sat derelict in the Coalbrookdale Valley, where coal and iron ore lay in abundance near the surface of the valley walls, and a narrow stream cut through the bottom with enough force to drive a water wheel and bellows. Darby had leased the wreck in September of 1708, the year prior, and spent a few months rebuilding it. As a boy in the 1690s, Darby had been an apprentice to Jonathan Freeth, a fellow Quaker who made malt mills. Darby understood from watching men brew ale that you did not smelt with coal, and if you smelt it with coke by baking out the sulfur first, you could produce a high quality product. The coal in the Coalbrookdale Valley happened to be unusually pure, and when you burned it, it yielded fuel clean enough to produce castable iron. On the 10th of January, he had his first blast day. Fully liquid high-quality iron flowed into the molds. Little did he know that with his firing, he had lit the fuse of the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult to overstate the problem that Darby solved. Before Darby, iron production in England was structurally capped. Every furnace could only be run on charcoal, and charcoal required timber. England, with its relatively small land area and low-density forests, was running out of trees. Iron masters competed with ship builders and construction for a shrinking stock of wood, and furnaces sat idle for months, waiting for enough fuel to turn them on. The industry had been in structural decline for over a century. Darby's invention would set Britain up to become the greatest empire in history. Every partnership that fueled this first forge was Quaker. Thomas Goldney of Bristol financed the works. Richard Ford, also a Friend, married Darby's daughter and managed operations. When Darby offered to teach his smelting technique to another iron master, the man he chose was William Rawlinson, a fellow Quaker. Weekday meetings were held in the company offices at the works. On Sundays, Darby sat with his fellow workers at a Quaker meeting in the town nearby. When he died in 1717, only 39 years old, and his widow died just months later, his eldest son was six. The business should have collapsed and Darby's invention should have been lost to the wind. Instead, Joshua Sergeant, Darby's brother-in-law, bought back the mortgage shares on behalf of his children, and Ford held the enterprise together until the boy was old enough to take his place. The Quaker network absorbed the loss through a mutual obligation they felt towards each other and to the enterprise. Their shared faith and the long patience of people who believed their work participated in something that would outlast them fueled resilience for the business. Abraham II expanded the works, introduced steam power, and paid higher wages than the local mines. And in times of food shortage, he bought farms to feed his workers. When he died in 1763, his son Abraham III took control at 18. In 1779, he completed the Iron Bridge over the Severn, the first cast iron bridge in the world,100 feet across. Nearly 400 tons of iron cast in the family's furnace went into its construction. He bore the cost overruns personally and died in debt at 39, the same age as his grandfather. He was buried in the Quaker burial ground at Coalbrookdale. The Barclays, the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, the Clarks, and the Wedgwoods were all prominent Quaker merchant families. A religious minority that at its peak numbered almost 60,000 people in the country of 6 million – just under 1% – at that time produced an overwhelming share of England's commercial and industrial infrastructure, so disproportionate that it still puzzles economic historians. The standard explanation is that the Test Acts barred Quakers from universities and public offices, so they moved their talents into trade. That is likely true, but also insufficient. Plenty of persecuted minorities channeled their talents into trade. Most of them did not build Barclays. The question of why the Quakers so radically changed Britain and, in turn, the economic history of the West is worth answering. 2. On Quakers Quakers are a strange people. I, Will, should know. I grew up as one. They're a sect that refused to swear oaths, refused to remove their hats before magistrates, refused to address anyone with honorifics, and finally refused, with a stubbornness that cost them dearly in fines, imprisonment, and social exile, to lie. Not in the way that most religious communities refuse to lie, which is to say they aspired to it one day and often fell short. The Quakers earnestly enforced a near-militant allegiance to the truth. Through meetings, through discipline, through expulsion, a