Andy Burnham took office as Britain’s prime minister this week promising to apply the economic program he calls Manchesterism, which he developed in its namesake city while serving as mayor for the past nine years. But Manchesterism is a term with a long history—one that in many ways represents the opposite of what Burnham claims for it today.
What exactly was the original 19th-century Manchester school of economics? How did the city of Manchester develop over the 20th century? And how has Burnham given Manchesterism new meaning today?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: What exactly was the original 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 arguably the secular enlightenment was triggered into its polemics in the 1750s by the earthquake in Lisbon, and the French Revolution has its epicenter in Paris in 1789, Manchester is the preeminent city of the Industrial Revolution, bar none. It’s the cotton city of world. It’s the first genuinely exclusive product of industrial modernization, which we talk about so much on this show and which now in the current generation, of course, is most represented by the cities of East Asia and China, in particular.
So, in 1717, Manchester in the northwest of England has a population of 10,000. By 1773, 25,000. By 1801, 70,000. By 1851, 300,000. This is explosive, economically driven urbanization of the type that we now know as a pattern but was for the first time produced really in Manchester through the import of cotton raw material, which of course doesn’t grow in England, and its spinning into thread in the spinning mills of Manchester—out of which then developed the first modern industrial product, which is widely abundant cotton cloth.
And as such, it really is the shock city of the 19th century. It’s where a lot of the early industrialization—the formation of modern chemistry to provide dyes, the steam engine to power the spinning mills—and modern politics in its own way, takes shape. No longer the politics of the 18th century but really the distinctive class politics of the 20th century. And so, in the 1830s, as British politics matures and we move increasingly toward an expansion of the franchise, Manchester becomes one of the key sites for the struggle over the future of British politics.
And on the one hand, you have chartism, which is the original radical movement of the 19th century, the first genuinely working-class politics, which is demanding universal franchise. And out of that emerges the first political definition of the working class, literally in those terms. And on the other side, the Manchester bourgeoisie, which is fighting its own fight against what it sees as the entrenched bastions of aristocratic reaction, who of course are focused on the interests of agriculture and in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars had managed to slap a huge tariff on the import of corn, of grain—in other words, for bread. This was a matter of concern for the industrialists because the level of wages they had to pay workers depended on the cost of food. And if the cost of grain went up, then ultimately the profits accruing to the generation of industrial production would go to the rate-limiting factor in the economic system, which was the supply of food.
And so this is a strategic struggle between the newly emerging bourgeoisie and the British aristocracy and land-owning class. And this begins with the anti-corn law movement, which is formed in 1837, centered in Manchester. And for the first time, driven through a true free trade policy, between the late 1830s and 1848, this is the moment where we can really describe the crystallization of a kind of libertarian, anti-state, anti-protectionist, modern economic politics.
But it’s really in the 1860s that Ferdinand Lassalle, the German socialist, actually dubs Manchestertum as the kind of Dickensian, hard-faced, most radical form of free trade. And also, of course, anti-national. So it moves from being a very live politics in the early 19th century to becoming a rather stereotype formula for liberalism.
CA: When we think of Britain and the 20th century, it tends to be London that comes to mind probably. What happens to Britain’s other cities, like Manchester? What is their trajectory?
AT: Over the course of the 20th century, what had originally been a relatively multipolar system of development shrinks and concentrates into the London core. And that’s the result of factors within the U.K., the nationalization of the U.K. economy. I mean, the thing that many of our listeners may know is that the Guardian newspaper, which people will read as a kind of left-wing alternative to the New York Times, it used to be the Manchester Guardian. It was the Manchester Guardian until the 1960s. It was a powerful bastion of a certain sort of campaigning liberalism centered in the obvious place for that to be. Birmingham likewise was a major counterweight to London. Over the course of the 20th century, that breaks down.
Manchester’s population peaks in 1931 at 766,000 residents and then begins a precipitous decline as a result essentially of the movement of industrial employment away from global north textiles producers to the rest of the world. And so, by the 1970s and the 1980s, Manchester is—a little bit like Liverpool but to a degree even more extreme—a classic case of British deindustrialization. The cultural product that folks may be familiar with, certainly those in my generation, is pop culture, right? So, if Liverpool gave us the Beatles, Manchester gave us the Smiths. It gave us the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, the Manchester club scene of the ’80s and ’90s. Very druggie. The culture of the rave, insofar as it percolates out from Britain rather than the house scene in the United States, is powerfully situated in Manchester. And then the other big global phenomenon of Manchester is football, or soccer, right? The two dominant teams of the ’90s, 2000s, the early 2010s, and then from the 2010s to the 2020s are both Manchester-based: Man United and Man City. And that maps along with a certain sort of pop culture revival—Oasis being the most dramatic kind of lad pop, Cool Britannia moment—onto the revival of Manchester.
And in British politics itself—and this is something that people talk about a lot about the structure of the U.K.—Britain has a very unresolved relationship to decentralization. But what began already in the ’80s and ’90s 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 components of the U.K. Constitution. And what emerged by the 2010s was an emphasis on big-city metropolitan areas—of which Manchester is one of the largest, with total population in the wider metropolitan area pushing 3 million—alongside London as a kind of powerhouse of British economic development.
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, emerging as prime ministers. This is a new, early 21st-century phenomenon. It would have been more common in the late 19th, early 20th centuries to see locally based politicians moving in this powerful way. But it’s a new phenomenon. It’s not by accident that Manchester should be the vehicle for this. Because if you’re looking for an alternative power base around the U.K. that isn’t in Scotland, Manchester would be your obvious pick.
CA: What does Burnham’s Manchesterism have to do with this entire history we’ve just discussed? It seems as if Burnham’s Manchesterism could be an inversion of free-trading bourgeois Manchesterism—but is there a deeper link?
AT: On the one hand, you could describe him as a kind of bland, typical product of his generation, my generation, profoundly shaped by the shock of Thatcherism in the ’70s and ’80s. He went to Cambridge more or less at the same time that I did. He [studied] English. He then moved into a professional career in politics in the Tony Blair period in London. He was around the Blair-Gordon Brown group. It’s all very kind of familiar. And I think then a cynic would also say that he is a careerist. He’s a man who’s after the main chance. And he has a chameleon quality that allows him to move through several different registers, including embracing a local boy of Manchester kind of identity and rootedness, along with a variety of other personas that he’s occupied over the course of his career. So he’s a really complicated figure who plays politics for real.
On the other hand, he’s also not uninteresting from an ideological point of view. And reading a bit about his biography, one of the things that really stood out for me and that makes him intelligible also against the European backdrop but may also be of interest in the United States right now is that he comes from a Catholic family. So his family is actually from Liverpool, which makes sense because Liverpool is one of the great centers of Catholicism in the U.K. So he went to Catholic elementary school, middle school, high school, I think. And he describes his own vision of the most foundational elements of his politics as deriving from Catholic social doctrine. He seems like a man who sits within what you might call the Christian social tradition, which is also something oddly that he has affinities with Blair over.
And then within that, I saw interesting comparisons between Burnham and the contemporary social democratic, socialist politics of the Iberian Peninsula. In other words, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Portuguese equivalents. Not just because they’re successful and charismatic and good-looking and patently modern social democrats but also in a sense that it is a kind of higher pragmatism, rooted in basic principles like anti-nationalism, for instance.
But then 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 traceable back to that profound violent rupture with the social contract to the postwar period. And so he is deeply rooted in a politics that actually at some level refuses the Thatcherite inheritance, which makes him quite different from Blair, who embraced it.
