The Power of Unaccountability (HT26)

In 1795, magistrates in the Berkshire village of Speenhamland faced an ominous problem. Bread prices had risen sharply, wages had not, and families were slipping below subsistence. The solution they improvised was simple; parish relief would be topped up according to the price of bread and the size of a household. The Speenhamland System was clumsy and highly localised in its application. It revealed, however, that hunger, once a seasonal and private misfortune, was becoming a structural feature of a changing economy. What is the ‘transition cost’ when a society profoundly shifts from one in which wealth and power were bound tightly together by land and locality to one in which wealth could expand while responsibility thinned out, stretched across markets and cities? If there is a common thread running from the land enclosures of the 18th century to today’s debates surrounding developments in artificial intelligence, it may be this: the capacity of the powerful to be completely insulated from the costs of their decisions.

To speak of modern unaccountability is not to romanticise feudalism. Medieval and early modern lords were doubtlessly exploitative and backed by force. But in much of pre-industrial Europe, elite wealth was rooted in land and in the labour of people who lived close by. The manor was a far more socio-economic unit: rents were collected face to face, and labour services were visible. Local populations knew who owned which fields and who owed what to whom. This closeness, naturally, did not guarantee justice, but instead created a friction which potentialised it. Lords were a small minority, dependent on a degree of order in the parish among tenants, who were themselves entirely dependent on the land. When the powerful pushed too far, resistance was often immediate. E. P. Thompson’s famous account of the “moral economy” of the 18th century English crowd showed that riots over bread were often protests against perceived violations of customary norms, against profiteering in a time of dearth. The poor appealed to shared ideas about fairness and subsistence - even in an immensely hierarchical society, power was entangled in local expectations.

Wealth in traditionally agrarian societies was also stubbornly material. Fields, flocks, barns or mills could not be moved with a keystroke. It sat in the landscape, vulnerable to local unrest and upheaval as much as it was to poor harvests –  as the saying goes “seen wealth is seizable wealth.”  To be wealthy was to be tied to land and, to some degree, to the people who worked it. The things that ultimately made people powerful were the things that benefitted, at least to some extent, wider society. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, this entanglement massively loosened. Enclosure transformed common fields and rights into private property on a vast scale, as well as narrowed access to land that had once supplemented wages or sustained families in hard times. Land became more overtly commercial, more easily bought and sold. People who had balanced wage labour with common rights found themselves pushed towards dependence on wages alone. Karl Polanyi described this as an attempt to treat land and labour as “commodities”. Polanyi’s phrasing may sound abstract, but the consequences of what he is describing were certainly not. When survival depends solely on wages set by an employer rather than on a mix of customary rights and local resources, bargaining power shifts. Instead of maintaining a sense of responsibility, the wealthy became increasingly detached from it.

Speenhamland was one response to this shift. It tried to prevent outright destitution without conceding a right to decent wages. Contemporary critics, like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, would still condemn it as encouraging idleness or depressing pay. Once the moral code of the economy was based around survival being disciplined by the market, there was no recourse when the actions of those in power were harmful. This would be accelerated by the increasing pace of the Industrial Revolution, a series of extraordinary innovations, in which Britain was a leading force, that would reinvent the way people lived and worked. It brought immense wealth to some and jobs and a better quality of life for others, but came at an undeniable human cost. By 1834, the Poor Law had been recast in a harsher, more egregious mould. Relief was centralised and deliberately made less attractive than the lowest wages. Simultaneously, people were moving in unprecedented numbers, and by the late 19th century Britain had become one of the most urban societies in the world. The countryside no longer defined the majority experience. The wealthy found new spaces in country retreats and fashionable districts such as Edgbaston and Headingley in  Birmingham and Leeds, physically removed from the grime of industrial production. Those who owned factories rarely shared the daily risks faced by those who laboured within them.

It would be misleading to paint all industrialists as remote figures peering down from distant mansions. Some lived near their mills, and some, like Robert Owen in New Lanark, even invested in housing or schools for workers. Yet the system they inhabited increasingly allowed for distance. Ownership could be divided into shares, and investors could benefit ventures without managing them. This was a new era of “absentee ownership”, i.e.,profit without presence. The legal architecture of the 19th century reinforced this development. Limited liability was formalised in Britain in the 1850s, notably under the governments of Lord Palmerston and Lord Aberdeen, which meant that investors could commit capital to a company while protecting their personal assets if it failed. Though this reform helped mobilise vast sums for infrastructure like railways, it also meant that the significant gains of enterprise could be privatised while the losses were capped. The wealthy increasingly bore less of the costs of failures that could devastate workers’ livelihoods; this was a highly dangerous situation. Urbanisation, the factory system, and limited liability birthed a new shape of society. Wealth could be accumulated at scale, and decisions could affect thousands of workers and entire districts. Those who benefitted most could be geographically and legally buffered from the worst consequences. Slum housing and cholera epidemics, such as the devastating outbreak in London in 1848, became features of urban life endured almost exclusively by the poor. The wealthy no longer needed herds of cattle nor a castle guarded by a private army, but they could increasingly bend outcomes in their favour regardless of the consequences.

There are obvious objections. To begin with, industrialisation, of course, did not invent misery. Agrarian societies knew disease and exploitation. Rather,  with industrialisation, suffering became more systematised and more easily separated from the people who profited. The owners of capital did not need to stand in the same muddy fields as those who toiled. They could reside in cleaner quarters, and rely on a state that, as Eric J. Evans has argued of early industrial Britain, was notably “benign” towards bourgeois interests. Additionally, feudal lords were hardly models of accountability. They wielded immense power and faced little formal constraint. That is true. But their wealth was inseparable from the land and communities over which they ruled. They could not as easily detach themselves from the consequences of crop failure or local unrest. Another counterpoint is that societies have generated new forms of accountability. Modern trade unions and expanded political rights represent hard-won attempts to force responsibility back onto concentrated power. Polanyi termed this the “double movement”: market expansion provoking social protection. This pattern is cyclical - each surge of economic transformation seems to outpace existing constraints. The price of progress seems to continue getting steeper, and we seem to be creating new problems faster than we are solving them.

In our century, the scale of distance has widened further. AI advancements offer a prime example. A select group of executives are engaged in an insane financial money-printing event, whilst entire categories of work are restructured or eliminated, displacing workers faster than labour markets can adapt. The vast data centres powering these systems consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, placing growing strain on local communities and ecosystems. Regulatory frameworks are beginning to take shape, but much like during the early years of industrialisation in Britain, they lag behind innovation, leaving the general public to absorb the consequences.

The modern world gives us far more of anything materially than any of our ancestors except maybe our parents, but modern economies have repeatedly created mechanisms that separate profit from proximity. There is a particular kind of frustration that characterises modern politics. The anger at being racked by incredible inequality, and at the sheer degree of denial afforded to those at the top, who seem to lack any sense of a shared reality. Speenhamland’s magistrates could not have imagined machine learning or data centres spanning millions of square feet; they were grappling with bread and wages in a rural parish. However, it is their dilemma that still functions in modernity. How do you prevent an economic system from devouring the people who live within it? How do you ensure that those who gain most cannot simply step away from the damage their gains entail? 

The story of unaccountability is not one of a moral decline from some ‘golden age’. Any historian can tell you about the evils of feudalism. One must nonetheless account for the way in which burgeoning industrial capitalism unlocked an enormous power elites had no previous experience with - to live far away, and to be protected by institutions designed purely for growth as opposed to any responsibility. Global finance and digital technology have extended this withdrawal, decisions can be made in boardrooms far removed from the communities they transform. As economies have grown more complex, the channels that connect action to consequence have snapped. Society scrambles to tie new knots in labour laws and environmental regulations – and these are evidence that accountability can be rebuilt. But the tension, as those paying attention know, never goes away.

The hard part is that there is no defined end point. There is only the ongoing task of tying decision-makers back to the world their decisions shape, before the distance becomes too great to cross. This all sounds quite intimidating, and that’s because it is.

FURTHER READING

P. K. O'Brien & R. Quinault, The Industrial Revolution and British Society  (1993)

K. Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021)

E. J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (1996)

R. Harris, A New Understanding of the History of Limited Liability: An Invitation for Theoretical Reframing (2020)

J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (1993)

K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944)                                                                                                                                                                                  

E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century (1971)