The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade by William J. Ashworth

Author:William J. Ashworth [Ashworth, William J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-01-25T22:00:00+00:00

Figure 6 ‘Carding, drawing and roving cotton’, c. 1830.

It was also the case that the nature of raw cotton made it ideal, compared to wool and other fibres, to mechanized spinning – with further momentum from the lucrative rewards available from the global cotton textiles market.9 A petition in 1790 underlined the key role of technology to British cotton quality, ‘until the year 1774, when, in consequence of the invention of cotton mills, yarns were produced of a quality fit for warps, so as to admit of the manufacture of calicoes similar to those imported from India, by making a species of cloth wholly of cotton yarn’.10 The mechanization of weaving took a little longer with the subsequent innovation being Edmund Cartwright’s first power loom in 1785, although it took roughly another thirty years before it worked well.11 By the mid-nineteenth century the power loom had finally eroded the competition from hand-weavers and the costs of power had significantly reduced. There had also been a general economic slump during the 1840s and the reduction of social labour to a legislated 10-hour day. All this combined to promote a switch from human labour to the new weaving technology.12

Sven Beckert and Giorgio Riello also emphasize the crucial supply of raw cotton Britain eventually monopolized from the Americas. It should be remembered that it takes approximately twelve times more land to produce a unit of woollen fibre compared to cotton. This has a parallel argument to the ecological argument by E. A. Wrigley regarding the British advantage over coal, as opposed to the large amount of land needed to cultivate timber. The solution to solving a fast-growing population needing to be clothed, writes Riello, lay with a ‘switch from a high energy-intensive fibre (wool) to a low energy-intensive fibre (cotton)’.13

If you combine these facts with the aggressive competition British cotton-based textiles had with superior Indian calicoes in Africa, the increasing demand for the cloth in the fast-expanding British American colonies, and the fact engineering skills were available in the nearby Midlands along with skilled clockmakers in the Lancashire city of Preston, then you have a convincing argument to the impetus behind technological innovation in cotton in the northwest.14

Crucially, this innovation required a high degree of state protection from competition. The result was, as Beckert puts it, the creation of ‘a world radically different from anything ever seen before without recourse to theoretical science, often without much education’.15 The ideas adopted for the spinning jenny drew from an array of other manufacturing processes such as the rollers involved in shaping metals and pressing paper, while the use of gears derived from the workings of a clock. Not surprisingly, then, Arkwright employed clockmakers to produce the gears and cogs involved in the new textile machines. Robert C. Allen estimates that something like 800 skilled watch- and clock-making artisans were employed in 150 Arkwright mills by the early 1790s. By 1830, 70 per cent of all Britain’s cotton workers were based in Lancashire. By contrast eighteenth-century

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