Before the Luddities: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 by Adrian Randall

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 177 the postwar world new investment was discouraged by below-capacity operating, fear of foreign competition, the low bxed costs of prewar equipment, the absence of coordination of re-equipment decisions in the various sectors of the industry, and a shortage in the supply of cutting-edge textile machinery. The descent continued in the 1950s and 1960s apart from a short spurt of investment expenditure in response to the government’s 1959 Cotton Industry Act, which offered subsidies to firms intending to re-equip. The major textile machinery manufacturer (TMM), with 80 percent of British capacity, “had an appalling reputation in the spinning industry for abusing its monopoly position by overcharging, making outdated products, treating its customers with contempt, and neglecting research and development” (p. 112). This is a compact, thoroughly researched investigation that treats the economic, political, and social dimensions of the industry with carefully supported and balanced judgments. Earlier studies by R. Robson (1957) and Caroline Miles (1968) are less comprehensive and necessarily less distanced. Singleton’s work is essential reading for any future investigation of technological aspects of Lancashire’s scrapheap. David J. Jeremy Dr. Jeremy, who has written on the history of textile technology, technology diffusion, British entrepreneurs, and modern British church history, is completing a study of managerial business strategies in the North West of England in the 20th century. He is a member of the International Business Unit, Faculty of Business and Management, at Manchester Metropolitan University. Before the Luddities: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776—1809. By Adrian Randall. New York: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xvii + 318; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, indexes. $59.50. The Luddite disturbances of 1811 — 12 have been regarded as among the first examples of powerful objection to the imposition of machinery with its threat of unemployment, challenge to the central role of the family in production, dislocation, and implication of time work discipline. Adrian Randall demonstrates that resistance to the introduction of machinery into the English woolen industry was both emphatic and widespread earlier than this, in the period 1776—1809. He compares the responses to the introduction of machinery in the West of England and the West Riding of Yorkshire, in which regions the organization of the woolen industry was markedly different. In the West of England woolen industry the “gentleman clothier” was responsible for the purchase of raw wool 178 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE and its successive putting out to scribblers and weavers. He was responsible for taking the cloth to the fulling mill for thickening and finally to finishing workshops from which the cloth was despatched for sale. The work, as a Select Committee of 1806 noted, was thus “done by persons who have no property in the goods they manufacture” (p. 18). The “gentleman clothier” owned the raw material throughout manufacture and sometimes some of the plant necessary for production but had little direct control over the process. He was an organizer and paymaster. In Yorkshire, on the other hand, manufacture was conducted by small masters who possessed little capital. They purchased wool and, with the assistance of their families and possibly several journeymen, were responsible for dyeing, scribbling, spinning, and weaving in their own homes, selling the cloth in its undressed state. These small masters were generally small-scale landowners who worked a dual economy of subsistence agriculture and cloth production. After an introductory chapter on the comparative industrial orga­ nization of the two regions, Randall proceeds to discuss the introduc­ tion of machinery, the development of the factory system, and the displacement of labor. This is followed by a discussion of resistance to the introduction of machinery, the beginnings of industrial violence, and machine breaking, paying particular attention to the Wiltshire Outrages. The book concludes with a discussion of the political economy of machine breaking within the context of machinery, custom, and class. Randall argues for the sense of community and belief in custom as a shaping and determining factor in the responses to economic change in the last quarter of the 18th century in the West of England and the West Riding of Yorkshire. He argues that the social...