Competing with India: cotton and European industrialisation

Abstract

The text above reads: ‘Arkwright of England struggled with making a machine to spin a cotton yarn for several years, which made his family impoverished. Seeing him wasting money without success, driven by the anger, his wife broke a scale model. Arkwright got so mad at her that he kicked her out of the house. After that event, he successfully invented the machine and made fortunes on it.’ In 1793 a select committee of the British House of Commons reported that British consumption of Indian cotton textiles was ‘reduced almost to nothing’. It was claimed that shops around the country offered ‘British muslins for sale, equal in appearance, [and] of more elegant patterns, than those of India, for one-fourth or perhaps more than one-third less in price’. How was it possible that Britain was now producing cottons that were cheaper and even better in quality than those of their Asian counterparts? The classic response is that an ‘industrial revolution’ swept Britain, changing the way in which production was carried out. Central to industrialisation was the application of a string of technological inventions that include John Kay's flying shuttle (1733), John Wyatt and Lewis Paul's roller spinning machine (1738), James Hargreaves's spinning jenny (1765; patented 1770), Richard Arkwright's water frame (1767; patented 1769), Samuel Crompton's spinning mule (1779) and Edmund Cartwright's power loom (1785).