The Hand-loom Weavers in the English Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution: some Problems

Abstract

T here was a time when the story of the English cotton industry held pride of place in accounts of those many social and economic changes which are banded together as the 'industrial revolution'. It is quite easy to see why this should have been so: cotton was, after all, the first major industry to adopt power-driven machinery on a factory scale; it was also very much a 'new' industry of the late eighteenth century, by comparison with woollen, silk, and linen textiles, and consequently its rapid expansion had a far greater impact on contemporary observers; 1 but perhaps what made cotton seem so important was the way in which it came to be involved so closely in national politics in the i830's and i840's. To a very large degree, the controversies over factory regulation and free trade concerned the cotton industry rather than any other, since, in the popular imagination at least, 'factories' meant cotton factories and 'free-traders' meant Lancashire mill-owners. The crucial importance of both these controversies in the development of the new urban-industrial society made it inevitable that the cotton trade should be generally regarded as the centre-piece of the new order. More recently, however, the emphasis in industrial revolution studies has changed, and the cotton industry has been dethroned from the position it formerly occupied. This has come about partly through the study of the more basic developments in transport, in power supplies, in machineand toolmaking, and in the financing of commercial and industrial enterprise, all of which might be termed the sine qua non of industrial development. It is also now recognized that exaggerated notions formerly prevailed as to the size and importance of cotton in relation to the rest of the economy. Even at the end of the Napoleonic War, when cotton was still the only industry to have adopted power-driven machinery and the factory system on a large scale, it was probably contributing no more than 72 per cent of the national income.2 In another sense too it was misleading to concentrate on the cotton trade, which was very much a new industry in the eighteenth century. For this newness makes its history during the period of industrial change untypical of the developments in older-established industries. But, untypical as it was, and exaggerated as it has been, the development of the English cotton industry over the period from I780 to i850 was still, as