In the end, though, for Engels, like Taylor, the most significant aspect of the concentration of large numbers of workers in mills and factory neighborhoods was the creation of a new social formation, a “proletariat . . . called into existence by the introduction of machinery.” Urbanization, wrote Engels, “helps weld the proletariat into a compact group with its own way of life and thought and its own outlook on society.” Historian E. P. Thompson summed up prevailing sentiment in nineteenth-century England: “However different their judgments of value, conservative, radical, and socialist observers suggested the same equation: steam power and the cotton-mill=new working class.” And that class, for Engels and many others, meant the coming of a new stage of history.72
Of course, the factory system had its defenders, in the national debate it provoked and more specifically around efforts, beginning at the start of the nineteenth century, to protect child and female workers, primarily by limiting their hours of work.73 A few factory defenders claimed there were no problems, or at least not any that were the responsibility of mill owners. Andrew Ure—who Marx dubbed “the Pindar of the automatic factory”—argued that the beating of children in woolen factories working on “slubbing machines” (which prepared yarn for spinning) was strictly the fault of the adult “slubbers.” Slubbing machines were hand powered, allowing their operators, Ure claimed, to slack off, leading them to beat their assistants in their efforts to catch up. Powered equipment, by setting the pace of labor, would eliminate the abuse of children. After acknowledging such problems also existed in cotton spinning mills using steam or water power, Ure retreated to simple denial, writing that in his visits to factories in Manchester and surrounding districts he “never saw a single instance of corporal chastisement inflicted on a child, nor indeed did I ever see children in ill-humour. . . . The work of these lively elves seemed to resemble a sport, in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity.”74
W. Cooke Taylor acknowledged poverty among mill workers and granted “juvenile labour to be a grievance.” He blamed neither the factory system nor the mill owners but depressed economic conditions stemming from Britain’s extended conflict with France and restrictions on trade, a view echoed by Charlotte Brontë in her novel Shirley (set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars). For Taylor, there was one thing worse than juvenile labor, “juvenile starvation.” “I would rather see boys and girls earning the means of support in the mill than starving by the roadside, shivering on the pavement, or even conveyed in an omnibus to Bridewell.” As a propagandist against the Corn Laws, which put a tariff on imported grain, for Taylor the solution to the ills of the factory lay in free trade, which would expand markets abroad and cheapen food at home.75 Thomas Carlyle shared Taylor’s view that the ills of the factory system were not intrinsic to it: “Cotton-spinning is the clothing of the naked in its results; the triumph of man over matter in its means. Soot and despair are not the essence of it; they are divisible from it.” This faith, that the Promethean triumph of the factory fundamentally represents human progress and can be cleansed of its abuses, has remained a core liberal belief ever since.76
While reformers defended the factory system in spite of its faults, others opposed all efforts to regulate mills. In the debate over an 1833 bill to limit the working hours of mill children, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Althrop, feared that new rules would diminish Britain’s competitiveness and reduce international demand for British textiles, hurting those meant to be protected. Some factory defenders opposed regulation on the grounds that property rights were absolute.77
A potentially powerful argument in the defense of the factory system—that if conditions were bad, they were no worse than elsewhere—gained little purchase, even though in many respects it was true. Cooke Taylor took a jab at the rural gentry—supporters of the Corn Laws—in claiming that conditions for agricultural workers were worse than for factory workers. Ure argued that the lot of handcraft workers was worse than “those much-lamented labourers who tend the power-driven machines of a factory,” while children working in coal mines were worse off than in textile factories. Engels did not fundamentally disagree. His study of the condition of the English working class documented the miserable circumstances of miners, domestic workers, pottery workers, and agricultural workers, as well as mill workers. In his view, the “most oppressed workers” were not factory employees but “those who have to compete against a new machine which is in the process of replacing hand labor.”78
Historian John Gray, in a study of the debate over factory regulation, showed how the mills came to symbolize the broad changes caused by industrialization and became the focus of efforts to ameliorate the often dreadful condition of workers, especially women and children. Nonfactory workers—some laboring for less money under harsher conditions—were all but ignored. The novelty of the factory system drew attention to the exploitation of its workforce, while the long-standing exploitation of agricultural workers, domestic producers, servants (encompassing nearly twice as many women as in the textile industry), and others went largely unnoted by politicians, journalists, and writers, who generally had little interest in the lower classes.79
The Factory Acts passed by Parliament in 1802, 1819, 1825, 1829, and 1831 regulated labor only in cotton mills and only the labor of children, doing nothing for the vast majority of British workers.80 They had only very modest effect on actual conditions, lacking effective enforcement mechanisms. During the debate over the 1833 act—which did bring substantial changes, ending the employment of children under nine and limiting the hours and banning night work for older children—a Royal Commission endorsed the regulation of factories not because they were necessarily the site of the most onerous child labor but because regulation was more feasible in “buildings of peculiar construction, which cannot be mistaken for private dwellings” and where timekeeping was subject to “the regularity of military discipline” than at other worksites. Precisely because textile manufacturing had become so concentrated in large, well-known mills, it was more susceptible to regulation and improvement than dispersed employment. In the voluminous official inquiries and extended parliamentary debates about textile mill labor, Gray notes, “The identification of problems requiring intervention was dissociated from any systematic critique of industrial capitalism, and indeed became linked to a vision of the well-regulated factory as the site of social and moral improvement, as well as the symbol of economic progress.” Thus the large factory became the vehicle for not only visions of ever-greater productivity and material bounty but also for the notion that a more humane version of the economic system soon to be dubbed capitalism was possible.81
Not everyone agreed. Engels said of the 1833 law, “By this Act the brutal greed of the middle classes has been hypocritically camouflaged by a mask of decency.” Admitting that the law checked the “worst excesses of the manufacturers,” he pointed to the ineffectiveness of some of its provision, like the requirement for two hours daily schooling for child mill workers, which Engels charged owners met by hiring unqualified retired workers as teachers. More profoundly, Engels, like Marx, believed that the exploitation of labor was an inherent characteristic of capitalism, of which the textile mills were the leading edge. For Marx and Engels, misery was not divisible from the factory system; for workers, it was its very essence.82
Marx’s opus, Capital, is an often abstract analysis of the entire system of the creation, circulation, and reproduction of capital and attendant social processes. Today, to the extent it is studied, it usually is as a universal description and critique of capitalism as an economic system. Yet Capital is a book deeply rooted in a specific time and place, in an England when the textile industry reigned supreme. Cotton is everywhere in Capital: in Marx’s explanation of key ideas, such as surplus value; in his account of broad historical developments, such as the transition from manufacture in the old sense of hand production to power-driven machine production; in his examination of a new set of class relations; and in his
outrage at the exploitation of workers. The centrality Marx gave to the struggle over the working day in Capital, “a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class,” which he saw as the main battleground over the degree of exploitation of workers, mirrors the centrality of the hours issue in the national debate over regulating English cotton mills, which both Marx and Engels wrote about in great detail.83
Time after time, when in Capital Marx uses an example to illustrate his theories, he turns to the cotton mill. In a typical passage, in which he is explicating his method to calculate the “rate of surplus-value,” Marx tries to explain to his readers “the novel principles underlying it” with examples: “First we will take the case of a spinning mill containing 10,000 mule spindles, spinning No. 32 yarn from American cotton, and producing 1 lb. of yarn weekly per spindle. We assume the waste to be 6%; under these circumstances 10,600 lbs. of cotton are consumed weekly, of which 600 lbs. go to waste. The price of the cotton in April, 1871, was 7 3/4 d. per. lb.; the raw material therefore costs in round numbers £342. The 10,000 spindles, including preparation-machinery, and motive power, cost, we will assume, £1 per spindle . . .” and on and on he goes for another half page of detailed calculations. There is nothing abstract here; Marx is talking about the ins and outs of the daily business of making cotton yarn, drawing much of his information from Engels, who spent nearly twenty years helping manage a Manchester cotton mill his family partly owned.84 Thus, the cotton mill figured very large in the emergence of industrial capitalism and in the thinking of its most important critics, who gave a privileged place in their understanding of the capitalist system to a particular form of production and a particular group of workers who were seen as representing the future shape of society, even though at the time they still constituted a modest fraction of economic activity and of the working class.
Worker Protest
Journalists, critics, government investigating committees, novelists, even poets, almost all from the middle or upper classes, poured out a flood of words about the factory system during the first half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, we have only a tiny corpus of appraisals from workers themselves, most of whom, if not illiterate, had little occasion or capacity to record their thoughts in forms that would receive much attention or survive through the years.85 To the extent we can reconstruct the attitude of workers toward the factory system, we have to do so largely by looking at their actions, not their words.
One relevant word, though, was brought into the English language by workers, “Luddite.” Today “Luddite” is widely used as a catchword for technophobes, opponents of machine-based advancement, stripped from its original context.86 The word came from the bands of workers and their supporters who in 1811 and 1812 and again from 1814 to 1817 attacked textile machinery, mills, and mill owners in the Midlands and in northern England, claiming they were acting under the command of General (or sometimes Captain or King) Ned Ludd.
Britain had a long history of machine-breaking as a form of protest and pressure, which predated the Luddites and continued after them. In the textile industry alone, incidents of machine wrecking occurred as early as 1675, with an attack on silk-weaving machines, and continued through the 1820s with periodic assaults on cotton equipment. Both Hargreaves and Arkwright had early installations of their machines destroyed by mobs, leading Arkwright to design his Cromford complex to be easily defended, with building placements, walls, and gates restricting access.87 But the Luddites represented a more extensive, threatening, and enthralling episode of machine breaking than anything before or after.
Luddite attacks generally were preceded by letters threatening the destruction of machines and buildings and even murder unless employers met specified demands. An 1811 letter, apparently sent to a hosier named Edward Hollingsworth, read (as transcribed from the damaged original) “Sir if you do not pull don the Frames or stop pay [in] Goods onely for work or m[ake] Full fason my Company will [vi]sit yr machines for execution agai[nst] [y]ou. . . ,” signed “Ned Lu[d].”88
The framework knitters, who made stockings, lace, and other woven goods on looms they sometimes owned but often rented from merchant-hosiers, were the first group of Luddites to go into action. To cut labor costs, merchants increased the rent and introduced wide looms, on which, instead of making a single item, large pieces of knitted material could be produced and then cut and sewed to make cheap goods, including stockings. Also, many merchants began paying in truck rather than cash. Faced with declining income and what they saw as the debasement of their trade, the frameworkers rallied under the banner of the mythical General Ludd, targeting wide frames and merchants who were cutting wages. Over the course of a year, an estimated one thousand knitting frames in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire were destroyed. It took the passage of a law making framebreaking a capital crime to halt the attacks.
The “croppers” in West Riding, Yorkshire, formed a second battalion in King Ludd’s army. Croppers did the final, highly skilled finishing work on woven wool, raising the nap and using large, heavy, hand shears to cut and even the surface. The introduction of gig mills, to raise the nap, and shearing frames, to trim it, threatened to eliminate cropping as a skilled, well-paid craft. After trying unsuccessfully to use lawsuits and parliamentary lobbying to check the advance of the new machines, the croppers took to armed attacks on mills housing the machinery, including a successful assault by some three hundred Luddites on a mill near Leeds and an armed battle at a mill in Rawfolds that left two Luddites dead (and provided the plot for Shirley). Soon after, a particularly hated mill owner was assassinated. To restore order, four thousand troops were sent to occupy West Riding.89
In Lancashire, a third eruption of worker violence broke out, including food riots and assaults on mills using steam-powered weaving equipment. The mill attacks—including one by a crowd of over a hundred, marching behind a straw effigy of General Ludd, which burned down a mill owner’s house before being fired on by a military unit, killing at least seven protesters—reflected the impact of mechanization on the hand-loom weavers. Initially, the factory system led to boom times for handweavers, as spinning machinery produced a bountiful supply of cheap yarn and a growing demand for weavers. The hand-loom workforce probably exceeded a half million between 1820 and 1840, outnumbering all factory textile workers. But the weavers’ “golden age,” as E. P. Thompson called it, was short-lived. The entrepreneurs who supplied the weavers with yarn and bought their products pressed down wages, even before power mills began providing substantial competition. Once they did, the downward pressure on wages and living standards became horrific, as mass impoverishment—sometimes literal starvation—descended on the weavers and their families. Looking back from not long after power weaving finally all but eliminated hand work, Marx wrote that “History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers.” And it was not just in England that the incorporation of weaving into the factory system took its toll; governor-general of India William Bentinck reported in 1834–35 “The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”90
Luddism, though the focus for much of the debate about industrialization, for the most part was only indirectly connected, when connected at all, to the giant factories that had popped up since the late eighteenth century. Hosiery knitting generally occurred in modest-sized workshops. Wool finishing likewise generally did not take place in massive mills. Only the attacks on power looms occurred on the terrain of the factory behemoth.
Luddites generally were more concerned with particular grievances against particular employers than with abstract opposition to technology. Some machine wrecking was part of a tradition of what Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot,” using the destruction of property to pressure employers to raise wages and make other concessions. Many of the Luddites themselves operated machinery, albeit hand-powered, and most depended
on factory-produced yarn for their livelihoods.91
Rather than as an expression of opposition to machinery or the mill system, Luddism is better understood as one of many forms of protest against the miseries workers—in factories, competing with them, and not engaged with them at all—experienced during the helter-skelter industrialization of the first half of the nineteenth century. Worker action took the forms that it did in part because other forms of collective activity were blocked. The concentration of workers in factories and urban neighborhoods created a critical mass for political discussion and labor organization, the context in which “The working-class made itself,” as Thompson famously wrote.92 But the outlets for action were limited.
Workers were shut out of direct participation in governance through most of the nineteenth century, with women and working-class men excluded from voting during the decades when the factory emerged as a key social institution. Workers did seek redress from Parliament, proposing laws, gathering signatures on petitions, testifying at commission hearings, and sending delegations to lobby members, but generally with scant results. The demand of the Chartists, who led massive popular mobilizations in the 1830s and 1840s, for universal male suffrage and the democratization of Parliament, fell on deaf ears.93
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