by Sven Beckert
It was all but impossible to keep up with the speed of the machine as it moved back and forth, so she sometimes had “her ends down”—that is, she had not attached the loose and broken ends of the thread fast enough. Such errors were costly. Ellen reported being beaten by Swanton “twice a week” until her “head was sore with his hands.” Swanton denied the frequency of the beatings, but admitted using “a strap” to discipline the girl. Her mother, who called her daughter “a naughty, stupid girl,” testified that she approved of such corporal punishment, and had even asked Swanton to be more severe to put an end to her habit of running away. Life was hard for Mary Hootton, she desperately needed the girl’s wages, and she begged Swanton repeatedly to keep on the girl, despite all the troubles. As Mary said, “I cries many a times.”
The beatings, however, were not the worst treatment Ellen experienced at Swanton’s hands. One day, when she arrived late to work, Swanton penalized her even more severely: He hung an iron weight around her neck (there was no agreement about whether it weighed sixteen or twenty pounds) and made her walk up and down the factory floor. The other children heckled her, and as a result, “she fell down several times while fighting with the other hands. She fought them with the stick.” Even today, nearly two hundred years later, the pain of the girl’s life, from the tedium of her work to the violence of her abuse, is hard to fathom.
While the city of Manchester sports a Rylands Library, Harvard University a Lowell student dormitory, and while every grade-school student learns about Richard Arkwright and Eli Whitney, there is of course no library or school named for Ellen Hootton. No one but a handful of historians knows anything about her life. Yet when we think about the world of cotton manufacturing, we should think of Ellen Hootton. Without her labor and that of millions of children, women, and men, the empire of cotton would have never been built. Neither Rylands nor Lowell would have accumulated their riches, and Arkwright’s and Eli’s inventions would have collected dust in the corner of a barn. Ellen’s story highlights the physical violence of punishment, but as important, the more banal violence of economic desperation, which brought ever larger numbers of people into factories, where they spent their lives, quite literally, in the service of the empire of cotton.
Like Ellen Hootton, thousands and, by the 1850s, millions of workers streamed into the world’s newly built factories to operate the machines that produced cotton thread and cloth.3 The ability to mobilize so many women, children, and men to work in factories was awe-inspiring. Many a contemporary was overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds or even thousands of workers walking to and from their places of toil. Every morning before sunrise, thousands of workers walked down narrow paths in the Vosges to the factories in the valley, crawled out of dormitory beds just up the hill from Quarry Bank Mill, left their struggling farms above the Llobregat River, and made their way through crowded Manchester streets to one of the dozens of mills lining its putrid canals. At night they returned to sparse dormitories where they slept several to a bed, or to cold and drafty cottages, or to densely populated and poorly constructed working-class neighborhoods in Barcelona, Chemnitz, or Lowell.
The world had seen extreme poverty and labor exploitation for centuries, but it had never seen a sea of humanity organizing every aspect of their lives around the rhythms of machine production. For at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, women, children, and men fed machines, operated machines, repaired machines, and supervised machines. They opened tightly packed bales of raw cotton, fed piles of cotton into carding machines, they moved the huge carriages of mules back and forth, they tied together broken yarn ends (as did Ellen Hootton), they removed yarn from filled spindles, they supplied necessary roving to the spinning machines, or they simply carried cotton through the factory. Discipline was maintained through petty fines and forced forfeiture of contracts: A list of dismissal cases from one early-nineteenth-century mill had official justifications ranging from banal disciplinary issues, such as “using ill language,” to idiosyncratic charges, like “Terrifying S. Pearson with her ugly face.” Maintaining a disciplined labor force would prove consistently difficult. In one English mill, of the 780 apprentices recruited in the two decades after 1786, 119 ran away, 65 died, and another 96 had to return to overseers or parents who had originally lent them out. It was, after all, the beginning of the era of William Blake’s “dark satanic mill.”4
Winter or summer, rain or shine, workers ventured into buildings rising several stories high, usually made of brick, and labored in vast rooms, often hot, and almost always humid, dusty, and deafeningly noisy. They worked hard, lived in poverty, and died young. As political economist Leone Levi put it in 1863, “Enter for a moment one of those numerous factories; behold the ranks of thousands of operatives all steadily working; behold how every minute of time, every yard of space, every practiced eye, every dexterous finger, every inventive mind, is at high-pressure service.”5
It is difficult to overstate the importance and revolutionary nature of this new organization of human labor. Today we take this system for granted: Most of us make a living by selling our labor for a certain number of hours a day; with the result—our paycheck—we purchase the things we need. And we also take for granted that machines set the pace of human activity. Not so in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries: If we look at the world as a whole, the number of people who would exchange their labor power for wages, especially wages in manufacturing, was tiny. The rhythm of work was determined by many things—by the climate, by custom, by the cycles of nature—but not by machines. People worked because they were compelled to do so as slaves, or because they were the feudal dependents of worldly or ecclesial authorities, or because they produced their own subsistence with tools they owned on land to which they had some rights. The new world of making yarn and cloth, as one of the innumerable cogs in the empire of cotton, was utterly, fundamentally different. Cotton manufacturing rested on the ability to persuade or entice or force people to give up the activities that had organized human life for centuries and join the newly emerging factory proletariat. Though the machines themselves were stunning and world-altering, this shift in the rhythm of work would be even more consequential. They may not have known it, but as Ellen Hootton and untold others streamed into the factory, they were looking at the future, the very industrial capitalism that their labor was building.
The ability to move workers into factories became key to the cotton empire’s triumph. As a result, a chasm opened around the world between statesmen and capitalists able to mobilize labor and those who failed. Convincing thousands of people to give up the only way of life they had known was no less complex than installing new machines. Both required, as we have seen, certain legal, social, and political conditions. The transition to the factory was at first concentrated in a few places, and even there encountered tremendous opposition. Success required a lopsided distribution of power that allowed statesmen and capitalists to dominate the lives of individuals and families in ways that still eluded elites in much of Asia and Africa. The power of the state did not just need to be extensive, as it was in many parts of the world, but intensive, focused, and penetrating all realms of life. As a result, in areas of the world in which rulers could not easily subdue alternative means of gaining access to subsistence, it was all but impossible to transition to factory production. Ironically, factory production itself would slowly undermine such alternative ways of organizing economic activity.
To be sure, the Industrial Revolution was mostly about labor-saving technology—as we have seen, productivity in spinning, for example, increased by as much as a hundred times. Still, these labor-saving machines required labor to operate them; as markets for cotton goods expanded explosively in response to falling prices, a rapidly growing cotton industry demanded at first thousands, then tens of thousands, and, in some parts of the world, hundreds of thousands of workers. In Britain, by 1861 there were 446,000 people working in the cotton industry. It has been estimated that in
1800 about 59,700 workers labored in the German cotton industry, a number that increased to 250,300 in 1860. The French industry drew on approximately 200,000 workers, the Swiss cotton industry in 1827 employed 62,400 workers. While the U.S. cotton industry only counted 10,000 wage earners in 1810, that number rose to 122,000 in 1860. Russia in 1814 employed 40,000 cotton workers, and about 150,000 in 1860. Spain in 1867 counted about 105,000 workers in its cotton industry. The global cotton industry rested on proletarianized labor; at the same time it was one of the greatest proletarianizing agents itself.6
Before the factory had become a way of life, capital owners had only one model for how to mobilize vast amounts of labor: the plantation economy of the Americas, built on the enslavement of millions of Africans. Many a cotton entrepreneur was intimately familiar with this system; Samuel Greg of Quarry Bank Mill, as we have seen, owned slave plantations on Dominica, and he was far from alone. But such possibilities had been forestalled in Europe because of the new sensibilities about economic man spurred by the Enlightenment and the resulting legal prohibitions against slavery in Europe. Bringing African slaves to Manchester, Barcelona, or Mulhouse was out of the question; enslaving the local population was also impossible. Moreover, slave labor had significant economic disadvantages—it was difficult to motivate workers under conditions of servitude, and supervision costs were high. Slave labor, moreover, incurred costs year round, sometimes for the life of the worker, and was not easily adjusted to the vexing boom-and-bust cycles of industrial capitalism. The model of the plantation, in other words, did not serve the needs of the factory.
Yet access to labor was crucial to manufacturers the world over. After all, an entrepreneur’s significant investment in machines could only be profitable with the promise of a predictable stream of labor to operate those machines. The labor power of women and men, girls and boys, was thus transformed into a commodity.7 Turning people into factory workers meant turning them into wage workers as well. For most people in Europe and elsewhere, however, wages had not been central to their livelihood. Many who lived off the land or made artisan crafts, not surprisingly, had little incentive to become factory workers. A farmer grew his own sustenance; an artisan created goods he could sell or barter. A factory worker, by contrast, possessed nothing but the power of labor.
Budding capitalists and statesmen thus had to invent new ways to mobilize labor on a massive scale—that “fresh race of beings” that a rural magistrate observed in Lancashire in 1808. If they had envisaged the millions of workers they eventually needed to hire, the problem might have seemed overwhelming—and indeed, sometimes concerns about insufficient labor supply were on their minds. From his home in the West Midlands, a Shrewsbury mill owner complained, for example, in 1803 that the greatest problem in starting his mill was to attract a sufficient number of workers.8
These hopeful employers had help, however, especially from the transformation of the countryside that was already decades—and in some places, centuries—in the making. Bonds of mutual obligation between lords and peasants had begun to break down. In Europe, landowners had enclosed huge areas of land, making independent farming less accessible to peasants, and the wave of proto-industrial work had already made manufacturing, and even wage payments, a normal part of many peasants’ subsistence.9
Moreover, the bureaucratic, military, ideological, and social penetration of a bounded territory by newly consolidating states aided mill owners. Coercion had almost always been a central element in getting people to perform labor for others, a staple for feudal lords and colonial masters alike. Yet one of industrial capitalism’s signal features was that coercion would now be increasingly accomplished by the state, its bureaucrats and judges, and not by lords and masters. Many capitalists throughout the world in need of workers feared the decline of personal dependencies such as serfdom, slavery, and apprenticeships, expecting idleness and even anarchy as a result. But in some areas the state had gained sufficient strength to create conditions that secured reliable flows of women, children, and men into factories. Throughout much of Europe, the rights of landowners and capitalists to control labor as personal dependents had been severely curtailed, but at the same time the state had increasingly taken on the role of legally compelling people to work (such as paupers, so-called vagrants, and children). Moreover, by the enclosure of the commons the state had made alternative possibilities of gaining a livelihood increasingly inaccessible, in fact increasing economic pressures on those without property. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld has put it, even “economic coercion is an artifact of the law,” that is, of the state.10
The state thus created a legal framework for wage labor that made it more fathomable to rising manufacturers. They appreciated that wage labor retained significant nonpecuniary coercive elements—bodily coercion—even in the centers of the new industrial capitalism. Indeed, employers in Britain, the United States, France, Prussia, and Belgium “required and strictly enforced labor agreements in wage labor” and “were using forms of legal compulsion to tie workers to jobs.” The 1823 Master and Servant Act, for example, explicitly allowed “English employers to have their workmen sent to the house of correction and held at hard labor for up to three months for breaches of their labor agreements.” Between 1857 and 1875, in England and Wales alone, about ten thousand workers annually were prosecuted for “breach of contract,” many of them sentenced to prison; cotton workers were frequently among them. In Prussia throughout the nineteenth century, workers could be fined and imprisoned for leaving their job: “Journeymen, helpers, and factory workers, who leave work without permission and without legal justification, or are guilty of shirking or gross disobedience, are to be punished with a fine of twenty Thalers or prison up to fourteen days,” determined the Prussian Gewerbeordnung of 1845.11
Despite powerful state support, recruiting workers remained a huge challenge for budding manufacturers, testifying to the fact that workers themselves, as long as they still had access to other means of subsisting, tried to escape the world of the factory. When apothecary Joan Baptista Sires, for example, opened a cotton factory in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona in 1770 with twenty-four looms and nineteen printing tables (places for the application of colors on cotton fabrics), one of his most difficult challenges was recruiting the 60 to 150 women and men he needed to keep up production. Turnover was huge, as most workers stayed only for a few months. Sires tried to solve this problem by replicating some elements of the artisan workshop in his factory, providing skilled male workers with the best-paid positions, but also allowing their wives and children to work in the factory, thus increasing the family wage while at the same time saving on their discounted labor. To try to enmesh workers at his factory, Sires allowed some families to live in the buildings, replicating a pattern long typical for artisan workshops throughout Europe.12
Fifty years later, in the United States, the problem of labor recruitment had not changed much. The Dover Manufacturing Company in Dover, New Hampshire, had to employ a total of 342 workers in the period from August 1823 to October 1824 just to maintain an average workforce of approximately 140.13 Workers came and left frequently, as they desperately tried to retain access to a livelihood outside the factory. Entering the factory for a few weeks, they would leave once they had made enough money to hold them over to the selling of their crops or when their labor was needed on the farm.
These patterns of labor recruitment were typical of regions undergoing cotton industrialization. In every case, proto-industrialization and proletarianization intersected. The spread of machine-made yarn, and later cloth, undermined hand spinning and handloom weaving on the farm, creating pressures on textile workers to find income elsewhere. For many, the only other viable solution was the very factory that had undermined their prior source of income. Barcelona entrepreneur Sires, in fact, usually hired workers from the farming areas surrounding the Catalan capital. In Saxony, earlier difficulties in recruiting labor were overcome when cheap yarns po
uring out of the first cotton factories outcompeted hand spinners, who were then forced to work in the expanding factories. In Switzerland, the tens of thousands of workers that putting-out merchants kept busy in the vast countryside as far away as the Black Forest provided a huge potential labor reservoir, and indeed many of them eventually moved into factory production. With the rapid expansion of the Alsatian cotton industry and its significant labor needs, entrepreneurs looked to the mountainous areas of the Vosges and the Black Forest for that labor. There, the survival of families still rested on agricultural pursuits and continued to do so even after the onset of factory production: Nearly all workers in the spinning and weaving mills of Wesserling, for example, a small town high above the city of Mulhouse, still owned their own land and supplemented their income by farming as late as 1858. In the search for spinners and weavers, capital moved ever deeper into the countryside, allowing manufacturers to pay extremely low wages because workers could still draw on the unpaid reproductive labor of family members—child rearing and the growing of food among them. Here, as elsewhere, the unfolding of capitalism depended on noncapitalist forms of production and labor.14
The renamed Dover Manufacturing Company mill (date unknown) (illustration credit 7.2)
More often than not, though, workers lost access to land and, faced with the decline of household manufacturing, moved from the countryside into cities. Indeed, cotton industrialization led to huge migrations, often across national borders. In 1815, among the fifteen hundred workers of the Guebwiller firm of Ziegler, Greuter et Cie, 750 were Alsatians, but the rest were migrants from Switzerland and Germany. U.S. textile mills drew on such migrants as well. Thousands of workers moved from the marginal agricultural soils of New England to the newly emerging textile towns, and many workers crossed the Atlantic, such as Irish women and men escaping the potato famine. The Dutch, Belgian, Catalonian, and French cotton industries drew on migrants from the surrounding countryside as well.15