While others were to develop and improve the high-pressure stationary engine and the steam locomotive, all the essential elements of steam power had now been put in place by the triumvirate of Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick. While James Watt is famed as the great inventor of the Industrial Revolution, Thomas Newcomen and Richard Trevithick deserve to be placed alongside him as the giants of steam power.
IV. Cotton
‘We saw our persons of quality dressed in Indian carpets. The chintzes were advanced from lying on their floors to their backs, and even the Queen herself was pleased to appear in China and Japan. I mean China silks and calicoes. Nor was this all, but it crept into our houses, our closets and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs, and, at last, beds themselves were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs.’
DANIEL DEFOE, 1726
10. The Rise of Cotton
THE COTTON INDUSTRY is the bellwether of the Industrial Revolution. Here the separate strands of money and power, innovation and ingenuity, labour and organisation came together in a sudden rush that launched the world into modernity. Cotton provided the vehicle for the historic change from an organic to an industrial economy. But how did a minor industry concentrated in a small, remote part of England become the driving force of a revolution in work, finance, management, business practice and technological innovation?
We will begin to answer that question in the next few chapters, but behind the stories of the world-changing machines, the huge mills and the colossal entrepreneurs lies a unique phenomenon that made this the most important industry in world history. People had always invented tools, devices and processes for doing work more easily, but at no time in the previous millennia had the need or desire for technical improvements produced an unstoppable momentum of continuing change. Once the cotton industry took off in the 1770s, it set in motion a period of transformation that has arguably lasted until the present. The Industrial Revolution was not a sudden change followed by a reversion to stasis: the jenny, the spinning frame and the steam condenser were the start of a process that has led to the microchip and the iPhone. The cotton industry provided a model for others to follow, so that eventually all branches of manufacture saw the need for continual innovation and joined the revolution.
So, why cotton? Here a number of factors came together to produce the conditions for industrial take-off. First, cotton was a worldwide trade, often described as the first global commodity, and second, the potential for expansion of British production was vast. In 1750, when all cotton was still spun by hand, Britain was producing around 3 million pounds of cotton yarn a year, while Bengal’s output alone was 85 million pounds. By the end of the century, thanks to the mechanisation of spinning, the British were producing most of the world’s yarn and British spinning machines were so efficient that even Indian producers were using them to save labour costs. The third factor was that the market for cotton kept growing. In 1790, 4 per cent of clothing in Europe was made of cotton (in a population of under 200 million); by 1890 it had grown to 73 per cent while the European population had roughly doubled to 400 million.1 And finally, there was the trade on which England’s wealth had rested for centuries and which, in the eighteenth century, gave birth to the cotton industry.
It was the wool trade that had made Britain a nation of craft workers and artisans well before industrialisation.2 From around 1100 to the middle of the eighteenth century the wool trade employed more people and made more money at home and abroad than all other trades combined. It was the foundation of English and later British prosperity, directly responsible for the wealth of its citizens, the commercial success of its market towns and the grandeur of its buildings; it paid for the abbeys and monasteries of Yorkshire and the wool churches of East Anglia and the West Country.3 But how did this trade develop? When European commercial networks began to emerge in the twelfth century, textiles became the backbone of regional, national and international trade. Fine cloths were produced in northern Italy, while a corridor of trade from Italy through the Rhine lands, Burgundy and Flanders stretched to the Baltic and Britain. Flanders and Italy imported wool from all over Europe and English abbeys and estates sold vast quantities of fleeces to merchants from the Continent. Long-term contracts were not uncommon: in the fifteenth century an Italian merchant bought all the wool produced by Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds for ten years.
It was the transition from a supplier of fleeces to a producer of woollen goods that marked the beginning of England’s prosperity. In the 1330s the European trade was in a cyclical period of decline, partly brought on by political unrest in the Low Countries, which was choking off demand for wool. Edward III invited discontented Flemish weavers, fullers and dyers to settle in England and many followed his call. More importantly, however, the Black Death, which arrived in England in 1348, brought huge disruptions. The loss of population caused a shortage of labour in the countryside, which in turn encouraged landowners to turn over arable land to sheep pastures.
Previously sheep were grazed on poor soil or used to manure land in open-field systems. Now the grazing of sheep on good pasture led to a huge expansion in production: while in the mid-1300s England exported around 5,000 cloth pieces per year, by the mid-1500s this had grown to 100,000 pieces of higher quality wool with longer fibres. This enabled English producers to specialise in a new type of cloth, known as worsted, which was lighter and smoother than traditional wool fabric. The trade in worsted cloth, also known as ‘new draperies’, now became the engine of English prosperity, making its way to every wool market in Europe and further afield.
The most important aspect of the wool trade was its ubiquity: hand spindles, spinning wheels, looms, combers, fulling mills, drying tenters and dyeing houses were spread across the country. While the denizens of farmhouses and country cottages washed, fulled, combed, spun and wove the wool, artisans in country towns finished cloth by dyeing, teaselling and rolling before selling it at markets. Different parts of the fleece have different qualities and so sorters separated up to twelve different types of wool – the shoulder wool being the best. Scouring or fulling removed the impurities through the use of fulling stocks to pummel the wool while it stood in stale urine, the ammonia helping to remove the natural grease. Some wools were then blended before being carded to align the fibres, and made into loose threads known as slivers (the equivalent of cotton rovings). Worsted wool was not blended but instead was combed to remove the short fibres, which became part of other wool products. The long fibres were then made into a ball known as a top, ready for spinning.
By the late medieval period wool was a highly developed industry in England; this was also the heyday of the trade guilds who protected their members’ interests, regulated entry into the trade, trained new members through apprenticeships, and maintained standards of production. By the sixteenth century the English wool trade had become a heavily regulated business, to the point where further expansion was threatened. At a time when urban populations were booming and the demand for cloth was growing vastly, the guilds became obstacles to the wider interests of the trade. The traditional medieval trade, centred on guild-controlled towns like Exeter, Honiton, Norwich and Beverley, began to lose out to places where the trade was dispersed in semi-rural communities where there were fewer restrictions. As regulation lost out to cut-throat competition, the chief beneficiary was the West Riding of Yorkshire, an area of wool-making without a large historic centre.
England’s role as a principal woollen cloth-maker was confirmed by the prohibition of the export of raw wool by James I in 1614 – which stayed in place until 1824. For two centuries all wool clipped in England was processed in England too. Today we understand that the processing of raw materials creates and distributes wealth much more effectively than selling commodities; the wool trade was an early example of this ‘enrichment through making’. The trade had always worked through a combination of town guilds and rural artisans working in their homes. From the sixteenth century the latter were increasing
ly controlled by clothiers who organised the making and distribution of cloth, and merchants, who made fortunes buying and selling it across Britain and Europe. Though the clothiers worked a system of putting-out, using home workers and paying on piece rates, there were also a few wool factories. In the 1590s the poet Thomas Deloney wrote a fictional account of the life of the legendary Jack of Newbury, who has been identified as the clothier John Winchcombe II who died in 1557. Deloney’s narrative poem makes no claim to literary greatness, but it includes the following description:
Within one room being large and long
There stood two hundred Looms full strong:
Two hundred men the truth is so
Wrought in these looms all in a row.
Allow for the possibility of exaggeration, but Winchcombe was a wealthy and influential man who certainly ran some kind of wool factory, and he is unlikely to have been alone in this.
Wool cloth was not only used for clothing and bedding but also for furnishings and wall-coverings. In 1577 William Harrison wrote: ‘in the houses of knights and gentlemen, merchantmen and some other wealthy citizens, it is not so gerson [uncommon] to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, turkey work . . . and fine linen . . . many farmers and skilled tradesmen garnish their joined beds with tapestrie and silk hangings, and their tables with carpets and fine naperies whereby the wealth of the country doth infinitely appear’.4
Note how wool was combined with linen and silk, both industries that were becoming established in England. The diaries of Samuel Pepys show him buying fashionable fabrics and clothes made of wool, leather, linen and silk, and sometimes Indian calicoes or cottons; in 1663 he bought his wife ‘a chinte . . . that is a painted calico for her to line her new study which is very preetie,’ having two years earlier bought an ‘Indian gown for myself’.5
Wool production was beneficial for a wide range of people. In 1675 the author of The Weaver’s Pocketbook, published in Dundee, pointed out the advantages of the prevailing system:
It is the advantage of this above many other trades, that a man may be dealing in it with a little stock, and from it get a little livelihood. It is the disadvantage of many other employments, that nothing can be done in them without several hundreds of pounds going: ’tis otherwise with this [weaving], my self have known many who came to considerable estates, who have told me they begun with ten pound; they passed but with a staff over Jordan, and at their coming back had great droves . . . It is a trade infinitely useful as to the poor. Females both women and children are imployed in preparing their yarn: children from their infancy almost, in winding their pipes, men in weaving at the loom.6
From the sixteenth century the West Riding of Yorkshire, stretching into east Lancashire, became the leading centre of wool production.7 The Pennine hills and climate were unsuitable for arable but ideal for sheep farming and the soft waters lent themselves to washing and dyeing wool. Existing towns like Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, Halifax and Huddersfield soon expanded and villages grew into small towns, spreading as far as the western slopes of the Pennines in Lancashire.
In 1724 Daniel Defoe saw woollen cloth being made throughout West Yorkshire, where ‘at almost every house there was a tenter and almost on every tenter a piece of cloth, or kersey or shalloon’.8
An efficient system developed where the independent clothier went to market and bought the wool; his wife and children carded and spun it; the clothier then dyed the wool, wove it and took it to the fulling mill before transporting it to his stall on the market. The family could make a good living by making one or two pieces a week and farming a holding of between three and fifteen acres of land. The famous Piece Hall in Halifax was built in 1779 to accommodate these independent traders, but they were soon overtaken by big merchants who handled the buying and selling, and paid the spinners and weavers a piece rate for their work. This putting-out system drove efficiencies in the production of cloth while feeding an ever-growing and ever-diversifying market. In 1700 the textile trade accounted for 70 per cent of English exports, and of a total production worth £5 million, £1 million was earned in the West Riding. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century the area had even overtaken Norwich in its specialist field as producer of worsted fabrics and was making more than half of Britain’s textile exports.
Wool made England rich and gave her a well-developed manufacturing infrastructure, but another product is also crucial to our story. Flax grown in Ulster and Scotland had been processed into linen cloth in situ and imported into north-west England for centuries, but when with the rising population the demand for linens for clothing and bedding increased, a spinning and weaving industry grew up in Lancashire to go alongside its indigenous wool trade. With linen being fashionable and within economic reach of even maids and servants, by 1756 consumption reached 80 million yards and by 1770 – before the cotton boom cut into the linen trade – it had increased to 103 million yards.9 By now the linen and wool trades were concentrated in a region encompassing the West Riding of Yorkshire, south-east Lancashire and part of north Derbyshire and Nottingham.
Cotton production, in comparison, was a latecomer to England. Cotton fabrics had been imported into Europe from India and other eastern regions for centuries. In the fourteenth century raw cotton was sold by Venetian traders in Flanders, particularly Antwerp, which became the centre of a small cotton-spinning and weaving industry.10 The Dutch wars of independence that saw the sack of the city in 1585 by Spanish troops resulted in many textile workers emigrating to England. By then Lancashire already had a small but well-established wool and linen industry, and it seems that here some Flemish weavers began experimenting with mixing fabrics, weaving linen with wool and with cotton to produce fustian. In his 1641 work The Treasure of Trafficke, Lewes Roberts provides the first record of the Manchester cotton trade:
The towne of Manchester in Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and worthily, for their encouragement commended, who buy the Yarne of the Irish, in great quantity, and weaving it returne the same againe in Linen, into Ireland to sell; neither doth the industry rest here, for they buy Cotten wooll, in London, that comes first from Cyprus, and Smyrna, and at home worke the same, and perfit it into Fustians, Vermilions, Dymities, and other such Stuffes; and then returne it to London, where the same is vented and sold, and not seldome sent into forraigne parts, who have meanes at far easier termes, to provide themselves of the said first materials.’11
But cotton manufacture remained a small industry in England, its output negligible in size in comparison to the high-quality, cheap and brightly coloured cotton fabrics brought from India by the East India Company. Increasingly European traders found it best to import white calicoes from India and to print the required patterns where they were being sold. So well was calico printing established in Britain by the end of the seventeenth century that calicoes presented a serious threat to the home textile industry; a petition presented in 1696 argued that calico printing in Bristol alone had risen from sixty to 1,000 pounds of cloth per week, while William Sherwin, the holder of a patent for printing calicoes, was employing 600 people at his various works. These may have been exaggerations but they show the level of concern among wool-makers in particular. A law was therefore passed in 1701 that made illegal the use and wearing of Indian or Chinese silks, and of Indian printed or painted calicoes, and striped or checked cottons.12 But as the law was aimed at imports of printed cloth, it had the effect of boosting the home calico-printing industry to such an extent that it undermined its own purpose. Cottons, made principally by printing on white Indian cloth, in fact became more popular than ever: by 1711 around a million yards were being printed in Britain annually, mostly on cheap Indian calico bought at 16d to 20d a yard, with printing costing around 2d to 3d. This severely undercut the price of wool cloth and when the wool industry protested, in 1711 duties of 3d a yard on calico and 1½d on printed linen were brought in; both were doubled in 1714.
The economic downturn c
aused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 forced Parliament to act once more to protect the wool trade: in 1721 an Act extended the prohibition to all Indian cotton cloth printed or stitched in any way, excepting only muslins which would not compete with wool cloth. ‘It is most evident,’ the Act stated, ‘that the weaving and using of printed, painted, stained and dyed calicoes in apparel, household stuff, furniture and otherwise, does manifestly tend to the great detriment of the woollen and silk manufactures of this Kingdom.’
So, a product that was popular among the British people was now effectively banned. The consumers’ first instinct was naturally to carry on acquiring cotton through illicit means, but they were also looking for any maker who could produce a reasonable imitation of Indian cotton, even if coarse in comparison. Manchester had a head start through its existing cotton and linen industries; by 1700 the region was already importing 500,000 kg of raw cotton from Smyrna via London.13 The 1736 Manchester Act was an implicit recognition that Britain was now becoming a cotton, as well as a wool, producer; it repealed some of the more draconian restrictions in the 1721 Act, including the bans on wearing certain cotton garments, and thereby gave the Lancashire industry a boost. By now cotton was also being cultivated in the West Indies and the colonies of North America, from where it could be shipped direct to Liverpool. In addition the damp, temperate atmosphere of south Lancashire gave perfect conditions for spinning fine thread.
The Lancashire cotton spinners made use of the same spindles and wheels that were used the world over, but they could not compete with the ultra-fine threads produced by the extraordinarily skilful hand-spinners of Bengal, and their threads were either coarse or would break too easily. So the Lancashire makers, probably following the lead given by Flemish immigrants, combined strong linen warp threads with cotton threads as the weft to produce fustian. When printed up these were popular substitutes for the banned Indian imports, and became the basis of a steadily growing Lancashire industry.
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