Was the factory a revolution in machines or in control?

The short answer

• Indian cloth set the standard. Indian calicoes, printed cotton cloths, showed Europeans what cotton could be: light, washable, cheap and dyed in colours that did not run. When Parliament banned printed calicoes in 1700 and their wearing in 1721 to protect English wool, it left a large home market that British producers could fill only if they matched Indian quality at Indian prices. Import substitution, meaning the effort to make at home what had been bought abroad, gave inventors a clear target and a protected space in which to reach it.
• Machines that suited the fibre. Spinning cotton is a repetitive task of drawing out and twisting fibres, the kind of motion that rollers, gears and the spinning rods called spindles could copy. Each machine solved a specific bottleneck: the spinning jenny multiplied spindles, the water frame strengthened the thread, the mule refined it, and carding engines prepared the raw fibre. Because cotton was imported, its supply could grow without competing for English farmland, so output could rise as fast as the machines allowed.
• Water power and modest capital. The first mills needed a fast stream, a building and a few thousand pounds, sums that a successful wigmaker, merchant or hosier, a dealer in stockings, could raise through partners and local banks. Richard Arkwright, the former wigmaker who patented the water-powered spinning frame, went into business with the Derby hosier Jedediah Strutt, and Samuel Greg, who founded the mill at Styal, drew on his family’s merchant and plantation wealth. The valleys of the Pennine hills in Derbyshire and Lancashire offered fast water within reach of markets and ports, which is why the first factories stand in steep, remote valleys far from the towns.
• Slave-grown cotton without limit. Cotton had to come from somewhere, and after 1793 it came above all from the American South. The inventor Eli Whitney’s cotton gin separated the seed from the short-fibred cotton that grew inland, so planters pushed slavery onto new land in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The supply of raw cotton thus expanded as fast as Lancashire’s demand, kept cheap by the unpaid labour of enslaved people, whose numbers in the United States nearly tripled between 1790 and 1830.

What it changed

Steam moves the mills to the towns. Water power tied mills to remote valleys, and from the 1790s steam engines freed them. Manchester’s mills clustered beside canals that brought coal, and the cotton district spread across south Lancashire, where coal, labour and the port of Liverpool lay close together. Chapter 3 explains the engine that made this possible, and chapter 5 the towns it created. Steam let the industry grow wherever coal could be delivered.

Child labour becomes a public question. The pauper apprentices of Styal, destitute children sent to work for their keep, and the children who worked twelve-hour shifts in Manchester’s mills became the subject of parliamentary inquiries from 1816 onwards. The mill owner Robert Owen argued from the example of his own model mill at New Lanark, the politician Michael Sadler’s committee of 1832 gathered testimony from the workers themselves, and the Factory Act of 1833 finally enforced limits on children’s hours with paid inspectors. Chapter 5 follows that struggle in Parliament and the mills. The children’s own testimony became the evidence that changed the law.

The handloom weavers’ boom and ruin. Machine-spun yarn first multiplied the work of handloom weavers, who were well paid until about 1805, and then drew so many recruits into the trade that rates fell. When power looms, mechanised weaving machines, spread in the 1820s and 1830s, weavers’ piece rates, the pay for each length of cloth, collapsed and many families fell into poverty. Their anger fed the machine-breaking and protest of chapter 6. Their fate showed that a machine could destroy a skilled trade within one working life, faster than any family could retrain or move.

Lancashire depends on the plantation South. By the late 1850s about three-quarters of Lancashire’s cotton came from the slave states of the American South, a dependence that tied Britain’s largest industry to the fate of slavery. When the American Civil War cut the supply in 1861, Lancashire’s mills fell silent and the trade turned to India and Egypt, the story that chapter 11 tells. The crisis showed how dangerous it was for Britain’s largest industry to depend on a single slave-worked region.