The Cotton Stimulus

The cotton textile industry, rather than wool, became the major agent for the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The cotton plant is subtropical in its origin. Its light, durable characteristics made it very popular with the British public, a trend that was facilitated by its importation from the Middle East, particularly Egypt, through Great Britain’s thriving overseas trade.8 In 1700, British cotton imports totaled about 1 million pounds and wool approximately 40 million pounds, a difference that remained similar for half a century. Most cotton manufacturing in the first half of the 18th century took place in small workshops and on farms in Lancashire, and by the 1760s cotton increasingly had become the nation’s major manufacturing enterprise. The change came about despite laws that lingered on the books and supported the older wool industry. One such provision was the requirement that all burials would use woolen shrouds and restrictions on the importation of competing fabrics such as cotton. Despite these laws, cotton could not be denied its new role and the timing could not have been better. Great Britain found the growing American cotton supply a boon to the increased demand for the fabric as the supply rose significantly, particularly after the invention of the cotton gin, and the price fell markedly. In 1760 Great Britain’s raw cotton imports had risen to two and a half million pounds. A generation later that number had increased nearly ten times and by the 1830s had grown to 366 million pounds. Perhaps most significantly, by 1860 the cost of cotton imports was no different that it had been in 1700. In the mid 19th century Great Britain had 1,800 cotton mills generating 53,000 kilowatts of steam power and employing 328,000 workers who produced 1.75 billion yards of cloth.9 One factor that contributed to this phenomenal growth was the fact that the fabric was better suited to the new mechanization processes sweeping Great Britain. Wool fiber is less substantial and consistent than cotton, which has a tough plant fiber and proved more adaptable to the unpredictable and sometimes awkward operations of the early machine devices. Even the adaptation of wool production to machinery could not compete with the speed and quality of cotton production. Finally, cotton found an eager and expanding market, as the taste for this more comfortable and easy to wash and maintain fabric had a revolutionary impact on work and everyday dress. Cotton allowed for the dying of vibrant colors and generated new fashion styles for the upper classes. But more significantly the wearing of cotton undergarments by the common person became commonplace. While production of woolen goods did grow throughout the 18th century, an insatiable appetite for cotton goods arose not only in Great Britain’s prime markets but also in temperate climes such as the Mediterranean, the Americas, West Indies, Africa, and Southeast Asia. British cotton exports to the American and West Indies colonies, for example, increased from 10% of its national total at the turn of the 18th century to 37% on the eve of the American Revolution and to nearly 60% by the late 1790s.

In addition to the availability of cotton, technology became another driving factor for the industry. Textile manufacturing took place in four steps: cleaning/combing, spinning, weaving, and finishing. In 1700, little mechanization was available. One issue was providing the weavers with a sufficient amount of yarn. Necessity and demand drove the new developments. In the span of six decades a number of machines appeared that would undermine the old cottage industry approach and solve the problem of matching production capability with demand. John Kay’s flying shuttle (1733) provided weavers with increased speed, and Edmund Cartwright’s power loom (1787) replaced the individual weaver at each loom with a number of looms capable of being powered by steam or water; a variety of spinning frames in the 1750s; Hargreaves’s spinning jenny in the 1760s, which provided the single spinner the ability to spin multiple threads simultaneously; Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769) and Samuel Crompton’s ‘‘mule’’ (1779), a hybrid of the water frame and jenny, combined to facilitate the process through mechanization. These devices, primitive by later models, provided advantages of six to twenty-four to one for a typical spinning jenny and perhaps 200 to one for the frame, a ratio that made the old spinning wheel obsolete. Yet even the most sophisticated eighty-spindle spinning jenny soon became incapable of competing with the steam power-driven mule that could operate 200 to 300 spindles.10 James Watt’s steam engine was first applied to cotton manufacture in 1785, and the boom began. The quantity of yarn produced increased 12-fold by 1800 and stimulated enhancements in the weaving process.

Ironically, despite the appearance of steam power driven machinery, the prosperity and wages of spinners and hand-weavers actually rose in the last two decades of the 18th century because of the insatiable demand for cotton goods. The trend to mechanization, however, became a substantial threat and sounded the eventual death knell for this occupation. The power loom was the catalyst. The device operated on par with the hand loom for several decades and had to overcome the problem of breaking threads. Although a solution was found, the disruption of the Napoleonic Wars and the trade restrictions placed on Great Britain delayed its widespread adoption until the 1820s. By that time one young boy operating two power looms could equal the output of 15 hand weavers. A decade later, one man and one boy assistant operating four looms produced twenty times that of the hand weaver. The number of power looms proliferated in Great Britain: 2400 in 1813, 14,000 in 1820, 55,000 in 1829 100,000 in 1833, 250,000 in 1850, and 369,000 by 1857.11 The number of hand weavers naturally declined although not without great resistance. It is estimated that some 250,000 hand weavers remained at work between the years 1810 and 1820, although the number fell dramatically to roughly 3,000 by 1850. Furthermore, the preliminary tasks in cotton textile production,

Such as cleaning, carding, and roving, also lent themselves to mechanization and thus added to the speed of the overall process.

That is not to say that the entire transition went smoothly. Lack of uniformity in machines and the frequent early breakdowns in equipment forced restarts and meant that much trial and error had to occur before success could be assured. Once the flaws had been corrected, British cotton production increased and exports soared. In 1800 Great Britain’s export ratio to domestic consumption of cotton cloth stood at four to three. By the late 1840s cotton made up about 50% of all British exports. Initially, the continent was the main market for British cotton, taking in one third of Britain’s exports, but increasingly Great Britain cast a wider net for its export market. After the 1820s, Latin America purchased one fourth as much cotton from Great Britain as Europe, but that percentage rose to one half by the 1840s. As the British advantage in machine production advanced steadily, it virtually destroyed India and Southeast Asia’s hand labor ability to compete and resulted in a 1,500% increase of British cotton exports to those areas in the 1820s and 1830s. For example, in 1813 Great Britain imported more than 2 million pounds of cotton cloth from Calcutta, India, but by 1830 Britain was exporting that same amount to Calcutta. Africa also felt the effect to a lesser degree, and only China resisted the British juggernaut until after the Opium Wars.

The British cotton industry experienced a major transition from 1750 to 1860 because of a number of factors. A growing consumer market placed a new and rising demand for cotton textiles. A thriving inventive spirit solved a number of problems that had created a bottleneck in the spinning and weaving processes. Entrepreneurs seized upon these developments and with few constraints standing in the way pushed for ever greater productivity using water and then steam power. Thus, the older, more primitive small-scale cottage industries could not compete with the new bustling factory enterprises emerging in areas such as Lancashire. By 1857 the once idyllic rural landscape had been transformed by the smoke belching from more than 2,200 cotton mills operating 33.5 million spindles and the growing number of workers herded into factory towns.12 These images became the testimony to the fact that the cotton industry had achieved dominant status and paved the way for the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.