The British Textile Industry: Cotton, Wool, and the Factory System

The British textile industry was the largest industry in the world in the early nineteenth century, and it was the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. The mechanization of the textile industry, beginning with the spinning jenny and the power loom, transformed the production of cloth and laid the foundation for the factory system.

The British Cotton Industry

The British cotton industry was the largest and most important sector of the British textile industry. The article on the development of the British cotton industry can be found at the Cottonopolis and the Manchester cotton industry page. The growth of the British cotton industry was driven by a series of technological innovations, including the spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule, and the power loom, which together mechanized the production of cotton cloth. The growth of the British cotton industry depended on a steady supply of raw cotton, which came increasingly from the American South after the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793.

The British Woolen Industry

The British woolen industry was the second-largest textile industry in Britain, and it had a long history before the Industrial Revolution. The woolen industry was concentrated in the West Riding of Yorkshire, with Leeds as its commercial center. The mechanization of the woolen industry was slower than the cotton industry, in part because the woolen weavers had more powerful guilds and traditions of skilled handwork. The introduction of the power loom into the woolen industry was gradual, and it was not until the 1840s and 1850s that the handloom weavers were finally displaced.

The Luddites and the Resistance to Industrialization

The introduction of the new textile machines was not without resistance. The handloom weavers, in particular, were severely affected by the introduction of the power loom, and they responded with a series of protests and acts of violence, including the destruction of machines. The most famous of these protests was the Luddite movement, which began in 1811 and continued into the 1810s. The article on the Luddites describes this important episode in the history of British industrialization.

The British Textile Mills

The textile mills were the defining institutions of the British Industrial Revolution. The article on the textile mills describes the development of the British textile mills in more detail.

The British Cotton Industry in Numbers

The growth of the British cotton industry between 1760 and 1840 is one of the most extraordinary episodes of sustained industrial expansion in economic history. Raw cotton imports rose from 11 million pounds in 1765 to 152 million in 1815, 588 million in 1830, and 1.4 billion in 1860, with the United States supplying about 80 percent of the total by 1860. The number of cotton spindles in Britain grew from perhaps 25,000 in 1765 to 3.4 million in 1815, 9 million in 1830, and 30 million by 1860; the number of power looms rose from 2,400 in 1813 to 100,000 by 1835. Cotton cloth exports climbed from 25 million yards in 1790 to 2.4 billion yards by 1850, making the industry by far the largest source of manufactured goods in world trade. Employment in the industry, including spinners, weavers, and ancillary workers, peaked in the 1850s at perhaps 1.5 million people, with a female and child labor force that drew in workers from a wide radius around the mill towns. The price of standard cotton cloth fell from 38 shillings per piece in 1790 to 5 shillings 8 pence in 1830, the productivity gains of which are among the most cited in the literature on industrial growth.

The Woolen Industry of the West Riding

The British woolen industry was the second-largest textile industry in the country, and it was concentrated in the West Riding of Yorkshire with its center in Leeds, the commercial capital, and Bradford, the later center of the worsted trade. The industry was organized in two distinct branches. The woolen or “cloth” trade, based on carded short-staple wool, was concentrated in the Stroud valley in Gloucestershire and the West Country, and it resisted mechanization longest because of the strength of the existing merchant guilds. The worsted trade, based on the longer-staple wool of the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire breeds, was more receptive to new machinery and became the heartland of the industry’s expansion. The introduction of the power loom into the worsted trade in the 1830s, and into the woolen trade a decade later, displaced the handloom weavers, who in Yorkshire numbered perhaps 60,000 in 1820 and fewer than 5,000 by 1850. The 1820s and 1830s were the years of the worsted industry’s “take-off,” and the resulting economic and social dislocation is the subject of Geoffrey Timmins’s The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (1993) and the earlier Edward Thompson essays on the West Riding.

Handloom Weavers and the Luddite Movement

The Luddite movement of 1811-1816 was concentrated in three areas — the East Midlands hosiery and lace industry, the West Riding shearing-frame workers, and the Lancashire and Cheshire croppers — and it was a direct response to the displacement of skilled hand labor by new machinery. The most famous episode was the breaking of the wide crop frames and shearing machines in the West Riding between January 1811 and February 1812, when the British government sent 12,000 troops into the area in the largest peacetime military deployment ever made on English soil. The Frame-Breaking Act of 1812 made machine-breaking a capital offense; seventeen men were executed for frame-breaking between 1812 and 1813. The interpretation of Luddism has been a long-running historiographical battle. E. P. Thompson’s “Moral Economy of the English Crowd” (1971) argued that the Luddites were acting within a recognized paternalistic tradition of protest, while Kirkpatrick Sale in Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (1995) read them as a serious political opposition to the emerging capitalist system. The orthodox view, defended by Malcolm Thomis in The Luddites (1970) and most recently by Robert Reid in Land of Lost Content: The Luddite Revolt 1812 (1986), treats them as a defensive movement of skilled workers facing the loss of their livelihood, with no broader political program.

Linen, Silk, and the Limits of Mechanization

The linen industry, concentrated in Scotland and Ulster, was mechanized in the 1820s and 1830s, but it never achieved the same growth as cotton. The British silk industry, concentrated in the east of England (Essex, Suffolk, the southwest) and centered on Spitalfields in London and Macclesfield in Cheshire, was the most resistant to mechanization. The fine, delicate nature of silk thread made it unsuitable for the heavy power looms of the early nineteenth century, and the industry’s skilled handloom weavers, often working in workshops attached to the merchants’ houses, were protected by the Spitalfields Acts of 1773 and 1801, which set piece rates and regulated entry into the trade. The Acts were repealed in 1824, and the industry began a long decline that was exacerbated by the removal of import duties in 1825 and the Free Trade movement of the 1840s. By 1860 the British silk industry was a fraction of its eighteenth-century size, and most of the silk sold in Britain was imported from France and, after 1860, from China and Japan.

The Trades of the Handloom Weavers

The 1842 Report on Handloom Weavers, prepared by James Edward Davis and the 1840 commission, found that the average weekly earnings of a handloom weaver in Lancashire had fallen from 19 shillings 4 pence in 1810 to 5 shillings 9 pence in 1835, while the prices of grain and bread rose and the cost of the loom, the frame, and the rent for the workshop consumed an increasing share of income. The Weavers’ Commissions of 1838 and 1840 documented the destitution in which much of the Lancashire weaving population lived in the late 1830s, and a relief scheme for the worst-affected districts was proposed by Lord Ashley in 1842. The weavers’ decline has been analyzed in detail by Maxine Berg in The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy (1980), who argues that the experience of the weavers shaped the political economy of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, both of whom used the case of the weavers as evidence for the iron law of wages. The weavers’ eventual absorption into the cotton factories, or into the new iron trades of Lancashire, marked the end of the old domestic system in the British textile industry.

Continuing Relevance: Cotton and the World Economy

The British cotton industry, in its period of dominance, produced the first truly global supply chain. Raw cotton from the American South and India was processed in Lancashire and exported as cloth to India, China, Africa, and Latin America. The system of slave-grown cotton, mechanized spinning and weaving, and global shipping produced the kind of integrated industrial economy analyzed by Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton (2014) and by Joseph Inikori in Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002). The British industry’s failure to invest in the new ring-spinning technology developed in the United States, and its slow adoption of the Northrop automatic loom developed in the 1890s, marked the beginning of its decline relative to the United States, Germany, and Japan. By 1910 Lancashire was still the largest single cotton-producing region in the world, but the British share of world exports had fallen from 75 percent in 1870 to 35 percent in 1900, and the long-term decline of the industry, accelerated by the disruption of the First World War and the loss of the Indian market, was already apparent.

The Industry in the 20th Century and the Post-War Decline

The British textile industry, which had been the largest in the world in the 1850s, was a fraction of its former size by 1960. The cotton industry, which had employed perhaps 1.5 million people in the 1850s, employed 250,000 in 1955 and 90,000 in 1975. The woolen industry, more durable, still employed about 175,000 in 1970. The post-war decline was driven by the same forces that had been at work since 1880: the loss of export markets to newly industrialized countries, the failure to invest in new technology, the high wages of British workers, and the saturation of the home market. The British industry was also affected by the introduction of synthetic fibers — nylon (Du Pont, 1938), Terylene (ICI, 1941), and acrylic fibers — which competed with the natural fibers in the post-war market. The 1959 Cotton Industry Act, which provided £30 million in modernization grants, was the first major state intervention; the 1964 Industrial Training Act and the 1966 Industrial Reorganisation Corporation were successors. The decline is the subject of Peter N. Stearns’s The British Workshop of the World, 1850-1914 (1972) and of Michael Dintenfass’s The Decline of the British Cotton Industry, 1870-1930 (1986), and it remains a touchstone for British discussions of industrial decline in the 21st century.

The Silk Trade and the Spitalfields Acts

The British silk industry was the smallest of the principal textile trades, but it was historically the most prestigious, and it had a long tradition of skilled handwork centered in the Spitalfields district of East London. The Spitalfields weavers, who were largely Huguenot refugees from the French persecutions of the late 17th century, were organized in a system of regulated apprenticeship and corporate guilds, and the Spitalfields Acts of 1773 and 1801 set minimum piece rates and restricted the use of certain looms. The Acts were designed to protect the weavers’ wages against the competition of the country weavers in the surrounding villages, who worked in the putting-out system. The repeal of the Spitalfields Acts in 1824, the result of the general movement for the repeal of the Combination Acts, was a severe blow to the Spitalfields weavers, and the introduction of the power loom in the 1820s and 1830s completed the decline of the handloom weavers of Spitalfields. The Macclesfield silk industry in Cheshire, the second principal center of the British silk trade, was less affected by the Spitalfields Acts and was more receptive to the new machinery, but it too declined in the face of competition from imported French and, after 1860, Chinese and Japanese silk. The history of the Spitalfields silk industry is the subject of Pamela Sharpe’s Adapting to Capitalism (1996) and of Maxine Berg’s Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2005).

The Role of Inventors: Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright

The most important individual contributions to the development of the British textile industry were those of Richard Arkwright (1732-1792), Samuel Crompton (1753-1827), and Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823). Arkwright developed the water frame in 1769 and built the first water-powered cotton mill at Cromford in 1771; he is generally credited with the invention of the factory system. Crompton developed the spinning mule in 1779, which combined the best features of the jenny and the water frame and produced a yarn of high quality. Cartwright developed the power loom in 1785, which mechanized the weaving process and completed the transformation of the industry. Each of these inventors is the subject of extensive biographical literature, including Malcolm Thomis’s The Life and Adventures of Richard Arkwright (1973), T. E. Heywood’s Samuel Crompton and the Crompton Mule (1958), and Mary E. Blagden’s Edmund Cartwright, Inventor of the Power Loom (1931). The trio is also the subject of H. I. Dutton’s The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution (1984), which traces the role of the patent system in the development of the new technology.

The British Textile Industry in the 19th-Century World Economy

The British textile industry, in the 19th century, was the single most important industry in the world economy. By 1850, the British industry was producing about 50 percent of the world’s cotton cloth, about 40 percent of the world’s woolen cloth, and about 80 percent of the world’s worsted cloth, and the British exports of textile products accounted for about half of all British merchandise exports. The British industry was the principal customer of the world’s cotton farmers, the principal supplier of the world’s cloth markets, and the principal employer of the world’s textile workers. The British industry’s success was the result of a combination of factors: the early start, the abundant coal and iron, the skilled labor force, the free trade policy, and the British Empire’s role as a source of raw materials and a market for finished goods. The British industry’s decline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the result of a corresponding set of factors: the rise of competing industries in Germany, the United States, and Japan; the loss of export markets to the new industrial countries; the failure to invest in new technology; and the high wages of British workers. The history of the British industry, in short, is the history of the British industrial economy in microcosm, and the lessons of its rise and decline are central to the understanding of modern economic development.

Key Dates in the British Textile Industry

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the British textile industry:

1733 — John Kay’s flying shuttle
1764 — James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny
1769 — Richard Arkwright’s water frame
1771 — Cromford Mill opens
1779 — Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule
1785 — Edmund Cartwright’s power loom
1811-1816 — Luddite movement
1813 — 2,400 power looms in Britain
1820 — 14,000 power looms in Britain
1835 — 100,000 power looms in Britain
1842 — 4.49 million American cotton bales produced
1860 — 30 million spindles in Britain
1870 — British share of world cotton exports peaks at 75 percent
1900 — British share of world cotton exports falls to 35 percent
1930 — British share falls to 17 percent

In this section

The Luddites The story of the Luddite movement, the resistance of British textile workers to the new industrial machines, and the government response that helped to shape the modern labor movement. The Textile Mills The history of the British textile mills, from Richard Arkwright's Cromford Mill to the great cotton mills of Lancashire and the woolen mills of Yorkshire.