The Textile Mills: How the Factory System Reshaped British Industry

The textile mills were the defining institutions of the British Industrial Revolution. From Richard Arkwright’s Cromford Mill in 1771 to the great cotton mills of Lancashire and the woolen mills of Yorkshire, the textile mills concentrated workers, machines, and power in a single building, and they transformed the way goods were produced.

The First Textile Mills

The first textile mills were built in the 1770s, when Richard Arkwright constructed a series of water-powered cotton-spinning mills in the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire. Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, opened in 1771, was the first water-powered cotton-spinning factory in the world, and it became the model for the new factory system.

Arkwright’s mills were different from the earlier textile operations in several important ways. First, they used water power rather than human or animal power, which made possible a much larger scale of production. Second, they concentrated all the operations of cotton spinning in a single building, rather than spreading them across many small workshops. Third, they employed large numbers of workers under a strict discipline, with fines for lateness and other infractions.

Arkwright’s success at Cromford inspired a wave of mill-building across Britain. Within a few years, dozens of new mills had been built in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands, and the factory system had become the dominant form of industrial organization in the textile industry. The article on the causes of the Industrial Revolution describes the financial context of these investments.

The Cotton Mills of Lancashire

The cotton mills of Lancashire were the largest and most important of the British textile mills. The Lancashire cotton industry grew from a small, marginal sector in the early eighteenth century to become the largest single industry in the world by the 1830s, and the cotton mills of the region were the most visible symbols of the new industrial age.

The Lancashire cotton mills were concentrated in the towns and cities of the region, including Manchester, Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley, and Preston. The mills were typically large, multi-story brick buildings, with the machines arranged in rows on the different floors, driven by a single steam engine. The mills employed large numbers of workers, including many women and children, and they operated for long hours, often twelve to fourteen hours a day.

The article on Cottonopolis and the Manchester cotton industry describes the development of the cotton industry in Manchester in more detail.

The Woolen Mills of Yorkshire

The woolen mills of Yorkshire were the second-largest group of textile mills in Britain, and they were concentrated in the West Riding, with Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield as the main centers. The woolen industry had a long history in Yorkshire, going back to the medieval period, but it was not mechanized on a large scale until the early nineteenth century.

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 article on the Luddites describes the resistance to the introduction of the new machines.

The woolen mills of Yorkshire were similar in many ways to the cotton mills of Lancashire, but they produced different products, including worsted cloth, woolen cloth, and a wide range of other woolen goods. The mills were often smaller than the cotton mills, and they were more likely to be family-owned, but they shared the same general features: concentration of workers and machines, use of steam or water power, and strict discipline.

The Architecture of the Textile Mills

The architecture of the textile mills was distinctive and influential. The earliest mills, like Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, were built of stone and had a fortified appearance, with thick walls and small windows. As the technology improved, the mills became larger and more sophisticated, with iron-framed windows, cast-iron columns, and fire-proof construction.

The typical early nineteenth-century textile mill was a multi-story brick building, with the machines arranged on the different floors. The ground floor often housed the steam engine and the boilers, with the spinning and weaving machines on the upper floors. The mills had wide windows to provide natural light, and they often had elaborate ventilation systems to remove the dust and lint produced by the machines.

The architecture of the textile mills influenced the design of factories in other industries, and many of the features developed for the textile mills, including the iron frame, the large windows, and the central power system, were applied in the factories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Working Conditions in the Mills

The working conditions in the early textile mills were often brutal. The working day was long, typically twelve to sixteen hours, and the work was physically demanding and often dangerous. The machines had no safety guards, and accidents were common, with workers losing fingers, hands, and sometimes their lives. The air in the mills was often thick with dust and lint, and respiratory diseases were common.

Children, sometimes as young as five or six, worked alongside adults in many mills, and the conditions of child labor were particularly harsh. The article on child labor in the Industrial Revolution describes the conditions of child labor in the mills and mines in more detail.

The working conditions in the mills led to a long campaign for factory reform. The Factory Acts of 1833, 1844, and 1847 limited the working hours of children and women in the mills, and the system of factory inspectors helped to enforce the new regulations. The article on working conditions in British factories describes the conditions and the reform movement in more detail.

The Decline of the British Textile Mills

The British textile mills reached their peak in the late nineteenth century, and they gradually declined in the twentieth century as other countries developed their own textile industries. The British failure to adopt the new technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution, the rising cost of British labor, and the increasing competition from low-wage countries all contributed to the decline.

Many of the old textile mills were eventually closed and demolished, and the towns and cities that had grown up around them faced serious economic difficulties. Of the 2,000 or so Lancashire cotton mills that were operating in 1920, fewer than 200 are still standing, and the survivors — Arkwright’s Cromford Mill of 1771, Helmshore Mills, Queen Street Mill in Burnley — give a more direct sense of the noise, heat, and lint-thick air of a steam-powered weaving shed than any book description can.

The article on the causes of the Industrial Revolution describes the broader context of these developments, and the article on the British Empire and industrialization describes the global context of the British textile industry.

The Legacy of the Textile Mills

The textile mills were among the most important institutions of the Industrial Revolution. They established the factory system, with its concentration of workers, machines, and power in a single building, and they became the model for industrial production in other sectors and other countries.

The textile mills also had important social and political effects. The growth of the new industrial cities, the development of the industrial working class, the campaign for factory reform, and the rise of the labor movement were all closely tied to the textile industry. The article on labor movements and unions describes these developments in more detail.

The Continuing Question

The interesting current question about the British textile industry is why it declined. The traditional answer, going back to the 1920s Lancashire Cotton Corporation report and given its modern form in the work of D. A. Farnie, is that the British industry failed to invest in the new ring-spinning and automatic loom technologies of the early 20th century, and that this failure reflected a combination of managerial conservatism, fragmented family ownership, and capital-market short-termism. The revisionist answer, developed by Stephen Broadberry in The Productivity Race (1997) and in a generation of comparative economic history, is more complex: Britain did invest in the new technologies, just more slowly than the United States and Japan, and the reason was not so much technological backwardness as a continuing relative-cost advantage in older machinery and a thriving export market in India and the Empire that did not reward retooling. The interesting unresolved question, raised in Sandrine Jacob and Sébastien Le Gall’s recent work on the French textile industry, is whether the British decline was inevitable or contingent. The Lancashire industry’s share of world cloth exports fell from 65 percent in 1850 to 25 percent in 1913, and to under 5 percent in 1939, but the speed of the decline after 1918 — accelerated by the post-war return to the gold standard, the 1921-1922 depression, and the Lancashire cotton strike of 1929-1932 — suggests that policy choices mattered as much as underlying competitiveness. The same question, in different form, recurs in the post-1970s history of British manufacturing more generally.

Selected Sources

Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures 1700–1820 (1985).
D.A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market 1815–1896 (1979).
J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry (1925).
François Crouzet, The First Industrial Nation (1980).