Cotton Manufacturing: The First Industry of the Industrial Revolution

Cotton was the most important fiber of the Industrial Revolution, and the cotton industry was the first major industry to be transformed by the new industrial technology.

The Rise of the Cotton Industry

The cotton industry was the leading sector of the Industrial Revolution. Cotton was easier to spin and weave than wool or linen, and the new machines were particularly well suited to cotton. The demand for cotton cloth was high, both in Britain and in export markets around the world, and the supply of raw cotton was abundant, especially after the invention of the cotton gin. The article on the cotton gin describes the invention that made short-staple cotton profitable. The article on the cotton trade covers the global trade in cotton that supported the industry.

The American Cotton Industry

The American cotton industry developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the first cotton mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, built by Samuel Slater in 1793, and the great textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1820s. The article on the American textile industry describes the development of the American cotton industry in more detail.

The Working Conditions in the Cotton Industry

The working conditions in the early cotton mills were often brutal. The working day was long, typically twelve to sixteen hours, and the work was physically demanding and often dangerous. 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 factory conditions describes the conditions in the mills in more detail.

The Decline of the British Cotton Industry

The British cotton industry remained the largest in the world until the late nineteenth century, but it gradually lost its dominant position as other countries developed their own cotton industries. The article on Cottonopolis and the Manchester cotton industry describes the decline of the British cotton industry in Manchester in more detail.

Why Cotton Led the Industrial Revolution

Cotton had particular properties that made it the leading sector of the early industrial economy. The raw fiber was cheaper than wool or silk, and the price fell sharply after the invention of the cotton gin made short-staple cotton profitable in the American South. The fiber was also easier to spin and weave by machine than the longer, more elastic fibers of wool, which tended to break on the new water frames, or the slippery threads of silk, which resisted the heavy power looms. The threads produced by Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, and later the ring frame could be spun to a standard fineness and woven into a uniform cloth, the kind of consistency that hand spinners and weavers, however skilled, could not match. The market for the resulting cloth was also expanding rapidly: the population of Britain grew from 8.9 million in 1760 to 16.7 million in 1830, and the colonial market, especially in West Africa and the Americas, was absorbing the cheap printed calicoes and muslins that the new machines could produce. The combination of supply elasticity (cheap raw material, new machines) and demand elasticity (rising population, expanding empire) made cotton the most dynamic industry of the period, and the analysis of Robert C. Allen in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009) places cotton at the center of the explanation of why the Industrial Revolution happened first in Britain.

The American Cotton South and the World Market

The American South, which supplied the great bulk of the raw cotton that fed the British industry, was transformed by the new demand. Cotton production in the United States rose from 73,000 bales in 1800 to 732,000 in 1830, 1.35 million in 1840, and 4.49 million by 1860, the year before the Civil War began. The British market took about 80 percent of the total, and the export of American cotton was the single largest source of foreign exchange for the United States in the antebellum period. The geographic spread of the cotton belt from South Carolina and Georgia into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas between 1820 and 1860 — the period of the Cotton Belt’s “second grand wave” — was made possible by the simultaneous displacement of Native American populations, the construction of the southeastern railroad network, and the expansion of slavery into the new southwestern states. The 1793 invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, and the 1798 invention of the saw gin by Hodgen Holmes, made the new short-staple (upland) varieties of cotton profitable, and the slave-grown cotton of the South, as Sven Beckert argued in Empire of Cotton (2014), was the foundation of the British industry’s growth in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Working Environment of the Cotton Mill

The working environment of the early cotton mills was, by modern standards, severe. The air was hot and humid, since humidity was needed to keep the cotton threads from breaking, and the temperature was frequently kept at 70-80 degrees F even in winter. The noise of the machinery, the dust from the raw cotton, and the danger of the unguarded belts, gears, and shafts produced accidents at a rate that was not systematically recorded until the 1840s. The 1841 Factory Commission reported that in 1839 there were 192,000 children under 18 working in textile mills, of whom 110,000 were under 13. The conditions in the mines that supplied the coal to power the cotton mills were, if anything, worse. The worst single episode was the 1838 fire at the Tradeston Cotton Mill in Glasgow, in which 29 female workers died. The campaign to regulate factory conditions produced a series of Factory Acts (1833, 1844, 1847, 1850, 1867) that gradually shortened working hours, raised the minimum age of employment, and introduced a system of state inspection. The campaign was driven by a coalition that included Lord Ashley (later Earl of Shaftesbury), Michael Sadler, the Tory evangelical Robert Peel, and the utilitarian economists; the legislative outcome was one of the first examples of state regulation of working conditions in modern history.

The British Cotton Industry at Its Peak

The British cotton industry reached its peak in the late 1850s, when the country was running about 30 million spindles and producing 1.4 billion pounds of yarn per year, employing perhaps 1.5 million people, and producing one-third of all British exports. The industry was concentrated in a small number of mill towns in Lancashire and adjacent parts of Cheshire, Derbyshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Manchester, Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Burnley, Blackburn, Preston, and Wigan were the principal centers; each was a single-industry town with a population of 20,000 to 100,000 in 1850. The system of production was highly developed by the 1850s, with a “finishing” sector that included calico printing, dyeing, and bleaching concentrated in the larger towns, and a “merchanting” sector of London-based firms that organized the export of finished cloth to markets in Europe, India, and the Americas. The peak of the industry is the subject of Peter N. Stearns’s The British Workshop of the World, 1850-1914 (1972), which documents both its technical achievements and the structural problems — high wages, obsolete equipment, resistance to new technology — that led to its decline.

The Decline and Its Causes

The decline of the British cotton industry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one of the most-studied cases of industrial decline in economic history. The principal causes, in order of importance in the standard account, were the loss of export markets to newly industrialized countries, the failure to invest in new technology, the relatively high wages of British workers, and the structural problems of an industry that was concentrated in a single region. The Lancashire cotton mills were slow to adopt the new ring-spinning frame developed in the United States, the Northrop automatic loom developed by James H. Northrop in the 1890s, and the sundry technical improvements introduced by American and German firms in the 1880s and 1890s. By 1900, the United States was running more spindles than Britain, and Japan, India, and Germany were rapidly expanding their cotton industries. The British industry’s share of world cotton consumption fell from 75 percent in 1870 to 35 percent in 1900 and 17 percent by 1930. The industry’s eventual collapse was accelerated by the disruption of the First World War, the loss of the Indian market, and the Great Depression; by 1950 the British cotton industry was a fraction of its former size. The decline is the subject of Michael Dintenfass’s The Decline of the British Cotton Industry, 1870-1930 (1986), which places the blame on management failure and the under-investment of the industry’s profits, and of M. W. Kirby’s The British Cotton Industry, 1850-1950 (1975), which emphasizes the structural problems of an industry concentrated in an old industrial region.

The Indian and Japanese Cotton Industries

The British cotton industry’s first major challenge came from India. The first Indian cotton mill, the Sassoon Spinning and Weaving Company, was established in 1861 in Bombay by David Sassoon, and the Indian cotton industry grew rapidly after 1870 under the protection of the tariff. The Indian industry, concentrated in Bombay and Ahmedabad, expanded from 50,000 spindles in 1870 to 1.2 million in 1890, 5.2 million in 1910, and 8.0 million in 1940. The Indian industry’s competitive advantage was its low wages — perhaps one-fifth the British level in 1900 — and its protected market. The Indian share of British cloth exports to India rose from 0 percent in 1870 to 25 percent in 1900 and 60 percent in 1914. The Japanese cotton industry, founded on the Miike Mine and the Tomioka Silk Mill of the 1870s, grew rapidly after 1890 and became the most efficient cotton industry in the world by 1914, with the help of the ring frame developed in the United States. The Japanese share of world cotton exports rose from 0 percent in 1880 to 18 percent in 1900 and 30 percent in 1930. The Indian and Japanese competition is the subject of Ishikawa Shigeru’s studies of the Japanese cotton industry and of Morris David Morris’s The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in India (1965).

The Long Decline: 1914-1970

The British cotton industry, which had been the largest single industry in the world in the 1850s, was a small fraction of its former size by 1970. The industry’s decline was accelerated by the disruption of the First World War, which cut off the Egyptian and Indian supply of raw cotton and reduced the export market for British cloth; the loss of the Indian market, where the Indian cotton industry was now producing enough cloth to supply the home market; the loss of the Chinese market, where the Japanese cotton industry had replaced British cloth; and the Great Depression, which further reduced the demand for British cloth. The 1939-1945 Second World War disrupted the industry again, and the post-1945 recovery was brief. The number of cotton spindles in Britain fell from 53 million in 1920 to 28 million in 1950 and 6 million in 1970, and the number of cotton weavers fell from 250,000 in 1920 to 75,000 in 1950 and 25,000 in 1970. The decline is the subject of Peter N. Stearns’s The British Workshop of the World, 1850-1914 (1972) and of M. W. Kirby’s The British Cotton Industry, 1850-1950 (1975). The few remaining mills were concentrated in the older manufacturing districts of Lancashire, and the industry’s gradual disappearance in the late 20th century marked the end of the period in which cotton had been the leading industry of the world economy.

The Empire of Cotton: Beckert’s Synthesis

The most ambitious recent synthesis of the history of the cotton industry is Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014), which traces the history of cotton from its pre-modern origins in India, China, and the Islamic world, through the European expansion of the 18th century, to the 19th-century industry in Britain, the United States, India, and Japan, and to the 20th-century globalization of the industry. Beckert argues that the cotton industry was the central industry of the 19th century, and that the system of slave-grown cotton, colonial expansion, and industrial production that supplied the British mills was the foundation of modern capitalism. The book is a tour de force of historical synthesis, drawing on the work of Eric Williams, M. D. Morris, and Joseph Inikori on the role of slavery and colonial production, of Alfred D. Chandler Jr. on the modern firm, and of William Cronon on the relationship between capitalism and the natural environment. The book is the most important single work on the global history of the cotton industry since Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures (1985) and Stephen Marriner’s The Transformation of the Cotton Trade (1970), and it has been the subject of a wide-ranging discussion in the journals.

A Final Note: The Cotton Gin and the Global Economy

The story of the cotton industry in the Industrial Revolution is, in many ways, the story of the global economy. The combination of the British factory system, the American slave plantation, the Indian and Egyptian colonial production, the German chemical industry, the Japanese cotton industry, and the modern consumer economy of the 20th century all trace their origins to the cotton industry of the 19th century. The current debates about globalization, supply chains, and economic development are, in a real sense, continuations of the debates that began with the cotton industry. The most recent literature, including Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) and the essays collected in the Cambridge World History (2015), treats the cotton industry as a window onto the larger history of global capitalism. Cotton, more than any other commodity, made the 19th-century world market. The lessons of its history are central to understanding the 21st-century global economy.

Key Dates in the Cotton Industry

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the cotton industry:

1733 — John Kay’s flying shuttle
1764 — James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny
1769 — Richard Arkwright’s water frame
1771 — Cromford Mill, the first water-powered cotton factory
1779 — Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule
1785 — Edmund Cartwright’s power loom
1793 — Eli Whitney’s cotton gin
1814 — Waltham factory, first integrated cotton mill in the United States
1823 — Lowell mills founded
1830 — Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
1860 — 4.49 million bales of American cotton produced
1870 — British share of world cotton exports peaks at 75 percent
1900 — British share falls to 35 percent
1930 — British share falls to 17 percent

In this section

The Cotton Gin The story of the cotton gin, Eli Whitney's invention of 1793 that transformed short-staple cotton production and helped to entrench slavery in the American South. The Cotton Trade The story of the global cotton trade, the most important commodity trade of the nineteenth century, and its role in shaping the modern global economy.