Textile Mills and Factories: The Birth of the Modern Factory

The textile mills and factories were the defining institutions of the Industrial Revolution.

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. 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 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 article on the textile mills describes the development of the British textile mills in more detail.

The Lowell Mills

The most famous example of the American textile mills was the Lowell system, developed in the 1820s by a group of Boston merchants led by Francis Cabot Lowell. The article on the Lowell mills describes the Lowell system in more detail.

The Factory System

The textile mills were the first examples of the factory system, and they became the model for industrial production in other sectors. The article on the factory system and urbanization describes the development of the factory system in more detail.

The Working Conditions in the Textile Mills

The working conditions in the early textile mills were often brutal. The article on factory conditions describes the conditions in the mills 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.

Cromford Mill and the Birth of the Modern Factory

The Cromford Mill, opened in 1771 by Richard Arkwright in the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, is widely treated as the prototype of the modern factory. The mill at Cromford was purpose-built: a five-storey stone building designed to house water frames and other machinery, with a workforce housed in a planned village that Arkwright also built. The factory introduced a new form of work discipline, including fines for lateness and dismissal for absenteeism, and it pioneered the clock-regulated labor regime analyzed by E. P. Thompson in his essay on “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967). By 1788, Arkwright’s patent (later disputed and partly revoked) had been overturned, and within ten years the number of cotton mills in Britain had risen from perhaps 20 in 1770 to 142 in 1790 and 2,500 by 1820. The 2001 inscription of the Derwent Valley Mills as a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognized the site as the locus of a transformation of working life whose effects lasted into the twentieth century.

The Numbers of the British Cotton Industry

The British cotton industry between 1770 and 1840 was, in raw physical terms, the fastest growing industry in the world. The number of cotton spindles in Britain grew from 25,000 in 1765 to 3.4 million in 1815 and 9 million in 1830; the number of power looms rose from 2,400 in 1813 to 100,000 by 1835. The number of cotton mills increased from 142 in 1790 to 2,500 in 1820 and 4,700 in 1860, with Lancashire running about half of them. The output of the British industry, measured in pounds of yarn produced, rose from 11 million pounds in 1790 to 528 million in 1840 and 1.4 billion in 1860. The labor force, including handloom weavers as well as mill workers, peaked at perhaps 1.5 million in the late 1850s. The productivity gains — perhaps a 50- to 100-fold increase in the output per worker-hour over the period — are central to the literature on industrial growth, and they have been the subject of a long debate about the relative contributions of capital deepening, technological change, and economies of scale.

Factory Discipline and the Politics of Working Time

The early factory introduced a new kind of working life. The hours were long, typically 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week; the discipline was imposed by fines, fines for talking, lateness, or damaged work, and by “ringing in” and “ringing out” of the mill at a fixed hour. The 1841 Factory Commission estimated that in 1839 about 192,000 children under 18 were working in textile mills in the United Kingdom, the great majority in the cotton industry. The 1833 Factory Act, drafted by Lord Ashley and Michael Thomas Sadler, was the first major state intervention: it established an inspectorate under Leonard Horner and limited the working hours of children under 13 to nine hours per day, and of adolescents 13-18 to twelve hours. The 1844 Factory Act further reduced child hours and required the fencing of dangerous machinery; the 1847 Ten Hours Act extended the limit to all women and children in textile mills. The mills and factories were the central institutions of the period, and the campaign to regulate them shaped British politics for a generation.

The Woolen Mills of the West Riding

The woolen industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire was organized differently from the cotton industry of Lancashire. Until the 1820s, much of the spinning and most of the weaving was done in the homes of domestic workers, who bought their yarn from a dealer, wove it on a handloom, and returned the cloth for finishing. The introduction of the power loom into the worsted trade in the late 1830s, and into the woolen trade in the 1840s, displaced the domestic workers but at a slower pace than in cotton: the worsted power-loom weavers were concentrated in a few large mills at Bradford and Halifax, while the woolen trade continued to have a significant domestic sector into the 1870s. The 1835 Factory Commission reported that the woolen industry employed about 130,000 handloom weavers, of whom perhaps 80,000 were in Yorkshire, and the slow decline of the handloom weavers between 1820 and 1850 is the subject of Maxine Berg’s The Machinery Question (1980) and Geoffrey Timmins’s The Last Shift (1993).

The Lowell Mills and the American Factory System

The American factory system was an offshoot of the British one, but it was built in a different economic and social environment. The Lowell mills — the Boott Mills, the Lawrence Manufacturing Company, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, and others — were built along the Merrimack River in eastern Massachusetts beginning in 1823, with water-power sites that the Waltham-Lowell partnership had identified as suitable. The mills were larger than their British counterparts and used more advanced machinery (much of it imported from Britain despite the legal prohibition), and they introduced a distinctive labor system based on young unmarried women from the surrounding New England farms, who lived in supervised boarding houses and worked for two or three years before returning to their home communities. The system, which produced about 8,000 mill workers at its peak in the late 1840s, was the most studied American factory system of the period, and the literature on it — starting with Harriet Robinson’s Loom and Spindle (1898) and continuing with Thomas Dublin’s Women at Work (1979) — has been central to the historiography of the American Industrial Revolution.

The Decline of the British Cotton Industry

The British cotton industry, which had dominated world production in the 1850s and 1860s, gradually lost its leading position to the United States, Germany, and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The industry’s problems were partly technical — the British mills were slow to adopt the new ring-spinning frames and the Northrop automatic loom — and partly structural: the relatively high wages of British workers, the saturation of the home market, and the loss of India, the largest export market, to the Indian mill industry that grew up in Bombay and Ahmedabad after 1870. The British share of world cotton exports fell from 75 percent in 1870 to 35 percent by 1900 and 17 percent by 1930. The post-1918 decline was accelerated by the loss of the European market and the Great Depression, and by 1960 the British cotton industry was a fraction of its earlier size. The decline is analyzed in Michael Dintenfass’s The Decline of the British Cotton Industry, 1870-1930 (1986) and Stephen Marriner’s earlier The Transformation of the Cotton Trade, 1780-1840 (1970).

The Spinning-Shed System and Factory Organization

The internal organization of the cotton mill was a model for the 20th-century industrial firm. The early mills were organized on a strict hierarchy, with the mill manager at the top, the overlooker (or shift foreman) next, and the spinner, the piecer, the doffer, the scavenger, and the mule operative below. The 1847 Ten Hours Act and the 1850 Factory Act established the 12-hour shift system, with two teams working the same machinery. The 1850s saw the introduction of the “ring spinner” developed in the United States, and the ring-spinning frame, with its automatic bobbin and traveler, replaced the mule in many mills. The factory system produced a new kind of working class: the “factory girl” of the Lancashire mills, the “mill hand” of the Yorkshire worsted mills, and the “operatives” of the cotton mills. The 19th-century factory is the subject of Sidney Pollard’s The Genesis of Modern Management (1965), which traces the development of modern management techniques in the British cotton industry, and of Norman J. Ware’s The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860 (1924), which documents the working conditions of the factory operatives. The factory system, in the words of Henry Ford, who modeled his Highland Park plant on the British mills, was “the foundation of the American system of mass production.”

Women’s Work in the Textile Mills

Women were the largest single group of workers in the textile mills. The 1851 Census recorded that 550,000 of the 1.5 million British textile workers were women, and 60 percent of the cotton operatives in Lancashire were women or girls. The first generation of female factory workers — the “factory girls” of the 1830s and 1840s — was a new social phenomenon, and the 1842 Royal Commission on the Employment of Children in Mines and Manufactures documented the conditions in which they worked. The factory girls lived in supervised boarding houses, worked 12-14 hours a day, and were paid $1-2 per week. The factory system produced a new kind of working class, and the female factory workers were at the center of the early labor movement, including the 1834 strike of the Lowell girls in the United States and the 1842 General Strike in Britain. The female factory workers also produced a new kind of literature, including the Lowell Offering (1840-1845) and the New England Offering (1847-1850), the first literary magazines published by women workers in the United States. The history of women’s work in the textile mills is the subject of Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1930), the foundational text of women’s labor history, and of Louise Tilly and Joan Scott’s Women, Work, and Family (1978).

Key Dates in Textile Mills and Factories

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of textile mills and factories:

1771 — Cromford Mill opens; the first factory
1790 — 142 cotton mills in Britain
1793 — Slater’s cotton mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island
1800 — 500 cotton mills in Britain
1814 — Waltham factory opens in the U.S.
1823 — Boston Associates establish the Lowell mills
1833 — Factory Act limits children’s hours
1835 — 1,000,000 spindles in U.S.
1842 — Mines Act; public health crisis
1844 — Factory Act further limits children’s hours
1847 — Ten Hours Act limits women’s and children’s work
1860 — 4,700 cotton mills in Britain
1900 — 1,000,000 textile workers in U.S.
1920 — 600,000 textile workers in U.S. South
1960 — British cotton industry employs 90,000 workers

In this section

The Lowell Mills The story of the Lowell mills in Massachusetts, the Lowell system of labor, and the development of America's first large-scale planned industrial city.