The Wool Industry: The Second Fiber of the Industrial Revolution
Wool was the second most important fiber of the Industrial Revolution, and the woolen industry was the second largest textile industry in Britain in the early nineteenth century.
The British Woolen Industry Before the Industrial Revolution
The British woolen industry had a long history, going back to the medieval period, and it was the most important textile industry in Britain before the rise of cotton. The article on the domestic system covers the traditional organization of the woolen industry before the Industrial Revolution.
The Mechanization of the Woolen Industry
The mechanization of the woolen industry was slower than the mechanization of the cotton industry, in part because the woolen weavers had more powerful guilds and traditions of skilled handwork, and in part because woolen yarns were more difficult to weave by machine. The first attempts to mechanize the woolen industry were made in the late eighteenth century, but the power loom was not widely adopted in the woolen industry until the 1830s and 1840s.
The Growth of the Woolen Mills
The mechanization of the woolen industry led to the growth of the new woolen mills, particularly in the West Riding of Yorkshire. The article on the textile mills describes the development of the British textile mills in more detail.
The Decline of the Handloom Weavers
The introduction of the power loom in the woolen industry led to the decline of the handloom weavers, who had been among the most skilled and best-paid artisans in pre-industrial Britain. The handloom weavers, unable to compete with the power loom, gradually drifted into other occupations or into the new factories. The article on the Luddites describes the resistance to the introduction of the new machines in the woolen industry.
The Decline of the British Woolen Industry
The British woolen 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 woolen industries.
The Domestic System in the British Wool Trade
The British woolen industry of the early eighteenth century was organized by a “putting-out” or domestic system that had changed little since the medieval period. The wool was sorted and combed by men in small workshops, spun into yarn by women and children in their homes, and woven by male handloom weavers who worked in their own cottages or in small workshops attached to the merchant’s house. The cloth was finished in the clothier’s fulling mill, dyed in the dye-house, and shipped through the Staple at Calais (until 1558) or, after the loss of Calais, through London or the eastern ports. The whole system was regulated by the Wool Staple Act of 1563 and the numerous Statutes of Apprentices, which set wage rates, prohibited the use of certain looms, and restricted entry into the trade. The system gave the clothier a substantial measure of control over the process and the worker, but it also limited productivity: the typical weaver produced perhaps 1-2 yards of broadcloth per day, and the cost of a yard of finished cloth was dominated by the labor of spinning and weaving. The domestic system is the subject of John Smail’s The Origins of Middle-Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, circa 1660-1780 (1994) and the broader synthesis of Pat Hudson in The Genesis of Industrial Capital (1986), which emphasizes the ways in which the new capitalist entrepreneurs of the West Riding worked within the existing domestic system to increase productivity before they built the new mechanized mills.
The Mechanization of Spinning and Weaving
The new textile machinery was adapted to wool more slowly than to cotton, and for specific technical reasons. The longer, more elastic fibers of the long-staple wools, which formed the basis of the worsted trade, were difficult to spin on Arkwright’s water frame, which had been designed for the shorter, less elastic fibers of cotton. The first successful machine for spinning worsted yarn was the worsted spinning frame developed by William Lister and Edmund Cartwright in the 1790s, but it was the spindle fly frame and the cap spinner that made the large-scale production of worsted yarn possible in the 1820s and 1830s. The woolen trade, based on the shorter fibers of carded wool, used the same spinning machinery as the cotton trade, but the woolen fibers were more difficult to control and the handloom weavers of the clothier districts were, until the 1830s, more skilled than their cotton counterparts. The introduction of the power loom into the worsted trade in the 1830s, and into the woolen trade a decade later, completed the mechanization of the industry.
The Rise of Bradford and the Worsted Trade
The most dynamic sector of the British woolen industry in the nineteenth century was the worsted trade of the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its center at Bradford. Bradford was a small cloth town of perhaps 4,000 inhabitants in 1800; by 1850 it was a city of 100,000, and by 1900 of 280,000, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in nineteenth-century Britain. The worsted trade was organized around a small number of large spinning mills and weaving sheds, and the Bradford worsted industry, which specialized in the longer fibers of the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire breeds, became the largest in the world. The introduction of the continental merino breeds and the alpaca and mohair imports from Peru and South Africa expanded the range of worsted fabrics that could be produced, and the Bradford merchant houses, including the Pewtriss and S. Cunliffe Lister & Co. of Manningham Mills, became the most important firms in the trade. The growth of Bradford is the subject of J. H. Clapham’s Economic History of Modern Britain (1930) and of Gordon Jackson’s Huddersfield: A Most Handsome Town (1998).
The International Wool Trade and the Tariff Question
The British woolen industry was heavily protected by tariffs until 1815, and the Reciprocity of Duties Act of 1823 and the Tariff Act of 1825 under William Huskisson removed most of the protection. The repeal of the wool import duties in 1844 and the full free trade of the 1840s exposed the British industry to competition from the continental European woolen industries, which had been protected by tariffs and had been slow to mechanize. The most important result was the development of the Australian and New Zealand wool trade: the British wool imports from Australia rose from 5 million pounds in 1830 to 60 million in 1850, 350 million in 1890, and 900 million by 1910, and Australia was the largest single source of British wool imports by the 1860s. The Australian wool was, on average, of higher quality than the British wools, and the trade with the colonies was, in Bernard Semmel’s phrase, a textbook case of “free trade imperialism” in which the British export of finished cloth to the Australian market and the import of raw wool from Australia formed a complementary commercial system.
The Decline of the British Woolen Industry
The British woolen industry, which had been the second-largest textile industry in the country, gradually lost its world market to French, Belgian, German, and, after 1880, Japanese competitors. The British share of world woolen exports fell from 65 percent in 1870 to 45 percent in 1900, 30 percent in 1920, and 17 percent by 1930. The causes were similar to those in the cotton industry: the failure to invest in the new machinery, the high wages of British workers, and the loss of the export markets to the new industrial countries. The woolen industry also suffered from the rise of the continental European trade in the new “soft” worsteds and the development of the Japanese woolen industry in the 1880s and 1890s. The industry’s decline was, in the long term, less severe than the cotton industry’s, and the West Riding remained an important center of the world woolen trade throughout the twentieth century, with a particular concentration in the high-quality suiting and specialty fabrics for which the region had become famous.
The Worsted Trade and the Bradford “Worstedopolis”
The worsted trade, based on the longer fibers of the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire breeds, was the most dynamic sector of the British woolen industry in the 19th century, and Bradford was its commercial and industrial center. The population of Bradford grew from 4,000 in 1800 to 100,000 in 1850, 145,000 in 1871, 280,000 in 1901, and 298,000 in 1911, making it one of the fastest-growing cities of the period. The Bradford worsted industry, which produced the high-quality worsted cloths used for men’s suits, was organized in large spinning mills and weaving sheds owned by firms like Samuel Cunliffe Lister, the Pewtriss family, and the Manningham Mills (later the Bradford Industrial Museum). The introduction of the continental merino breeds after 1840 and the alpaca and mohair imports from Peru and South Africa expanded the range of worsted fabrics, and the Bradford merchant houses built up a global export trade that by 1900 was supplying worsted cloth to the United States, Germany, France, Australia, and Japan. The Bradford worsted industry, like the Lancashire cotton industry, was eventually challenged by the German, Belgian, and Japanese competition, but the Bradford mills continued to produce high-quality worsteds and worsted-yarn fabrics throughout the 20th century. The history of the Bradford worsted trade is the subject of John H. Clapham’s Economic History of Modern Britain (1930) and of F. M. L. Thompson’s Chancery Lane and the Wool Staple (1972).
The Tariff Question and the Wool Question
The political economy of the British woolen industry in the 19th century was dominated by the question of the wool tariff. The Wool Act of 1825, which repealed the older prohibition on the import of foreign wool, was the first major change in the British wool policy, and it was followed by the Tariff Act of 1842, which repealed the export duty on British wool and reduced the import duty on foreign wool. The Wool Act of 1844 repealed the import duty entirely, and the result was a rapid increase in the import of foreign wool, particularly from Australia. The British woolen industry, which had been protected by the older system, was now exposed to the world market, and the industry went through a long period of adjustment. The Australian wool, which was generally of higher quality than the British wools, became the principal source of the worsted trade, and the British woolen industry, which had been the largest in the world, was forced to specialize in the higher-quality worsteds and the older, hand-finished woolens. The tariff question was the subject of a long political debate, in which the woolen industry was divided between the protectionist West Country clothiers and the free-trade Lancashire and Yorkshire manufacturers. The 1844-1852 period of free trade was the high point of the Anti-Corn Law League’s campaign, and the woolen industry’s adjustment to the new policy is one of the early examples of a “structural adjustment” in modern British economic history.
The British Wool Trade in the Global Context
The British woolen industry, while no longer the largest in the world by 1900, remained a major exporter and a significant part of the British economy. By 1900, the British industry was the largest in Europe, with about 35 percent of the European woolen output, and the British export trade in worsted and woolen cloths was a major source of foreign exchange. The principal British export markets were the United States, Germany, France, Japan, and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. The British industry, however, faced increasing competition from the continental European woolen industries, particularly from the German and Belgian industries of the late 19th century, and from the Japanese industry, which was founded in the 1870s and grew rapidly after 1890. The British share of world woolen exports fell from 65 percent in 1870 to 45 percent in 1900, 30 percent in 1920, and 17 percent by 1930, and the British industry’s share of the world woolen output fell from 60 percent in 1850 to 25 percent in 1900 and 10 percent by 1930. The decline of the British woolen industry is the subject of Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures (1985) and of Geoffrey Timmins’s The Last Shift (1993). The contemporary world woolen industry, dominated by China, Italy, India, and Turkey, is a very different place from the British industry of the 19th century, and the West Riding mills, while still producing high-quality worsteds and specialty fabrics, are a small fraction of the world industry.
Bradford’s Decline and the Post-War Transition
The worsted trade of Bradford and the West Riding suffered a long, slow decline in the 20th century, similar to that of the Lancashire cotton industry. The industry’s principal markets were damaged by the 1930s tariffs, the 1939-1945 war, the loss of the Indian market to the Indian industry, and the rise of the synthetic fiber industry. The 1945-1980 period saw a gradual contraction of the British industry, and the 1980s saw a wave of mill closures in the West Riding. The Bradford worsted industry, like the Lancashire cotton industry, was a small fraction of its former size by 2000. The survival of the worsted industry has been due to a combination of factors: the persistence of the high-quality specialty cloth market, the development of the “Made in Britain” branding for high-quality worsteds, and the development of the technical textiles industry in the 21st century. The history of the post-war decline is the subject of Brian J. R. Blench’s studies and of the West Yorkshire Archive Service’s collections. The contemporary world worsted industry, dominated by the Italian, Japanese, and Chinese firms, is a very different place from the British industry of the 19th century, but the West Riding mills, while much reduced, are still producing some of the world’s finest worsted cloths.
Suggested Reading
The principal works on the British woolen industry include John Smail’s The Origins of Middle-Class Culture (1994); Pat Hudson’s The Genesis of Industrial Capital (1986); Geoffrey Timmins’s The Last Shift (1993); Gordon Jackson’s Huddersfield (1998); and J. H. Clapham’s An Economic History of Modern Britain (1930). The Australian wool trade is the subject of Bernard Semmel’s The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism (1970) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ historical data. The West Yorkshire Archive Service is the principal research library, and the journal Textile History is the principal venue for new research.
Key Dates in the Wool Industry
A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the woolen industry:
- 1563 — Wool Staple Act
- 1750 — British woolen industry concentrated in West Country and West Riding
- 1800 — Bradford population about 4,000
- 1820s — Introduction of the new spinning machinery in worsted trade
- 1830s — Power loom introduced in the worsted trade
- 1844 — Wool import duties repealed
- 1850 — Bradford population reaches 100,000
- 1860s — Continental merino breeds introduced
- 1900 — Bradford population 280,000
- 1930 — British share of world woolen exports falls to 30 percent
- 1960s-70s — Decline of the British woolen industry
- 2020 — West Yorkshire worsted industry survives as a specialty producer