Empire of Cotton

by Sven Beckert

  As early as 1769, however, spinning was already seeing further improvements thanks to Richard Arkwright’s water frame, a machine that anticipated Greg’s mill by relying on falling water. Consisting of four rollers that drew out the cotton strands before a spindle twisted them into thread, it allowed for continuous spinning, and unlike the jenny, which had at first been mostly employed in people’s homes, the water frame required larger amounts of energy, thus concentrating production in factories. A decade later, in 1779, Samuel Crompton’s mule was the capstone of these inventions, combining elements of the jenny with those of the water frame (hence its name). The mule was a long machine with two parallel carriages: Bobbins of roving (lightly twisted cotton fibers) lined one side, and spindles ready to accept spun yarn lined the other. The exterior carriage, mounted on wheels, was pulled out about five feet, stretching multiple lengths of roving simultaneously. The number of rovings spun depended on the number of spindles mounted to the mule: Although two hundred was the norm in the 1790s, the number would climb to more than thirteen hundred over the ensuing century. The stretched roving was then twisted into yarn and wound onto the spindles as the carriage was pushed back in. Unlike with the water frame, which operated continuously, yarn was produced in five-foot bursts, but was stronger and finer than yarn produced on water frames. The mule was first powered by water (which remained the dominant source of power until the 1820s), but later mostly by steam engines (which James Watt patented in 1769).13

  With spinning no longer a laggard, pressure shifted back to weaving. First came a vast expansion of home-based weaving. With new machines and an abundant supply of thread, this was a golden age for weavers all over the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside, as tens of thousands of cottagers spent endless hours on their looms working up the rapidly increasing output of British spinning factories. While Edmund Cartwright had patented a water-powered loom as early as 1785, productivity improvements in weaving at first proved modest, and technical problems with power looms great.14

  Britain’s growing class of manufacturers, despite issues with looms, were acutely aware that these new machines allowed them to increasingly dominate the one node in the global cotton complex whose control had eluded them: manufacturing. In eighteenth-century India, spinners required 50,000 hours to spin a hundred pounds of raw cotton; their cohorts in 1790 Britain, using a hundred-spindle mule, could spin the same amount in just 1,000 hours. By 1795 they needed just 300 hours with the water frame, or, with Roberts’s automated mule after 1825, only 135 hours. In just three decades, productivity had increased 370 times. Labor costs in England were now much lower than in India.15

  Prices for British yarn fell accordingly, and soon were lower than those manufactured in India. In 1830, British cotton merchant Edward Baines cited the price of one pound of Number 40 yarn (the number reflects the quality of the yarn—the higher the number, the finer the thread) in England as 1 shilling, 2.5 pence, while in India the same quality and quantity of yarn would cost 3 shillings, 7 pence. Manchester spinners McConnel & Kennedy reported that the prices for its high-quality 100-count yarn fell by 50 percent between 1795 and 1811, and, despite various ups and downs, continued to fall further throughout the nineteenth century. While yarn prices, especially of fine yarns, fell the most rapidly, the cost of finished cloth also declined. A piece of muslin in the early 1780s cost (in deflated prices) 116 shillings per piece; fifty years later the same piece could be had for 28 shillings.16

  The resulting boom in cotton manufacturing was unprecedented. After nearly two centuries of slow growth in Europe, British cotton manufacturing expanded by leaps and bounds. Between 1780 and 1800, output of cotton textiles in Britain grew annually by 10.8 percent, and exports by 14 percent; already in 1797 there were approximately nine hundred cotton factories. In 1788, there had been 50,000 mule spindles, but thirty-three years later that number had increased to 7 million. While it had been cheaper to produce cotton cloth in India before 1780, and its quality had been superior, after that year English manufacturers were able to compete in European and Atlantic markets, and after 1830 they even began to compete with Indian producers in India itself. Once Indians began using British-manufactured yarn and cloth, it signaled to all that the world’s cotton industry had been turned on its head.17

  As ever larger numbers of cotton factories began to dot northern England to accommodate the new spinning and weaving machines, it might come as a surprise that the inventors, who had enabled this departure, had started in distinctly unspectacular ways. They created a world radically different from anything ever seen before without recourse to theoretical science, often even without much education. They were skilled men in tiny workshops, with little formal education. Among the inventors, Kay came from the most prosperous family, as his father was a modestly successful woolens manufacturer. He might have received some formal education in France. Hargreaves, on the other hand, was a handloom weaver from Blackburn, who probably never had any formal schooling—much like Arkwright, the youngest of seven children born to poor parents, who learned how to read first from his uncles and then educated himself. Crompton grew up in dire poverty: After his father died, Crompton began to spin cotton, perhaps as early as age five, while his mother tried to make ends meet by spinning and weaving. All four were tinkerers, people who breathed and lived with their machines, trying to solve practical problems with simple tools and insights that emerged from their day-to-day efforts to improve production.18

  But they were far from local heroes. Their innovations sometimes even brought down the wrath of their neighbors, who dreaded the job losses the innovators caused. Fear of mob violence drove Kay and Hargreaves away from the places they had made their inventions. Neither translated their inventions into wealth; after losing their efforts to defend their patents, they lived modestly. When Hargreaves died in Nottingham in 1778, he owned little more than a prize from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures, and his children were destitute. Only Arkwright profited from his invention—establishing cotton factories in numerous locations. Yet a rapidly growing number of British manufacturers did embrace the new technologies, a British state valued them so highly that it criminalized their export for nearly half a century after 1786. From then on, technical progress became a constant: Profits were made by increasing the productivity of human labor. This would in fact become a defining feature of industrial capitalism.

  These new machines, the “macro inventions” celebrated by historians Joel Mokyr, Patrick O’Brien, and many others, not only accelerated human productivity, but also altered the nature of the production process itself: They began to regulate the pace of human labor.19 Dependent on central energy sources and requiring large spaces, production moved out of the home and into factories. Along with the machines, workers assembled in unprecedented numbers in central locations. While putting-out merchants had traversed the countryside searching for laborers, now workers sought out manufacturers in search of employment.

  The mechanization of cotton spinning created a novel entity: the cotton mill. Although mills could vary tremendously in size, they shared one attribute: a nearby source of running water. To harness its energy, either a dam was constructed or an inlet was cut from a steep section of river and diverted through a waterwheel. The waterwheel drove shafts that ran through the length of the mill, upon which large leather belts could be engaged or disengaged in order to run the various machines. Unlike its predecessors, the mill’s primary function was not to simply aggregate and control labor, but to house a complex array of machinery. And by the 1780s, some mills were taking on gargantuan proportions; at two hundred feet long, thirty feet wide, and four to six stories in height, they dominated the surrounding countryside.20

  Yarn production in these mills entailed three basic steps: willowing, carding, and spinning. The first step had workers, generally women, spread the raw cotton upon meshed tables and beat it with sticks to remove any twigs, leaves, and dirt that the ginning had failed to rem
ove. Since the process pushed so much fire-hazardous cotton dust into the air, it was often completed in adjoining buildings rather than within the main mill complex. After the cotton was cleaned, a series of machines centralized in the bottom floors of the mill would transform the raw cotton into “roving,” a thin cord of lightly twisted, parallel fibers ready to be spun. First, the cotton was fed into a carding engine, a spinning cylinder covered in metal teeth fitted into a similarly toothed casing. Through carding, a snarled mess of cotton was turned into an untangled so-called sliver with the fibers running parallel. The cotton was then fed into a draw frame, a set of rollers through which the sliver was passed—stretching, twisting, and drawing it—creating the roving. The cotton strand was then wound into a roving can, from which it could be placed onto a bobbin. Finally, the cotton was ready to be spun. Spinning machines were located across the top floors of the mill, and the machines themselves usually took one of two forms: Arkwright’s water frame or, increasingly, Crompton’s mule.21

  To operate all this machinery and to move the cotton through the factory, manufacturers hired hundreds of workers, most of them children and women. And while not all workers arrived at the factory gates voluntarily and received wages, the majority did. This was, as we will see later, another important institutional innovation of industrial capitalism. Outside the slave plantations of the Americas capitalists for the first time organized, supervised, and dominated the production process.22

  Such domination of labor by capital, embrace of technological revolution, and social innovation did not happen elsewhere, including in the heart of the world’s cotton industry, China and India. This was in some ways surprising, since for centuries manufacturing in these parts of the world had defined the cutting edge of global cotton production technology. Way back in 1313, Wang Zhen had written a description of a “machine for spinning hemp thread” that came quite close to Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Arkwright’s water frame. Developing new spinning machines was certainly within the grasp of Chinese artisans, or, for that matter, their French or Indian counterparts. Moreover, trade in cotton and cotton textiles was the most important facet of an increasing commercialization of the Chinese economy between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries.23

  Despite these promising preconditions, neither China nor India—nor, for that matter, England’s closest European competitor in technical education, Prussia—came close to dominating as many nodes within the global cotton production complex as Britain. Nor did any other country embrace war capitalism as effectively. Moreover, in India and China, peasants were more secure on the land than their British counterparts, making it more difficult for eager manufacturers to mobilize large numbers of workers. Because of the different organization of households, especially limitations on women’s outside activities, female-dominated spinning had extremely low opportunity costs in India and China, making the embrace of new technologies less likely. Women’s labor, in the calculation of peasant households, was inexpensive. In India, additionally, the chain between the weaver and the final consumer was a long one, with many intermediaries. “To break out of this traditional historical institution” proved difficult, as one historian has remarked, and in the minds of many, of little advantage. Many spinners and weavers in the English countryside likely felt similarly to their brethren in India and China; they knew that newer spinning technology would make their home-based manufacturing unsustainable. And yet with few other means of earning income, and with their episodic efforts to organize against the encroachment of technology defeated by a determined state, they had little choice but to capitulate to industrial capitalism.24

  Water-powered ramie spinning wheel, China, 1313 (illustration credit 3.4)

  Embracing new technologies, subduing labor without enslaving it, and finding new ways to organize production emerged in cotton mills first, and as a result the once modest industry scattered along the rivers of Lancashire and neighboring Cheshire grew by leaps and bounds—around the time of Greg’s construction of his first mill in 1784, new mills blossomed, and in the decades thereafter existing mills expanded, sometimes quite significantly. Greg himself employed 2,084 workers in five mills in 1833, and the number of spindles at his Quarry Bank Mill had quadrupled, to 10,846. In 1795, cotton manufacturer Robert Peel expanded operations into twenty-three different mills, all owned and managed by him. In other instances, new producers entered the industry, often people with little capital but the right kinds of connections. When Irish merchant William Emerson wanted to help a relative start a spinning mill, he wrote to his business partners McConnel and Kennedy in Manchester, informing them in a letter “that a relation of mine has a desire to acquire a knowledge of Carding and Spinning, and for which purpose, I wd willingly send him to you for Six Mo and pay you any reasonable price for his instruction, you d be so good to say if you could with convenience have him Instructed Either in your own House or any other and on what terms.”25

  As factories multiplied, many remained small and their owners were often not wealthy by the standards of Liverpool merchants, Somerset landowners, or London bankers. In 1812, 70 percent of all firms had fewer than ten thousand spindles and were valued at less than £2,000. The entrepreneurs who entered the industry came from a variety of backgrounds. Many had been merchant-manufacturers, others manufacturers in different industries, while others had started out as well-off farmers, or even as apprentices with unusual mechanical abilities. There were certainly examples of extraordinary social mobility, such as Elkanah Armitage, who began work at a cotton factory at age eight as a spinner’s helper and fifty-nine years later owned mills that employed 1,650 workers.26

  Others, however, started with more substantial resources, such as Samuel Oldknow, who was born in 1756 in Anderton, Lancashire. His father already owned a successful muslin manufacturing operation worked entirely by handlooms. Following his father’s premature death, Oldknow was apprenticed to his uncle, a draper, before he returned to his hometown in 1781 to rebuild the family muslin business. It was auspicious timing. The introduction of the spinning mule in 1779 made high-quality, mass-produced yarn available on an unprecedented scale, allowing Oldknow to break into a market previously dominated by Indian manufacturers. Oldknow also partnered with two London firms to secure wide access to British and overseas markets. As he put it in a draft of a 1783 letter, “The prospect is at present very propitious.” By 1786, he was the most successful muslin manufacturer in Britain. Oldknow continued to build mills and expand his enterprises, at one point controlling some twenty-nine mills. By 1790, he was branching out into spinning with the construction of a steam-powered factory in Stockport; by 1793, an even larger six-story spinning mill in Mellor began production.27

  Cotton manufacturing, even if engaged in on a small scale, was astonishingly profitable in the 1780s and 1790s. The firm of Cardwell & Birle had average annual returns on their capital of 13.1 percent, N. Dugdale 24.8 percent, and McConnel & Kennedy 16 percent. Such profits allowed them to expand without much recourse to formal capital markets. Indeed, “the favorite source of capital [for expansion] was retained profits.” Yet such capital was often augmented by merchants who invested in mills that they did not run themselves, and, more important, by London and Liverpool merchants’ credit for the purchase of raw cotton and the sale of yarn and cloth. This additional working capital was crucial: While in 1834 fixed capital investments in factories and machines in the British cotton industry may have amounted to £14.8 million, working capital invested in raw cotton and wages equaled £7.4 million—a very significant share. Access to such capital rested often on personal connections, and as the need to secure significant amounts of circulating capital increased, it became more difficult for people outside the middle class to join the ranks of cotton capitalists. High profits from production in turn made manufacturing an ever more attractive field for further investments.28

  One example of the rapid growth of cotton mills was the Manchester cotton manufacturers McConnel &
Kennedy. They founded their partnership in 1791, focusing on the production of spinning machines, a business that came naturally to machine maker James McConnel. One day, however, McConnel produced two mules that his customer could not pay for, and this seeming bad luck led him to begin using them himself. His partner, John Kennedy, and two other investors expanded both the production of machines and spinning, investing a total capital of £500, an exceedingly modest sum. Calling themselves “machine makers and spinners,” they expanded their mills rapidly, focusing on high-quality yarns. In 1797 they operated 7,464 spindles; by 1810 the number of spindles had increased to 78,972, while the number of workers they employed grew from 312 in 1802 to 1,020 in 1816. Like others, they financed that expansion out of retained profits, which had averaged 26.5 percent annually between 1799 and 1804.29

  The growth of cotton manufacturing soon made it the center of the British economy. In 1770, cotton manufacturing had made up just 2.6 percent of the value added in the economy as a whole. By 1801 it accounted for 17 percent, and by 1831, 22.4 percent. This compared to the iron industry’s share of 6.7 percent, coal’s 7 percent, and woolens’ 14.1 percent. In Britain, as early as 1795, 340,000 people worked in the spinning industry. By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons. At the same time, the industry itself became centered on a small part of the British Isles: Lancashire. Seventy percent of all British cotton workers would eventually labor there, while 80.3 percent of all owners of cotton factories originated in that same county.30