Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England

Abstract

From the point of view of the preindustrial world, the development of the English cotton textile industry in the eighteenth century was truly revolutionary. The industry was established early in the century as a peasant craft (section 2; note 2), and by 1850 it had been almost completely transformed in terms of the organization and technology of production. Of the total work force of 374,000 employed in the industry in 1850, only 43,000 (approximately 11.5 percent of the total) were employed outside the factory system of organization. In terms of technology, the industry was virtually mechanized by this time: there were 20,977,000 spindles and 250,000 power looms in the industry in 1850. What is more, steam had become the dominant form of power used in the industry—71,000 horsepower supplied by steam as opposed to 11,000 supplied by water (Mitchell, 1962: 185, 187). Value added in the industry by this time exceeded by about 50 percent that in the woolen textile industry, the dominant industry in England for over four centuries. This rate of development was something that had never been experienced in any industry in the preindustrial world. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution in England, in the strict sense of the phrase, is little more than a revolution in eighteenth-century cotton textile production.

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