The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century

An outline of the beginnings of the modern factory system in England

Paul Mantoux

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136585661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This classic volume, first published in 1928, is a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of the Industrial Revolution. Arranged in three distinct parts, it covers:

* Preparatory Changes
* Inventions and Factories
* The Immediate Consequences.

A valuable reference, it is, as Professor T. S. Ashton says in his preface to this work, 'in both its architecture and detail this volume is by far the best introduction to the subject in any language... one of a few works on economic history that can justly be spoken of as classics'.

PART I

Preparatory Changes

CHAPTER ONE

THE OLD TYPE OF INDUSTRY AND ITS EVOLUTION

NOWHERE is the contrast more striking than it is in England between the great industrial towns of the present time, humming with factories and black with smoke, and the quiet small towns of the past, where artisans and merchants went leisurely about their business. For today it is still possible to compare them, without crossing that imaginary line which, as has been aptly remarked, seems to divide England into halves, one being pastoral and the other industrial.¹ Not far from Manchester and only a few miles from Liverpool, Chester still stands, with its massive walls whose foundations were built by the Romans, its quaint old streets lined with over-hanging lath-and-plaster houses, its shops sheltered under two ‘rows’ of superimposed arcades. But these towns of other days bear, like fossils, only the stamp of the activities of which they were a living part. The activities themselves, the old forms of industry, have vanished, save here and there in remote and poor localities or in some backward industries. We must nevertheless know what they were, in order to compare them with the conditions of economic life in the following period, and to appreciate the importance of the changes which, towards the end of the eighteenth century, marked the coming of the modern factory system.

I

The woollen industry in England was the most characteristic and the most complete example of the early system of manufacture. Because of its existence in nearly all parts of the country, of its intimate connection with agriculture and of the age and strength of its traditions, the records of this ancient trade throw light into the general condition of industry before the industrial revolution.

From time immemorial, long before its industrial awakening, England, a country of pasture, has bred sheep and sold their wool. A large part of it was sold abroad, either in exchange for the wines of southern Frailee, or to provide the raw material for the looms of busy Flemish towns. After the Norman conquest, Flemish artisans crossed the Channel and taught the English how to use some of this wealth themselves. Their immigration was encouraged by the Crown, which several times, and notably at the beginning of the fourteenth century, tried, with the help of these foreign pioneers, to lay the foundations of a national industry. It developed and prospered from the reign of Edward III onwards, spread to the towns and villages and became the main source of wealth to whole populations. Nay more: if it be true, as the theorists of the mercantile system argued in the seventeenth century, that a nation is rich only in proportion to the quantity of gold and silver in its possession, and that it can grow rich only by exporting goods in exchange for specie, then the woollen industry has made England’s fortune. Wholly English, in raw material as in labour, it asked nothing from the outside world, and the stream of gold and silver all went to swell the common treasury, that indispensable adjunct to national greatness.

The prestige with which the woollen trade was surrounded until towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the kind of precedence it enjoyed over all others, are attested by the standard phrase used in describing it. It is ‘the staple trade, the great staple trade of the king¬dom’. All other interests come only second to it. According to Arthur Young ‘wool has been so long supposed the sacred staple and founda¬tion of all our wealth, that it is somewhat dangerous to hazard an opinion not consonant to its single advancement’.¹ The sole object of a whole series of laws and regulations was only to safeguard, to support and to guarantee the quality of its products and the high rate of its profits.² Parliament was besieged by its complaints, requests and constant demands for intervention, which gave rise to no astonishment, for its right to claim and to obtain was recognized by everyone.

The best proof which we still have of this self-asserting supremacy is the mass of publications relating to the woollen industry and the woollen trade. It is common knowledge that English economic literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries abounds in polemics written from day to day on current events: pamphlets, tracts, sometimes one-page leaflets. In an age when the press was still in its infancy it was in this way that people, or groups of people wishing to make generally known any particular fact, or to win support for their cause, reached the ear of the public or of Parliament. There was no question of any importance that was not in this way forced upon public attention and discussed with a view to a practical solution. In this immense collection of pamphlets, the woollen industry can lay claim to a very long shelf. Nothing which concerns it is forgotten; its progress is vaunted, its decadence is deplored, a thousand contradictory pleadings are to be found, mixing authentic facts with interested allegations. Now it may be a question of permitting or prohibiting the export of wool, or of encouraging or discouraging its manufacture in Ireland, or of reinforcing or abolishing the ancient regulations of manufacture, or of imposing fresh penalties on practices considered damaging to this privileged and all but sacred industry. No one will realize the aggregate bulk of petitions presented to Parliament by employers, workmen and merchants, interested in the woollen trade, unless he has perused page after page many volumes of the Journals of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords. The woollen industry before the industrial revolution had its historians,¹ and even its poets, for ‘The Fleece’, sung by Dyer,² is not the legendary Golden Fleece but that of English sheep, from which the cloth of Leeds and the serges of Exeter are made. The Woolsack which, in front of the royal dais and beneath the gilded ceiling of the House of Lords, serves as a seat to the Lord Chancellor of England, is not an empty symbol.

In English eyes — until the day when a new system of production altered everything, including ideas — the prosperity of the country was chiefly maintained by the woollen industry. Proud as it was of its ancient traditions, and already flourishing when the maritime trade of England hardly existed, it represented the work and acquisitions of a long past. The main features of the old industry which in 1760 were almost intact, and which in 1800 still partly survived, were those handed down from the past: its evolution had, so to speak, taken place by their side and without destroying them. To define these characteristics and to explain this evolution is to describe the main features of the old economic system.

II

To begin with, let us look at the industry from the outside, as a traveller on his journey might make inquiries as to the products of each district and the occupations of its inhabitants. One thing strikes us at once — namely, the great number of industrial centres and their dispersion, or rather their diffusion, over the whole country. The fact is the more striking for us as nowadays, under the factory system, the opposite is the case. Each industry is highly centralized and controls a limited area in which its productive power is concentrated. Cotton spinning and weaving occupy, in the Great Britain of today, two districts, narrowly concentrated round two centres. The first is Manchester, surrounded by a belt of growing towns all with the same functions and the same needs, and forming together as it were but one factory and one market. The second is Glasgow, which stretches along the Clyde Valley from Lanark to Paisley and Greenock. Outside these two districts there is nothing comparable to them or which deserves to be mentioned in the same breath.

Let us now follow Daniel Defoe in his ‘Tour through the whole island of Great Britain’,¹ and let us visit with him the counties of England proper. In the villages of Kent the yeoman, while still owning and cultivating land, weaved that fine cloth known as Kentish broadcloth, which in spite of its name was also made in Surrey.² In Essex, today a purely agricultural county, the old town of Colchester was famous for its druggets, ‘those stuffs which we see the nuns and friars clothed with abroad’;³ several neighbouring villages, fallen now into complete obscurity, were then busy hives of industry.⁴ In Suffolk, at Sudbury and Lavenham, coarse woollen goods were made, called says and calimancoes.⁵ As soon as Norfolk is reached ‘we see a face of diligence spread over the whole country’.⁶ There lies the town of Norwich surrounded by a dozen market towns,⁷ and a throng of villages ‘so large and so full of people, that they are equal to market towns in other countries’. There long staple wool was used, and it was combed instead of being carded.⁸ In the counties of Lincoln, Nottingham and Leicester the making of woollen stockings, either by hand or on frames, created a fairly extensive trade.⁹

We are now reaching the district where in modern times the woollen trade has concentrated more and more. The West Riding of Yorkshire, all along the Pennine range, was already peopled with spinners and weavers, all grouped round certain towns: Wakefield, ‘a large, handsome, rich clothing town, full of people and full of trade’;¹ Halifax, where coarse materials called kerseys and shalloons are made;² Leeds, the market town for the whole district;³ Huddersfield and Bradford,⁴ whose products had not yet become famous.⁵ Further north lay Richmond and Darlington, in the county of Durham;⁶ further east, York, the ancient seat of the Primate, of which a fallacious popular verse prophesied that it should one day throw even London into the shade.⁷ Crossing the watershed, and entering Lancashire whence later cotton practically drove out wool, we find in Kendal and right up in the hills of Westmorland, the manufacture of druggets and ratteens,⁸ whilst in Rochdale they imitated the bays made in Colchester.⁹ Further south, round Manchester, Oldham and Bury,¹⁰ wool had been spun and woven long before cotton had ever made its appearance in England.

The industry was less developed in the Midlands. Nevertheless Defoe quotes Stafford as ‘an old and indeed ancient town ... grown rich by the clothing trade’.¹¹ Towards Wales, there were Shrewsbury,¹² Leominster, Kidderminster, Stourbridge,¹³ and Worcester, where ‘the number of hands which [the woollen trade] employs in this town and adjoining villages is almost incredible’.¹ In the county of Warwick, picturesque Coventry, the town of three spires, wove not only ribbons but woollen materials.² In the counties of Gloucester and Oxford, between the Severn estuary and the upper reaches of the Thames, the valley of Stroudwater was famous for its fine scarlet woollens, which were manufactured at Stroud and Cirencester,³ while Witney blankets were sent as far as America.⁴

We now reach the south-western counties, and here we must stop at almost every step. On Salisbury Plain and along the course of the Avon the numerous cloth-making towns followed one another thick and fast: Malmesbury, Chippenham, Calne, Trowbridge, Devizes, Salisbury:⁵ the land of flannels and fine cloths. In Somerset — apart from Taunton and the great port of Bristol⁶ — the industrial centres were closely packed together towards the south and east: Glastonbury, Bruton, Shepton Mallet and Frome, which was destined, they said, to become ‘one of the greatest and wealthiest inland towns in England’.⁷ This district extended, with Shaftesbury and Blandford, across Dorset,⁸ and with Andover and Winchester, rig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps and Charts
• Preface by Professor T. S. Ashton
• Author’s Preface to The Second Edition
• Introduction
• Part I Preparatory Changes
• Part II Inventions and Factories
• Part III The Immediate Consequences
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX