English Industries
The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780.
EcoNomac history is now making headway in England. The society founded three or four years ago to promote its study is flourishing. Conservative Oxford has just established a chair in the subject for Mr. G. N. Clark, following somewhat tardily in the wake of Cambridge. The Reader in Economic History at Oxford, Mr. Lipson, has published two more volumes of his very able survey of the English field. Furthermore, at long last two very competent and industrious scholars have pro- duced a really serious and detailed account of the early stages of our great cotton industry—a book that shows much local and technical knowledge as well as a grasp of the larger quest- ions involved.
Mr. Wadsworth and Miss Mann make it clear that the cotton trade did not spring out of the so-called Industrial Revolution, as many people think. They would not have needed to devote 500 closely printed pages to the trade before 1780 if that were so. Cotton wool, as the product of the cotton plant was called, was known to medieval England and manufactured cottons- fustians and bombazines—were imported from the Continent long before the Reformation. It may be that the Dutch or French Protestant refugees introduced the trade in Elizabeth's day, as one of the "new draperies." At any rate under James I. there were Lancashire dealers in cotton-wool, and fustians, of flax and cotton, were being freely exported. Under Charles I. Humphrey Chetham, the great Manchester merchant who founded the school known by his name, and the first public library, dealt in fustians and sold raw cotton to the countrymen, who spun it into yarn. By the Restoration the Dutch loom or engine loom," weaving twelve pieces of ribbon at once, was familiar in London and being worked in Lancashire, sometimes in master weavers' shops which were early precursors of the weaving sheds of to-day. The Lancashire trade was free from guild restrictions, except in a few towns like Preston, and deve- loped naturally on a basis of credit. It grew out of the far older linen trade and was conducted on similar principles, with Manchester and its merchants and finishers as the main-. spring of the industry. Indian printed stuffs were for long the formidable rivals of Lancashire cottons;. they were used by our African merchants to barter for slaves, which were exported to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar and other tropical produce, gradually including more and more cotton.- But Lancashire from 1700 onwards took to calico-printing, and after long - efforts mastered the secret of Turkey red, the brilliant dye which negro and home customers alike admired. Cotton velvets were introduced and became widely popular in Europe about 1760. The authors pile detail on. detail, quoting for example from the books of the well-known firm of J. & N. Philips &Co., founded in 1747, to show how large and complex and profitable the cotton trade had become long before steam-engines in mills had begun the so-called "Indus- trial Revolution." The towns had grown rapidly, but every village or hamlet had its cotton workers, nominally indepen- dent but actually attached to the merchants or drapers who put out work to them at a price.
The authors discuss the early inventions of machines with exceptional care, and with far more technical knowledge than most writers on the subject have possessed. Lewis Paul took out a patent for roller-spinning in 1738, and it was applied in several factories by him and Wyatt and others. But the machine had serious defects, and much money was lost in the next twenty years on vain attempts to remedy them. Kay's flying shuttle, patented in 1733, proved ultimately of greater value to the weaver than Paul's machine was to the spinner. Kay himself profited little by the invention in England, and found a more kindly reception in France. But while his shuttle was rapidly improved and generally adopted here, in France, despite all the official patronage that it received, it was soon forgotten. The first successful spinning machines were Hargreaves' spinning jenny, patented in 1770 when he had left Lancashire for Nottingham, and Arkwright's roller- spinning machine—possibly but not certainly derived from Paul's earlier device—for which the inventor, then also at Nottingham, sought a patent in 1768. Arkwright built a factory at Cromford in 1771 and worked it by water-power, from which his machine was known as the water frame. It is interesting to learn that his notorious disputes with the Lancashire cotton trade were caused not by imitators of the water frame but by those who denied the validity of his patent for a carding engine because it was already in wide use, and who won their case in the courts. Arkwright's real claim to distinction, we are told, is that he applied power to the whole sequence of carding and spinning, and thus founded the factory industry. And" the new machinery spread rapidly in England because the whole community was interested in it." The "Industrial Revolution" was made possible by the long and cautious developments of the preceding two centuries which Miss Mann and Mr. Wadsworth are the first to describe in lucid and trustworthy detail.
For a general survey of these two centuries nothing could be better than Mr. Lipson's two volumes on "The Age of Mercan- tilism." His plan is to devote separate and substantial chap- ters to the main topics—industry, foreign trade, agriculture, the mercantile system, the control of industry, and the relief of the poor—and on each head he has much that is new and useful to say. The chapter on the mercantile system is pecu- liarly pertinent at this moment, with its account of our fore- fathers' tariff policy and their anxiety about the balance of trade and the outflow of coin and bullion. It is true that England in those days was self-supporting and that her imports were luxuries rather than necessities, but even so the old controversies about foreign trade are by no means unlike the debates of to-day. There, indeed, lies the value of economic history, in that it presents examples of the working of this or that theory in trade or finance, and shows how complex and unforeseen are the reactions to the policies that statesmen
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