The British textile industry

Assembled from 25 blocks · 2 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. The sector in which mechanisation, the factory and the industrial city all appear first, and the reason a revolution in one commodity can stand for a change in an entire economy. Textiles suited it: demand was elastic, so cheaper cloth sold in far greater quantity rather than merely cheaper; the processes were repetitive and mechanically tractable; and cotton in particular carried no entrenched domestic producer interest. The sequence within the sector is the thing to hold on to, because it is a chain of bottlenecks rather than a single leap — flying shuttle, then jenny, then water frame, then mule, then, much later, the power loom — each relieving the constraint the last one created. Wool, the older and politically stronger British trade, mechanised later and more slowly for exactly that reason. By the middle of the nineteenth century cotton goods were Britain's largest export by value, produced in a region of a few hundred square miles from a fibre that would not grow within a thousand miles of it.
3. Knowledge
4. Raw cotton
5. The British textile industry
6. Connections
7. The spinning jenny
8. Raw cotton
9. The Engels pause
10. The Factory Inspectorate
11. Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes
12. Hargreaves devises the spinning jenny
13. Crompton completes the spinning mule
14. The rotative engine turns a shaft
15. Cartwright patents the power loom
16. Arkwright's patents are overturned
17. The handloom weavers are displaced
18. The Great Exhibition
19. Liverpool
20. The British textile industry
21. Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes
22. Crompton completes the spinning mule
23. Evidence
24. Named as the canonical source for the output and trade series referred to qualitatively in this pack. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted. No numeric series from Mitchell is quoted here for that reason; every output statement in this pack is deliberately an order of magnitude rather than a figure, and a curator with access should replace those statements with dated numbers.
25. Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.