Raw cotton

Assembled from 17 blocks · 2 evidence · 18 related

1. Story
2. The fibre that industrialised first, and the one detail of the story that cannot be told inside Britain. Cotton had no British agricultural interest to protect — unlike wool, which had guilds, statutes and a parliamentary lobby — so mechanising it met little organised resistance, and it takes mechanical handling better than wool or flax. Every pound of it was imported. The supply moved from the Levant and the West Indies to the plantations of the United States South after the 1790s, and Lancashire's expansion is inseparable from the expansion of chattel slavery that produced the crop: the mill and the plantation were two ends of one system, and the cheapness of the cloth depended on the unfreedom at the other end. Britain's raw cotton imports grew from a few million pounds a year in the mid-eighteenth century to several hundred million by the mid-nineteenth, one of the steepest sustained series in any pre-modern trade record.
3. Knowledge
4. Raw cotton
5. Liverpool
6. Connections
7. Liverpool
8. The British textile industry
9. Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes
10. Crompton completes the spinning mule
11. Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City (delisted 2021)
12. Raw cotton
13. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
14. The census records an urban majority
15. Evidence
16. 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.
17. 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.