The British textile industry

node · earth · Lancashire, west Yorkshire, Glasgow, the Midlands

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.