01:360:401 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Spinning Jenny, Putting-Out System, Water Frame
21 May 2018
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Chapter 22: The Revolution in Energy
and Industry
1. The Industrial Revolution in England
1. Eighteenth-Century Origins
1. The expanding Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century served
mercantilist England well and the colonial empire, helped by strong
position in Latin America and in the African slave trade provided a
growing market for English manufactured goods
2. It was much cheaper to ship goods by water and no part of England
was more than 20 miles from navigable water and in the 1770s, a
canal-building boom enhanced this natural advantage and provided
easy movement of England’s enormous deposits of iron and coal,
critical raw materials in Europe’s early industrial age
3. Agriculture played a central role in bringing about the Industrial
Revolution; English farmers second only to Dutch in 1700, and
continually adopted new methods
1. The result, especially before 1760, was a period of bountiful crops
and low food prices and families could spend more on
manufactured goods (instead of all food)
2. Demand for goods within Britain complemented the demand from
the colonies
4. England had other assets that gave rise to industrial leadership
1. England had an effective central band and well-developed credit
markets
2. The monarchy and the aristocratic oligarchy, which had jointly
ruled since 1688, provided stable government and let the
domestic economy operate with few controls, encouraging
personal initiative, technical change, and a free market
3. English had a large class of hired agricultural laborers, rural
proletarians whose numbers increased during the enclosure
movement and these rural wage earners were relatively mobile
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and along with cottage workers formed a potential industrial labor
force for capitalist entrepreneurs
5. All the factors combined to initiate the Industrial Revolution, coined by
people in the 1830s to describe the burst of major inventions and
technical change; technical revolution together with an impressive
quickening annual rate of industrial growth
1. Industry had grown at only 0.7 percent between 1700 and 1760,
while industry grew at the rate of 3 percent between 1801 and
1831 (industrial transformation)
2. The decisive quickening of growth probably came in the 1780s,
after the American war for independence (longer process than the
political revolutions)
3.
6. The Industrial Revolution was not complete in England until 1850 but
had no real impact on the continental countries until after 1815
2. The First Factories
1. The first decisive breakthrough of the I.R. was the creation of the
world’s first large factories in the English cotton textile industry and
technological innovations in the manufacture of cotton cloth led to a
system of production and social relationships
2. The putting-out system of merchant capitalism was expanding across
Europe in the eighteenth century (most developed in England) but
under the pressure of growing demand, the system’s limitations first
began to outweigh its advantages (after 1760)
3. Constant shortage of thread in the textile industry focused attention of
improving spinning, as wool and flax was hard to spin with the
improved machines
1. Cotton was different and cotton textiles had first been imported
into England from India and by 1760, there was a tiny domestic
industry in northern England
2. After many experiments, James Hargreaves invented his cotton-
spinning jenny in about 1765 and barber-turned-manufacturer
named Richard Arkwright invented (or possibly pirate) another
kind of spinning machine, the water frame
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3. Hargreaves’s jenny was simply, inexpensive, and hand operate;
up to 24 spindles were mounted on a sliding carriage and each
spindle spun a fine thread when the woman moved the carriage
back and forth and turned a wheel to supply power
4. Arkwright’s water frame acquired a capacity of several hundred
spindles and demanded water power; water frame required
specialized mills, but could only spin coarse, strong thread, which
was put out for respinning on cottage jennies
5. Samuel Crompton invented another technique around 1790 that
required more power than the human arm and cotton spinning
was concentrated in factories
4. Cotton goods became much cheaper and were bought by all classes
and families in cottage industry could now obtain thread spun on the
jenny or obtain it from a factory
5. Wages of weavers, how hard pressed to keep up with the spinners,
rose markedly until about 1792 and were among the best-paid
workers in England
6. One result of the prosperity was a large numbers of agricultural
laborers became handloom weavers and was an example of how
further mechanization threatened certain groups of handicraft workers,
for mechanics and capitalists soon sought to invent a power loom to
save on labor costs; Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom in
1785 and handloom weavers received good wages until at least 1800
7. Working conditions in the early factories were worse than those of
cottage workers
1. Until the late 1780s, most English factories were in rural areas,
where they had access to waterpower and employed small
percentage of all cotton textile workers
2. People were reluctant to work in them because they had low pay
and factory owners turned to young children as a source of labor
(abandoned by parents)
3. Under care of local parishes, parish officers often apprenticed
orphans to factory owners where the parish saved money and
factory had workers
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