Roots of Industrialization

British inventors had been steadily perfecting steam engines for five decades before George Stephenson built his Rocket. A key breakthrough took place in 1776 when Scottish engineer James Watt developed an efficient steam engine that could be used to pump water from coal mines or drive machinery in textile factories. Since coal fired the steam engines that drove new textile machinery, innovations tended to reinforce one another. This kind of synergy built on previous changes in the textile industry. In 1733, the Englishman John Kay had patented the flying shuttle, which enabled weavers to “throw” yarn across the loom rather than draw it back and forth by hand. Weavers began producing cloth more quickly than spinners could produce the thread. The resulting shortage of spun thread propelled the invention of the spinning jenny, a spinning wheel that enabled one worker to run eight spools at once. The increased output of yarn then stimulated the mechanization of weaving. Using the engines produced by James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton, Edmund Cartwright designed a mechanized loom in the 1780s that, when perfected, could be run by a small boy and yet yield fifteen times the output of a skilled adult working a handloom. By the end of the century, manufacturers were assembling new power machinery in large factories that hired semiskilled men, women, and children to replace skilled weavers.

Several factors interacted to make England the first site of the Industrial Revolution. England had a good supply of private investment capital from overseas trade and commercial profits, ready access to raw cotton from the plantations of its Caribbean colonies and the southern United States, and the necessary natural resources at home such as coal and iron. Good opportunities for social mobility provided an environment that fostered the pragmatism of the English and Scottish inventors who designed the machinery. The agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century had enabled England to produce food more efficiently, freeing some agricultural workers to move to the new sites of manufacturing. Cotton textile production skyrocketed.

Elsewhere in Europe, textile manufacturing—long a linchpin in the European economy—expanded even without the introduction of new machines and factories because of the spread of the “putting-out,” or “domestic,” system. Under the putting-out system, manufacturers supplied the raw materials, such as woolen or cotton fibers, to families working at home. The mother and her children washed, carded, and combed the fibers. Then the mother and oldest daughters spun them into thread. The father, assisted by the children, wove the cloth. The cloth was then finished (bleached, dyed, smoothed, and so on) under the supervision of the manufacturer in a large workshop, located either in town or in the countryside. This system had existed in the textile industry for hundreds of years, but it grew dramatically in the eighteenth century, and the manufacture of other products—such as glassware, baskets, nails, and guns—followed suit. The spread of the putting-out system of manufacturing is sometimes called proto-industrialization to signify that the process helped pave the way for the full-scale Industrial Revolution. Because of the increase in textile production, ordinary people began to wear underclothes and nightclothes, both rare in the past. White, red, blue, yellow, green, and even pastel shades of cotton now replaced the black, gray, or brown of traditional wool.

Workers in the textile industry enjoyed few protections against fluctuations in the market. Hundreds of thousands of families might be reduced to bankruptcy in periods of overproduction. Handloom weavers sometimes violently resisted the establishment of the factory power looms that would force them out of work. In England in 1811 and 1812, for example, bands of handloom weavers wrecked factory machinery and burned mills in the Midlands, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. To restore order and protect industry, the government sent in an army of twelve thousand regular soldiers and made machine wrecking punishable by death. The rioters were called Luddites after the fictitious figure Ned Ludd, whose signature appeared on their manifestos. (The term is still used to describe those who resist new technology.)