Was the factory a revolution in machines or in control?

The short answer

• Indian cloth set the standard. Indian calicoes showed buyers a light, washable and inexpensive cotton printed in colors that did not run. To protect English wool, Parliament banned printed imports in 1700 and their wearing in 1721. British producers had an opening if they could match Indian quality and prices. Making at home what had previously been bought abroad is called import substitution; protection gave inventors room to attempt it.
• Machines that suited the fibre. Drawing and twisting cotton fibers requires repeated movements. Rollers, gears and spindles, the rods that spin thread, could perform them. The jenny multiplied spindles; the water frame made thread stronger; the mule made it finer; and carding engines prepared the fiber. Imported cotton did not compete for English farmland, so its supply could grow with the machines' output.
• Water power and modest capital. A stream, a building and a few thousand pounds could establish an early mill. A successful wigmaker, merchant or hosier, a stockings dealer, could seek that money from partners and local banks. Former wigmaker Richard Arkwright joined the Derby hosier Jedediah Strutt; Samuel Greg drew on his family's merchant and plantation wealth for Styal. Fast streams in the Pennine valleys of Derbyshire and Lancashire lay within reach of ports and markets. Those conditions drew the first factories to remote, steep valleys.
• Slave-grown cotton without limit. Eli Whitney's 1793 gin separated seeds from short-fibered cotton grown inland. Planters could expand cultivation in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, carrying slavery onto new land. The American South became the main source of cotton after 1793, and supply grew with Lancashire's demand. Unpaid enslaved labor kept it cheap; the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled between 1790 and 1830.

What it changed

Steam moves the mills to the towns. The first mills needed streams, so they stood in remote valleys. From the 1790s steam made locations supplied with coal practical. Manchester's mills gathered beside coal-bearing canals, and the district spread across south Lancashire near workers and Liverpool's port. Chapter 3 explains the engine; chapter 5 follows the towns it helped create.

Child labour becomes a public question. The working lives of Styal's pauper apprentices, destitute children sent to work for their keep, and Manchester children on twelve-hour shifts came before parliamentary inquiries from 1816. Robert Owen offered his model mill at New Lanark as evidence of another approach. Michael Sadler's 1832 committee heard workers themselves, and the Factory Act of 1833 used paid inspectors to enforce limits on children's hours. Chapter 5 follows the struggle in mills and Parliament, including the testimony that helped change the law.

The handloom weavers’ boom and ruin. At first machine-spun yarn gave handloom weavers more work and good pay, lasting until about 1805. More people entered the trade and rates fell. Then power looms spread in the 1820s and 1830s, and piece rates—the pay for each length of cloth—collapsed. Many families became poor; their anger fed the protests and machine-breaking of chapter 6. A skilled occupation could be destroyed within a working life, faster than families could retrain or move.

Lancashire depends on the plantation South. Lancashire obtained about three-quarters of its cotton from the American South's slave states by the late 1850s. This tied Britain's largest industry to one region and its system of slavery. When the American Civil War cut supplies in 1861, mills fell silent and the trade turned toward India and Egypt. Chapter 11 follows the resulting crisis.