Technology in the Industrial Revolution: So What?

The Industrial Revolution – which here will mean the mechanization of textile production in Britain between the 1760s and the 1840s – is too often packaged and served as a kind of a technological myth in global economic history. Whether valorized as a tale of innovation and economic growth or condemned as an instrument of European imperialism and oppression, the Industrial Revolution (IR) often functions as a climax or inflection point in traditional narratives of world history.¹ In playing these roles, “The Industrial Revolution” has too often been presented as what historians of technology call a “black box,” in which inventions enter the story at one side (John Kay’s flying shuttle, followed by various devices for spinning cotton into yarn) and mass production (and with it, English empire, and the West’s triumph over the Rest) are spat out the other end of it. Most of what happens in between is unexamined – placed in a black box that needs no further examination. In this mythical version, new mechanical devices function as exogenous shocks. Leaving unexplored the processes by which individual devices were developed and adopted into existing systems means that the IR has for too long been presented as a coherent episode of technological change – a foundation myth, with lessons to impart.²

The traditional version of the IR begins with John Kay’s flying shuttle, patented in 1733, which – according to William Radcliffe in 1828 – sped up weaving so much that each weaver needed as much yarn (his raw material) as 5-8 people could spin. That was more than his family could provide.³ The flying shuttle thereby threatened a domestic system of production in which all members of a household had contributed to making a finished cloth piece from beginning to end. In this story, improvements in weaving created a bottleneck in household production. To meet the looms’ demand, James Hargreaves invented a spinning jenny and Richard Arkwright devised a water-frame (both patented in 1769), and then came Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule (about 1779) which combined the two. Each device successively improved the quantity and quality of yarn spun to meet the demand of the weavers equipped with the new shuttles that flew.⁴ Arkwright is also often credited with the invention of the factory (the reason he was knighted), while James Watt invented a steam engine at about the same time, that powered the machines of mass production. Even in the mythological version, people resisted their shift to working for wages in factories, instead of minding their families as workers at home: Luddites broke textile machinery to preserve traditional ways, and further mechanization helped replace them.⁵

The story is familiar in its shape if not its details: new inventions are ascribed to individual men, which create a new social, economic, and political world that eventually triumphs – despite resistance from indigenes, proletarians, and other groups made subaltern by the very story they protest. The narrative form of black-boxed technological change is almost invariably a tale of progress, as one machine gives way to the next, which is always better at the job.  One traditional method that historians of technology have used to open such black boxes is to bust the myths that stand in the stead of the actual messy history. In the case of the Industrial Revolution, this myth-busting can be done from several directions.

First, the mythological narrative is a story of spinning alone, and does not explain weaving, which in Britain was done at home without power for another half-century. Handloom weaving of machine-spun yarns increased dramatically during the IR: the number of cotton handloom weavers tripled in Great Britain between 1795 and 1833, as did the prices paid for their finished pieces.⁶ While John Kay’s flying shuttle supposedly sped up weaving, which then inspired mechanization of spinning and its movement out of the domestic setting, the mechanization of spinning actually increased the workforce that wove at home, by hand, as well. Moreover, the reason for the persistence and expansion of handloom weaving was not simply the lack of appropriate machines: looms powered by steam engines were already operating in New England’s factories by 1815, while in 1829 handloom weavers in Britain still outnumbered those at work on powerlooms by four to one. Inventing a machine is not the same as shifting a sector to mechanized production.⁷ Critical thinkers will also recognize that William Radcliffe was himself the inventor of a powerloom, and his historical analysis of spinning and its shifts also advertised his own device.

But even the mythical version, in which successive inventions for spinning advanced British cloth merchants toward mass production, evokes the long-established productive framework into which new machinery arrived—the household, with its own division of labor, from which had emerged over several centuries a putting-out system, that divided the work of spinning and weaving into separate households. The second critique of the mythical Industrial Revolution notes that the earlier and ongoing division of labor outside the scale of household production was itself an innovation, and not one caused by the new mechanical spinning devices associated with the Industrial Revolution story.

Thirdly, those British clothiers who adopted new machinery relied on the market protection provided by their government. Merchants who felt that domestic production was threatened by a “Calico Craze” of cotton cloth imported from India sought Parliamentary protection for their business. The Calico Acts of 1701 and 1721 provided successive laws against imports, shielding the nation’s merchants as they tinkered with new production methods and distribution channels. Beyond the production on the British Isles, the nation’s tradesmen also dealt goods across what they called “the Atlantic trade,” established during the centuries of American colonization, and adapted to the cultivation and sale of cotton after American independence. And finally, the Atlantic trade was anchored to the slave trade between Africa and the Americans, and the enslaved people transported on the Middle Passage of the triangular trade were the labor forces of the plantations growing cotton in the nineteenth century—the raw materials that fed into the spinning machinery of Britain’s industrial revolution. Protection in the home market, adventurism abroad, and stiff competition for customers on distant shores: this was the economic context for the adoption of the storied machinery of the IR.⁸

In other words, the traditional mythological version of the IR ascribes it to inventions, and thus to British men with brilliant labor-saving ideas, but bursting the myth open reveals both a global story of interconnections as well as a national story of industrial protectionism. But it is not enough to show counter-evidence that undermines the mythological version. It is important to recognize the history of that version and the purposes it served: it was presented by men like William Radcliffe in 1828, and other men with economic interests in the cotton spinning industry, in their pursuit of political power. The nineteenth-century “Free Trade” movement that abolished the Corn Laws and the Parliamentary protection for agricultural, landed elites was animated and populated by cotton merchants and manufacturers whose goals described neither the protectionist past in which their industry had grown up nor the nation then expanding its imperial might. Men who sought what they called “Free Trade” invented a mythological version of complicated technological change in order to make it palatable and powerful in their politics. Their success can be found in the statues of inventors and the names of heroes that advance the stories.⁹ But the traditional story of industrialization is mythological not only because it was invented, stitched together and puffed up into a narrative by people with goals, but also because it functions the way myths do: it opens the window to the imagination of modern Western culture: that innovation is the product of individual genius, and that technology changes the world around it. Closer investigation into the history of technology always reveals impulses derived from the world outside machinery itself, the goals that devices are intended to meet, and inputs that help make technology operational.

These are the reasons the IR is worth re-investigation, and the reasons why I wrote a book about it for the undergraduate classroom, using history of technology methods to uncover the contexts for the British origins of global processes.¹⁰ As a result, the Industrial Revolution no longer functions as merely an inflection point, for good or ill, in global history. Instead it is a case-study in the complex processes of technological change. Machines do not themselves explain mechanization, but close investigation of their internal workings actually indicate the social, political, and economic context of why devices worked then and there. The actions of British merchants in response to changing patterns of business on the world stage, the efforts of workers to protect their prerogatives as their conditions changed, the transformations outside the Isles – shifting global history, from the Indian Ocean to the French Revolution: The Industrial Revolution presents a welcome opportunity for understanding and explaining to students the ways in which new devices are made to work, the world on which they draw.

About the author: Barbara Hahn is Professor of History at Texas Tech University. Her first book, Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937, examined the relationship between the tobacco industry and tobacco agriculture over three centuries, while her second The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (with Bruce E. Baker, Newcastle University), investigates cotton futures trading and the regulation of new financial derivatives in the Progressive Era. More recently, Dr. Hahn published Technology in the Industrial Revolution, which is short and intended for the undergraduate classroom.

Cover image: Brown, Ford Madox. John Kay, Inventor of the Fly Shuttle A.D. 1753. a mural at Manchester Town Hall. Manchester City Council, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain Due to Age, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BrownManchesterMuralJohnKay.jpg.

Notes

1. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
2. Exceptions, of course, include David S. Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
3. William Radcliffe, Origin of the New System of Manufacture, Commonly Called “Power-Loom Weaving,” (Stockport: James Lomax, Advertiser-Office, 1828), 59-60
4. Edward Baines, Jr., History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson), 1835; Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes, and Other Fragments (London: Rivingtons, 1884).
5. Barbara Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 64, 95-96, 134-35, 178.
6. Peter Kriedte, “Decline of proto-industrialization, pauperism, and the sharpening of the contrast between city and countryside,” in Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, trans. Beatrice Schempp (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press and Paris, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1981), 156.
7. Geoffrey Timmins, The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 35-185; Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984); Gail Fowler Mohanty, Labors and Laborers of the Loom: Mechanization and Handloom Weavers, 1780-1840 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006); David J. Jeremy, “Innovation in American Textile Technology during the Early Nineteenth Century,” Technology and Culture 14, no. 1 (Jan. 1973), 44-52.
8. Geoffrey Turnbull, A History of the Calico Printing Industry of Great Britain, ed. by John G. Turnbull (Altrincham: John Sherratt and Son, 1951), 21-25; Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 156, 218, 431-32; Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain. Including a History of the Liverpool Cotton Market and of the Liverpool Cotton Brokers’ Association (London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1886).
9. Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750-1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution.
10. Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution.