Cotton and the Industrial Revolution

Patrick O’Brien, in a series of publications co-authored with Philip Hunt and Trevor Griffiths in the 1990s, advanced a new and stimulating view of the process of British industrialization. Moving beyond classic analyses that posited the mechanization of textile production as the explananda of what is succinctly called the Industrial Revolution, O’Brien convincingly argued for the importance of political economy. The British state fostered the growth of a small sector such as cotton textile manufacturing especially in the north of England. Two conditions internal to the kingdom brought about over time what was in no sense a coherent mercantilist – let alone industrial – set of policies. First, the weight of linen imports on Britain's balance of trade. As woollens and worsteds were quantitatively by far the most important items of export – and they had been so for several centuries – by the eighteenth century, linen was Britain's major import especially from continental Europe and Ireland. Whilst there was no clear idea that cotton yarn and cloth might replace flax and linen, the British state understood that such a heavy reliance on foreign markets was both economically and politically hazardous. Second, it was thought that the economic system internal to the British Isles might provide a solution to this problem. England, climatically unsuitable for hemp and flax cultivation, had a thriving linen industry. Scotland and Ireland emerged instead within what might be considered an internal “colonial system,” as areas for the cultivation of valuable flax.

This explanation was complemented by the work of historians who put more weight on processes of product innovation than on political economy. The development of new draperies in response to the commercialization of lighter woollens in Continental Europe was part and parcel of the transformation of a number of productive sectors in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that included glass, porcelain as well as textile production. Key to the creation of new products was the inspiration gained from and the imitation of goods imported not just from Continental Europe but also from Asia. The Chinese porcelain and Indian cotton textiles imported by the English and other European East India companies stimulated not just new patterns of consumption but also attempts at substituting these imports with home-produced wares.