Behemoth Page 2
With John and Thomas Lombe’s Derby Silk Mill, the factory seemingly popped into existence fully developed, without infancy.2 A picture of the mill is immediately recognizable to our eyes as a factory. A five-story, rectangular brick building, its façade punctured by a grid of large windows, in outward appearance it closely resembles thousands of the factories which were to come, including many still operating. Inside it had all the main characteristics of a modern factory: a large workforce engaged in coordinated production using powered machinery, in its case driven by a twenty-three-foot-high waterwheel. The combination of externally powered equipment and numerous people working together in one space might not seem like much today, but at the time it represented the beginning of a new world.3
Figure 1.1 Sir Thomas Lombe’s Derby Silk Mill in 1835.
The first factories were built not out of grand social visions but to take advantage of mundane commercial opportunities. The Lombes put up their factory to profit from a shortage of organzine, a kind of silk yarn used for warp. To make cloth, yarn, called the weft, is woven over and under a crossing set of yarns, called the warp. Because alternate strands of warp are repeatedly pulled up to allow the weft to be pushed through, they need to be stronger. To make organzine, long threads produced by silkworms were wound into skeins. These had to be put onto bobbins, twisted, “doubled” with other threads, and then twisted again to make yarn, a process known as silk throwing. While on the continent machines were being used to throw silk, in England it was done using spinning wheels, a process too slow to meet the demand from weavers.
In 1704, a Derby barrister built a three-storied, water-powered mill to house imported Dutch silk-throwing machines, but he proved unable to produce quality yarn. Thomas Lombe, a local textile dealer, tried next, sending his half brother John to northern Italy to study the methods used there. Defying laws banning the disclosure of information about the construction of silk-throwing machinery, he returned with several Italian workers and enough information for the Lombes, working with a local engineer, to build and equip their factory. Children apparently did much of the work inside.
Thomas Lombe claimed that his mill was never a great success, in part because of his difficulty in getting raw silk from Italy. This may have been a strategy to discourage competitors and convince Parliament to extend the patent he took out on his machines. Instead, in 1732 the British government, to promote industrial development, gave Lombe a large cash payment in return for making public a model of his machinery.4
The factory system spread slowly. In 1765 there were just seven mills producing organzine, though one, near Manchester, by the end of the century had two thousand workers, a gigantic enterprise by contemporary standards. More common were smaller mills using power-driven machinery to produce tram, a weaker type of silk thread used for weft.5
While entrepreneurs, driven by practical calculations, moved cautiously in following the Lombes’ footsteps, observers almost immediately recognized the novelty and importance of the Derby mill. Daniel Defoe visited the factory—“a vast Bulk”—in the 1720s, declaring it “a Curiosity of a very extraordinary Nature.” Like Charles Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, fictional archetype of the early industrial age, Defoe, in the face of this modern marvel, fell back upon “Fact, fact, fact!” “nothing but Facts!” Anticipating the gee-whiz wonder of so many future descriptions of large factories, he recounted how the Lombe machinery “contains 26,586 Wheels and 97,746 Movements, which work 73,726 Yards of Silk-thread, every time the Water-wheel goes round, which is three times in one Minute, and 318,504,960 Yards in One Day and Night.”6 James Boswell, who visited the same mill a half century later, in the stream of tourists who came to see this new thing under the sun, more tersely described the machinery as “an agreeable surprize.”7
Alone, the Derby mill might have remained “a Curiosity of a very extraordinary Nature.” But it turned out to be the opening of the factory age. In its wake came ever more factories, which would radically transform the British economy and ultimately world society. The large factory would prove to be the leading edge and the leading symbol of a broader Industrial Revolution that created the world we live in.
Cotton
The lasting importance of the Lombes’ factory was not as a template for silk mills but as a template for cotton mills. Limited demand, foreign competition, and difficulty obtaining suitable raw material restricted British silk production. But cotton was a different story, becoming the driving force for the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the factory system we still use today.
Cotton cloth, used for clothing and decoration, long predated the first British cotton mills. By the sixteenth century, textiles produced in India by spinners and weavers working at home with simple, hand-powered equipment were being exported to Europe, West Africa, and the Americas. A century later, they had become a truly global commodity.8
Until the late seventeenth century, it would have been rare to have seen someone in Europe wearing cotton clothes; imported cotton textiles were used largely for household decoration. Most clothing was made out of other fibers: wool, flax, hemp, or silk.9 But the quality and variety of cotton cloth soon made it a favorite for European garments. With increasing population and rising income pushing up demand, local merchants tried to take over at least some of the processes for making cotton textiles from foreign producers, an early example of what would later be called import substitution.10 Instead of importing calicos—cotton cloth with printed patterns—European traders began buying plain white Indian cloth, which they had decorated by local artisans. By the mid-eighteenth century, large-scale calico printing shops, some with hundreds of workers, were operating in various parts of Europe.11 English merchants also began weaving imported cotton yarn with flax to produce fustians.12
In 1774, Britain ended restrictions on producing and decorating all-cotton textiles, earlier put into place to protect the silk and wool industries. Deregulation, along with fustian production, contributed to ballooning demand for cotton yarn.13 Merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs set out to capture the market with locally produced product. But the obstacles they faced were considerable.
Simply getting enough raw cotton was the first problem. Indian producers used Indian-grown cotton, but the European climate was unsuitable for its cultivation. In the late eighteenth century, Britain imported cotton from all over the world, including Asia and various parts of the Ottoman Empire. Supply lagged behind demand, leading to the increasing cultivation of cotton in the Americas using slave labor, first in the West Indies and South America and then, after the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (patented in 1794), in the southern United States. By the early nineteenth century, over 90 percent of the cotton used in Britain was grown by slaves in the Americas. As British textile production exploded, cotton growers in the United States moved westward into the Mississippi River valley, where a brutal empire arose on the labor of enslaved Africans (“food for the cotton-field,” Frederick Douglass called them). Thus, the rise of the factory system, with its association with modernity, was utterly dependent on the spread of slave labor. “Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry,” wrote Karl Marx—an overstatement, but one with much truth.14
The technical demands of turning raw cotton into weft and warp presented a second challenge. As Edward Baines wrote in his 1835 History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, whereas “silk needs only that the threads spun by the worm should be twisted together, to give them the requisite strength,” “[c]otton, flax, and wool, having short and slender filaments, require to be spun into a thread before they can be woven into cloth.” The raw cotton used in Britain had individual fibers generally less than an inch long. To convert it into yarn it had to be “carded,” combed to pull apart the fibers and line them up in parallel to create a “sliver.” Slivers were then drawn out to a prescribed thickness (“roving”) and twisted to gain strength. Both the last step and all the processes together we
re called “spinning.”15
Until the 1760s, spinning was a domestic industry, with men doing the heavy work of carding, while women used spinning wheels to create finished yarn and children helped out in various ways. As Blaines noted, “the machines used . . . were nearly as simple as those of India.” However, it cost more to produce cotton yarn in Britain than in India and the quality was lower, too fragile to use as warp. And there was not enough of it; it took at least three spinners along with a few ancillary workers to keep one weaver (generally male) in yarn, meaning weavers often had to go beyond their own household for supplies, a problem exacerbated by the introduction of the flying shuttle in the 1730s, which greatly increased weaving productivity.16
Conditions were ripe for a radical change. Expanding fustian, hosiery, and cotton textile production ensured inventors and investors a payoff if they could increase the output, improve the quality, and lower the cost of cotton yarn. Merchant entrepreneurs already had experience with large-scale production through their organization of extensive networks of domestic spinners and weavers, who were given raw materials by a central agent to make specific types of yarn or cloth and paid by the piece. Though the banking system in the textile districts had limited financial and technical capacity, manufacturers, merchants, and landed gentry had capital resources to back new enterprises. A large, underemployed agricultural workforce constituted a potential labor pool for large-scale industry.17
In the last decades of the eighteenth century, English inventors, artisans, and merchant manufacturers developed a series of machines to boost the quality and quantity of locally produced cotton yarn. James Hargreaves developed the first mechanical spinning device in 1764, the jenny. It proved of limited use, since it could only produce weft and required a skilled worker to operate. Richard Arkwright was more successful. A tinkerer, who had had his ups and downs as a barber, wig maker, and public house owner, Arkwright applied for a patent on a spinning machine in 1768 and seven years later for carding equipment. With partners, he first built a mill in Nottingham that used horses to power spinning machines. He soon switched to water power, long used for sawmills, grain mills, mineral-crushing mills, and paper mills, building a factory in Cromford, an isolated spot sixteen miles up the River Derwent from where the Lombes had built their mill. Once he perfected his carding and spinning machinery, Arkwright and various partners built additional factories along the Derwent and then elsewhere. Arkwright’s profits from his mills and royalties from his patents made him a very rich man.18
In part to circumvent Arkwright’s patents, other carding and spinning machines were developed, including Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule, giving those seeking to go into cotton yarn manufacturing a choice of equipment, some better suited for warp and some for weft. The boosts in productivity were startling: the earliest jennies increased output per worker sixfold or more, while Arkwright’s equipment, once perfected, proved several hundredfold more efficient. In the late eighteenth century, the first power looms for weaving were introduced, mechanizing the next step in textile production. The early looms had many problems and could produce only low-quality fabric. As a result, hand-weaving remained dominant in cotton production until the 1820s and even later in worsted and wool. But with incremental improvements, power looms gradually became the norm in virtually all forms of weaving.19
Arkwright’s Nottingham mill employed three hundred workers, about the same number as the Lombes’. His first mill in Cromford was smaller, with about two hundred employees, mostly children. A second mill he put up in Cromford had eight hundred workers. Jedidiah Strutt, a hosiery manufacturer and early partner of Arkwright’s, erected a mill complex in Belper, seven miles south of Cromford, that employed 1,200 to 1,300 workers by 1792, 1,500 in 1815, and 2,000 by 1833. The complex of mills in New Lanark, Scotland, which Arkwright helped build but Robert Owen and his partners took over, had 1,600 to 1,700 workers in 1816. By then, steam-powered cotton mills were being erected in urban areas, with several factories in Manchester employing over a thousand workers. The giant factory had arrived.20
Figure 1.2 English inventor and entrepreneur Sir Richard Arkwright in 1835.
Why the Giant Factory?
Why did cotton manufacturers adopt factory production? And why did their factories grow so large? This was a subject of considerable discussion both at the time that the first big mills were built and among scholars in more recent times. Popular accounts of the birth of the factory often present it as a technologically driven imperative, the outgrowth of a series of paradigm-shifting inventions, like Arkwright’s spinning machines. But as many scholars have shown, there was no simple relationship between mechanical innovation, social organization, and production scale.
Early mechanized spinning equipment did not require a factory environment. The first models of Arkwright’s machines were small and could be powered by hand in a cottage setting. That also was true of the early jennies and mules. Arkwright apparently promoted centralized factory production not because of technical considerations but to protect his ability to collect patent royalties. Reasoning that if his machines were widely used in domestic production they inevitably would be copied without his receiving payments, he only licensed his equipment to be used in units of a thousand spindles or more, practical only in large, water-powered mills of the sort he himself constructed (hence his spinning machines were dubbed “water frames”). Even then, Arkwright tried hard to keep information about his equipment secret; in 1772, he wrote to Strutt, “I am Determind for the feuter [future] to Let no persons in to Look at the wor[k]s.”21
Even as large factories became a familiar sight in the early nineteenth century, they were not the most common mode of production in the British textile industry. Nonfactory production, far from disappearing, continued and even grew in various sectors of the industry. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, many textile manufacturers had both factories for spinning and weaving and networks of domestic handweavers.22 Furthermore, well into the nineteenth century, the typical British textile mill was small. In 1838, the average cotton mill had 132 workers, the average woolen mill just 39. In Lancashire, the most important textile region, in 1841, only 85 of 1,105 mills employed more than 500 workers.23
Factories did not necessarily follow the Lombe/Arkwright model of a single manufacturer operating an entire, powered plant. Some factories housed large numbers of workers using hand-powered equipment. Also, until the 1820s, it was common for mills to rent space and power to multiple small employers. In 1815, two-thirds of Manchester cotton firms occupied only part of a factory. One Stockport mill housed twenty-seven master artisans, who collectively employed 250 workers, a system not unlike that common in metalworking factories, where artisans rented individual work spaces and access to steam power. In the woolen industry, into the mid-nineteenth century, one historian wrote, “multiple tenancy of mills and the subletting of room and power were common features.” There were even some “cooperative” mills used by subscribing small producers. In the silk industry, when steam-powered looms began being used in the 1840s and 1850s, the technology was adapted to domestic production. Steam engines were erected at the end of rows of cottages occupied by weavers, each with a few looms, with power transmitted through shafts into the small buildings.24
Myriad arrangements, then, of technology, scale of production, and business organization could be found for nearly a century after the first large, water-powered cotton mills were constructed. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did steam- or water-powered equipment located in factories owned and operated by single entities become the dominant model in all the major subdivisions of the British textile industry. And even then, what by the standards of the day could be considered very large factories—mills employing over a thousand employees—were the exception, not the rule, in both urban and rural settings.25 But the very large mills received a disproportionate amount of attention, both at the time and since, because they were seen as the cutting edge of not only industry
and technology but also of social arrangements.26
Why did the owners of these facilities choose to go big, to adopt the large, centralized factory model? Charles Babbage, the great English mathematician and inventor, devoted a whole chapter “On the Causes and Consequences of Large Factories” in his influential 1832 book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers. Babbage began with the obvious, that the introduction of machinery tended to lead to greater production volume, resulting in “the establishment of large factories.” A leading student of the division of labor, he contended that efficient production units had to be multiples of the number of workers needed for the most efficient division of labor in a particular production process. He also noted various economies of scale. These included the cost of maintenance and repair workers and accounting staff, who would be underutilized in too small a factory. Additionally, centralizing various stages of production in one building reduced transportation costs and made one entity responsible for quality control, making lapses less likely.27
But what exactly was large? Babbage elucidated the factors that set a floor on efficient size, but not how to determine optimal size. In the cotton industry, only a few workers were needed to operate each spinning or weaving machine. In practice, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, it seemed as if there were few production economies achieved by the giant cotton factories that midsize or even smaller enterprises did not share. In the late nineteenth century, the pathbreaking economic theoretician Alfred Marshall noted that “There are . . . some trades in which the advantages which a large factory derives from the economy of machinery almost vanish as soon as a moderate size has been reached. . . . [I]n cotton spinning, and calico weaving, a comparatively small factory will hold its own and give constant employment to the best known machines for every process: so that a large factory is only several parallel smaller factories under one roof.”28