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  Writing just after Babbage, Leeds journalist Edward Baines echoed some of his explanations for the adoption of the factory model, while adding a few that pointed in a different direction. Centralization, he argued, allowed greater supervision of every stage of production by a skilled overseer. It also lessened the risk of waste and theft of materials. Finally, it facilitated the coordination of various stages of the production process, preventing “the extreme inconvenience which would have resulted from the failure of one class of workmen to perform their part, when several other classes of workmen were dependent upon them.”29 In sum, centralizing gave manufacturers the ability to better supervise and coordinate labor, the work of many individuals who under the putting-out system would be supervising their own labor (and that of family members) in far-flung domestic settings.

  Scholars trying to explain the rise of the factory system have elaborated Baines’s arguments. Until the 1970s, historians of industrialization stressed technology as the driving force for change. David Landes began his long chapter on “The Industrial Revolution in Britain” in his 1969 classic, The Unbound Prometheus, by stating, “In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode of production—the factory system.” New machines opened the possibilities for increased productivity and profits, sparking a series of organizational and social shifts, often quite sudden, including the rise of the large factory and the industrial “revolution” that accompanied it.

  The academic neo-Marxist revival that began just as Landes was finishing his tome led to a reconsideration of the story, pointing toward advantages in labor supervision rather than technical superiority in the rise of the factory system. Concentrated workers could be made to work longer and harder than dispersed workers, while creating more consistent products and limiting endemic theft and embezzlement. Thus the example of early factories that brought workers under one roof without introducing power machinery or changes in production methods. But other scholars then challenged the idea that the reorganization of labor accounted for the savings gained by factory production, pointing instead to some of the advantages that Babbage, Baines, and Marshall noted in moving multiple processes, which in the past had been conducted by external agents, into a single location and within a single firm: inventories could be reduced, transportation costs lowered, and production more closely aligned with shifts in demand.30

  Concurrent with these debates over the reasons for the adoption of the factory model was a growing literature that rejected the idea that the industrialization entailed a radical break with past practices. Rather, economic historians argued, a less visible process of “protoindustrialization” laid the basis for later, more dramatic and widely noted changes that came to be labeled the Industrial Revolution. By the early eighteenth century, in England and elsewhere in Europe, merchants and entrepreneurs were organizing increasingly large networks of home-based producers, selling to broadening markets, and accumulating capital. In the process, urban-based manufacturing migrated to the countryside, where excess and off-season agricultural workers provided a ready labor source. Thus large-scale, rural-based manufacturing already had emerged before the invention of power-driven machinery and large mills, making the seemingly revolutionary leap not quite so great.31

  Even with the old and new explanations for the rise of the factory system, it remains unclear why cotton mills so quickly reached a very large size, in the 1,000- to 1,500-worker range, but thereafter stopped growing, with new mills tending to be smaller. In the early days of the factory, the economics of water power may have made large-sized plants attractive, given the relative scarcity of sites and the capital investment needed to construct dams and channels to deliver a steady flow to waterwheels. At New Lanark, the largest mill complex in Great Britain, workers had to carve out a hundred-yard rock tunnel to get water to the mill wheels. Steam power provided greater flexibility. While some steam-powered mills also were large, perhaps as a way to quickly grab market share, historian V. A. C. Gatrell suggested that, after the first wave of cotton mill construction, new entrants saw few economies and greater risks in matching the size of the pioneer plants, recognizing that managerial constraints could make larger plants less efficient.32

  Perhaps plant size did not simply reflect economic calculus. At a moment when most wealth in Britain took the form of land ownership or government bonds, large factories provided a way to establish social status. Arkwright built a castle, Willersley, near his Cromford mills, having bought most of the surrounding land. The ex-barber was soon acting as a paternal grandee, building a chapel and school (with compulsory attendance) for the children who made up much of his workforce and sponsoring festivals for his workers. In an extravagant gesture that symbolized the social elevation made possible by his inventions and mills, Arkwright lent the Duchess of Devonshire five thousand pounds to cover her gambling debts. His son, while continuing to operate the family mills, invested heavily in land and government bonds and provided mortgages to the gentry and even the nobility, becoming the richest commoner in Britain. The Strutt family, though better established than Arkwright, followed a similar trajectory. Frances Trollope portrayed the use of a large factory to transform social status in her 1840 novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy, with Sir Matthew Dowley building a mansion on an estate from which the “grim-looking chimney cones” of his factory could be seen.33 As it would do over and over again, the giant factory brought into existence not only a new mode of production but also a new class of wealthy industrialists who sought to join the ruling elite.

  Creating the Factory World

  Cotton mills were on an entirely different scale than the small commercial and residential buildings in the river valleys and towns where they first appeared. England had big buildings, buildings bigger than the biggest new cotton mills. The great cathedrals were much larger. And in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new types of large urban buildings sprung up: hospitals, barracks, citadels, prisons, colleges, warehouses, and dockyards. But cathedrals and other big buildings had interior spaces organized for very different activities than manufacturing.34 To accommodate large-scale production, power-driven machinery, and masses of workers, new architectural designs and improved building techniques and materials were needed. Innovations to meet the specific needs of the cotton industry soon spread beyond it, shaping the built environment in England and elsewhere for the next two centuries.

  Arkwright apparently modelled his first Cromford mill on the Lombes’, also five stories high. Its “long, narrow proportions, height, range of windows . . . and large areas of relatively unbroken interior space,” wrote historian R. S. Fitton, “became the basic design in industrial architecture for the remainder of the eighteenth and through the nineteenth centuries.” Arkwright’s second mill at Cromford was seven stories high and 120 feet long, and a third mill he erected nearby was 150 feet long and topped by a cupola.35

  Arkwright used timber post and beam construction for his mill interiors, leaving them vulnerable to the ever-present danger of fire, with so much flammable thread and cloth lying around and cotton dust in the air. In the early 1790s, William Strutt (Jedidiah’s son) erected a mill with cast-iron columns, ironclad wood beams, and brick-arch floor supports to reduce the fire danger. Soon after, Charles Bage, a friend of Strutt, designed a five-story flax mill that was the world’s first completely iron-framed building, forerunner of all the iron- and steel-structured buildings that were to come, including the skyscrapers that steel framing made possible. Improvements to iron beams quickly followed; replacing wood timbers with iron not only reduced the danger of fire but increased the distances which could be spanned, allowing wider floors to accommodate the large, self-acting spinning mules that were introduced in the 1820s. To heat their multistory mills (which reduced thread breakage), Arkwright and the Strutts followed the example of the Lombe mill, designing complex systems to circulate warm air.36


  Power looms, which became increasingly common in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, did not easily fit into existing mills, because their operation created such strong vibrations that they could not safely be situated above the ground floor. Instead, it became the common practice to build single-story weaving sheds, often abutting spinning mills or in their yards. To light these extensive structures, their roofs had rows of pitched ridges, with windows on one side of each ridge to bring in indirect sunlight. The “sawtooth roof” soon topped all sorts of industrial buildings and can still be seen on both sides of the Atlantic.37

  In early textile factories, complex arrangements of shafts and gears distributed power from waterwheels to individual machines. Water power was cheap and efficient, as long as there was a steady flow of water. That meant that mills had to be sited on rivers with substantial, steady flows, like the Derwent. Even then, sometimes there was not enough water, leading some mill owners, including Arkwright, to experiment with using steam engines—recently perfected to drain mines—to lift water into reservoirs, which could steadily supply water to a waterwheel.

  The thin supply of labor in the often isolated areas with good mill sites presented a bigger problem. (Arkwright chose Cromford for his mills in part because it was near a lead mine, hoping to hire miners’ wives and children.)38 Using steam power to directly drive spinning and weaving equipment, though more expensive, allowed mills to be built in urban areas, giving access to larger labor pools and obviating the need of mill owners to supply housing.

  Technically, only minor modifications were needed to adapt mill design from water to steam power, but the change had huge effects. Steam engines required coal-fired boilers, leading to a vast expansion of the coal industry, which became another driving force of the Industrial Revolution. Steam-powered mills contributed mightily to environmental degradation, both from coal mining and the volumes of soot and black smoke emitted from their boilers. In Hard Times, Dickens described the “rattling” and “trembling” of factory steam engines, pistons going up and down “like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness,” and boilers spewing out “monstrous serpents of smoke.” Black smoke and polluted air came to emblemize Manchester and other urban centers of textile production and the Industrial Revolution itself.39

  Another innovation, first seen in cotton mills, was the elevator, a clever solution to the challenge of rapidly moving people and material in and out of multistory buildings. Primitive water-powered hoists were installed in several Strutt mills around the turn of the nineteenth century. A large 1834 Stockport mill, designed by William Fairbairn, included a steam-powered elevator in each wing, a device so new that a contemporary description had no language for it, calling the shafts “upright tunnels.”

  Fairbairn was a key figure in the diffusion of design innovations. His company could provide a complete, fully equipped factory to specification; “The capitalist has merely to state the extent of his resources, the nature of his manufacture, its intended site, and facilities of position in reference to water or coal, when he will be furnished with designs, estimates, and offers.” Fairbairn’s firm built plants around the world, including a wool factory near Istanbul for the Sultan of Turkey and a giant spinning and weaving complex in Bombay.40

  Nothing better captured the sense of invention in the textile districts of Britain than the “Round Mill” built at the Strutts’ factory complex in Belper. The three-story, circular stone building, divided into eight segments, apparently derived from Samuel and Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. In its center stood an inspection station from which a supervisor could observe activity in the entire building, realizing the ideal of constant surveillance the Benthams championed. The Strutts may have adopted the Benthams’ design to minimize the risk from fire, as the central overlooker could shut off any of the building segments by closing doors, isolating the flames and protecting the rest of the structure.41 Though the Round Mill found few direct imitators, the idea of continual surveillance would become ever more part of the factory regime, never more so than in our own times.

  Change rippled outward from the large factory, beyond its own walls. Mill owners had to develop physical, social, and psychological infrastructure to make factory production possible. Simply getting people and material to and from rural mills required extraordinary effort. When Arkwright arrived at Cromford, the nearest road suitable for wheeled vehicles lay miles away; small bales of raw cotton had to be carried over the moors by packhorses until 1820, when mill owners built a new road alongside the Derwent. Even with workers walking as much as four or five miles to work each day, not enough people lived near rural mills to staff them fully. So many early mill owners built housing for their workers, sometimes even what amounted to whole new villages, with churches, schools, inns, and markets.42

  Feeding so many people clustered near isolated mills also presented a challenge. Some manufacturers set up their own farms to supply their workers with foodstuffs. Very commonly workers received only a small part of their wages in cash with the rest in the form of rent payment for company-owned houses and “truck,” goods or credit at company stores (“tommy shops”) that sold food, coal, and other supplies, often above market prices and of low quality, a source of smoldering resentment among workers.43

  Truck helped solve another problem mill owners faced, a shortage of currency with which to pay their employees. Small-denomination coins did not circulate in sufficient quantities to meet big payrolls, which were extremely unusual before the mills. Hoarding exacerbated the problem.Mill owners had to improvise, paying workers with tokens or foreign currency overstamped with new denominations or issuing their own notes, which they hoped local merchants would accept.44

  Difficult as these challenges were, they paled before the problem of discipline. For Andrew Ure, a leading booster of the emerging factory system, the greatest hurdle mill operators faced was “training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation.” Of course, hand-powered, domestic manufacturing—like all work—required discipline, too, but it was a different kind of discipline, with the pace of work keyed to the completion of particular tasks. Much as in farming, intense activity alternated with slack times. Domestic producers interspersed carding, spinning, and weaving with household chores, farming, other kinds of labor, and leisure. Famously, in many trades workers used “Saint Monday” (and sometimes “Saint Tuesday,” too) to take care of personal business, recover from hangovers or bring on new ones, socialize, or simply laze about, putting in few hours of productive labor. Recalling the days of hand spinning, one witness testified before an 1819 parliamentary commission that “it was generally the practice to drink the first day or two of the week and attempt to make it up by working very long hours towards the close of the week.”

  The sometimes romanticized autonomy of domestic labor extended only to heads of households, generally men. Wives, children, apprentices, and employed journeymen did not have the same control over their time; they were subject to external discipline regulating not only their periods and pace of work but all aspects of the production process. Discipline was familial, embedded in their general subservience to the head of their household. It could be harsh but it still was task-oriented, with production for the market intermixed with production for the home, domestic chores, and, if they were lucky, recreation.

  By contrast, factory production required coordinated activity by dozens or hundreds of workers, who were expected to start and stop work at the same time, day after day. Companies developed elaborate sets of rules and systems of fines and punishments for their violation. Overseers monitored when workers came and went and what they did inside the mill. Some workers had their activities regulated by the demands of the machines they worked on, having to do a particular task at a particular point in the cyclical operation of the apparatus. Ure pooh-poohed the strain of such machine-paced work; the
“piecers” in fine spinning, children charged with retying broken threads, had “at least three-fourths” of each minute off, making it, in his view, an easy job. Friedrich Engels, writing a decade later, saw it differently: “To tend machinery—for example, to be continually tying broken threads—is an activity demanding the full attention of the workers. It is, however, at the same time a type of work which does not allow his mind to be occupied with anything else. . . . [It] gives the operative no opportunity of physical exercise or muscular activity. . . . It is nothing less than torture of the severest kind . . . in the service of a machine which never stops.” “In handicrafts and manufacture,” Marx wrote in Capital, “the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”45

  If, as David Landes put it, “The factory was a new kind of prison; the clock a new kind of jailer,” that in turn created another problem, how to be punctual in a world in which workers did not own clocks. In the past, workers never needed to be punctual or to key their work to particular moments of time. To enforce the new time discipline, some factories rang morning bells to awaken their workers. In urban districts, workers hired a “knocker-up” who used a long pole to knock on their upstairs window each morning to make sure they arose in time for work. Eventually, the knocker-up became a stock figure on Lancashire music-hall stages, adding to the original meaning of the term a second one that it retains to this day.46

  Factory Tourism

  Although recent scholarship has debunked the idea that the factory system arose from the genius of a few inventors and entrepreneurs who changed everything, drawing a subtler picture of economic and social changes that began long before the Industrial Revolution took off, the Industrial Revolution nonetheless was a revolution, and seen as such at the time. Contemporary observers had no doubt that the cotton mill and the changes it wrought represented a technical, economic, and social break from the past. From the late eighteenth century on, factories, factory villages, and manufacturing cities drew tourists, journalists, and philanthropists from continental Europe and North America as well as Great Britain itself.47 Part of the attraction was their novelty. W. Cooke Taylor, the son of an Irish manufacturer who toured the industrial districts of Lancaster in the early 1840s, wrote that “The steam-engine had no precedent, the spinning-jenny is without ancestry, the mule and the power-loom entered on no prepared heritage: they sprung into sudden existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.”48