Nature's Evil

With a constant supply of cotton, English village workshops developed new techniques of dyeing cotton. The old colouring method that Alderman Cockayne had failed to master, even under royal patronage, relied on a supply of exotic and expensive dyes from the colonies and needed expert knowledge. In the mid-eighteenth century, craftsmen applied to cotton the new methods of print-making which had been developed by engravers and book printers for work on paper: wooden or brass plates were coated with dye and the cloth was rolled over the plates. Imitating Indian calico, printed fabrics increased profit; thanks to machines, their productivity was eighty times greater than that of traditional Indian techniques. Then chemists created a dye to replace the very costly cochineal. Proto-industry materialised the exchange between slave labour across the ocean, subsistence farming in the British countryside, and early capitalism in towns and ports. The source of raw materials, for example silk or cotton, was remote and concentrated; but their processing in Italy or England was based on the distribution of this commodity among dozens of adjacent villages and thousands of workers. New industries combined topical resources, such as sugar, cotton and silver, with diffused resources such as grain, wool, coal and hemp. But the extraction of topical resources and their primary processing – the cause of great evil – took place across the ocean, while the extraction of diffused resources and the secondary – most profitable – processing remained in England and Europe.

One of the most well-informed participants of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton, wrote that there was something in the nature of cotton that made it particularly suitable for being processed by machine. 32 Waterwheels powered wool, flax and silk factories, but the newest cotton factories were powered by steam engines. Those entrepreneurs who could take production away from cottages and put all the processing under one roof in a factory profited from the economy of scale, cutting transportation distances and using machines. In 1841 in Manchester there were already 128 cotton factories – ‘satanic mills’– and they produced more than half of all British textiles. The number of domestic workshops producing cotton and wool fell by a factor of ten. Having lost their work and land, people were moving to the factories.

The historian Karl Polanyi considered the Industrial Revolution to be a transformation ‘as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians’. The new creed consisted in the belief that ‘all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.’ 33 New factories astonished contemporary observers by their size. More and more machines – for cleaning, spinning and, finally, weaving – were powered by the energy of falling water, harnessed by weirs and driven through mill-races. They all benefited from the economy of scale, but this scale depended on the nature of the resource being processed: in England in 1835 the average cotton factory employed 175 workers, while a wool factory had forty-four. Cotton mills were the first in which steam machines supplemented waterwheels; wool factories were several steps behind. The cotton thread, sturdier than wool, was not damaged by the tension and vibration produced by the machines; more expensive, cotton fabrics offset the expenses of complex machinery. Most of the inventors of the new machines started as watchmakers. Their machines were expensive and the cost of entering this new business was very high. But the expenditure was well worth it: large weaving looms, powered by waterwheels and supported by steam engines, could process the same quantity of cotton as hand looms but needed only a tenth of the workforce. 34