United Kingdom

Cotton textiles remained the dominant new industry, centred in Manchester, with the textile factory being thought of by one of its contemporary admirers, the Leeds manufacturer Edward Baines, as “the most striking example of the dominion obtained by human science over the powers of nature of which modern times can boast.” By 1851 there were some 1,800 cotton factories in Britain. From 1815 to 1851 raw cotton imports had increased unevenly from 101 million pounds to 757 million pounds, while exports of manufactured cotton piece goods increased from 253 million yards to 1.543 billion yards. Manchester was the centre of the cotton industry. During the same period, however, similar steam-driven technology accounted for the expansion of the woolen textiles industry, with Australia, which had provided no raw wool for Britain in 1815, supplying about 30 million pounds in 1851. Bradford and Leeds were the centres of the woolen textile industry. It was the textiles industry more than any other that illustrated Britain’s dependence on international trade, a trade that it commanded not only through the volume of its imports and of its manufacturing output but also through the strength of its banking and other financial institutions, as well as the extent of its shipping industry.

Cotton manufacture c. 1830 using an automatic spinning mule of the type devised by Richard Roberts in 1825. Wellcome Library, London

The second, capital goods, phase of industrialization, beginning in the mid-19th century, broadened the manufacturing base into areas such as shipping and engineering. In tandem with this advance was the growth of the service industry as the economy expanded over time. The advent of mass consumption in the second half of the 19th-century—resulting in the slow development of mass retailing by multiple stores—was one consequence of this. While the factory and mechanized production played important roles in the process of industrialization, this process has been usefully described as “combined and uneven development.” Undoubtedly, hand technology and muscle power continued to play a considerable role far beyond the mid-19th century, and, as older forms of production continued alongside new, they were incorporated in, and to some extent regenerated by, factory production. The artisan sector, the conduct of work in people’s homes, and subcontracting all remained central to many industries—for example, the hosiery industry in Nottingham.

Much production was in fact small-scale and characterized to varying degrees by employers’ dependence on the skills and authority of the worker; if in some areas—for example, the trades in London—capitalism made progress by degrading the status of craft workers, in other areas workers were able to hold their own and adapt to new situations by organizing through the trade unions that gave them leverage over employers. Even in mechanized industries, managerial hierarchies were weakly elaborated, and there was a considerable dependence on worker skill and authority as well as a limited penetration of technology. Also of great importance were domestic service and small shop keeping. The upshot was not a linear process of change in which the end result was de-skilled factory production and the homogenization of the condition of workers but rather a complex set of outcomes in which the relations of capital and labour represented a variegated division of power.

In fact the decentralized nature of industrial production paralleled the decentralized state, and workers’ understanding of the economy was in many ways similar to their view of the state—namely, one of guarded acceptance. As it did with all other sectors of British life, the state for the most part studiously stayed outside the field of industrial relations; nonetheless, developments in the economy and in labour relations had a decisive role in shaping British workers’ views of the state. Within labour itself, there were divisions between “honourable” (traditional, apprenticeship-based, well-paid) and “dishonourable” (low-status, corner-cutting) trades, between those with a trade and those without, between the skilled and the unskilled, between union and nonunion workers, and between men and women. The labour movement itself reflected these divisions, as the increasingly strong trade union movement of this period was in fact largely shaped to meet the interests and demands of the skilled male head of household.