COTTON SPINNING AND

WEAVING
The British had always woven cloth out of wool and flax (to
makelinen). From the seventeenth century, the country had been
importingbales of cotton cloth from India at great cost. As the East
India Company’s political control of parts of India was established, it
began to import, along with cloth, raw cotton, which could be spun
and woven into cloth in England. Till the early eighteenth century,
spinning had been so slow and laborious that 10 spinners (mostly
women, hence the word ‘spinster’) were required to supply sufficient
yarn to keep a single weaver busy. Therefore, while spinners were
occupied all day, weavers waited idly to receive yarn. But a series of
technological inventions successfully closed the gap between the
speed in spinning raw cotton into yarn or thread, and of weaving the
yarn into fabric. To make it even more efficient, production gradually
shifted from the homes of spinners and weavers to factories. From
the 1780s, the cotton industry symbolised British industrialisation in
many ways. This industry had two features which were also seen in
other industries. Raw cotton had to be entirely imported and a large
part of the finished cloth was exported. This sustained the process of
colonisation ,
 STEAM POWER
The realisation that steam could generate tremendous
power was decisive to large-scale industrialisation.
Water as hydraulic power had been the prime source
of energy for centuries, but it had been limited to
certain areas, seasons and by the speed of the flow of
water. Now it was used differently. Steam power
provided pressure at high temperatures that enabled
the use of a broad range of machinery. This meant
that steam power was the only source of energy that
was reliable and inexpensive enough to manufacture
machinery itself. Steam power was first used in
mining industries. As the demand for coal and metals
expanded, efforts to obtain them from ever-deeper
mines intensified.
 CANALS AND RAILWAYS
Canals were initially built to transport coal to cities. This was because the bulk and weight of
coal made its transport by road much slower and more expensive than by barges on canals.
The demand for coal, as industrial energy and for heating and lighting homes in cities, grew
constantly. The making of the first English canal, the Worsley Canal (1761) by James Brindley
(1716-72), had no other purpose than to carry coal from the coal deposits at Worsley (near
Manchester) to that city; after the canal was completed the price of coal fell by half. Canals
were usually built by big landowners to increase the value of the mines, quarries or forests on
their lands. The confluence of canals created marketing centres in new towns. The city of
Birmingham, for example, owed its growth to its position at the heart of a canal system
connecting London, the Bristol Channel, and the Mersey and Humber rivers. From 1760 to
1790, twenty-five new canal-building projects were begun. In the period known as the ‘canal-
mania’, from 1788 to 1796, there were another 46 new projects and over the next 60 years
more than 4,000 miles of canal were built. The first steam locomotive, Stephenson’s Rocket,
appeared in 1814. Railways emerged as a new means of transportation that was available
throughout the year, both cheap and fast, to carry passengers and goods. They combined two
inventions, the iron track which replaced the wooden track in the 1760s, and haulage along it
by steam engine. The invention of the railways took the entire process of industrialisation to a
second stage. In 1801, Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) had devised an engine called the
‘Puffing Devil’ that pulled trucks around the mine where he worked in Cornwall. In 1814, the
railway engineer George Stephenson (1781-1848) constructed a locomotive, called ‘The
Blutcher’, that could pull a weight of 30 tons up a hill at 4 mph. The first railway line
connected the cities of Stockton and Darlington in 1825, a distance of 9 miles that was
completed in two hours at speeds of up to 24 kph (15 mph), and the next railway line
connected Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Within 20 years, speeds of 30 to 50 miles an
hour were usual .
 WHO WERE INVENTORS?
It is interesting to find out who the individuals were who
brought about these changes. Few of them were trained
scientists. Education in basic sciences like physics or chemistry
was extremely limited until the late nineteenth century, well
after the technological inventions described above. Since these
breakthroughs did not require a full knowledge of the laws of
physics or chemistry on which they were based, advances
could be and were made by brilliant but intuitive thinkers and
persistent experimenters. They were helped by the fact that
England had certain features which European countries did not.
Dozens of scientific journals and published papers of scientific
societies appeared in England between 1760 and 1800. There
was a widespread thirst for knowledge even in the smaller
towns. This was met by the activities of the Society of Arts
(founded in 1754), by travelling lecturers, or in ‘coffee houses’
that multiplied through the eighteenth century .
 CHANGED LIVES
In these years, therefore, it was possible for individuals with talent to bring about
revolutionary changes. Similarly, there were rich individuals who took risks and invested
money in industries in the hope that profits could be made, and that their money would
‘multiply’. In most cases this money – capital – did multiply. Wealth, in the form of goods,
incomes, services, knowledge and productive efficiency, did increase dramatically. There
was, at the same time, a massive negative human cost. This was evident in broken
families, new addresses, degraded cities and appalling working conditions in factories.
The number of cities in England with a population of over 50,000 grew from two in 1750 to
29 in 1850. This pace of growth was not matched with the provision of adequate housing,
sanitation or clean water for the rapidly growing urban population .