The Power In The Land. Fred Harrison

       4 The Power Loom Puzzle

      The Industrial Revolution was heralded by a flood of inventions and the accumulation of capital which, in new forms, constituted enormous power with which to produce wealth. Innovation was in the air. People were searching for new ways of producing goods at cheaper cost. The conveyor belt was born. Mass production based on the division of labour and the use of mechanical power could have raised the living standards of everybody. Sadly, for the workers, this was not to be:

... without the increase in productive power that is due to industrialization the rise in real wages could not possibly have occurred. The important question is why it was so long delayed. There is no doubt at all that it was delayed; whether there was a small rise, or an actual fall, in the general level of real wages in England between (say) 1780 and 1840 leaves that issue untouched. It is the lag of wages behind industrialization which is the thing that has to be explained.¹

      Explanations for this have been partial and none have taken into account the regressive effect of land monopoly. The Marxist critique has conditioned us to believe that capital and the motives of its owners constitute the problematic area. The acquisitive greed of the capitalists is held to be responsible for large- scale poverty and deprivation.

      From the outset the modern factory system has been blamed. Men had been severed from a tranquil, pastoral history and the machine was nominated as Enemy No. 1. Yet this was ironical, for the machine was as much a victim of the early years of industrial society as were the men.

      The land monopolists’ ability to periodically exact speculative rents — demanding a portion of tomorrow’s higher level of output today — deterred new capital formation. If this hypothesis is correct, it should solve a curious mystery: why the cotton kings of Lancashire were strangely reluctant to expand their businesses by enthusiastically adopting the power loom during the first long-run trade cycle in industrial history. By untangling the webb which shrouds this phenomenon we expect to reveal the inner processes at work in the imperfectly-free market which shackled the machine and postponed the prospect of prosperity for the men who owned or worked with them.

      It was over tea with some friends in a hostelry in Matlock, Derbyshire, in 1784, that the Rev. Edmund Cartwright, a country parson and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, resolved to invent a power loom which would take the backache out of weaving cotton. Hitherto, weaving had been by hand in little cellars and country cottages. But with the invention of the spinning jenny, the manufacturers from Manchester to Glasgow were producing yarn at an unprecedented rate. Output was threatening to race ahead of the capacity to turn it into cloth. This was a problem for new technology to solve, and when he returned to his home in Nottingham, Cartwright set to work on a lathe. He soon produced the first mechanical device for weaving cotton, a major technical breakthrough which promised astonishing results for the leading industry in Britain. Yet it was to be four decades before the manufacturers took up mechanical weaving on a serious scale. Why? Although more efficient than hand-weaving the apparent lack of interest in the invention was attributed by observers at that time to the competition from low-wage hand-weavers. Mr Brougham addressed his fellow Members of the House of Commons in 1817 in these terms:

It is now found, for the first time in the history of mankind, so low are wages fallen, so great is the pressure of distress, that manual labour is making reprisals on machinery, standing a successful competition with it, beating it out of the market, and precluding the use of an engine, far from costly in itself, which saves three labourers in four. The further introduction of the power loom is actually stopped by the low rate of weavers’ wages.²

This attempt at an explanation is unconvincing. It is true that this was a period of hunger marches and demands from the cotton weavers for a legally- enforced minimum living wage; a time when brave cavalrymen with swords drawn charged and killed defenceless protestors at Peterloo, in Manchester. But the argument is inconsistent with the timing. In 1808, one estimate put the number of factories using the power loom as only 28 or 30.³ In 1813 there were about 2,400 power looms in the UK; in 1820 there were a mere 14,150. But then, in the next decade, the number escalated to about 55,000 in 1829.⁴ Why, in the third decade of the 19th century — when wages were still low — did entrepreneurs suddenly find the power loom an attractive proposition ?⁵

The cotton weavers’ wages were low, but this was not due to their having to compete with machines. If anything, the higher output of machine production should have raised wages, and for this there is evidence.⁶ One major reason for the level of wages was the competition from migrant Irish peasants, who could learn the weaving technique quickly and were willing to accept lower wages than Englishmen.⁷

Brougham’s explanation is also unconvincing because it implies that the entrepreneurs were making sufficient profits — thanks to the low rate of wages and piece rates — to justify continued production under the existing system. This was not the case.⁸ Nor does a change in consumer demand offer an explanation. If the foreign markets were restricted during the Napoleonic war, they were not much better when peace came: an impoverished Europe did not act as a significant stimulant to output in the 1820s. A minor boom in 1825 was preceded and followed by business recessions. Yet there was a marked switch to power looms during this decade.

Equally unsatisfactory is the suggestion by Halévy that the rate of take-up of power looms could have been retarded by the threats against the machines from the handweavers.⁹ Weavers were no more vigorous in their protests than other groups of workers who, before or since then, believed that their livelihoods were jeopardised by the introduction of machinery; and threats from workers in agricultural or other manufacturing sectors did not deter capitalists from introducing their innovations if there was a profit to be made.

      Even less plausible is Halévy’s main explanation, that manufacturers would not invest in the power loom because existing capital equipment had not been exhausted. In fact, it is difficult to understand how he could have advanced this argument at all. After describing how the cotton manufacturers had readily adopted machines for spinning the yarn, he continued:

For the weavers, however,