False Economy - Alan Beattie [89]
After another bill was drawn up in 1697 and once again stalled, the protectionists' anger got personal. A demonstration of Spitalfields weavers managed to force its way into the lobby of Parliament, and on its way back to East London tried to break into East India House, the company headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the City of London. Three were jailed. In March, a deputation of three thousand weavers threatened Sir Josiah Child's own house in Wanstead in East London, and in April another demonstration outside East India House ended in a riot and the building was again assaulted.
In 1700, a bill finally passed that banned the wearing of manufactured silks or printed or dyed calicoes from Persia, China, and the East Indies. Some elements of the free trade coalition, such as traders who bought calicoes for re-export to Europe, were placated by the creation of a system of bonded warehouses. Peace returned and all was well with the woolen industry. Or rather, in another pattern to become wearily familiar in trade disputes, it wasn't. No sooner had one hole in the dike been stopped up than another one sprang open. Because imports of plain cotton cloth were still allowed, as a petition to Parliament in 1703 plaintively explained, the Act "hath rather occasioned the figuring, printing and staining of calicoes here in England to the detriment of our woolen manufactures."
An excise duty, or sales tax, on printed cottons and linens was imposed, and then doubled. But still the imports kept coming and the wool and silk weavers suffering. Without the East India Company to blame, they were reduced to venting their fury on the consumers, who had failed dismally to change their predilections as required. The summer of 1719 witnessed numerous incidents of "calico-chasing": gangs of weavers roaming the streets of London, tearing cotton clothes off the backs of hapless female passersby and triumphantly parading their captured trophies around the streets on the tops of poles.
The onslaught of petitions started up again, pinging into Parliament from all corners of the country. Most likely there was some surreptitious central coordination by the well-organized London weavers: the wording of the complaints was suspiciously uniform, and some emanated from towns with no weaving industry at all. Still, it worked. The "Calico Bill" that passed in 1721 showed just how ridiculous a law a truly determined lobby could achieve.
It banned not just the importing but the wearing or use in furniture or furnishings of all printed, painted, or dyed calicoes—except, as a concession to consumers, those unfashionably dyed all blue. It would be tempting to record this for posterity as the all-time historical high-water mark for textile protectionism, were it not outdone by an even more draconian law of the same period in France that made the smuggling of contraband textiles a capital crime on the third offense. Three strikes and you're dead.
I noted at the beginning of this chapter that political protection can defy market forces for decades, or even centuries, if the lobby backing special treatment is sufficiently strong. But when an overwhelmingly superior product comes along, it's hard to keep it out for very long. So it was with the woolens lobby. The ban on imported manufactured cottons merely set English printers to work on linen or fustian (a linen-cotton blend): Scottish linen-makers had managed to get an exception for their product in the Calico Bill.
And in a fine example of necessity being the mother of invention, the compulsory wearing of hot, heavy clothing spurred the development of spinning machinery for English manufacturers to make their own cotton cloth. Twelve years after the bill was passed, John Kay made a significant breakthrough in weaving technology with the creation of the flying shuttle. Within fifty years of that, a trio of inventions—the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the water frame—were on the way to mechanizing textile production. British manufacturers could now beat handmade Indian cloth on grounds of cost as well