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By Root 665 0

even backfire. To get round the law, East India merchants began to import raw cotton instead, and entrepreneurs started ‘putting out’ cotton to the cottages of rural spinsters and weavers to be made into cloth for export or even, mixed with a little linen or wool to keep it legal (the Calico Act was eventually repealed in 1774), for domestic sale. They had already been ‘putting out’ wool for decades, stealing a march on the Low Countries, where powerful craft guilds had prevented ‘putting out’ by smashing looms in rural cottages. The putters-out were clothiers with a reputation for loan sharking who made a living mostly by supplying raw wool to workers in their cottage homes and paying to collect finished cloth later, minus any interest on loans. The wives and daughters of farmers, and their menfolk in certain seasons, were in effect prepared to add to family income by selling labour as well as produce. Sometimes they found themselves in debt, because they borrowed money from the putters-out to equip themselves.

You can see these folk as desperate wage slaves driven off communal land by enclosure acts, the division of common land into private plots that gradually spread across most of England between about 1550 and 1800. But this is misleading. It is more accurate to see the rural textile workers as taking the first step on the ladder of producing and consuming, of specialisation and exchange. They were escaping self-sufficiency into the cash economy. It is true that some people were dispossessed of their livelihoods by enclosure, but enclosure actually increased paid employment for farm labourers, so it was for most a shift from low-grade self-sufficiency to slightly better production and consumption. Besides, Irish and Scottish as well as English migrants flocked to the textile districts to join the cottage industries. These were people giving up peasant drudgery for the chance of joining the cash economy, albeit at a low wage and for hard work. People were marrying younger and consequently giving birth to more children.

The result was that the very people who were joining the industry as workers would soon begin to be its customers. Suddenly the rising income of the average British worker met the falling cost of cotton cloth and suddenly everybody could afford to wear (and wash) cotton underwear. The historian Edward Baines noted in 1835 that the ‘wonderful cheapness of cotton goods’ was now benefiting the ‘bulk of the people’: ‘a country-wake in the nineteenth century may display as much finery as a drawing room in the eighteenth.’ The capitalist achievement, reflected Joseph Schumpeter a century later, ‘does not typically consist of providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.’

But increasing supply was not easy, because even the remotest Pennine valleys and Welsh marches were now thickly settled with the cottages of weavers and spinsters, transport was dear and some of the workers were earning good enough wages to take weekend holidays, occasionally even drinking their pay away till Monday night, preferring consumption to extra income. As the twentieth-century economist Colin Clark put it, ‘Leisure has a real value even to very poor people.’

So, stuck between booming demand and stalling supply, the putters-out and their suppliers were ripe customers for any kind of productivity-enhancing invention, and with such an incentive, the inventors soon obliged. John Kay’s flying shuttle, James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, Samuel Crompton’s mule – these were all just milestones on a continuous road of incrementally improving productivity. The jenny worked up to twenty times as fast as a spinning wheel and produced a more consistent yarn, but it was still operated entirely by human muscle power. Yet by 1800 the jenny was already obsolete, because the frame was several hundred times as fast. Frames were increasingly powered by watermills. Ten years after that the ‘mule’, a machine that combined