This paper offers a new perspective on the emergence of machinery in the cotton spinning trade during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It does so by examining the interplay between economic, political, and national interests within the early Hanoverian state. Changes in trading relationships between textile producers across the three kingdoms of England/Wales, Ireland, and Scotland created escalating supply-side problems, which, by the 1760s, would precipitate a quest for solutions based on new technologies.A mong competing interpretations of the first industrial revolution, whether as a process of unbalanced growth, propelled by a few, technologically dynamic sectors, or as a more broadly based and incremental sequence of change, the primacy of cotton textiles as the paradigm example of precocious mechanization remains uncontested. Narratives continue to acknowledge the fundamental discontinuity that occurred in the spinning of cotton yarn in the second half of the eighteenth century. Within two or three decades from the 1760s, a process longestablished in a confined proto-industrial region in the north-west of England, small in scale, and domestic in character, was restructured along factory lines, employing machinery of increasing size and complexity. 2 That transformation has long been recognized as one of the key episodes in technological and industrial history, not merely for Britain, but for the world economy as a whole. 3 Despite this, our understanding of why machinery emerged in that industry, in that region, and at that time remains seriously incomplete. This is, in part, a consequence of the frustratingly thin documentation surrounding the appearance of the key innovations, compounded by confusing claim and counter-claim concerning their original authorship, and a paucity of knowledge about the processes of technological 1 The authors would like to thank three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.