Spinning the industrial revolution

Abstract

The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's 'high wage economy' view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such 'high wage economy' in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low-productivity, low-wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.T he handloom weaver and the coal miner are the tragic heroes of nineteenth-and twentieth-century British economic history, their skills rendered redundant, their livelihoods decimated, and their communities destroyed by the onward march of economic progress. One figure is missing from this iconic company: the hand spinner. The spinner shared a similar fate, condemned by the technological changes of the late eighteenth century, the demise of her trade perhaps even more brutal than the later and prolonged agonies of the weavers or the miners. Yet until recently hand spinners have been overlooked in the historiography of industrial change, partly because they were almost exclusively women and children who spun alongside domestic and agricultural work, making their occupation nearly invisible. 1 A spotlight has suddenly been shone on these long-neglected workers by a new interpretation of the industrial revolution.The currently popular explanation of why Britain was first to industrialize is Allen's 'high wage economy' thesis. It claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel in Britain, but not in Europe or Asia, incentivized innovation and the adoption of techniques that enabled Britain to access a new and superior growth

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