The Spinning Jenny and the Industrial Revolution: A Reappraisal

Gragnolati, Ugo; Moschella, Daniele; Pugliese, Emanuele

doi:10.1017/s0022050711001604

Cited by 27 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Styles, ‘Fashion, textiles and the origins’, has emphasized the resort to machinery as a way of overcoming the technical challenges that the industry faced, while Humphries, ‘Lure of aggregates’, has claimed that mechanization, especially the development of the factory, was motivated by the desire to use cheaper child and female labour in a way that ensured discipline and quality control. Other authors have provided an internal critique by questioning Allen's profitability computations; see Gragnolati, Moschella, and Pugliese, ‘Spinning jenny’. There are links here to an older literature which saw mechanization and the factory as the product of the search for either standardization (see Szostak, Role of transportation ) or control (see Marglin, ‘What bosses do’).…”

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confidence: 99%

Spinning the industrial revolution

Humphries

Schneider

2018

The Economic History Review

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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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confidence: 99%

Spinning the industrial revolution

Humphries

Schneider

2018

The Economic History Review

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“…Hence, when a spinner bought a jenny with which she could produce three times as much yarn per hour as with a wheel, the spinner did not triple her production but rather produced the same amount and saved the two thirds of her time previously devoted to spinning. This assumption has been criticised by Gragnolati et al (2011Gragnolati et al ( , 2013. They argue that it is not economical to make an investment in a technology with increasing returns to scale and at the same time to reduce the quantity of labour applied.…”

Section: The Profitability Of the Spinning Jenny In Catalonia At The mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, they demonstrate that by maintaining the quantity of labour and, thus, increasing production, the jenny would have been profitable in France in all but the worst case scenario. Thus, they conclude that Allen's model is incomplete and factor prices alone cannot explain the delay in the adoption of the spinning jenny in France (Gragnolati et al 2011). In fact, in a subsequent study they develop a model in which factor prices and the size of demand are combined to predict precisely the timing of the adoption of the jenny both in Britain and France (Gragnolati et al 2013).…”

Section: The Profitability Of the Spinning Jenny In Catalonia At The mentioning

confidence: 99%

Wages and Prices in Early Catalan Industrialisation

Sabartés

Galarraga

2014

SSRN Journal

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Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British Industrial Revolution in the second third of the nineteenth century. The roots of this industrialisation process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became successfully integrated in international trade and the region enjoyed an intensification of its agrarian and proto-industrial activities. These capitalist developments were subsequently reinforced by a successful printed calico manufacturing business concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny had occurred earlier in the 1790s. In this paper, in line with Allen (2009aAllen ( , 2009b, we explore whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, we supply series of real wages in Barcelona for the period 1500-1808 in line with studies conducted within the 'Great Divergence' debate. Second, we undertake a comparative analysis of the relationship between the prices of labour and capital. Finally, we focus on the cotton spinning sector to determine the potential profitability of the adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. We find that although Catalonia was not a high wage economy in the way that Britain was in the second half of the eighteenth century, evidence from the cotton spinning sector confirms the relevance of relative factor prices in the adoption of new technology. Within the booming sector of cotton after the 1780s, high wages created strong incentives for adopting the labour-saving spinning jenny. JEL Codes: N00, N33, N63, N83.

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“…His analysis has been challenged for employing questionable assumptions about earnings in both countries, as well as for its assumptions about working practices. 15 Questionable, too, is Mokyr's suggestion that special characteristics of cotton fibres made their mechanical spinning an easier problem to solve than mechanically spinning flax or wool. In fact, the opposite was true.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century Cotton Spinning

Styles¹

2020

Textile History

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The Spinning Jenny and the Industrial Revolution: A Reappraisal

Cited by 27 publications

References 7 publications

Spinning the industrial revolution

Spinning the industrial revolution

Wages and Prices in Early Catalan Industrialisation

The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century Cotton Spinning

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