ABSTRACT
THE CALTON WEAVER OVER THE BROW OF the hill from the main street of the old town of Lanark, tightly tucked in to the twisting cleft carved by the upper Clyde, is the nexus of buildings we know as New Lanark, the cotton mills and battleship-like tenements, built from 1785 on, which mark the new industrial Scotland. It was made possible by the economic development of the previous generation, by the organization of capital in the banking system, by the skills built up in the fine linen industry of the west of Scotland and the markets it had created at home and overseas. Even the limited improvements of Scotland’s transport system mattered. Though in the 1780s the canal system, such as it eventually was, was still only in construction, the roads were now capable of regular cart and carriage use and the Clyde had been deepened. West Indian cotton was available in increasing quantities. But a mill on the scale of the new big ones of the 1780s and ’90s (in the latter decade New Lanark gave work to over 1,300) could not have been built without the new English invention, Crompton’s spinning mule of 1779, which made possible mass production of really fine threads for the popular muslins of the day. The Industrial Revolution, which arrived in Scotland in the 1780s, was a special variant of the tremendous changes taking place in England, starting with the breakthrough of the cotton and iron industries into rapid growth. In Scotland it was at first one-sided, confined to cotton. Though Scotland already had a single great modern ironworks at Carron, it would be over forty years before her iron industry followed cotton into general and steady growth, and growth is as
important as industrialization in a definition of the Industrial Revolution. Even in cotton the change was for a long time confined to spinning: weaving continued to be a hand industry and a profitable skill for those who possessed it. So we have, for instance, in the description of Neilston parish in 1792 in the Statistical Account, a picture of the new and bustling cotton industry: two cotton mills already built employing together more than three hundred people, over half of them children, a bleachfield for the cloth and 152 handlooms at work. The minister points out the results of all this; expensive habits such as tea and sugar for breakfast, the children working in the mill instead of going to school, their minds ‘contracted’, their lungs full of cotton fluff, and their skin impregnated with smelly machine oil. In New Lanark and in Nielston one could already see the shape of things to come. The Industrial Revolution was to concentrate the population in the central valley of lowland Scotland, particularly in the western half of it. The workers were the surplus labour of the countryside. We do not know how many of them were pushed out in the reorganization of farming, and how many more came for the higher income available in industry. Even though improved farming was labour intensive, many parishes in the Statistical Account in the 1790s report a slight drop in population and attribute it to the throwing together of holdings to make large farms. Scottish tenant right had been so lacking that eviction would not produce the clamour that enclosure sometimes did in England. The absence of protest is not entirely adequate as evidence for the belief that people left the land because they were drawn to the towns rather than because they were pushed out. In any case some of those who came ‘voluntarily’ may have done so from a pressing sense of economic necessity. There were areas in the Highlands in which the future prospects even in the 1790s were clearly not in proportion to the population expansion. The early population of one Bastille-like tenement in New Lanark was drawn from the poorhouses of Edinburgh and Glasgow and from a ship, taking emigrants from the Highlands to the New World, which was forced in at Greenock. In this closely organized industrial village they would learn the new disciplines of factory life, the importance of regularity and time-keeping, of wages which came by the week instead of the annual system of farming, of food from the store instead of the field, of a life in which small children were profitable to their parents. The block of oneroomed family homes still preserved in the Livingstone memorial at Blantyre, lower down the Clyde, is evidence of the social discipline under which the early industrial workers and their families lived.
