ABSTRACT
The experience of growth, decline and transformation of the eighteenth-century textile industries frequently passes for the whole story of Britain’s economic revolution. Of course, this means a very one-sided, and indeed blinkered, view of economic fortunes and prospects in the period. But we cannot deny the significance of textiles to the British industrial experience. Behind their significance, too, lay a richly textured saga of growth and decline, small-scale industry and large-, home and factory, manual labour and machinery. For the textile industries include far more than the cotton manufacture: there was the experience of work in wool and worsted, linen, silk and framework knitting. How were these other branches of the textile industry organized in the eighteenth century? What were their tools and techniques, and what happened to them? We shall here compare the progress and decline of several branches of the textile industry in the eighteenth century-not just the success stories, but the failures and those which ‘also ran’.
