ABSTRACT
The textile industries form a fascinating terrain for the acting out of the human drama of technological change. The technologies fundamental to any production process interacted in a fatal way with the lives of men and women at work, and the community around them. New technologies meant the pinnacles of wealth and success to some; destitution to others. The social divisions they created might appear within one small community, or provoke a great regional split. New technologies were resisted or welcomed; they were stamped with age and gender as were the older methods which had gone before. They created some new jobs, but they also meant unemployment in a whole new way to many others. New methods, new machines did not just mean temporary bad times; they could eradicate a trade and with it the assumption of work for the rest of a person’s lifetime. Along with this, the skills which formed a part of any technology were developed, cherished, protected and fought for. With this in view, we turn to the story of technological change in the eighteenth-century textile industries.
