ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the manufacture of leather and leather goods constituted, by value, the second or third largest manufacturing industry in Britain, with an output valued at between £10·5 million and £12 million. In 1837, McCulloch ranked leather still below only cotton, wool and possibly iron, but the rapid growth of other industries during the third quarter of the century began to reduce the relative importance of the leather industry (D. Macpherson, 1805, p. 15; McCulloch, 1837, p. 118). Even in 1881 one knowledgeable tanner reckoned that leather manufacturing was ‘fifth in importance among the trades of this Kingdom’ ( Rimmer, 1960, p. 119). Perhaps the industry’s relative decline explains why historians have neglected its history, for not until the second half of the century did technical and organisational developments bring about a transformation in any way comparable with the Industrial Revolution as it affected other major British industries. None the less, the preceding decades witnessed growth and some development in response to changes in the size and character of the market for final products, as well as to pressures which stimulated the search for cost-reducing innovations.
