ABSTRACT
The relevance of the cotton industry to the British economy in the period from the 1770s to the beginning of the First World War can hardly be overrated. The commercial crisis of 1873 ushered in the next phase, dubbed the 'Indian summer' by historians of the cotton industry. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the British cotton industry had come to be characterized by a high degree of regional concentration, coupled with a marked diversity of local specialization. The structure of British industry facilitated the externalization of industrial relations through delegation to an organization. Although the bulk of nineteenth-century factory legislation concerned hours of work and the age of entry into factory work of juvenile labour, other aspects of the labour process were regulated as well. The workforce in the Lancashire cotton industry was divided by age as well as gender. Female cotton weavers' pay compared favourably, too, with women's earnings in other textile industries.
