ABSTRACT
Wool textiles were the first global consumer goods industry of England, though they have been overshadowed after 1780 by the even greater success of cotton. Between 1750 and 1830, West Yorkshire became the most dynamic and successful wool textile region ever seen. Links to the old trading system based around London had helped to start growth off, but new markets and new products, marketed and shipped independently, became the rule, with production set within an atomised domestic network. Proto-industrialisation theory briefly seemed to have defined the process whereby this system was transformed into factory-based mass production, but few historians who have worked closely on the north of England now accept this model of a merchantdominated, poverty-stricken, extensive system that depended upon agricultural failure for its labour force. The Yorkshire manufacturing region certainly never had a mass of people excluded from farming, and it became increasingly geographically concentrated. It became a cluster of specialised production districts which collectively produced woollen and worsted cloth of all qualities, instead of low quality woollens with little diversity or fashionability. Merchants traditionally held back from manufacturing, dealing instead with large numbers of independent clothiers in public markets, and urbanisation came late and in a fragmented manner.1
