ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the initiatives of innovative linen merchants to meet new exigencies created by the Napoleonic wars. It explores the recruitment of women weavers during the Napoleonic war in order to assess its economic and social impact. The chapter argues that war conditions presented Irish entrepreneurs with a golden opportunity to snap the link between gender and commercial linen weaving. While women offered industrialists an alternative labor supply of weavers, sufficient raw material had to be secured as well. Raw material for the new flax-spinning mills became a real problem early in the Napoleonic wars. Irish entrepreneurs were knowledgeable about technological breakthroughs in spinning machinery for worsted and linen yarns and had started to adapt the technology to their own machine-building. They read the signs well and lobbied the Irish Linen Board to subsidize their private efforts to protect and expand what was commonly called the nation's staple industry.
