ABSTRACT
One particular occupation, that of handloom weaving, has attracted major attention from historians, and every account of the Industrial Revolution devotes space to this group of workers whose varying fortunes seem to encapsulate all the problems, all the strains and stresses associated with that great change. The reason for so much attention is not hard to find. Handloom weaving was the largest industry in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century and the third largest of all occupations after agriculture and domestic service: weaving of cotton, wool, worsted, silk and linen was widely spread over England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, providing employment for men, women and children on a variety of fabrics at varying levels of skill, while the finished cloth was overwhelmingly Britain’s largest export, responsible for more than half the value of our foreign trade. Yet within this great industry the handloom weavers first rose to a brief prosperity, followed by gradual, albeit irregular, decline and ultimate extinction within the space of little more than the two generations covered by the years 1790 to 1850. In the words of a recent historian generally favourable to the consequences of economic change, the handloom weavers are ‘the leading example of technological unemployment during English industrialization’. 1 For contemporaries the increasing misery of the weavers, exacerbated by the adoption of power looms and the factory system, produced a series of official investigations and aroused a major public debate about the nature and effects of machinery as Britain entered the ‘machine age’. For the first time, the country faced a problem of large-scale redundancy in an age when belief in competition and the efficacy of the free market was becoming paramount. Should workers be protected in some way, should the machine be restrained, or should the members of a doomed craft merely be taught to accept the inevitability of progress, to ‘flee from the trade, and to beware of leading their children into it as they would beware the commission of the most atrocious of crimes’. 2
