ABSTRACT
The importance of the textile industry in defining, describing and determining the nature of the British Industrial Revolution has been established by contemporaries and modern historians alike. In describing the role of child labor in the textile industry, particular attention is given to the cotton industry because many of the inventions and innovations in die production of textiles were first applied to cotton. Children were hired because the macroinventions and innovations in the new textile factories could be classified as either labor intensive technology, labor substituting technology or labor specific technology. In the upper and lower scribbling rooms, there were forty-two and forty-six children, respectively, working as helpers with only ten adult workers in each department. Children and youths worked as both secondary and primary workers in the textile industry, and their contributions were important to the overall operation. Contemporaries gave conflicting reports in the British Parliamentary Papers with regards to the prevalence of family-based employment in the textile industry.
