The Productivity of Capital in the Lancashire Cotton Industry during the Nineteenth Century 1

The growth of the Lancashire cotton industry has supplied generations of historians with illustrative material to depict labour-saving technical change. Capital-saving innovations, it is said, were hardly very important until the close of the nineteenth century. Whatever the facts for the modern period, technical improvements in the heyday of the cotton industry surely raised not only capital per man but also capital per unit of output. In the absence of reliable statistics on the capital stock this can only be surmised, but it is not on that account any less widely held.