The Factory and the Industrial Revolution

The orthodox account of the Industrial Revolution concentrates on the rise of steam power and machinery and the spread of the factory system. In a recent text-book, surveying modern British economic history, Donald McCloskey maintains that ‘ingenuity governed the Industrial Revolution’. 1 Symbolic of this growth of ‘ingenuity’ were the great innovations associated with cotton textiles, the growth of Manchester as ‘Cottonopolis’ and the forging of the cotton factory with the Industrial Revolution. There is, however, a body of opinion that is more cautious about the notion of an Industrial Revolution based on rapid technological change closely related to the cotton industry. Its sophisticated expression is found in the works of Berg 2 and Samuel, 3 where it is argued that the process of technological change was rather narrow and limited and the changes in technology were not widely diffused until well after the conventional completion date of the Industrial Revolution, at mid-nineteenth century. In particular Samuel has argued that the concentration on cotton and iron has tended to foreclose on the analysis of other sectors of the economy which continued to use non-mechanised and’ non-factory systems of production late into the nineteenth century. 4 An explicit defence of the factory will be made in Chapter 6 ; here we intend to explore the relationship between the factory and the notion of an Industrial Revolution, and to spell out our general methodological approach associated with the idea of business structure.