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Lancashire was once the Cotton Capital of the world. Raw cotton came in to Liverpool docks and was sold on the Exchange. In the beginning, it was then transported to cottages all over the county where whole families, including the children, would clean, card, spin and weave it. The finished cloth was then sold on the Manchester Exchange. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution new machines saw the work transferred from home to factory. It was said that Lancashire could produce enough cotton before breakfast to supply the UK market, with the remainder of the day's supply going overseas. Read the first hand accounts from local people, and look at the remarkable collection of contemporary photographs.
The Lancashire cotton industry doubtless counts among the most thoroughly researched industries in Britain. Cotton processing has attracted attention both as the pioneer of industrialization and the harbinger of industrial decline, in many ways typifying the development of the British economy from unchallenged global leader to the demise of large sectors of its manufacturing industry. Yet among the spate of book and articles published about the industry, there is a conspicuous lacuna. Gender, though rarely addressed specifically, permeates the industry's historiography nonetheless. This study tackles head-on the notion of gender within the cotton industry during the period 1880-1914, not so much to trace its effects on the industry itself, but instead concentrating on the ways gender radicalized particularly the female workers in the Lancashire mills. In so doing, it promotes the view that it was women weavers' experience of the way in which gender inequality in the labour process clashed with varying degrees of inequality in the other spheres of their lives that caused many of them to organize for the franchise. Their experience of equality in the labour process both sensitized them to inequality elsewhere and empowered them to fight against it by showing it to be a product of society rather than nature. 'Drawing on the examples provided by disenfranchized working-class men and middle-class women alike, they accounted for inequality in terms of their exclusion from the polity. In the process of holding their own against male co-workers, supervisory staff, employers, labour activists, politicians, and even many middle-class women, they evolved their own version of working-class femininity, which differed in important ways from the female domesticity that had a vibrant existence in labour rhetoric, but rarely beyond.
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.
This book examines the decline of the cotton textiles industry, which defined Britain as an industrial nation, from its peak in the late nineteenth century to the state of the industry at the end of the twentieth century. Focusing on the owners and managers of cotton businesses, the authors examine how they mobilised financial resources; their attitudes to industry structure and technology; and their responses to the challenges posed by global markets. The origins of the problems which forced the industry into decline are not found in any apparent loss of competitiveness during the long nineteenth century but rather in the disastrous reflotation after the First World War. As a consequence of these speculations, rationalisation and restructuring became more difficult at the time when they were most needed, and government intervention led to a series of partial solutions to what became a process of protracted decline. In the post-1945 period, the authors show how government policy encouraged capital withdrawal rather than encouraging the investment needed for restructuring. The examples of corporate success since the Second World War – such as David Alliance and his Viyella Group – exploited government policy, access to capital markets, and closer relationships with retailers, but were ultimately unable to respond effectively to international competition and the challenges of globalisation. The chapters in this book were originally published in Business History and Accounting, Business and Financial History.