The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (24 page)

Improved Textile and Pottery Making

The 1820s mark the beginning of the age of steam that changed the face of the earth—its atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and surface. A hundred years earlier, world population had begun the ascent that didn’t peak until the end of the twentieth century. Prompted in part by the growing number of mouths to feed, bodies to cloth, families to shelter, factories to fuel the voracious appetite for fossil fuel went long unrecognized. Looked at retroactively, the cascading effects of thousands of unintended consequences from the successive technologies of industry were horrendous. It took another century and a half for people to realize that the effects of the collective actions of billions of rather small two-legged animals had actually blown through local and regional limits to become global. Statistics carry the message: Between the closing decades of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, artificial energy made laborers two hundred times more efficient. One expert has calculated that global output grew fortyfold in the twentieth century alone.
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But that is to get ahead of the story that gathered force during the nineteenth century with engineers constantly fiddling to improve the design of Watt’s engine.

Making beautiful things also became easier with steam. Since the sixteenth century, Europeans had been importing porcelain from China. These delicately wrought and decorated pieces put to shame the heavy crockery that European potteries turned out. They also showed what it was possible to achieve. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, firms in Sèvres and Limoges, France, and Staffordshire, England, took on the challenge of matching the quality of China ware. Josiah Wedgwood led this endeavor. Born into a potter’s family, he grew up familiar with the casual organization of work in the potteries of Staffordshire. As in most crafts at the time, workers took off for wakes, weddings, fairs, and personal bouts of drunkenness. Hours were irregular, and the master potter, who typically had a shop with eight or nine journeymen and apprentices, was not much of a taskmaster. Every potter knew most of the maneuvers that turned clay into a pot, and with rare exceptions, they accomplished these tasks with indifferent success. A legendary figure in the history of industrialization, Wedgwood looked at these features as a challenge for reform.

Wedgwood approached pottery making like a scientist, an artist, and a taskmaster. He experimented with clay and quartz, blended metallic oxides, and invented the pyrometer to measure oven temperatures. He perfected a cream-colored earthenware that even the royal family used. His reputation grew from his genius at organizing his factory and molding his employees into expert craftsmen much as they molded clay into plates, bowls, and cups. Truly a visionary, Wedgwood imagined what would be ideal and then bent every effort to achieve it. Contrary to customary work routines in the potteries, he decided that his different lines would be produced in separate rooms and that potters, raised up to do every task, would instead concentrate on a single one. For producing colored ware in Wedgwood’s factory, for instance, painters, grinders, printers, liners, borderers, burnishers, and scourers worked together in a single room, along with the modelers, mold makers, firemen, porters, and packers who belonged to all the divisions.
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Wedgwood took the mixed bag of humanity on his payroll and shaped it into a modern work force. He used bells and clocks to instill punctuality. Exact record keeping enabled him to identify and fine refractory employees. He introduced women into his plants, infuriating his male employees even though they were paid substantially more than the women. He had no tolerance for the easy work habits of his father’s generation, but he did take care of his workers’ material needs, paying them high wages, looking after their health, and building houses to replace the huts that they were used to living in.

Not long after Wedgwood opened up his new factory in the northwest of England, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia placed an order for a thousand pieces of his famous creamware. When he read that the empress wanted her plates and bowls decorated with beautiful landscapes as well as depictions of ancient ruins and magnificent houses, Wedgwood realized that he didn’t have the artists to do this kind of work; nor would it be easy to train the ones he had. Somehow he was able to send 952 dishes to the empress. This close call with failure convinced him to start a school to train designers and decorators from an early age. Perhaps nothing demonstrates better his tendency to think in the long term than this willingness to shape adolescents into skilled craftsmen and women. Visitors to China had reported in amazement that seventy different pairs of hands worked on each plate issuing from a Chinese factory. The difference between Wedgwood’s organization and this extreme division of labor in China was that while Wedgwood wanted quality, he insisted upon efficiency.
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In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Wedgwood shipped tons of his creamware, black basalts, and jasperware to Poland, Denmark, Italy, South America, Germany, France, and the Low Countries. His was the standard of the day for style, artistry, glazes, material, and production facilities. When he installed steam engines into his pottery at the end of the eighteenth century, the modern ceramics industry was born. Wedgwood also helped spur England’s canal-building mania in the last decade of the eighteenth century, giving early proof of the mutually enhancing relationship of industry and transportation.
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Nature favored England with many rivers; canals enhanced their convenience.

Like the Staffordshire potteries before Wedgwood arrived on the scene, the English textile industry had clung to old production routines. Some workers were gathered in factories run by waterpower, but many men still worked at home with the help of their families and a few apprentices. Blacksmiths and clockmakers fashioned the tools with wood and a few iron parts.
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It was an industry ripe for industrialization, and cotton was the fabric that held out the best hope of success. Its fibers were easier to work with than those of wool, silk, or flax, and its market was huge. The goal was to mechanize the movements made by the hands and arms of the spinners and weavers.

Four men, working independently, transformed textile making with their inventions of the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the power loom, all designed to speed up the process of turning wool into thread and thread into cloth. Their differing success epitomizes the mixed fate of inventors. Both James Hargreaves and Thomas Arkwright came up with the spinning jenny, a simple device that multiplied the spindles of yarn spun by one wheel. Once it was in operation, the number of additional spindles went quickly from eight to eighty. Hargreaves was a weaver, but Arkwright had better connections to backers and was able to set up a factory where he successfully brought six hundred workers, many of them women and children, under one roof. Edmund Cartwright, a country clergyman and graduate of Oxford, became absorbed with the weaving process after visiting a cotton spinning mill. A year later, in 1785, he patented a power loom that used steam power to operate a regular loom for making cloth. It became the prototype of the modern loom. Although Cartwright built a weaving mill, he went bankrupt. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which, as the name suggests, combined two inventions, the spinning jenny and the power loom. He had to sell the rights to his mule because he was too poor to pay for the patenting process.

Steam power gave the British the competitive edge in textile making, particularly cotton. They could undersell almost all Indian and Chinese producers. The market for cotton was global, and England’s fabrics were so cheap that they were able to break open many of the world’s protected markets. The boom in cotton sales put a premium on dyes as well, most of them produced in the New World. Brazilwood delivered a red dye, as did the madder plant, which came from Turkey. Human inventiveness is wonderful; somehow someone discovered that the dried female body of an insect found on Mexican cactus, cochineal, could produce a brilliant scarlet color. It became part of the palette for dyeing cottons. Indigo, a beautiful shade of blue, originated in India. Before the age of chemical dyes, colors were hard to come by, and wearing brilliant shades of clothing signaled wealth. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, one of the few female innovators of the period, successfully experimented with the cultivation of indigo in South Carolina. Now both climates of the colony could produce something for the world market: the wetlands with rice and the drier upland with indigo. These brilliant dyes turned yet one more luxury into a pleasure enjoyed by shopgirls and their beaux. Ordinary people could now wear purple, once the color of kings, but not without raising eyebrows at first.

Steam turned textile manufacturing into the principal industry of the nineteenth century. Cotton could be grown in more places than sugar could be, but the places were still limited. Americans didn’t start raising short-staple cotton until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. After that, demand became ferocious, growing twentyfold in fifty years. At last the mills of Manchester had a steady supply of cotton as settlers and their slaves moved into the virgin lands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. When the North successfully blockaded cotton shipments to England during the Civil War, Great Britain turned to Egypt, where the government had been promoting cotton production. Still later the availability of cheap power to pump water long distances made profitable cotton growing in China as well as parts of Arizona and California. But this is to get way ahead of the story of capitalism in the eighteenth century.

The Appearance of Factories

Workers had been long gathered in breweries, shipyards, blast furnaces, mines, and paper mills. With the industrialization of textile making and ceramics, the factory became the symbol of a new industrial era, though factory workers remained a minor part of the diverse work force of modern societies. The poet William Blake memorably called them “dark Satanic Mills.” Those using waterpower dotted the English countryside, but most steam-powered ones clustered around England’s coal deposits in the Midlands. Factories were dark, dirty, and dangerous places, slightly better for employees than were mines. Women and children worked alongside men in mines, moving coal by basketfuls through long, poorly ventilated tunnels. Whether powered by water or steam, factories brought to an end the autonomy of the family working together at home. Now owners or supervisors could monitor their employees’ performances as they coordinated their routines, though kinsmen continued at first to work together in factory units. The increasing complexity of the machinery and consumers’ insistence upon standard products made supervision more and more important.
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Bringing their workers into one location, employers could impose twelve-hour workdays, which became the norm in the nineteenth century.

Wedgwood’s success brought jobs to Staffordshire. His hometown grew fivefold during his lifetime, but other timesaving inventions threw men and women out of work. All the innovations dramatically altered the lives of workers. Taking the long view, economists can show that making goods cheaper usually ends up creating employment by releasing demand for other commodities. The pain comes in the short run, and many an English worker reacted to that pain with bitterness. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Yorkshire laborers whose families had sheared sheep for generations smashed the shearing frames that were undermining their way of life. They took the name of an earlier resister, Ned Lud. These Luddites declared war on the machines that violated venerable work routines and banished comfort and conviviality from the workplace.

Actually woolen clothmakers in the west of England had earlier embarked on a serious effort to thwart clothiers from introducing the spinning jenny. Menacingly, this device could do the work of twenty spinners. These craftsmen had the advantage of a long tradition of regulation in the woolen trade, so they called upon Parliament to enforce laws that had been on the books for generations. After a decade of petitioning, lobbying, and pamphleteering clothmakers finally secured a parliamentary inquiry. These workers were fighting to retain an old and stable way of life; their employers, to enhance profits by saving labor costs. The workers harked back to once-honored rules that inhibited innovations; the manufacturers argued that the laws were archaic and self-defeating. It was a new twist on the much older wrangle between tradition and reform, continuity and change.

Parliament repealed the old statutes regulating the cloth trade in 1809. Two years later Luddite militancy animated thousands of laborers across a wide swath of England. While clothmakers were smashing stocking frames, farm workers attacked another invention, the mole plow used to make draining channels with a steel ball. As the name suggests, it created a track resembling that of a mole, the animal that raises the dirt slightly as it moves just below the earth’s surface. The government sent an armed force of twelve thousand soldiers to quell the rural riots, a force greater than that which the Duke of Wellington took with him to Spain to fight Napoleon. Parliament followed up by adding frame breaking to the list of capital crimes, which already numbered in the hundreds. Over the century that spanned the Industrial Revolution there were more than four hundred instances of direct action against the pace and scope of workplace changes in Great Britain. The destruction of property evoked savage responses from landlords, manufacturers, financiers, and merchants, who exercised a firm control on the British government. Nowhere are that control and the values that underpinned it more conspicuous than during the Irish famine of 1846–1848. While hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were starving, the Irish sent food to prosperous England because the laws prevented their feeding themselves from the product of acres owned by absentee landlords.
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