PH_Industry

Introduction

Industry

Agriculture

Population

Appendices

Recommended Reading

INDUSTRY

Factories and other forms of industry

Several sectors of manufacturing saw significant transformations that impacted upon the lives of many thousands of workers. Perhaps the most dramatic change was the rise of the steam powered factory which lay behind the remarkable productivity gains in the textile sector. The image of smoking factory chimneys dominating the skyline of many northern towns by the mid nineteenth century, together with the long hours and poor conditions of work experienced by many factory workers (including children) are central to our image of the period. Yet factories were limited to the textile sector (together with some pottery works) in this period and such buildings never became the location of work for most people in industrial society.

The Cloth Dresser. Source: George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire

Even in textiles, factories existed alongside other more scattered forms of workshop and household production using hand tools and small- scale technologies. The manufacturing sector, even in the most technologically advanced industries, such as cotton, was characterised by plants of various sizes and levels of sophistication, often linked by subcontracting in which larger firms employed an array of smaller ones for particular jobs or processes.

The domestic system: advantages

The domestic system whereby manufacturing was done by family labour working at home expanded apace both before and during the industrial revolution. Its main advantages were cheapness and flexibility. In putting-out systems, which were common, raw materials were distributed to a mass of waged workers working in their own homes. Labour was cheap because there was often little alternative work available in overpopulated parts of the countryside. Putting out merchants could soak up unemployed workers in slack times of the year at very low wages. Many of the cheapest workers in the domestic system were women and children who

Wensley Dale Knitters.
Source: George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire

combined manufacturing with household and childcare tasks to supplement family incomes. They had many important skills which they had learned in the normal course of household self provisioning and which were now harnessed to commercial use in such manufactures as textiles, clothing, hosiery, gloves, rush and straw items and foodstuffs. There were few overhead costs for employers in the putting out system, such as the costs of premises, fuel, or lighting, and workers most often provided and maintained their own tools and equipment.

The domestic system: disadvantages

The disadvantage of dispersed domestic production, compared with factories was that it was difficult to discipline workers and to get them to produce on time, especially at harvest time when agricultural work usually took precedence. It was also impossible for employers to supervise the quality of output and difficult to prevent raw materials being stolen. Keeping back materials for ones own use was often regarded by workers as a perk of the trade but in an increasingly competitive climate, with many putting out merchants competing with each other, such embezzlement ate into profits. Finally, it was of course impossible to introduce technological advances which could not be fitted into the home. Spinning jennies up to 16 spindles were often used in domestic premises, and some silk weavers in the 1840s and 1850s had steam engines installed at the end

Woman Spinning. Source: George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire

of terraced streets to power their looms. Many other intermediate or small scale technologies such as the stamp and press used in the Birmingham button and pin industries were equally at home in domestic and workshop premises as in factories. But extensive use of powered technologies of mass production and the close supervision of specialised labour was impossible as long as domestic industry remained dominant.