Cotton Markets

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
Economic engines are industries that stimulate self-perpetuating demand and the growth of other industries. Sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean required slaves, who needed to be fed during transit from Africa. Thus, rice became a necessity. That in turn led to a demand for slaves in South Carolina.

Similarly, the rise of large cities like London presupposed the development of food surpluses, building materials, and clothing for inhabitants who couldn’t provide themselves with necessities by their own labor. Textiles have been a driver of economic growth since the Middle Ages when Flemish weavers in Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres needed yarn, and English landowners raised sheep to produce wool for export. [1]

Bubonic plague decimated populations of Europe. It entered England in 1348 and killed 40 to 60% of the population. [2] The disease spread to Lancashire in September of the next year, where it spared the wealthy, the old and ailing, but took the "youthful and healthy." [3]

Edward III invited survivors from Hainult in Flanders to migrate, [4] probably after the French-speaking county became the domain of Bavaria after his wife’s sister’s husband died and her property was inherited by his sons. [5] They were settled throughout the country, including in Manchester [6] and Preston in Lancashire.

Preston was located on the River Ribble where it opened into an estuary of the Irish sea. It then was developing into a port. [7] Manchester was situated near water falls on the Mercey river that could be harnessed for water power. [8] It already was a center for woolen manufacture. [9] The influx of Flemish weavers solidified its status, while Preston became a center of the textile trade by the 1550s. [10]

The industry remained local and relatively primitive. When Spain attacked Antwerp in 1585, during the Counter-Reformation, Elizabeth I let Protestant refugees settle in England. Some went to Manchester. Their settlement was hedged by "restrictions and burdens on foreigners setting up business as masters in England, in the trades then carried on in this country, whilst foreigners commencing a new art would be exempt from those restrictions." Edward Baines believed this meant they introduced cotton spinning and weaving. [11]

Cotton was not then competitive. That began when the East India Company began importing printed cotton fabrics from India into England in 1631. [12] Soon after, Armenian merchants arrived in France in 1640 with the secrets of calico printing. [13] Baines noted cotton manufacturing was mentioned in Manchester for the first time the next year, but in a way that suggested the industry was well established. The raw materials came from Cyprus and Smyrna through London. [14]

Industrial activity, no doubt, was depressed during the religious wars that commenced in England in 1640. Manchester supported Parliament and the Puritans [15] while Preston sided with Charles I and the Roman Catholics. [16]

When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the East India Company gave him calicos to stimulate demand among the upper classes. [17] Unlike woollens, whose yarns were dyed and woven into plaid patterns like tartans, calicos had designs printed on them in bright colors. Some local printing began in 1676. [18]

The trading company was so successful, woollen interests, including the aristocrats who raised sheep, began complaining to Parliament. France had banned the import, manufacture, or use of calico in 1686. [19] They wanted the same protection. England banned finished cloth in 1700, but it still allowed the import of undyed cotton. [20]

The acts did not have the desired effect, because Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and Huguenot weavers began fleeing the country. Giorgio Riello noted Holland and Switzerland were the primary beneficiaries. [21] Baines found evidence one had settled in London by 1690. [22]

Following riots directed toward Huguenot weavers in London in 1719, [23] Parliament enacted more restrictions on calico in 1721. It exempted raw cotton, muslin worn by the wealthy, and blue calico worn by the poor. [24] The result was smuggling by the East India Company and others. [25]

Riello thought the reason calicos became a threat to the European textile industry was the dyes that created the brilliant patterns were unknown, and were produced by unfamiliar techniques. [26] The English finally found an inexpensive way to process indigo to create blue in 1734. [27] The Swiss mastered madder to produce red in 1768. [28] Francis Drake pioneered using copper plates to transfer designs in Dublin in 1754. [29]

France repealed its calico laws in 1759 to the benefit of Swiss craftsmen. [30] England waited until 1774. [31] By that time, Robert Peel had established a calico printing works in Preston, [32] and James Hargreaves had patented the spinning jenny that made cotton thread more quickly. [33]

The cost of cotton production was finally low enough to be competitive with India, [34] and the British laws were repealed in 1774. [35] The textile industry in Lancashire began to drive the economy. By 1785, 80,000 people were working in its mills. [36]

Lancashire imported its food and lumber from Ireland. [37] Its labor didn’t just come from the countryside, but from Scotland. During the period of protection, Scots land owners had started evicting their tenants in 1762 to convert their land to sheep pasture. [38] This increased the number of workers in Preston, which had remained both Roman Catholic and Jacobite. [39]

The parents of Thomas Hilton’s wife, [40] Jane Lachlison, moved there from Scotland [41] in the early 1800s. [42] One of her sisters, Lydia, married Thomas Arkwright. [43] His ties to the Richard Arkwright who introduced the centralized mill into cotton thread production in 1771 [44] were remote at best. The family had been in the area for generations. Richard’s father had at least 13 children by several wives, and his great-grandfather may have had three sons, each of whom had sons. [45]

The Hiltons and Lachlison began moving to the United States in the 1830s. Before them, Samuel Slater had migrated to New England in 1789. He’d been apprenticed to one of Arkwright’s partners, and understood both the machinery and the manufacturing process. Moses Brown hired him to build a mill in 1793 in Rhode Island. [46] That was the same year Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin. [47]

The gears of the industrial engines meshed. The textile mills demanded more raw materials. The Southern plantations that responded by growing cotton used slave labor. That, in turn, increased the demand for rice.

End Notes
1. Encyclopædia Britannica. "Ghent." Last updated 12 January 2015.
2. Wikipedia. "Black Death in England."

3. R. Sharpe France. "A History of Plague in Lancashire." Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Transactions 90:1–175:1938. 21.

4. Edward Baines. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835. 90.

5. This is supposition. Writers only say the middle 1300s. Edward married Philippe de Hainaut in 1328. [48] Her father died in 1337, [49] and her brother died in 1345. Her older sister Margaret inherited the title, which meant it went to her husband Louis IV of Bavaria. He died in 1347, and she resigned in favor of her son. When he double-crossed her, she reasserted her rights to Hainault. In the ensuing battles, Edward supported her in 1351 and changed sides in 1354. [50] One would guess he issued his invitation sometime in the 1350s.

6. Baines. 90.
7. Wikipedia. "Preston, Lancashire."
8. Wikipedia. "Manchester."
9. Baines. 90.
10. Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Preston." May 04, 1999; Last Updated: Dec 20, 2018.
11. Baines. 84

12. E. J. Donnell. Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton. New York: James Sutton and Company, 1872. 7.

13. Maddy. "Calico and Its Origins." Historic Alleys website. 6 February 2010.

14. Baines. 100–101. His source was Lewes Roberts. The Treasure of Traffic. London: E. P. for Nicholas Bourne, 1641.

15. Wikipedia, Manchester.
16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.

17. Beverly Lemire. Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660-

1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 15. Cited by Peter Fisher. "The Calico Acts: Why Britain Turned its Back on Cotton." History thesis. University of Puget Sound, 2012. 3.

18. Baines. 258. Giorgio Riello mentioned 1677 in a table on page 32. "The Rise of Calico Printing in Europe and the Influence of Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." London School of Economics website.

19. "Printed Textiles from the 18th Century." Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes, Mulhouse, website.

20. Wikipedia. "Calico Acts" and "Textile Manufacture during the Industrial Revolution."
21. Riello.
22. Baines. 259.
23. Fisher. 12.
24. Fisher. 16.

25. Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta. "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India and Shifting Competitive Advantage, 1600-1850." Global Economic History Network conference, Utrecht, 23–25 June 2005. 7. Their source was P. J. Thomas. Mercantilism and the East India Trade, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1926.

26. Riello.

27. Riello. 35. This demand lead to the indigo production in South Carolina, mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019.

28. Riello. 39.
29. Riello. 42.
30. Riello. 20.
31. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
32. Baines. 262–263.
33. Wikipedia. "Spinning Jenny."
34. Broadberry.
35. Wikipedia, Calico Acts.
36. Donnell. 37.
37. Baines. 87.
38. Wikipedia. "Highland Clearances."
39. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Preston.

40. Hilton was mentioned in the post for 3 February 2019. Nothing was clearly known about Hilton. The Ancestry website entry for "Thomas Hilton" reported he as "born in England, Scotland on 17 Nov 1797, parents unknown."

41. "Jane Lachlison." Ancestry website. It said she was "born in Scotland on 6 Jun 1802."

42. Her brother was born in England in 1814 according to Grave History. "James Lachlison." Find a Grave website. 26 October 2014.

43. jrpv. "Lydia Lacklison Arkwright." Find a Grave website. 12 April 2012.
44. Wikipedia. "Sir Richard Arkwright (1732 - 1792)."

45. Tricia Booth. "People: Richard Arkwright’s Family." Her Belper Derbyshire Historical and Geological Records website.

46. Wikipedia. "Samuel Slater."
47. Wikipedia. "Eli Whitney."
48. Wikipedia. "Philippa of Hainault."
49. Wikipedia. "William I, Count of Hainaut."
50. Wikipedia. "Margaret II, Countess of Hainaut."