Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

Richard Arkwright was the first entrepreneur to install a steam engine in a cotton mill; he used it to pump water to the mill-race of a waterwheel. He also invented a ‘water frame’ which continuously spun cotton threads and could be reconfigured; it was far more powerful than the hand-powered spinning jenny. Using new mechanisms, Lancashire businessmen produced grey cloth with linen warp and cotton weft, which could be printed almost like a calico. Robert Owen, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, introduced this system in the Scottish village of New Lanark, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century became a centre for social experiments. Owen limited the working day in his cotton-spinning mill to ten hours, refused to employ children under twelve years old, and expected workers to know their multiplication tables. Robert Peel, the owner of watermills in Lancaster, soon adopted these rules; in 1819 these two mill-owners introduced to Parliament the Factories Bill, in an attempt to regulate the work of children in the cotton industry. Dogged by patent scandals and lawsuits, Arkwright still succeeded in becoming a wealthy man. Owen lost control of Lanark in 1825 but won fame for founding New Harmony, a utopian community in America. One of Peel’s sons, another Robert, became the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

The birth of the proletariat

With wool in decline, farmers and tenants lost their incomes, and shepherds turned into paupers. Again, the growing cities absorbed the surplus population. Much bigger than the metals-processing industry, the textile industry was the real cradle of the proletariat. Mechanised spinning and weaving looms needed constant input from human workers to keep them going. At the lowest levels, these people themselves had to work like machines, repeating thousands of identical movements and doing nothing else. The monotonous character of this work repelled the peasants, but their children excelled at this work. To a greater extent than ships or mines, these factories shaped an indistinguishable mass of human bodies who had nothing to lose but their work. These untrained but disciplined, poorly motivated and exhausted workers did constitute a proletariat of sorts – an alienated workforce subjected to the machine.

As long as cotton mills depended on waterwheels they had to be located near river weirs, which preserved the rural character of the industry. These mills were far from sea ports, usually in hilly terrain – they needed a fast-flowing current and stable river banks. Only the second generation of steam-powered machines, which didn’t need a waterwheel, made the cotton industry urban. Thanks to these new machines, coal-powered factories were built in the same coastal clusters which had been developed for long-distance trade. The Industrial Revolution led to the depopulation of interior regions. The widely scattered cottage industries that had absorbed displaced agricultural labour and the watermills that had been built where nature dictated were all abandoned. Proceeding at an extraordinary pace, new coastal urbanisation boosted inequality. Radically changing its terms, the exchange between town and country increased the power of the ports and metropolitan cities, which sucked in everything – people, resources and capital.

The Napoleonic wars caused a spike in the demand for fibre; it was needed in all its variety to meet the demands of war – ropes, sails, uniforms, blankets, tents and much more. After the war, demand plummeted and prices collapsed. Ships with American cotton stayed unloaded in British ports for months. Having returned to the hemp market in 1814, Russian landowners once again saw no profit. The pay of weavers in English factories was three times lower than during the war. In Lancashire, the centre of the textile industry, people were hungry. In August 1819 an infamous massacre took place at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. A mass rally of 10,000 textile workers and their families, dressed in their Sunday best, demanded bread, work and parliamentary reform. A regiment of mounted hussars with drawn swords dispersed the crowd, leaving fifteen men and women lying dead on the field. The incident was dubbed Peterloo, an ironic reference to the recent Battle of Waterloo.