Cotton mills and the factory system

In 1771 Richard Arkwright opened a water-powered spinning mill at Cromford in Derbyshire. As he added more mills there, the number of people he employed at Cromford grew to about 1,000.

Spinning and weaving at home

Before the factories, most cloth in Britain was made in people’s homes. A merchant delivered raw wool or cotton to families in the countryside, collected the yarn or cloth they made and paid them by the piece. Spinning, twisting fibres into yarn, was slow work, and it took several spinners to keep one weaver supplied. In 1733 John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which let a weaver throw the shuttle across a wide loom with one hand, and weavers got faster still. The shortage of yarn became the problem that inventors tried to solve.

Jenny, frame and mule

Around 1764 James Hargreaves, a weaver in Lancashire, built the spinning jenny, a hand-turned machine that spun several threads at once. It still needed a skilled operator, and its yarn was too weak for the warp, the lengthwise threads of a cloth. Richard Arkwright, a barber and wig maker from Preston, solved that. His spinning machine, patented in 1769, drew the cotton out between pairs of rollers turning at different speeds and spun a strong, hard yarn. It was too large to turn by hand and was built to be driven by water, so it became known as the water frame. It also needed little skill: children could tend it. In 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the ideas of the jenny and the water frame in the spinning mule, which made fine, strong yarn, and in the 1780s Edmund Cartwright began building a power loom so that weaving too could be done by machine.

Cromford and the factory

Arkwright needed money, and in 1770 he went into partnership with Jedediah Strutt, a hosiery manufacturer, and Samuel Need. In 1771 they built a mill at Cromford, beside a stream in the Derbyshire hills, where a water wheel drove the frames on several floors through shafts and belts. Arkwright later patented a carding machine that prepared the raw cotton for spinning, so that every stage from bale to yarn happened under one roof. He kept building, eventually employing about 1,000 people at Cromford, and built houses, an inn and a market place for his workers. That was the factory system: many workers gathered in one building, tending machines driven by one source of power, working fixed hours set by the owner rather than by themselves. Today Cromford Mill is the centre of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site.

Where the cotton came from

Cotton does not grow in Britain. In the 18th century most of the raw cotton spun in Lancashire came from plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil worked by enslaved Africans. Then in 1793 Eli Whitney, a young man from Massachusetts working in Georgia, built a cotton gin, a machine that pulled the sticky seeds out of short-staple cotton far faster than by hand; he received his patent on 14 March 1794. Short-staple cotton grew well across the American South, and cotton growing spread west across Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Enslaved people did the planting and picking, and the number of enslaved people in the United States grew with the cotton crop. By the early 19th century the mills of Lancashire and the cotton plantations of the American South were two halves of one system.