Cotton Textile Prices and the Industrial Revolution

C otton textile technology defined the British industrial revolution. To contemporaries and historians the invention of spinning machines, the development of the factory system, and the social consequences of the transformed cotton industry marked the beginning of a new age. The histories of the great inventors and of the working class have long attracted attention, but our understanding of the economic effects of the technological change remains incomplete. New technology reduces the price of existing goods and introduces new ones and, even if we believe that technology affected society primarily by profoundly altering work and social structure, change occurred because new ways of doing things were cheaper, yielded products of higher value, and increased profits. It is surprising, then, that we know little about the change in cotton textile prices and the cost of production between the 1 760s and the early nineteenth century. Edwards, who has written the most thorough recent economic examination of the period, provides only sporadic information about cotton cloth prices. Recently, Cuenca Esteban has attempted to fill the gap by estimating cloth prices using partial information and various assumptions. He argues that the price of cotton cloth fell dramatically despite wartime inflation-by nearly one-third between 1770 and 1801 and nearly 50 per cent more by 1815. In Cuenca's view, then, prices before the industrial revolution were nearly three times their 1815 level; the wartime inflation almost doubling the cost of living notwithstanding. More direct evidence from accounts of cotton textile firms shows that, although cotton textile prices declined dramatically relative to other prices, Cuenca greatly exaggerated the scale of the fall.2 Surviving company records and government archives contain information that can, with careful manipulation, show the trend of prices of many cotton goods in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The new technology had different impacts in different circumstances and