Chapter : 2. The Age of Industrialisation
The Coming up of the Factory
The Coming up of the Factory :
The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s. But it was only in the late eighteenth century that the number of factories multiplied. The first symbol of the new era was cotton. Its production boomed in the late nineteenth century. In 1760 Britain was importing 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton to feed its cotton industry. By 1787 this import soared to 22 million pounds. This increase was linked to a number of changes within the process of production.
In the early nineteenth century factories increasingly became an intimate part of the English landscape. So visible were the imposing new mills, so magical seemed to be the power of new technology, that contemporaries were dazzled. They concentrated their attention on the mills, almost forgetting the bylanes and the workshops where production still continued.
(i) A series of inventions (Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill) in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of each step of the production process.
(ii) Now the costly new machines could be purchased, set up and maintained in the mill.
(iii) All the processes were brought under one roof and management, which allowed supervision over the production process, a watch over quality, and the regulation of labour.
(iv) In the early nineteenth century, factories increasingly became an intimate part of the English landscape. So visible were the imposing new mills that contemporaries were dazzled. They concentrated their attention on the mills, almost forgetting the bylanes and the workshops where production still continued.
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