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Two decades of difficulty for the British and American cotton industries were followed by the outbreak of the Second World War, which did nothing to balk the trend of Lancashire's collapse or the shift of the United States cotton industry from North to South. The Lancashire cotton industry became far more automated in the 1960s, with the scrapping of redundant machinery, yet this did little to halt the inexorable decline of the industry. Accordingly, in the next 20 years Lancashire's demise was virtually complete, as Table 8.1 shows, with almost the last vestiges of a dying industry vanishing in the 1981 recession. In the United States, between 1950 and 1970, 300,000 textile jobs were lost in New England alone, whilst an increasingly capital-intensive industry, which was based upon multi-fibres, continued to develop in the South. In the 1970s and early 1980s, however, unemployment in the Southern states began to rise at an alarming rate and numerous businesses closed or were taken over (Gaventa and Smith 1991: 182). Nevertheless the cotton and related industries survived, albeit on a diminished scale and, by 1983, the United States had the distinction of being home to the world's most ‘productive’ textile industry. The shifting role of business communities has been inseparable from the evolution of cotton manufacturing from the eighteenth century. Similarly, in the second half of the twentieth century the decay of communities based upon cotton and the demise of industrial districts, deprived of their dynamism, is a reflection of the collapse of the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the dramatic expansion of United States cotton manufacturing in the late nineteenth century, Lancashire remained the home of the world's largest cotton industry before the First World War. Yet, during the war and afterwards the increased capacity and continued labour productivity growth in the United States meant that by 1924, the United States had overtaken Britain as the largest producer of cotton cloth (see Table 7.1). During the 1920s and more especially the 1930s, on the other hand, both industries encountered the increasing competitive threat of Japan at home and abroad. The Japanese share of world cotton textile exports outstripped Britain by 1933, a lead which she sustained throughout the 1930s, as Figures 7.1 and 7.2 demonstrate. By the outbreak of the First World War, despite common technological origins, the British and American cotton industries had developed along quite different trajectories. Distinctiveness in the experience of industrialisation, in government–industry relations, in commercial policy and in the characteristics of product and factor markets meant that the historical forces shaping business strategy were strikingly dissimilar. The sharpest contrast came in the product and market orientation of the two nations, with Britain having the world's most export-oriented cotton industry. On the other hand, efforts to penetrate the Far Eastern market had only marginally reduced the legendary reliance of the United States cotton industry on its domestic market. The divergent evolution of the two industries and the resultant contrasts in organisation and capabilities make the shared experience of difficulties and decay in the interwar period all the more remarkable – their explanation is one of the principal themes of this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]