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This article utilises male occupational data recorded in the baptism registers of England and Wales, 1813–1820, to locate the geographical distribution of the textile manufacturing industry at that time. By comparison with female and male occupations abstracted from the 1851 census, it shows that the location was set at least as early as the second decade of the nineteenth century, and before the introduction of steam power or the mechanisation of weaving could have played significant roles. By 1813–1820, the once great regional textile centres of East Anglia and the West Country were no more. Approximately sixty-six per cent of fathers employed in the textile industry lived in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Moreover, textile manufacturing was further concentrated into a small number of parishes. Two-thirds of fathers lived in thirty-six parishes, and fifty per cent resided in only nineteen parishes. An association between the location of the main textile parishes and the proximity of the coal measures is evident. The registers contain a large number of entries for male spinners, reflecting the extent of uptake of Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule. The data confirm that the mule was dominant in cotton spinning within at least thirty years or so of its introduction. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, cotton spinning by hand was a redundant occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THIS PAPER EXAMINES the archaeological evidence for hand spinning in medieval Britain from c 1200 to c 1500. Ceramic, stone and baked clay spindle whorls have dominated the excavated finds, but a new corpus of lead-alloy spindle whorls, recorded through the Portable Antiquities Scheme and Scottish Treasure Trove, is presented here. Analysis of the metal whorls' distribution, manufacture, dating and decoration is provided, illuminating the wide social and economic contexts in which they were used. From memento mori of pious spinners to sexually potent objects representative of lubricious gossips, the ubiquitous spindle whorl was a universal tool that had a powerful agency. The artefacts are small finds embodying daily life but also tie into the wider national economy of the High and Late Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which topics within the issue are discussed which includes spinning in textiles, British textile retailers and textile industry in Great Britain.

The Worsted Acts, passed between 1777 and 1791, established semi-official industrial police forces in nearly a third of the counties of England, charged with detecting and prosecuting fraudulent reeling of worsted yarn by hand spinners. The Acts have been interpreted as the response of late eighteenth-century employers to new and growing problems of labour discipline associated with the putting-out system. But frauds by spinners in reeling yarn were not new. They had characterised the worsted industry since its rapid expansion began at the end of the sixteenth century. Over the subsequent two centuries, employers addressed the problem repeatedly. How they tackled it depended crucially on the way the different regional worsted industries were organised and on dramatic changes in the willingness and capacity of the state to regulate manufacturing. The Worsted Acts emerge as the product of a distinctive eighteenth-century approach to industrial regulation, reactive and particularistic, but bureaucratically innovative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the records of British firms that supplied nearly 90 percent of world trade in cotton spinning machinery, we track the evolution and diffusion of spinning technology over more than 50 years. In contrast to scenarios in which modem technologies supplant older methods, we observe two paradigms in competitive coexistence, each one supporting ongoing productivity growth through complementary improvements in machinery, organization, and workforce skills. International productivity differences were magnified under the skill-based mule, British spinners being the world's best. Global diffusion of ring spinning was driven by advances in fiber control, a "directed" technological response to the expansion of world trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new perspective on the emergence of machinery in the cotton spinning trade during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. It does so by examining the interplay between economic, political, and national interests within the early Hanoverian state. Changes in trading relationships between textile producers across the three kingdoms of England/Wales, Ireland, and Scotland created escalating supply-side problems, which, by the 1760s, would precipitate a quest for solutions based on new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the development of major native industries in China. The light industrial sector can be divided into those products that were sold primarily to the domestic market, and those having a large foreign market. In the heavy industrial sector there is coal, iron, machinery, and cement. The cotton yarn industry developed slowly until 1917 because of market conditions. After the war began, English cotton supply declined and could no longer be exported in large quantities. However, the British cotton goods shipped to China did not come as yarn. The Chinese market took coarse yarns from four count to twenty count. Most of the yarn was ten count and it was used for a China lacked heavy industry. Almost all of its machinery came from abroad, especially from Great Britain and the U.S. During the war, not only did those nations decrease their machinery production, but what was produced was difficult to export. The Chinese demand for spinning machines could not be met easily.

For a century from 1843 until 1942 textile machinery dominated the export of machines from Great Britain and Platt Bros. & Co. Ltd., enjoyed a unique ascendancy within the textile engineering industry. An index of the annual production of the main department of that firm during the period of its prime may measure activity within the engineering trade, the spread of the cotton industry and the diffusion of a new spinning technology. The accompanying index records the total production of the firm as well as its exports and reveals the importance of the home market which absorbed 53 per cent of the total spindles manufactured between 1880 and 1914. The index reveals the susceptibility of the firm to cyclical fluctuations in demand and the importance of the last great mill-building boom of 1905-9. That boom was based upon the home trade, which purchased 64 per cent of the spindles manufactured. The British cotton industry increased its spindleage by 15.9 million spindles from 39.75 million in 1880 to 55.653 million in 1913 and may have replaced as much as three-quarters of its installed spindleage in 1880 by 1913 if the proportion of 44.57 per cent of the total increment during 1905-1909 supplied by Platt is be extended over the whole period, suggesting a high level of re-investment.

A review of the article ""Th'ancient distaff" and "whirling spindle": measuring the contribution of spinning to household earnings and the national economy in England, 1550-1770," by C. Muldrew, which appeared within the journal "Economic History review," volume 65, is presented.