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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]

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.