Author Archives: John Styles

Click on the link below for the open-access download of John Styles’ chapter, ‘Re-fashioning Industrial Revolution: Fibres, fashion and technical innovation in British cotton textiles, 1630-1780’, in G. Nigro (ed.), Fashion as an economic engine: process and product innovation, commercial … Continue reading →

Open the link below for the open-access text and download of John Styles’ article, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century Cotton Spinning’, Textile History, 51 (2020), pp. 1-42. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00404969.2020.1812472

In ‘Spinning their wheels: a reply to Jane Humphries and Benjamin Schneider’, published in Economic History Review online early view in May 2019, Robert Allen once again defends his High Wage Economy explanation of the industrial revolution in textiles. Specifically, … Continue reading →

It’s been fascinating seeing the responses to Judy Stephenson’s post ‘Spinning little stories: Why cotton in the Industrial Revolution was not what you think’ on the Economic History Society’s Long Run blog (https://ehsthelongrun.net/2016/12/01/spinning-little-stories-why-cotton-in-the-industrial-revolution-was-not-what-you-think/). It’s partly about my East Asian Journal … Continue reading →

The late Eric Hobsbawm famously remarked ‘whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton’. Traditional accounts of the British Industrial Revolution tell the story of an Asian textile – cotton – transformed into a cheap, mass-produced British staple by means of cost-cutting … Continue reading →

I recently visited LVR-Industriemuseum Textilfabrik Cromford, at Ratingen, near Düsseldorf, Germany. The museum is located in the first water-powered cotton spinning mill to be built in continental Europe. It was constructed in 1783-4 by Johann Gottfried Brügelmann, a Wuppertal merchant, to … Continue reading →

I recently visited Quarry Bank Mill near Wilmslow, Cheshire, one of the early water-powered cotton spinning mills, built on the River Bollin in 1784 to house the mechanical spinning frames invented by Richard Arkwright a decade and a half earlier. … Continue reading →

This enormous water-powered silk-throwing mill, at Caraglio in Piedmont in north-western Italy, was built in 1676-8. Mills like this were the model for the first successful English factory for manufacturing silk warp yarn [organzine] by water power, built by Thomas … Continue reading →