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Before the 1760s, textile production was a cottage industry using mainly flax and wool. A typical weaving family would own one handloom, which would be operated by the man with help of a boy; the wife, girls and other women could make sufficient yarn for that loom. The knowledge of textile production had existed for centuries.
In the 1950s and '60s, many workers came from the Indian sub-continent and were encouraged to look for work in Lancashire. An increase in the work force allowed mill owners to introduce third (night) shifts. This resurgence in the textile industry did not last long, and by 1958, Britain had become a net importer of cotton cloth.
[2]: 41–42 The British textile industry used 52 million pounds of cotton in 1800, which increased to 588 million pounds in 1850. [45] The share of value added by the cotton textile industry in Britain was 2.6% in 1760, 17% in 1801, and 22.4% in 1831. Value added by the British woollen industry was 14.1% in 1801.
The era of King Cotton was underway by the early 1800s to such an extent that by the mid-19th century, southern slave plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton. The introduction of the cotton gin was as unexpected as it was unprecedented. British textiles had expanded with no change in ginning principles in centuries.
The cotton textile industry was responsible for a large part of India's international trade. [78] India had a 25% share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century. [79] Indian cotton textiles were the most important manufactured goods in world trade in the 18th century, consumed across the world from the Americas to Japan. [76]
Competition grew in the domestic textile industry and wages declined, so workers began to go on strike. Resistance was led by the young women known as mill girls. With the mid-nineteenth-century growth in immigration and social changes post-Civil War, mill owners began to recruit immigrants, who often arrived with skills and were willing to ...
c. 27000 BC – Impressions of textiles and basketry and nets left on small pieces of hard clay in Europe. [3] c. 25000 BC – Venus figurines depicted with clothing. [3] c. 8000 BC – Evidence of flax cultivation in the Near East. [4] c. 6000 BC – Evidence of woven textiles used to wrap the dead at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. [4]
Textile manufacturing in the modern era is an evolved form of the art and craft industries. Until the 18th and 19th centuries, the textile industry was a household work. It became mechanised in the 18th and 19th centuries, and has continued to develop through science and technology since the twentieth century. [2]