INDUSTRIES 



purchase material to set the poor to work 

 upon, makes no mention of cotton, and Camden, 

 who wrote in 1590, has no word to say of the 

 cotton industry, as Baines assures us, though 

 Manchester is not missing from his description. 

 Defoe, indeed, imagined for the manufacture of 

 cottons English ancestry more remote even than 

 that of the woollen industry; but he was 

 obviously misled by the term 'cottons,' which 

 had been applied to certain classes of woollen 

 goods, or possibly to mixed linen and woollen 

 goods, before the inhabitants of this country 

 appear to have thought of fabricating the short- 

 stapled cotton fibre. It is not improbable that 

 these ' Manchester cottons ' made of wool were 

 designed to imitate and rival the coarse cottons 

 bought from abroad : they were probably sham 

 cotton made of wool, in the same sense that 

 flannelettes are sham woollens made of cotton. 

 The references to these earlier cottons, which are 

 numerous, have been dealt with fully in the 

 section on the woollen industry. The term 

 ' fustian,' we may note, which was applied to 

 coarse cotton goods after the cotton manufacture 

 became one of our leading industries, had been 

 used to denote certain woollen or worsted goods 

 made at Norwich and in Scotland in early days.*^ 

 The correctness of Baines' speculation that the 

 cotton industry proper was introduced to this 

 country by refugees out of the Netherlands from 

 the persecutions and disturbances of the second 

 half of the sixteenth century has never been 

 disproved, but the petition concerning the 

 duke of Lennox's patent casts some doubt 

 upon it. The new industry was probably 

 fortunate in its choice of the non-corporate 

 town of Manchester, where strangers were 

 not sacrificed in the interests of freemen by 

 the exclusive privilege accorded to the latter. 

 Cotton wool was imported as early as the 

 thirteenth century for candle wicks. Accord- 

 ing to Dr. Whitaker's note to an entry in the 

 books of Bolton Priory relating to this use of 

 cotton and dated 1298, cotton was at that time 

 obtained from the Levant.™ Hakluyt refers to 

 the bringing of cotton wool from the Levant at 

 the beginning of the sixteenth \ century, and 

 notices in the same passage the exportation of 

 our woollen ' cottons.' '^ 



^' Baines quotes in illustration an Act passed in 

 1504. for regulating the Company of Shearmen of 

 Norwich, and also from Blomefield's Hist. ofNorf. ii, 

 62, a passage relating to Norwich fustians in the reign 

 of Edward III. 



'" The extract from the books of Bolton Priory is 

 quoted by Baines on p. 96 : ' In sapo et cotoun ad 

 candelam, xvii, S. id.' Dr. Whitaker's note is in 

 Hist, of Craven (ed. 2, 1812), 384. 



" Hakluyt, Voyages, ii, 206. Quoted from Baines' 

 Hist, of the Cotton Manufacture, 96-7. Macpherson 

 (Annals of Commerce') tells us that cotton was ob- 

 tained from Antwerp in 1560 : at that time the 

 cotton industry was flourishing in the Netherlands. 



Despite Lewes Roberts' complimentary 

 reference of 164 1 to the Manchester cotton and 

 linen industries the manufacture of woollens con- 

 tinued for some years thereafter to be the lead- 

 ing trade of Lancashire.'* But by 1727 Defoe 

 could write of Manchester : ' The grand manu- 

 facture which has so much raised this town is 

 that of cotton in all its varieties.' " ' There is a 

 great manufacture here of linen and cotton,' said 

 Pococke of the same town in 1750.'* The 

 growth of the cotton industry throughout the 

 eighteenth century may be read from the official 

 figures obtained by Baines from the Board of 

 Trade, and for the first time published in his 

 history." They are as follows : — 



Re-exportations of cotton wool are not men- 

 tioned, and it is not plain, therefore, what the 

 home consumption ■ exactly was, but from 

 statistics furnished to a committee of the House 

 Commons on the manufacture which are printed 

 in Postlethwayt's Dictionary under ' Linen,' it 

 appears that the average re-exports did not ex- 

 ceed 150,0001b. between 1743 and 1749.'* By 

 1774 some 30,000 people in and about Man- 

 chester were engaged in the cotton manufacture, 

 if we are to credit a statement made to Govern- 

 ment in a petition praying for the retention of 

 the law throwing open to foreign vessels the 

 ports of Jamaica and Dominica." It was not, 

 however, until the period 1770-88, according to 

 RadclifFe, the author of the Origin of the New 

 System of Manufacturing, published in 1827, that 

 the cotton trade drove out its companion woollen 

 industry in bulk from the cotton district proper. 

 Radcliffe's statement does not lack support, 

 and the ejectment was satisfactorily explained 

 in part by an eye-witness : 



The rapid progress of that business (cotton spinning) 

 and the higher wages which it affords, have so far dis- 

 tressed the makers of worsted goods in that county 



" See evidence already given in previous sections. 



" Tour, iii, 219. Proof that he meant cotton 

 goods proper will be found on p. 221 of the same 

 volume. 



'* Travels through England, i, 1 1 . 



"Op. cit. 109-10. 



'"' The table is quoted in Baines' History, 1 1 1 . 



" Bryan Edwards' History, Civil and Commercial, of 

 the British Colonies in the West Indies. 



381 



