The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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A.D. 1776 —1850. oy capitalist employers, rome of whom were drawn mercantile business and some of whom kad risen from the ranks 618 LAISSEZ FAIRE cloth trade of the West of England ; but the moneyed men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been merchants rather than manufacturers of textile goods. It was only with the progress of the industrial revolution that the wealthy em- ployer of labour attained to anything like the social status which had been accorded to successful merchants from time immemorial. But the triumph of capital in industry involved the rise and prosperity of a large number of captains of industry, It seems probable that there was comparatively little room for the intrusion of new men in the old centres of the cloth trades. There were large and well-established houses engaged in this manufacture in the West of England, and they had an honourable ambition to maintain the traditions of their trades. In Yorkshire, too, there was a class of capitalist merchants who were ready to deflect their energies into manufacturing as occasion arose. The wealthy em- ployers of the West Riding seem to have been chiefly drawn from this class. though they were doubtless reinforced to some extent by men like Hirst who had risen from the ranks? There is reason to believe, however, that in Lancashire, and the other areas where the cotton trade was carried on, the course of affairs was somewhat different. This industry was characterised by an extraordinary expansion, and it offered abundant opportunities for new men, of energy and per- severance, to force their way to the front. “Few of the men who entered the trade rich were successful. They trusted too much to others—too little to themselves; whilst on the contrary the men who prospered were raised by their own efforts —commencing in a very humble way, generally from exercising some handicraft, as clockmaking, hatting, &e., and pushing their advance by a series of unceasing exertions, having a very limited capital to begin with, or even none at all, saving their own labour?” The yeomen farmers as a class failed to seize the opportunities open to them; but a “few of these men, shaking off their slothful habits, both of 1 For an admirable examination of the growth of this class see P. Mantoux, La Révolution Industrielle, 376. 2 The Woollen Trade during the last Fifty Years, Brit. Mus, 10347. de. 25. 8 P. Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 83.

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