CAPITALIST AND DOMESTIC SYSTEMS IN CLOTHING TRADE 503
to procure the hand-jennies which were used in spinning, A.D. 1659
and thus to get more yarn spun under their own roofs. These
new inventions of the eighteenth century were quite con-
gruent with the domestic system’, while the attempt to took
: . : t
introduce them gave rise to conflicts between the masters eRe
and men in capitalist areas. Up till the eve of the intro-
duction of steam-power, domestic weaving seems to have been
readily compatible with the introduction of labour-saving
appliances, and to have developed in Yorkshire because of
she economic advantages it possessed, though capitalism had
been established in the West of England district.
227. The cloth manufacture had been conducted in many Pains were
2 . . taken to
parts of the country with a view to foreign markets, from open and
the fifteenth century onwards, and had to some extent dis- 75%,
played a capitalist character at that period”. Special pains ats for
. . English
had been taken that the expansion of English commerce, in clot.
she seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, should cause an
increased demand for the product of English looms. This
object has been kept in view in the struggle about well-
ordered trade, in the negotiations for the Methuen Treaty,
and in the agitation for maintaining it; and a similar feeling
somes out in the conditions which were eventually imposed
on the East India Company, in regard to the export of English
goods®. The government were at pains to foster the cloth
trade, not merely by opening up better markets abroad, but
by fresh industrial regulation. It is in all probability true
that the machinery for maintaining the quality of the manu-
facture had fallen into disuse*, and there is very little fresh
Brief Biographies of Inventors of Machines, p. 3. On the other hand, the flying
shuttle does not appear to have come into use in the West of England till 1796
‘Reports, ete. 1840, xxiv, 892, printed pag. 372), and the Eastern Counties weavers
aad apparently been forced to adopt it before that date. Arthur Young notes at
Dolchester in 1784, * The manufactory is exceedingly improved by means of a
mechanical addition to the loom, which enables one weaver to do the business
of two. In wide stuffs they formerly had two hands fo a loom, now only one.”
Annals of Agriculture, mm. 109.
1 The machinery for the finishing of the cloth does not appear to have been
compatible with the domestic system. The shearmen in Yorkshire, who were
wage-earners employed by merchants, resisted the introduction of gig-mills, while
‘he West of England manufacturers were successful in doing so. See below, p. 661.
* See Vol. 1. p. 437. 8 In 1768. See above, p. 470.
i An attempt was made to reconstruct it in the West Riding by creating
a clothiers’ corporation. 14 C. II. ec. 82.
