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Notes on Chapter 3 of "Empire of Cotton" by Sven Beckert.
Page 63:
In retrospect, late-eighteenth century England seemed ripe for a reinvention of cotton manufacturing.
Beckert notes that Britain:
He argues that such conditions were "hardly unique". Regarding the "double freedom" of workers, this puts him at odds with Brenner and "Political Marxism", who argue that the existence of a large class of workers without access to the means of subsistence was unique to Britain at this time.
Page 64:
Wages in the United Kingdom were significantly higher than in other parts of the world; indeed, in 1770 Lancashire wages were perhaps as much as six times those in India. Even though by this point improved machinery meant that productivity per cotton worker in Britain was already two to three times higher than in India, that multiplier was still not sufficient to level the playing field, War capitalism had created a fundamentally new set of opportunities for British cotton capitalists, but it had no answer to the question of how to enter cotton cloth markets in a globally significant way. Protectionism had been a workable answer to a point, and was deployed to great success, but the tantalizing possibility of global exports could not be preserved by such prohibitions...
Since labor costs were the primary obstacle to grasping the new tantalizing opportunities, British merchants, inventors, and budding manufacturers - practical men all - focused on methods to increase the productivity of their high-cost labor.
Key technological developments (p.65):
In the three decades before 1825, labor productivity in British cotton spinning increased by 370 times.
TODO: Summarize Malm on water to steam power, link here.
Page 57:
Greg's factory was embedded within globe-spanning networks... Greg secured the essential raw material for production from his merchant relatives in Liverpool, who had purchased it off boats from places like Jamaica and Brazil. The very idea of cotton fabrics... came from Asia... much of Greg's production would leave the United Kingdom... feeding the slave trade on the western coast of Africa, dressing Greg's very own slaves on the island of Dominica, and catering to consumers in continental Europe.
In 1770, cotton manufacturing constituted 2.6% of value added in British economy, by 1831, 22.4% (p. 73). By 1790s, ~61% of cotton cloth exported, driving international competitors from the field (p. 74). 56% of all additional British export from 1784-1806 were in cottons.