¹ Hoffmann, Walther G., British Industry 1770–1950, trans. Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (Oxford, 1955).Google ScholarDeane, Phyllis and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth 1688–1959, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1967), chs. 2, 5 (hereafter cited as British Growth).Google Scholar

² Hobsbawm, E. J., Industry and Empire (London, 1969), p. 56.Google Scholar

³ McCloskey's, Donald N. useful overview in “The Industrial Revolution, 1780–1860: A Survey,” ch. 6 in Floud, Roderick and McCloskey, Donald N., eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge, 1981) comes to much the same conclusion, although if the results of the present article are to be believed, his calculations for cotton before 1815 require revision. See the Appendix.Google Scholar

⁴ Booth, Charles, “Occupations of the People,” Journal of the Statistical Society (1886), pp. 314–435.Google Scholar Booth's work in this regard has been carefully examined and found good by Armstrong, W. A., “The Use of Information about Occupation: Part 2. An Industrial Classification 1841–1891,” in Wrigley, E. A., ed., Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 226–310.Google Scholar

⁵ Deane and Cole, British Growth, p. 212. Armstrong (“The Use of Information,” p. 264) unfortunately produces separate totals for woolens, cotton and silk, and flax, hemp, and others. His procedure cannot be accepted because it involves allocating all the textile workers who were not identified by branch in the census, principally 12,988 “Spinners (branch not specified)” and 110,031 “Weavers (branch not specified),” to cotton and silk. This hardly seems appropriate given cotton's lead in factory production. Deane and Cole's shares and my weighting of women and weavers by half imply about two thirds of these workers were in wool, not cotton. This seems generally consistent with the technological history of the industry.Google Scholar

⁶ For “other industries” the midpoint of the range of growth rates of industries other than cotton and iron has been used in the projection for earlier weights.Google Scholar

⁷ Sandberg, Lars, “Movements in the Quality of British Cotton Textile Exports, 1815–1913,” this JOURNAL, 28 (03 1968), p. 8.Google Scholar

⁸ von Tunzelmann, G. N., Steam Power and British Industrialization to 1860 (Oxford, 1978), p. 231.Google Scholar

⁹ Sandberg, “Movements,” p. 24.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Hyde, Charles, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry 1700–1870 (Princeton, 1977), pp. 204–06 (hereafter cited as British Iron).Google Scholar

¹¹ Deane and Cole, British Growth, pp. 185, 187, 195–96, 212.Google Scholar

¹² The ratio of the value of final output to raw material costs has been taken as two. The ratios in American iron-working industries were: nails, 1.7; stoves, 2.1; hardware and miscellaneous iron manufactures, 2.3; cutlery, 2.6; clocks, 2.8; blacksmiths, 3.2; guns, 4.3. U. S. Census, 1840, pp. 137–42. An alternative aggregation procedure is possible following Deane and Cole (British Growth, p. 222) based on Irving's real values for exports (“Official and Real or Current Values for Imports and Exports of Great Britain to and from Ireland,” Parliamentary Papers, 1803/4, VIII, p. 4). Irving's data for iron exports show the following values: iron bars, 20/ per hundredweight; iron nails, 35/6 per hundredweight; pig iron, £8 per ton; wrought iron, £7.19 per hundredweight; wire, £3 per hundredweight. The implied value added in converting a ton of pig iron to wrought iron— presumably various final products—is equivalent to just over 12 tons of pig iron. This seems high. An output aggregate valuing cast iron at pig iron prices and finished iron at the average of the nail and wrought iron price grows from 5.7 in 1775 to 16.8 in 1815 and 55.5 in 1841, somewhat slower growth from 1770 to 1815 than calculated in the text.Google Scholar

¹³ Hyde, British Iron, pp. 127–29, 141.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Both the Fisher and the Divisia indices have the property of being first-order approximations of the welfare gain for a single consumer. See Diewert, W. E., “Harberger's Welfare Indicator and Revealed Preference Theory,” American Economic Review, 66 (03 1976), 143–52.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Hoffmann was aware of the importance of the choice of weights (British Industry, pp. 17–23, 34–5) but surprisingly made no investigation into the implications of his choice.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The weighting, particularly of cotton, is crucial to this issue. It is perhaps worth noting MacPherson's, David estimate of industrial output for 1783 (Annals of Congress, vol. 4 [New York, Johnston Reprint, 1972; originally published 1805], p. 1546). His enumeration, which excludes building and food and drink (20 to 25 percent of the total) weighs cotton at just under 2 percent and iron at 23 percent of the total.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Deane and Cole, British Growth, pp. 75–80.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Population estimates are from U.S. Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), pp. 757–58.Google Scholar The 1797/98 data include half a million for the area to become the Dominion of Canada (see McEvedy, Colin and Jones, Richard, Atlas of World Population History [London, 1978] P. 285).Google Scholar Exports are from Price, Jacob M., “Net Trade Series for Scotland's and Britain's Trade with the Thirteen Colonies and the States, 1740–1791,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3 (1975), 324–25;Google ScholarDeane and Cole, British Growth, p. 87.Google Scholar

¹⁹ See Armytage, Frances, The Free Port System in the British West Indies (London, 1953), chs. 1, 6.Google Scholar Also see Platt, D. C. M., Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (London, 1972), ch. 1.Google Scholar

²⁰ N. F. R. Crafts of University College, Oxford has shown me an aggregate series for industrial output constructed primarily from this data in Deane and Cole. The result, despite the choice of somewhat different time periods, is very like that in Table 5.Google Scholar

²¹ Deane and Cole, British Growth, pp. 212–13. The index appears to have been constructed by aggregating the various component series on the basis of 1801 value added weights. The weights become somewhat inappropriate by the second quarter of the nineteenth century since they fail to account for the relative decline in cotton prices. Thus in 1841 cotton seems to make up three quarters of the index when its share of value added in was only about 40 percent. The growth of the textile index is thus exaggerated in the post-Napoleonic War period.Google Scholar

²² Deane and Cole, British Growth, p. 166.Google Scholar

²³ Feinstein, C. H., “Capital Formation in Great Britain,” ch. 2 in Mathias, Peter and Postan, M. M., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 7, The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour, and Enterprise (Cambridge, 1978).Google Scholar

²⁴ Robert E. Gallman's work with the nineteenth-century United States Censuses, which contain data on sales and value added, indicate value added as about 70 percent of sales. “Commodity Output, 1839–1899,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 24 (New York, 1960), pp. 59–60;Google Scholar and “Gross National Product in the United States, 1834–1909,” in N.B.E.R., Output, Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, No. 30 (New York, 1966), pp. 46–7 indicate that in 1839 the value of final sales of manufactured goods was $345 million and the value added in manufacturing was $250 million. Value added exceeds income originating in the sector. Twentieth-century data, Historical Statistics of the United States, p. 402 and Series P8 and F26, indicate between 70 and 75 of value added is income originating.Google Scholar

²⁵ This would be a major undertaking. It would start with the summary of the various parliamentary investigations in “Public Income and Expenditures from 1688,” Appendix 13 to Part III: “Explanation and Historical Notices of the Several Heads of Public Income and Expenditure,” pp. 669–700. Parliamentary Papers, 1868/9 XXXV;Google Scholar and also Glover, Richard, Peninsular Preparation: Reform of the British Army, 1795–1809 (Cambridge, 1963).Google Scholar

²⁶ Glover, Michael, Wellington's Army in the Peninsula, 1808–1814 (Newton Abbott, 1977), ch. 8, cf. p. 107.Google Scholar

²⁷ Flinn, M. W., “Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850,” The Economic History Review, 27 (08 1974), 395–413.Google Scholar These data have recently been reanalyzed by sophisticated techniques in von Tunzelmann, G. N., “Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850, Revisited,” The Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 32 (1979). Von Tunzelmann's analysis reemphasizes the fragility of these data but does not contradict the assumption here.Google Scholar

²⁸ Gilboy, E. W., Wages in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1934);Google ScholarDeane and Cole, British Growth, p. 19. I have used Deane and Cole's “general average.”Google Scholar

²⁹ There are recent estimates presented by Ronald Lee and Roger Schofield, “British Population in the Eighteenth Century,” in Floud and McCloskey, Economic History of Britain.Google Scholar

³⁰ For evidence of demand elasticities see, for example, Houthakker, H., “An International Comparison of Household Expenditure Patterns Commemorating the Centenary of Engel's Law,” Econometrica, 25 (10 1957), 532–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cross-sectional investigations also show a relationship between the level of per capita income and the size of the manufacturing sector. See Chenery, Hollis B., “Patterns of Industrial Growth,” American Economic Review, 50 (09 1960), cf. p. 634;Google ScholarKuznets, Simon, Economic Growth of Nations (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971), chs. 3, 4, cf. p. 111. The choice of an income elasticity of 1.4 represents the choice at the high end of the range of reasonable values, causing a more rapid growth of estimated demand (that is, a more conventional result).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ Crafts, N. F. R., “English Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century: A Re-examination of Deane and Cole's Estimates,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 29 (05 1976), 226–35,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and idem, “National Income Estimates and the British Standard of Living Debate: A Reappraisal of 1801–1831,” Explorations in Economic History, 17 (April 1980), 176–88.Google Scholar

³² The most important distinction to make is between muslins and calicos. The muslins took four times as long to weave as calicos and seem to have been priced in roughly the same proportion. Donald McCloskey's otherwise very useful article in The Economic History of Britain suffers from a failure to notice that distinction. His comparison (p. 110) of “[a] piece of cloth that sold in the 1780s for 70 or 80 shillings” with one “selling in the 1850s for around 5 shillings” seems to be comparing an unprinted velveret—a new fancy weave muslin—with ordinary grey cloth calico some 70 years later, with misleading consequences for his calculations of productivity growth in the industry before 1815. Much of the literature about the industrial revolution in cotton emphasizes the muslin branch, primarily because those were new products that captured the imagination of contemporaries. This emphasis is misleading, however, since coarser calicos made up most of the industry's output. As G. N. von Tunzelmann reports, the average count of yarn in 1788 was about a 27 (Steam Power, p. 182) and was probably still below 40 in the 1830s (p. 184).Google Scholar

³³ Beveridge, William, Prices and Wages in England for the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century: Vol. 1. Price Tables: Mercantilism (London, 1939), pp. 450, 458.Google Scholar

³⁴ Neild, Alderman, “An Account of the Prices of Printing Cloth and Upland Cotton from 1812 to 1860,” Journal of the Statistical Society, 24 (12 1861), 491–97;Google ScholarGrimshaw, , Parliamentary Papers, 1833 VI, p. 607.Google Scholar

³⁵ Unwin, George, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 2nd ed. (Manchester, 1968), pp. 60–64.Google Scholar

³⁶ Such an adjustment seems appropriate; see Neild, “An Account of the Prices,” p. 491.Google Scholar

³⁷ Wadsworth, Alfred P. and de Lacy Mann, Julia, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire (Manchester, 1931), p. 266.Google Scholar

³⁸ Parliamentary Papers, 1833 VI, p. 607.Google Scholar

³⁹ Von Tunzelmann, Steam Power, p. 181.Google ScholarEllison, Thomas, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London, 1886), p. 55 shows a much sharper decline in the price of 40 yarn than does von Tunzelmann, 40 yarns falling from 16/0 in 1779 to 2/10 in 1812. But Ellison also quotes 20 to 24 count yarn in 1743 at 3/4 to 4/6 (p. 16), as do Wadsworth and Mann (The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, pp. 173, 177, 269, 436, 438).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ This estimate derives from earnings per week of 5 shillings 6 pence to 7 shillings a week reported by Arthur Young in his Northern Tour (1769) and 8 shillings to 10 shillings a week in 1770, reported by William Radcliff (both reported in Wood, G. H., The History of Wages in the Cotton Trade during the Past Hundred Years [London, 1910], p. 105);Google Scholar the observation that weekly earnings of the weavers employed by Samuel Oldknow were 12 shillings for calico weavers and 16 shillings for plain muslin weavers in 1787; and the statement that they had increased about 50 percent since 1784 (Unwin, Samuel Oldknow, pp. 113–14). These can be converted to rates per piece at the conventional ratio of full employment being equivalent to 4 pieces of calico per week.Google Scholar

⁴¹ There are several sources here. The most accessible compilation is in Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers: A Study of the English Cotton Textile Industry during the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1969), p. 99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see the interesting table of earnings of weavers (after deducting estimated costs) in Manchester, reproduced in Daniels, G. W., “The Cotton Trade at the Close of the Napoleonic War,” Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1917–1918), Appendix II.Google Scholar

⁴² Nield, “An Account of the Prices,” p. 492, indicated a printed cloth sold at 44 shillings 6 pence when grey cloth sold at 25 shillings in 1813, or 63 shillings and 49 shillings in 1814. There is some evidence of improvement in finishing, but few would argue it was comparable to the improvements in spinning.Google Scholar

⁴³ Deane and Cole, British Growth, p. 185.Google Scholar