Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Map of the weaving towns and villages of north-east Lancashire in 1821
- 1 Problems and sources
- 2 The organization of the industry
- 3 The labour force
- 4 The coming of the powerloom
- 5 Wages: (I) The piece-rate
- 6 Wages: (II) Earnings and the standard of living
- 7 Public opinion and the handloom weavers
- 8 Organized industrial action among the cotton handloom weavers
- 9 The weavers and radical politics
- 10 The problem of poverty
- 11 Displacement and disappearance
- Appendix 1 Some piece-rate series
- Appendix 2 The piece-rate and the price of food
- Appendix 3 G. H. Wood's estimates of average weekly earnings
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Map of the weaving towns and villages of north-east Lancashire in 1821
- 1 Problems and sources
- 2 The organization of the industry
- 3 The labour force
- 4 The coming of the powerloom
- 5 Wages: (I) The piece-rate
- 6 Wages: (II) Earnings and the standard of living
- 7 Public opinion and the handloom weavers
- 8 Organized industrial action among the cotton handloom weavers
- 9 The weavers and radical politics
- 10 The problem of poverty
- 11 Displacement and disappearance
- Appendix 1 Some piece-rate series
- Appendix 2 The piece-rate and the price of food
- Appendix 3 G. H. Wood's estimates of average weekly earnings
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Attempts to interest the legislature in their plight; industrial action against their employers; and spasmodic outbreaks of political radicalism: in none of these ways were the cotton handloom weavers successful in maintaining their position within the economic organization of early nineteenth-century Britain. But although there was no permanent relief to their long decline, there were temporary ones which at least prevented them from actually dying of want as they were forced out of the economic race. For England had at that time an elaborate structure of both public and private charity which served to keep the weavers alive even in their most miserable periods of depression. The present study does not seek to trace the history of Poor Law administration or to examine the aim and scope of private philanthropy in Lancashire in the early nineteenth century; both these vast fields still await the close attention of historians. Nevertheless, the attempts to mitigate the worst extremes of poverty to which many families were likely to sink at this time deserve some examination.
The problem of organizing charity on a sufficiently large scale to deal with the critical situations in which the handloom weavers frequently found themselves was enormous. The cotton weavers were numerous, and concentrated within a relatively limited area; in many of the country villages and small towns of Lancashire, the majority of the inhabitants found their employment at the loom.
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- The Handloom Weavers , pp. 233 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1969