This piece originally appeared at Hyperdimensional.
Mechanized textile production was the high technology of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Inventions like the spinning jenny and water frame—both pioneered in Britain—massively increased labor productivity. The deployment of these and related technologies offered an early glimpse at what industrial-scale manufacturing would mean for economics, politics, and labor relations. The world had not yet seen “factories” in anything like the modern sense, but these technologies presented the first opportunities for proto-industrialists to build the early iterations of what we now think of as the factory.
Naturally, Britain—the island empire, the world’s preeminent naval power—was home to much of this early innovation, just as it was the cradle of the first industrial revolution. And the British guarded this technology jealously. Parliament passed increasingly stringent restrictions on the export of tools used in textile manufacturing, designs for the most innovative equipment, and the manufacturing equipment itself throughout the final decades of the 18th century. They forbade workers with specialized knowledge of textile manufacturing from emigrating, and they prohibited foreigners from entering the early textile factories. They strove vigorously to maintain British leadership in textile manufacturing.
But there was a hungry upstart entering the picture: the United States of America. What began during this era of British technology policy as a British colony ended as an independent country, victorious in war against the empire. We Americans had no interest in maintaining leadership. We had no interest in protecting our technology or preserving our competitive edge. We wanted, simply, to compete, to build and, perhaps one day, to lead ourselves.
Industrial machinery was easy enough for the British to hoard within their borders, but the knowledge inside a person’s mind was far harder to contain, even in an era whose information and communication technologies were far more limited than what we have today.
Eventually, an enterprising Brit by the name of Samuel Slater, who had served as an apprentice to the inventor of the water frame, made his way to America. There he collaborated with New England financiers to create an American textile manufacturing venture. Around the same time, an American named Francis Cabot Lowell managed to make it into British textile factories, memorizing the design of their equipment. His transplantation of those ideas—and not insignificant innovations of his own—gave rise to the Lowell System, a template for American industrial production that would be replicated many times over. Lowell, Massachusetts, bearing his name ever since, would become the birthplace of American capitalistic dynamism.
Within a few decades, American textile manufacturing would equal, if not surpass, British output. And we sold our textile manufacturing equipment internationally, too. At first, perhaps our equipment was not as good. But that mattered little, because the world’s best machines—the ones made by the empire on the island—were illegal or difficult for other countries to buy. And eventually, by virtue of making the machines at great scale, America became better at that, too, than the British.
I often whether the British could have played their cards differently. I wonder what the world would have looked like if the British had supplied America—and everyone else on Earth—with textile manufacturing equipment, rather than keeping it mostly on their island. But I also wonder whether the British really had a choice. Textile manufacturing was perceived as a key domestic competitive advantage, as a pillar of Britain’s economic and even military dominance. This was a matter of national security. What else were they to do but protect?
Surrender, disguised as protection and nationalism. This, for the British, is how it happened. History can be cruel.
One of the lessons I take from history is that a great power sometimes has no choice but to walk a certain path. Sometimes, you are simply making the best wagers you can with the cards you have in your hand.
