Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Jane Humphries
Author-Workplace-Name: All Souls College, University of Oxford
Author-Name: Benjamin Schneider
Author-Workplace-Name: Merton College, University of Oxford
Title: Spinning the Industrial Revolution
Abstract: The prevailing explanation for why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in
Britain is Robert Allen’s (2009) ‘high-wage economy’ view, which claims that the
high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the
adoption of new techniques. This paper presents new empirical evidence on hand
spinning before the Industrial Revolution and demonstrates that there was no such
‘high-wage economy’ in spinning, a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify
the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial
to the British textile industry in the Early Modern period with evidence of
productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Our
results show that spinning was a widespread, low-wage, low-productivity
employment, in line with the Humphries (2013) view of the motivations for the
factory system.
Classification-JEL:  J24, J31, J42, J46, N13, N33, N63, O14, O31
Keywords: hand spinning, women's wages, Industrial Revolution, textiles, Great
Divergence, High Wage Economy interpretation of invention and innovation
Length: 55 pages
Creation-Date: 2016-06-05
Number: _145
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/14544/spinning-the-industrial-revolution-for-discussion-paper-series-final.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_145