Themes

This book is an analysis of the long-term forces shaping the British and American cotton industries over two hundred years, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The choice of a very long-term perspective deliberately highlights both the continuities and changes in the forces shaping business behaviour and the evolution of business culture, which may be obscured when shorter historical periods are studied. Inevitably this means that this is a work of critical synthesis, which tries to make sense of general trends, rather than being based on an extensive use of primary sources, which are used instead to fill inevitable gaps in the secondary literature. This multidisciplinary study derives insight from management, political economy and industrial sociology as well as from the methodologies and empirical studies of business, economic and textile history.

Contemporaries began commenting on the differences between cotton manufacturing in Britain and the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This began with an awareness that New England industrialists were producing cotton cloth in ways that were quite different from those found in Lancashire and with dissimilar social consequences. Attention has been particularly focused on the variations which occurred in organisation, technology and most particularly in labour productivity. Diverging experience, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards, has been explained in terms of resource allocation, of relative product and factor market conditions, of differences in entrepreneurial energy and in institutional development.