The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century Cotton Spinning

摘要

The rise and fall of the domestic spinning jenny in the Lancashire cotton industry spanned a mere forty years. Nevertheless, the jenny remains one of the key technical innovations of the Industrial Revolution, original and Janus-faced. In conception and operation, it was embedded in the material and technical divisions of labour distinctive to domestic cotton spinning in Lancashire during the previous century. Yet, once in use, it was rapidly re-engineered as a larger, more costly machine installed in non-domestic, proto-factories, while the discontinuous mode of operation it borrowed from hand spinning was reproduced in the spinning mule of 1779 by its inventor, Samuel Crompton, who had worked at a jenny in his youth. The mule would dominate Lancashire cotton spinning for the next century and a half. Nevertheless, James Hargreaves' spinning jenny is not the Industrial Revolution in miniature, a microcosm of the wider phenomenon and its causes. Considered in isolation, the jenny cannot answer the big questions as to why the key technical innovations of the Industrial Revolution in textiles were British, or why they focused on cotton. The jenny's origins were narrowly embedded in one part of Lancashire and its cotton industry during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. The genealogy of the other key spinning invention - Richard Arkwright's water frame - was more elaborate and cosmopolitan, with roots in British mercantilism and the centuries-old history of western European silk manufacture.