The Power Loom and the Fate of the Handloom Weavers

Once machines produced abundant yarn, weaving became the slower step. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman, patented a power loom, but early versions were unreliable, and power looms did not become common until improvements in the 1810s and 1820s. In the meantime, cheap machine-spun yarn created a boom for handloom weavers, whose numbers and earnings rose at first. As power looms spread, the price of woven cloth fell and handloom weavers' piece rates collapsed.

By the 1830s many were living in deep poverty, and parliamentary inquiries documented their plight. Their story is central to debates about industrialization's costs: a skilled group first prospered from new technology and then was displaced by it. Some historians see the weavers as victims of change; others stress that their children found work in mills and that cheaper cloth benefited consumers.