Robert Owen and the New Lanark Experiment

Robert Owen, a Welsh-born manufacturer, became manager and part-owner of the New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland in 1800. Convinced that people's character was shaped by their surroundings, he improved housing, cut working hours, stopped employing very young children and opened a school, the Institute for the Formation of Character, in 1816, which included an early infant school. Owen showed that a mill could stay profitable while treating workers better, and thousands of visitors came to see it.

He campaigned for factory laws and later founded a cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, which failed within a few years. Owen inspired the cooperative movement and early socialism. Critics then and now note that New Lanark remained a strictly controlled community run by a paternalistic owner, raising questions about whether reform from above respects workers' independence.