in the countryside and continue to cultivate their small plots. Income from proto-industrial production supplemented their shrinking income from cultivation. It also allowed them a fuller use of their family labour resources. Within this system a close relationship developed between the town and the countryside.
Merchants were based in towns but the work was done mostly in the countryside. A merchant clothier in England purchased wool from a wool stapler , and carried it to the spinners; the yarn (thread) that was spun was taken in subsequent stages of production to weavers, fullers , and then to dyers. The finishing was done in London before the export merchant sold the cloth in the international market. London in fact came to be known as a finishing centre.
This proto-industrial system was thus part of a network of commercial exchanges. It was controlled by merchants and the goods were produced by a vast number of producers working within their family farms, not in factories. At each stage of production to workers were employed by each merchant. This meant that each clothier was controlling hundreds of workers.
. The Coming Up of the Factory The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s. But it was only in the late eighteenth century that the number of factories multiplied. The first symbol of the new era was cotton.
Its production boomed in the late nineteenth century. In Britain was importing . million pounds of raw cotton to feed its cotton industry. By this import soared to million pounds.
This increase was linked to a number of changes within the process of production. Let us look briefly at some of these. A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of each step of the production process ( carding , twisting and spinning, and rolling). They enhanced the output per worker, enabling each worker to produce more, and they made possible the production of stronger threads and yarn.
Then Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill. Till this time, as you have seen, cloth production was spread all