John Styles

Research Professor in History, University of Hertfordshire
Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Victoria and Albert Museum

John Styles is Research Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Previously he was Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where he remains Senior Honorary Research Fellow. He specializes in the history of early-modern Britain and its empire, especially the study of material life, manufacturing and design. His most recent books are Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (co-edited with Amanda Vickery, 2006), The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (2007), and Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens, 1740-1770 (2010). His exhibition, ‘Threads of Feeling’, was displayed at the London Foundling Museum in 2010-11 and at the de Witt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA in 2012-13 (www.threadsoffeeling.com). From 2010 to 2015 he held a European Research Council Advanced Grant for his research project ‘Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel, 1400 to 1800’ (www.spinning-wheel.org). He is currently writing a book on fashion, textiles and the origins of the British Industrial Revolution.

Abstract

Yorkshire worsteds and Lancashire cottons: markets, fashion and technical innovation in the early industrial revolution

In most histories of textiles and the industrial revolution, it is the Lancashire cotton industry that holds centre stage. Conventional accounts of the British industrial revolution tell the story of an Asian textile – cotton – transformed into a cheap, mass-produced British staple by means of cost-cutting mechanical inventions conceived in Lancashire. Yet if we consider the eighteenth-century north of England more broadly, Lancashire’s burgeoning cotton industry did not stand alone. It was encircled by other, equally buoyant textile manufactures – woollens to the east, linens to the west, silks to the south and, most important, worsteds on almost all sides. Like cotton, these were rapidly expanding industries. Indeed, Yorkshire worsteds, with their core around Halifax, were more recent arrivals in the north of England than Lancashire cottons. The paper compares the development of the two neighbouring industries and the ways they interacted, with a particular emphasis on products, markets and technical innovation.