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

Abstract

In February 1777, Imbert de St Paul, the French government’s inspector of manufactures at Nimes, witnessed a spinning jenny at work for the first time. An experienced member of the state industrial bureaucracy, he had already heard about the jenny, which had been introduced into France by one of his colleagues in 1771. Nevertheless, he had to confess it ‘is a very ingenious machine, though very simple, and seeing it work, we were all simply astonished we had failed to guess its secret’. Invented in England in the mid-1760s by the Lancashire weaver James Hargreaves, this simple but ingenious machine remains a familiar icon of the Industrial Revolution, its origins and its impact repeatedly interrogated in the search for explanations of Britain’s eighteenth-century economic transformation. The jenny features as a key technical breakthrough — a ‘macroinvention’ — in the two most influential recent interpretations of the Industrial Revolution: Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective and Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850. For Allen the spinning jenny was a macroinvention because it was a new technology with big effects. Its importance lies in its impact, setting in train a long trajectory of advance that resulted in huge increases in productivity. It is ‘the industrial revolution in miniature’, the machine that exemplifies Allen’s argument that the demand for technological innovation was shaped by the relative prices of factors of production — for the jenny, principally labour and capital — in an eighteenth-century English economy characterised by high wages, but cheap capital. Mokyr, by contrast, insists that macroinventions are only very weakly related to economic forces, if at all, and that their precise timing is difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain. He presents them as radical new ideas that emerge without clear precedent, but have dramatic economic consequences. Less invested than Allen in the economic theory of induced innovation, he presents the jenny as just one of a cluster of macroinventions in cotton spinning that emerged in Lancashire between 1760 and 1780, a cluster that included Richard Arkwright’s water frame and