Prices and Profits in Cotton Textiles During the Industrial Revolution
AbstractCotton textile firms led the development of machinery-based industrialization in the Industrial Revolution. This paper presents price and profits data extracted from the accounting records of three cotton firms between the 1770s and the 1820s. The course of prices and profits in cotton textiles illumine the nature of the economic processes at work. Some historians have seen the Industrial Revolution as a Schumpeterian process in which discontinuous technological change created large profits for innovators and succeeding decades were characterized by slow diffusion. Technological secrecy and imperfect capital markets limited expansion of use of the new technology and output expanded as profits were reinvested until eventually the new technology dominated. The evidence here supports a more equilibrium view which the industry expanded rapidly and prices fell in response to technological change. Price and profit evidence indicates that expansion of the industry had led to dramatic price declines by the 1780s and there is no evidence of super profits thereafter.
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Bibliographic InfoPaper provided by Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford in its series Oxford University Economic and Social History Series with number _081.
Length: 42 pages
Date of creation: 26 May 2010
Date of revision:
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Web page: http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/
Industrial Revolution; cotton textiles; prices; profits.;
Other versions of this item:
- C. Knick Harley, 2010. "Prices and Profits in Cotton Textiles During the Industrial Revolution," Economics Series Working Papers Number 81, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
- N63 - Economic History - - Manufacturing and Construction - - - Europe: Pre-1913
- N83 - Economic History - - Micro-Business History - - - Europe: Pre-1913
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- Mokyr, Joel, 1976. "Growing-up and the industrial revolution in Europe," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 371-396, November.
- Paul A. David & S. Ryan Johansson & Andrea Pozzi, 2010.
"The Demography of an Early Mortality Transition: Life Expectancy, Survival and Mortality Rates for Britain's Royals, 1500-1799,"
Oxford University Economic and Social History Series
_083, Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
- Paul David & S. Ryan Johansson and Andrea Pozzi, 2010. "The Demography of an Early Mortality Transition: Life Expectancy, Survival and Mortality Rates for Britain's Royals, 1500-1799," Economics Series Working Papers Number 83, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
- Harley, C. Knick, 2012. "Was technological change in the early Industrial Revolution Schumpeterian? Evidence of cotton textile profitability," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 516-527.
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