Some argue that this ‘mobility’ was driven by the ‘enclosure movement’,
the forcible eviction of people from the land by landlords to facilitate a shift
from cultivating land with crops to sheep grazing (which required fewer work-
ers) to take advantage of expanding international markets for woollen ware.
Much of this land had previously been held under common ownership and was
taken over by landlords and turned into private property. Others scholars
emphasize technological change in the cotton textile industry which drew
women and children in from the household and agriculture to make them part
of the industrial labour force. The spinning jenny (a key textile technology,
discussed later in this chapter), for example, had a horizontal wheel requiring
a posture most comfortable for children aged between nine and twelve. By the
1830s about three-quarters of employees in English textile mills were women
and children. There is little evidence of any ‘quality’ change in the labour force
during these years; the new entrants were mainly illiterate. As late as 1801 to
1831 primary school enrolment was only 36 per cent, and even by the end of
the nineteenth century secondary school enrolment was only 17 per cent
(Crafts, 1995:754).
Investment
As part of the older ‘revolutionary’ school of thought, Charles Feinstein (1978)
argued that there was a significant rise in investment in the late eighteenth
century. Nick Crafts (1995) has used his new estimates of national income to
show that investment increased from under 6 per cent of GDP in the mid-to-
late eighteenth century to around 8 per cent by the end of the nineteenth
century. Other scholars have argued instead that the level of investment was
less important than the fact that changes in technology associated with the
early Industrial Revolution in cotton mills,coal mines and iron furnaces were
relatively simple and cheap, requiring little investment. Furnaces, buildings,
hammers and boilers were not normally installed by outside firms but were
built,maintained and altered by the firm’s own workers at relatively low cost.
Another change was again not about more investment, but the concentration of
the existing capital stock in much larger factories (Nef, 1934, Pollard, 1964).
Productivity (TFP)
Early studies of productivity during the Industrial Revolution also tended to
emphasize its ‘revolutionary’ aspects. This view argues that from the late eigh-
teenth century a series of technological innovations often associated with a
‘heroic entrepreneur’ transformed the British cotton textile sector and gave rise
to the modern factory system. These innovations included the spinning jenny
1766, Arkwright’s water frame (1769), Crompton’s mule (1779) and
Cartwright’s power loom (1787). Efforts to measure the impact of this techno-
logical change have never found more than a small impact. Estimates of
productivity (TFP) growth for the late eighteenth century declined from early
estimates of 1.3 per cent per annum to later estimates of only 0.1 per cent per
annum (Feinstein,1978; Crafts and Harley, 1992). Others have argued that
16 Introduction