368 Ch. 10 • Eighteenth-Century Economic And Social Change

Carding and spinning at home.

to collect and pay for the goods that had been completed. They would then

transport the goods to the next stage in the production process, for exam­

ple, to a dyer. Low pay rates in the countryside encouraged the persistence

of rural industry. At the end of the eighteenth century, hand-knitted stock­

ings produced by rural Scottish families still cost less than those knitted on

a power loom.

As the cottage industry was organized by household, women had a major,

even determining, role in the organization of the household economy,

including training young children. There were both male and female wool

spinners. One man, later a successful inventor of textile machinery, recalled,

“my mother taught me to earn my bread by carding and spinning cotton,

winding linen or cotton weft for my father and elder brothers at the loom,

until I became of sufficient age and strength for my father to put me into a

loom.” Many families of home spinners, weavers, glove-makers, and shirt­

buttoners also worked the land—theirs or someone else’s—part time. Rural

industry paused at harvest time.

Inventions

Technological change contributed to the Industrial Revolution. Between

1660 and 1760, 210 new inventions were patented in England; during the

next twenty-nine years, there were 976. But inventions at first had little to

do with increased productivity. They were probably less important than the

infusion of investment capital into manufacturing and the expansion of