West Riding – Western Rhineprovince, 1790-1840: Diverse Paths to ...

West Riding – West of the Rhineland, 1780-1840 40
Alfred Reckendrees, University of Cologne reckendrees@wiso.uni-koeln.de
There is no information about how many of the looms were processed inside of the factory
workshops and how many homeworking weavers were occupied. We may assume that the
factories accounted only for 2/3 of the looms and we may also assume that the number of
employees is overestimated by 30%. According to this rough estimates the 19 factories had
employed 1388 looms and altogether 5756 employees within their factory establishments.
Than the average number of employees would decrease to 302, the number of looms inside
the factory workshops to 73. Spinning had taken 20% of all the factory employees, weaving
and preparing the loom probably 36% (1 ½ worker per loom). Most of the other employees
were occupied with finishing processes (some operations could not be done by
machines e.g. examinating the woven cloth and removing knots, or mending little holes;
fixing the cloth at the tenter, transporting the cloth that was very heavy when it was wet,
and so on). Of course this data consider only the cloth factories. However, even if one regards
all the about 50 firms that had more than 10 employees (including putting-out clothiers)
in 1849, the average employment per unit had been more than 110.
Gregory regards the decreasing number of employment per unit in the West Riding (table
8) as a prove of productivity increases compared to the West of England where the average
number of employees rather increased. I cannot follow this argument because such a comparison
of employment per unit makes sense only if the range of vertical integration is
similar. It makes no sense to compare scribbling and fulling mills with fully integrated
cloth factories by employment per unit. For a fully mechanised scribbling and fulling mill
his argument is correct, but in case of vertically integrated cloth factories one has to look
(1.) if perhaps the depth of integration has increased, and (2.) at the product quality of the
factories because fine cloth production depended to a great deal on manual labour (up until
the 20 th century). However, most of the mills in the West Riding were still scribbling and
fulling mills integrated into the domestic system where spinning and weaving was the occupation
of the cottage industry. Gregory himself suggests that in the 1850s 50% of the
workforce was still occupied in the domestic industry, 144 i.e. not in factories. The different
structures of the production system must be tanken into account.
Nevertheless, the range of the vertical integration of the cloth factories, the size range of
the factories, the average number of employees (and also the dominating types of products)
are indicating that the structure of the industry of Aix-la-Chapelle (that is not fully identical
with the whole of the west of the Rhineland) seems to be more similar to the industrial
structure of the West of England’s cloth industry than to the cloth industry of the West
Riding. Burtscheid and Eupen on the other hand would be closer to the industrial structure
of the West Riding. This is indicated especially by the higher rate of specialised spinning
factories (in Burtscheid and Eupen) and specialised finishing firms (Eupen), and by the
lower rate of vertically integrated fine cloth producers. 145
144 Gregory, Transformation (1982), 69. See also the figures of Hudson (table 8, above).
145
Nachweisung derjenigen Farbikationszweige, welche zusammen eine Anstalt bilden, in der Gewerbe-
Tabelle […] für das Jahr 1849 aber in verschiedenen Kolumnen vertheilt sind, DSTA BR 2116-49,
Gewerbe-Tabelle der Fabrikations-Anstalten und Fabrik-Unternehmungen aller Art [...] 1849, BR 2116-
48 F.180pp. (Burtscheid), F.209pp. (Eupen).