Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

More hidden was the part played by Alcester’s gentry and professionals in local ventures.
In return, farmers from local villages, and country tradesmen such as carpenters, millers
and masons, served the townspeople.
In the late seventeenth century textiles and shoes were probably produced for
marketing outside the study area, as were guns and needles. Alcester had to be adaptable.
The collapse of the knitting trade in the mid-seventeenth century was to be the first of
many downs in Alcester’s roller-coaster ride from early modern times to the twentieth
century. Its occupations were diverse, and at this period no trade dominated its economy
as knitting may have done previously and as the needle-trade would do in the nineteenth
century.
In the first half of the eighteenth century the town’s retailers and tradesmen did
their best to keep abreast of the times in supplying their customers with more exotic
imports and luxuries from fish-skin breeches to sugar and spices. Alcester’s involvement
in the gun-trade probably indicates that in a small way it played its part in the slave
triangle, perhaps exporting its guns and receiving foreign goods in return. However,
Alcester fared badly during the epidemic of 1725-1730. Thereafter the trade in guns,
textiles, leather and horn declined. In the mid-eighteenth century the town survived as a
market centre, but was not enjoying the most flourishing chapter of its history.
After 1750 Alcester saw many changes: turnpike roads, enclosure, the decline of
the manor court (and its short-lived revival). Alcester increasingly embraced the needle
trade, which was already flourishing in many villages north of the town. At the end of
the century Alcester’s commitment to the needle-trade became more pronounced with
utilisation of water-power and division of labour.
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