Moderns

The Weaving Industry

[Quotations from The Lion In The North, by John Prebble]

after 1752 [ p.311] '... linnen spinners and weavers at last flourished in the towns about Glasgow, forming their own company to market their product in Africa and America, and a bank for the extension of credit. In the last quarter of the [18th] century, the cotton industry of Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire was revolutionised by the inventions of the Englishmen James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, by the building of mills and by the employment of dispossessed Highlanders.'

from 1792 [p.313] 'The liberal-minded section of the [Scottish] middle class, anxious for reforms that would give it political rights equal to the economic burden it carried, was sympathetic to the principles of the French Revolution and encouraged by their success. More passionate, more desperate and more in need, was the anger of the new worker class, cottage operatives, spinners and weavers, colliers and ironworkers upon whose labour the county's prosperity fundamentally rested ...

[p.317] '... the zealots [of the reform movement] ... now formed themselves into societies of United Scotsmen ... Once more the leaders were young advocates, small merchants and skilled artisans, but a strong body of support came from the weavers, extraordinary men with firm radical and Calvinistic convictions. Many of them, particularly about Paisley, were lyric poets, and they had a joyous enthusiasm for the arts and sciences. They were also more prosperous than any other worker group.'

From 1820, after harsh suppression of the Reform Movement [p.320] '...Weavers, wrights and colliers had learnt a harsh but memorable lesson in unity, in the power of labour when it is withheld, for sixty thousand of them had answered the strike call, if not the summons to arms. But the nationalism, the heady dreams of political independence that had inspired the reformers since 1792, quickly faded, and the emerging working class of Scotland would soon look southward for solidarity with its English brothers.'