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Consider the Greg family. In 1784, Samuel Greg established the Quarry Bank Mill outside of Manchester. Originally powered by water, in the early years of the nineteenth century the mill converted to coal and steam. (The factory also engaged in weaving in addition to spinning cotton cloth.) The new technology proved more dependable than water, and coal allowed the factory to operate year-round, most workers putting in 12 hour days, six days a week. At the time, the mill was one of the most advanced factories globally, with direct connections to Boulton and Watt, the leading developers and marketers of steam engines. With four other textile mills by the early 1830s, Samuel Greg at Co. became one of, if not the most, powerful cotton companies in the country. According to the historian Andreas Malm, Quarry Mill became “the largest establishment in Europe.”
In late 1810, the assessed value of the factory was L4111 12s, about L400,000 today. A later 1831 assessed value had risen to L17,958, or about L2.42 million in today’s money, a remarkable increase in two decades. This includes worker cottages and other buildings.
According to a 2010 Oxford study, the Quarry Bank Mill accounts went from a debt balance of L3,822 in 1798, to a positive balance of over L69,047 in 1810. Here are some financial details taken from that 2010 study:Quarry Bank Mill
Like all companies, profits went up and down. Market demand changed. Equipment broke or had to be updated. Workers could be non-compliant. Indeed, workers targeted the Quarry Bank Mill in 1842 as part of a wave of worker mobilization demanding higher wages and various political reforms.
But if we concluded our discussion here it would be difficult to not be impressed. The company made lots of money. It was constantly improving, adapting new technological innovations. We would want to declare, as have countless statements about capitalism and the supporters of Adam Smith: “herein lies the miracle of the Industrial Revolution, a marriage of capital and technology to create a very profitable business that generated very considerable wealth.” Here was a family with modest roots that had done well, fantastically well. Adam Smith would have been thrilled.
Indeed, this is what happens when we cast our analysis relatively narrowly and follow free market conventional wisdom. But what if we take a few steps back? The first thing we would discover is that the family had been enmeshed in cloth production and various mercantile and other pursuits. Their economic interests were set firmly on the broader Atlantic economy.
This is not surprising. The Atlantic world was where the action was, where one could make (and loose) one’s fortune.
What were these pursuits? According to various studies, these involved provisioning plantations and privateering during the Seven Years War. The latter is a euphemism for economic gain using violence, especially attacking enemy vessels, confiscating property, and so on.
With the end of the Seven Years War, England expanded its presence in the Caribbean, taking various islands from the French, including Dominica. The island’s economy boomed, as did islands such as Jamaica. The Dominica economy centered largely on sugar as well as serving as an important terminus in the movement of enslaved people across the greater Caribbean. These were profitable times for sugar plantations. Rates of profit has been steadily about 10% yearly since mid-century, though the American war temporarily reduced profitability. The Atlantic Slave Trade that was bringing chattel to the Caribbean was also rising dramatically in this period. In other words, this period marked the apogee of the plantation complex.
Samuel Greg’s uncle John Greg became Government Commissioner on Dominica. The family had multiple plantations and owned more than one hundred slaves. John Greg returned to England as an absentee proprietor. His brother, Thomas, also had a plantation owned with a Waddel Cunningham.
John Greg died in 1795. Thomas, Samuel’s father, died in 1796. Up through the ending of slavery, the family had plantation holdings in Dominica, though as before the wealth accrued by plantation slavery and other Atlantic economic activities was making its way across the Atlantic. Samuel uses the wealth from the Atlantic world to help found Quarry Bank Mill, including its crucial period of expansion around the turn of the century.
The rest, as we say, is history.
But why should we care? One major reason is that there is a persistent, indeed a pernicious, tradition of explaining away the entanglements of the Atlantic world with the Industrial Revolution. It is as if the slavery, privateering, provisioning plantations, and so on in the end are all irrelevant to what others have called the “great divergence.” But as scholars of that divergence have made clear, the Industrial Revolution simply cannot be explained—or explained away—as an endogenous development. To pretend otherwise is to sanitize the past, including the development of capitalism.