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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, a somewhat late adopter of the new technology. (The factory also engaged in weaving in addition to spinning cotton cloth.) The new technology proved more dependable than water, and coal and steam allowed the factory to operate year-round, most workers putting in 12 hour days, six days a week. The mill became 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 other words, Greg epitomized England’s Industrial Revolution.
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 in the modern age, profits went up and down. Market demand changed. The cost of raw cotton varied. 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.
This is all very impressive, especially if we concluded our discussion here. The company made lots of money. It was constantly improving, adopting new technological innovations. We would want to declare, as have countless statements about capitalism and blind 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 extended family had been enmeshed in cloth production and various mercantile and other pursuits. Their economic interests were set firmly in the broader Atlantic economy. Activities were wide-ranging: food, clothing; rum and molasses; and guns. Trading was both licit and illicit. The trading firm of Greg & Cunningham was very profitable. The latter partner also ended up in a New York jail; the firm had been trading weapons with the French. (Their ships also attacked French and Spanish vessels. Today, this seems like a contraction, but in the eighteenth century this would have surprised few people.)
This is not surprising. The Atlantic world was where the action was, where one could make (and loose) one’s fortune. The quickest road to capital accumulation–or catastrophic loss–lay in the Atlantic.
What were these pursuits? Again, according to various studies, these involved provisioning plantations, the cloth trade, weapons, and a range of other economic ventures, as well as 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. (I explore privateering as one road to capital accumulation in The Killing Age.)
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 had 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.
This is where the Atlantic connections start getting interesting. 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 Waddell Cunningham, the wealthy Belfast merchant.
John Greg died in 1795. Thomas, Samuel’s father, died in 1796. Up through the ending of slavery in the 1830s, the family had plantation holdings in Dominica. Throughout, wealth accrued by plantation slavery and other Atlantic economic activities was making its way back and forth across the Atlantic. Samuel used the wealth from the Atlantic world to help found Quarry Bank Mill in 1783, including its crucial period of expansion around the turn of the century.
Ultimately, Samuel Greg’s father left his relatively little, but Samuel inherited a huge amount from his uncle Robert Hyde, who was a major merchant/manufacturer in Manchester (and firmly engaged in the Atlantic World). Robert’s father, Samuel, owned a plantation in Jamaica.
In other words, there were important relationships connecting Manchester with the broader Atlantic World. I have not mentioned the obvious: the great bulk of the cotton that was spun into cloth came from slave plantations across the US South. Nor have I discussed here the connections between Manchester and Liverpool; the latter was the most important port connecting England to Africa and the slave trade.
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, 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. Crucially, we simply can’t suppose that capital’s origins and development were somehow innocent, the good fortune of hard work. Nor do old-fashioned Marxist approaches work, the ones that go all the way back to the enclosure movement and again insist on largely endogenous histories. Capitalism–including the Industrial Revolution–emerged out of global entanglements, especially with the Atlantic world. To pretend otherwise is to sanitize the past, including the development of capitalism. And as I tried to make clear in The Killing Age, the formative century and a half of capitalist development was uniquely violent.