Question

Why did so many of the early factories of the Industrial Revolution specialize in making cotton cloth? Why cloth? And why cotton?

Answer 1

it was mainly the use of technology to make the simple ideas work perfectly fine which mainly contributed to the industrial revolution in England during 18h century. In the graph of spinner’s          earning in comparison to man’s indicated that during 1580s, a common woman worker was earning only 35% of wages in comparison to the man , but as the capital intensive industries started to grow, this earning of woman workers rose up to 75% of total wages of man. This intensive investment in capital intensive industry was mainly to fulfill the increased demand of the UK’s local demand.

With the development of these technology based machines, a lot of money was saved in the form of wages paid to the labor and it resulted in the rate of return on investment to increase rapidly up to the level of 35% during1750s. On the other hand, other economies were not having such a high rate of return n the investments and thus the investors in other economies did not invest in these capital intensive technologies. Thus , the development of technology in Britain resulted as the economy at that time was a high wage economy and in order to reduce the wages paid, the technology was developed.

The assumption made is that with the development of technology, the wage rates will fall, the rate of return in these technologies are quite substantial, the demand is more than enough to receive the huge investments.