New Evidence on the Stubborn English Mule and the Cotton Industry, 1878-1920.

This article discusses why the English cotton industry was so much slower than the rest of the world to make the switch from mules to ring-frame spinning. This article presents the records of six textile machinery companies. These records are now available at the Lancashire Record Office in Preston. The new figures show that Lancashire's commitment to mule-spinning prior to World War I was indeed overwhelming, so much so that it calls into question attempts to explain the choice in terms of demand patterns and labour skills. The data also allows the direct testing of subsidiary hypotheses in a comparative international setting. In trying to make sense of these diverse national adoption patterns, it is helpful to remember that the ring and the mule represented basically different principles of spinning which had been in competition since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The mule is based on the principle of intermittent spinning, in which spinning and winding operations alternated. The late nineteenth-century ring-spinning machine, on the other hand, rested on more than one hundred years of development of the principle of continuous spinning.