Cotton Spinning Machinery Orders, British Textile Machinery Firms, 1878-1933

This was a long-term study of the diffusion of cotton-spinning technologies from Britain to emerging textile industries around the world. Cotton manufacturing was the first global industry, and the dataset provides information on orders covering roughly 90 percent of world trade in these machines. Virtually every major national cotton industry is covered, the major exception being the United States of America (whose textiles industry was supplied primarily by the protected textile machinery industry). The orders include detailed information about machine specifications, such as frame size, machine speed, the yarn count for which the machine is designed, and the types of raw cotton to be utilized. A specific issue that motivated the research project was the choice between mule spinning and ring spinning, on which national patterns diverged widely. There is an extensive literature on this topic, to which Saxonhouse and Wright contributed. See most recently: "Technological Evolution in Cotton Spinning, 1878-1933," in Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy (eds.), <strong>The Fibre that Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600-1990s</strong> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).