The Factory and the Child Labor Question: A Study in Technology and Change

Auburn University, Auburn AL

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal Abstract Lindy Biggs, Auburn University The Factory and the Child Labor Question in Early Industrial Britain: A Study in Technology and Change This project examines a debate in late 18th and early 19th century England concerning, apparently, the labor of children in the nation's cotton textile factories. In fact, the aim of this project is to show that, at a deeper level, the debate was about the shifting social and moral economy that resulted from industrialization. It is a story of men seeking profit through new technology and the conflicts they encountered. It is at the same time about fundamental social and cultural change. The project grows from an interest in the way technology participates in peoples' lives; how it shapes the way we live and think and view the world. The project describes the needs of a new technological system and the way they reshaped life in British society. The intensity of the conflict over the factory and its technology was possible because technology could be questioned at this time, before new technology came to be viewed as a panacea and equivalent to progress. This story provides a unique look into a society debating its technological future. This is a book-length study of the early British textile factory and its impact on political and social ideologies. It sees the transition to an industrial society as social, cultural, and political history rather than economic. It seeks to develop a social geography of the factory, describing the factory building, its machines and their operations, the work force and the work culture, and its impact on local culture. And it explores the wide-ranging discourse all levels of British society about the nature of the factory and the morality of child factory workers. The discourse has to be examined in the context of broad changes in British social and political ideology, particularly the laws regarding the treatment of the poor. A cry arose at the end of the eighteenth century in England to regulate the employment of children in cotton textile mills. Manchester physicians had traced epidemic disease to the cotton spinning mill of Robert Peel, where children, who had been purchased as isparish apprentices from London orphanages, worked under unhealthful conditions. These physicians began the child labor reform movement when they wrote letters to Parliament requesting government attention. The concern over child labor grew over the next decades until it became a prominent and highly emotional reform debate. Many groups had an interest in shaping the laws regulating child labor because those laws also regulated the factory and manufacturing. The stakes were high indeed, for whoever controlled the use and regulation of the factory would have a major role in shaping the future moral and economic order of the country. The intensity of debate suggests that the stakeholders were aware of the potential consequences of the outcome.