Abstract

"The Career Progression of Child Labourers in the English Cotton Industry, 1834-1857"

Alexander Tertzakian, University of Glasgow (alexander.tertzakian@glasgow.ac.uk), Xuesheng You, Cardiff University (youx5@cardiff.ac.uk)

Quarry Bank Mill was one of the foremost cotton manufacturing concerns of the British Industrial Revolution. Located in Greater Manchester and founded in 1784 by Samuel Greg, the mill’s evolution from a water-powered spinning factory to a fully integrated textile enterprise incorporating all mechanised processes encapsulates the classic story of the rise of the factory system. Its extensive archival records – including wage books, school attendance records, and other firm documents – offer a unique opportunity to analyse the relationships between labour, technology, and wages in the cradle of the cotton industry.

This paper draws on a fully digitised set of Quarry Bank’s wage books from 1834 to 1857, which include fully transcribed worker names, to trace the careers of operatives across the mill’s process rooms, organised by technology type. By linking subsets of these workers to the 1851 census, their ages can be determined and their wage trajectories reconstructed. The analysis identifies the technologies and processes that employed children by age and sex, compares adult wages among those who began work as children with those who did not, and estimates the “skill premium” associated with early factory employment. It also explores the dynamics of technological switching, retraining, and their wage implications over the duration of employment. The paper shows how significant numbers of children were redeployed throughout the factory as a result of technological change, rather than the latter reducing the need for their labour. Indeed, child labour remained integral to the factory workforce well into the mid-nineteenth century. By reconstructing individual careers and linking them to technological and organisational change, this paper contributes to debates in business and economic history concerning the formation of the factory workforce, the decline of child labour, and gendered employment.