Lancashire’s place in the book’s account is not merely geographic: it was a setting where comparatively open conditions for production supported new industries, and where those industries later used parliamentary petitioning to resist restrictions. Its history connects local differences in economic regulation to national political conflict and, ultimately, to the textile innovations associated with the Industrial Revolution.

Production and the Civil War

Before 1640, limited guild regulation in Lancashire helped the production of the New Draperies, a lighter style of cloth, to develop. The area where these textiles were concentrated was the only part of the county to support Parliament during the English Civil War. The contrast with towns whose monopolies were protected by the Crown illustrates how local economic arrangements could shape political allegiance: Lancashire’s cloth-producing interests were associated with fewer barriers to entry, while established monopolists had reason to support royal protection.

Cotton, Linen, and Parliamentary Politics

In the early eighteenth century, wool manufacturers sought to protect their trade from imported Asian textiles. Parliament’s 1701 restrictions prohibited wearing specified imported silks and printed or dyed calicoes, and the 1721 Calico Act closed loopholes by banning the use or wearing of printed, painted, stained, or dyed calico in Great Britain. These measures excluded Asian competition but did not eliminate competition from domestic cotton and linen, including fustian, a popular cloth made by mixing cotton and linen.

The wool industry then sought restrictions on linen, which was made chiefly in Scotland and Ireland. Its campaign encountered opposition from fustian producers in the growing industrial centers of Manchester, Lancaster, and Liverpool. Both sides petitioned Parliament, gathering signatures in support of their positions. The resulting Manchester Act of 1736 protected the manufacture and use of cloth made from linen yarn and cotton wool when produced and printed or painted in Great Britain. The outcome marked a defeat for the wool manufacturers’ attempt to extend protection against domestic rivals.

From Local Industry to Industrial Change

The book presents the parliamentary outcome as evidence that England’s pluralistic political institutions placed limits on entry barriers: competing economic groups could bring their interests into the policy process through voting and, especially, petitioning. The victory for cotton manufacturers mattered beyond the immediate dispute. Over the following half century, technological innovations in cotton-cloth manufacture helped drive the Industrial Revolution and the spread of the factory system.

That transformation is visible in the subsequent account of mechanized textile production. Richard Arkwright’s water frame, patented in 1769, was developed through a partnership with hosiery manufacturers and used at an early factory built at Cromford in 1771. Arkwright later expanded to factories including one in Manchester. Lancashire’s earlier textile production and its role in the political struggle over cotton thus form part of a broader account of how local industrial interests and national institutions helped shape economic change.