I may have caused some confusion by including some material on mid-nineteenth century Manchester in the first class. After that I cycled back to the situation in the late fifteenth century around the time of the voyages of Columbus and da Gama.
In 1600, when the British East India Company was founded, there was no shortage of raw cotton. This is because the process of making thread and then weaving textiles was so slow that the existing supplies were more than adequate. In next week’s class we will see how the steps of the process were originally performed.
We will then see how each time one step of the process was speeded up by a new invention there would be a scramble to find a way to invent something to eliminate the next bottleneck in the process. Only after the introduction of machines that simultaneously spun hundreds of threads did the supply of raw cotton become the bottleneck.
