A familiar storyline dominates the history of the Lancashire cotton industry. Factory-based textile production was at the centre of the industrial revolution in Britain, generating vast wealth, thanks in substantial part to its innovative yet avaricious entrepreneurs, wedded to the ideology of laissez-faire economics and profit maximization. Given the influence of this received narrative, and its characterization of financial behaviour and financial consequences, it is perhaps surprising that hitherto there has been no long-run financial history of Lancashire cotton firms. The performance of these firms, and the economic behaviour of their entrepreneurs, investors and managers, would undoubtedly appear to warrant substantial and systematic scrutiny, either to confirm the stereotypical account or to test the validity of alternative narratives. The purpose of this book is to present a financial history of the industry, offering precisely such an investigation.

The book concerns the British cotton industry, which was predominantly located in Lancashire and its immediate periphery. While the sizeable cotton industry in Scotland is not a prime focus, linkages between Lancashire and Scotland are investigated and found to be more significant, based on financial ties, than suggested hitherto. It is also important to note that in the second half of the twentieth century the boundary between cotton and other textiles, mainly man-made fabrics, became increasingly blurred, but even so, there are good reasons to place the Lancashire section at the centre of an analysis of the British textile industry over a long-run period. Specifically, a history focused on the financial performance of constituent firms, from the advent of powered factory production in the late eighteenth century until recent times, has the potential to highlight critical success factors driving long-run and sustainable profitability.

Histories of Lancashire textiles

Lancashire, and cotton textiles more broadly, has attracted enormous attention from historians, economists, and other scholars, which raises the question of why another study is needed. Indeed, because of the length of the period to be examined, c.1780–2000, there are naturally many overlaps between this and previous histories of the industry. Douglas Farnie's seminal account of the industry in his book The English Cotton Industry and the World Market is unlikely to be surpassed in terms of depth and quality of scholarship.