DAVE MANSEIL!L The upstirge in cotton and the decline in linen is shown in the following table: Number of Linen and cotton looms in Belfast 1760-1810 1760 1791 1806 1810 Linen looms 400 129 4 Cotton looms 522 629 860 By 1811 Belfast was importing over three quarters of the total Irish imports of raw cotton. Cotton rapidly took over the Irish domestic market from linen (which was three times as expensive in 1810) but met with little success in exporting to England, which maintained high protective duty barriers before the Union, which were scaled down to 10% by 1808 and abolished in 1824 under Huskisson's free trade policies. The cotton boom which was sustained by the buoyant wartime economy lasted until the end of protection in 1825, although there were dips which created pockets of acute unemployment among weavers especially during phases of overproduction. The weavers, who still used hand looms, were much worse paid than the spinners whose side of the industry had been mechanised, and after 1815 their wages were forced down by a third, a result of the general British depression of the period. The weavers resisted efforts to lower their wages: there was a weavers' riot in 1815 and an attempt to form a weavers' association in 1824, but their efforts were to no avail. After the depression of 1825 the cotton industry declined. Wages in all levels of the industry declined by about a third. The abolition of protection led to a flooding of the Irish market by cheaper and finer English muslins and cottons. This menaced the weavers with almost immediate starvation, and attempts were made to assist them, at first by providing them with food at half-price, and later by helping them to emigrate principally to America (although as late as 1838 there were still 12,000 to 15,000 weavers within ten miles of Belfast, but few if any, elsewhere. By 1861 the few weavers and their families left were surviving on starvation diets, and they were wiped out by the cotton famine of 1861-2, brought on by the American Civil War). An accidental introduction of new textile technology « saved» most of the cotton spinners so that they could undergo the full rigours of capitalist exploitation. At the crucial moment a cotton manufacturer, Thomas Mulholland, when rebuilding his burnt-out cotton mill decided, because of the keen 72
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