| Research Abstract |
There were various factors in competitions among regional textile industries before the British industrial revolution. I focus on the following points; how the industrial moral economy was in each regional industry and how it was overcome, how cloths were transmitted from manufacturers to markets, especially whether tradesmen and merchants were general dealers or special ones and whether they could give manufacturers quick and correct information of fashions among consumers or not. In the woolen industry of West of England where social and cultural gaps were very big between gentleman clothiers and domestic workers, the latter were persistent with the industrial moral economy and resisted against gentleman clothiers who were often justices of the peace. As the clothiers depended on agents and general merchants in London markets, they delayed in responding to changes of fashions and in introducing spinning machines to construct factories. It is clearly contrasted with the Lancashire cot
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ton industry, in which manufacturers overcome the industrial moral economy in the section of spinning at the end of the 18^<th> century, developing new markets through Liverpool, and realizing free competition among spinners, that is, the political economy, to construct factories with spinning machines. On the other hand, embezzlement was one of the most important factors of industrial moral economy and domestic workers regarded it as 'perquisite', while clothiers and government had tried to prohibit it by many acts since the 16^<th> century. In the 16^<th> and 17^<th> centuries, they could settled embezzlement by satisfaction under the acts, but from 1749, embezzlement was punished immediately as a crime, with clarification of idea of property right. Those acts were intensified especially in regions of worsted industry which developed large putting out system, though its market was undermined by cotton. As for the London cloth market and merchants, I only surveyed works of various fields of London history, to prepare for a research into the subject. Less
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