This is a repository copy of Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1437/ Article: Toms, S. (1998) Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry. Journal of Industrial History. pp. 35-55. ISSN 1463-6174 Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing
[email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request.
[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ B. Research Articles Growth, Profits and Technological Choice: The Case of the Lancashire Cotton Textile Industry ]. S. Toms University of Nottingham Industrial history is necessarily concerned with economic growth and decline. Lancashire Cotton textiles provides a classic case study of these processes. From being the vanguard sector of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the industry fell into rapid and terminal decline in the twentieth. Determinants of growth and decline, such as industry structure, profitability, capital accumulation and technological choice have been addressed in previous studies, although certain variables have enjoyed more attention than others.1 The period 1870-1914 has been regarded by some as a time when Lancashire entrepreneurs made the mistakes that condemned the industry to its subsequent downfall.