Note 87 — Chapter I · THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COTTON MANUFACTURE

“I proceed to another visible increase of trade, which spreads daily among us, and affects not England only, but Scotland and Ireland also, though the consumption depends wholly upon England, and that is, the printing or painting of linen. The late Acts prohibiting the use and weaving of painted callicoes either in clothes, equipages, or house furniture, were without question aimed at improving the consumption of our woollen manufacture, and in part it had an effect that way. But the humour of the people running another way, and being used to and pleased with the light, easie, and gay dress of the callicoes, the callicoe printers fell to work to imitate those callicoes by making the same stamps and impressions, and with the same beauty of colours, upon linen, and thus they fell upon the two branches of linen called Scots cloth and Irish linen. So that this is an article wholly new in trade, and indeed the printing itself is wholly new; for it is but a few years ago since no such thing as painting or printing of linen or callicoe was known in England; all being supplied so cheap and performed so very fine in India, that nothing but a prohibition of the foreign printed callicoes could raise it up to a manufacture at home; whereas now it is so increased, that the parliament has thought it of magnitude sufficient to levy a tax upon it, and a considerable revenue is raised by it” (A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), p. 296, quoted in Baines’ Cotton Manufacture, pp. 260-261). A good brief account of the early development of calico printing in this country is given in two lectures by Edmund Potter, of Manchester, vol. iii., The Monthly Literary and Scientific Lecturer, 1852. The trade began in the neighbourhood of London in the last years of the seventeenth century and was first established in Lancashire in 1764. Shortly afterwards the first Robert Peel became interested in it and carried it on with great vigour. “Peel was to calico printing what Arkwright was to spinning.” See also Report of Committee on Manufactures, Commerce, and Shipping (1833), p. 237.