Hanging by a Thread: The Scottish Cotton Industry, c. 1850-1914.

The Scottish cotton industry has been the poor relation of Lancashire as far as historians are concerned. While there have been endless studies of the English cotton industry there has been relatively far less interest in the Scottish industry; the present monograph by William Knox is, in fact, the first book-length study of the industry. This discrepancy is not hard to explain. Scottish cotton was pretty much dead on its feet by the end of the nineteenth century and had been long surpassed by the much larger and more dynamic industry of Lancashire. Yet in the early nineteenth century Scottish cotton had been more advanced than its southern competitor, and the story of Scotland and Britain's first major industrial casualty is of some importance both in its own right and for what it might tell us about British manufacturing …