Cotton Mills in Glasgow

For two generations, cotton was king in Glasgow. As the tobacco trade faded, the city and the towns around it filled with spinning mills and the clatter of looms, and cotton became the great industry of the age — employing tens of thousands, enriching a new class of manufacturers, and drawing in a workforce of women and children who laboured long hours for little reward. It was also the setting for one of the darkest episodes in Scottish labour history, and it ended, as it had begun, at the mercy of events an ocean away.

This page tells its story: the rise of cotton, the mills and the weavers, the workers who toiled in them, the tragedy of the Calton weavers, the plantations that grew the raw cotton, the famine that broke the trade, and what remains.

The rise of King Cotton

Cotton rose as tobacco fell. In the decades after 1780, as the American war closed off the old tobacco trade, Glasgow’s merchants and manufacturers threw their capital and energy into a new material — cheap, versatile, endlessly in demand — and the west of Scotland became one of the great cotton regions of the world. New spinning mills, powered first by water and then by steam, rose across Glasgow and the surrounding country, and around them grew the weaving, bleaching, dyeing and printing trades that turned raw cotton into finished cloth. For the best part of a century, cotton was the largest industry in the city, the engine of its growth and, alongside the older trades of the Merchant City, the maker of many of its fortunes, as central to Glasgow’s industrial revolution as iron or the loom.

The mills & the weavers

The industry’s heartland lay in the east and along the rivers. In districts such as Calton, Bridgeton and Anderston, forests of tall brick chimneys marked the spinning mills, while the streets around them were filled with the handlooms of weavers working cotton into cloth. Some of the most famous mills stood a little upstream, at New Lanark on the Clyde, where the great water-powered works became a model of enlightened management under David Dale and Robert Owen. Weaving, in particular, was carried on by tens of thousands: at its height there were said to be more than twenty thousand handloom weavers across the west of Scotland, a vast, skilled and fiercely independent workforce whose labour clothed much of the nation — though their prosperity would in time be broken by the coming of the power loom, which did by machine what they had done by hand.

A workforce of women & children

The mills ran on the labour of the many, and above all on that of women and children. In the spinning factories it was women and young children who tended the machines through working days that stretched to twelve or fourteen hours, in hot, deafening and dangerous conditions, for wages far below those of the men. Children as young as eight or nine worked at the frames, and the toll on their health was heavy. The prosperity that cotton brought to the manufacturers and to the city was purchased, in large part, by the endurance of a workforce with little protection and less power — a pattern that would eventually help drive the long campaign for factory reform.

The Calton weavers

From that hardship came tragedy. In 1787 the handloom weavers of Calton, then a weaving village on the edge of Glasgow, went on strike against a sharp cut in their wages, marching in orderly processions through the streets of the city. When the authorities moved to break the protest, soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, and six weavers were shot dead — the earliest major industrial dispute in Scottish history, and one of its most infamous. The Calton weavers are remembered as Scotland’s first working-class martyrs; thousands attended their funeral, and their sacrifice is commemorated to this day, notably in a striking painted panel in the People’s Palace. Their deaths stand at the very beginning of the long struggle for workers’ rights in Scotland.

Cotton & the plantations

Glasgow’s cotton, like its sugar and tobacco, carried a hidden cost. The raw cotton that fed the city’s mills was grown, in great part, on the plantations of the American South, where it was cultivated and picked by enslaved African Americans held in bondage under a brutal system of forced labour. The booming mills of Glasgow and the enslaved workers of the cotton fields were bound together across the Atlantic in a single chain of production — the one utterly dependent on the other. To tell the story of Glasgow cotton honestly is to remember that its raw material, no less than the sugar of the Caribbean, was the product of slavery.

The Cotton Famine

That dependence proved the industry’s undoing. When civil war broke out in the United States in 1861, the naval blockade of the Southern ports choked off the supply of raw cotton to Britain, and the mills of Glasgow and the wider region were starved of the material on which they wholly relied. The result was the Cotton Famine of the 1860s: mills fell idle, tens of thousands of workers were thrown out of employment, and great hardship and distress spread through the cotton districts. Though some trade recovered when the war ended, the famine dealt Glasgow’s cotton industry a blow from which, in the face of growing competition, it never fully recovered.

The threads that remain

Cotton slowly gave way. As the industry declined, Glasgow’s energies turned increasingly to the heavy trades of iron, steel and shipbuilding for which it would become still more famous, and the mill chimneys of the east end fell silent one by one. Yet the cotton age left deep marks: in the surviving mills and weavers’ cottages, in the finishing and dyeing trades such as the celebrated Turkey red works of the Vale of Leven, and in the wider textile industry that outlasted cotton itself. Above all it left a memory — of a city clothed in cotton, and of the weavers of Calton, whose stand for a fair wage is not forgotten.

The essentials