Samuel Greg (1758-1834) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1766 he went to Manchester to live with an uncle. By 1782 Samuel had taken over his uncle's textile firm. He married Hannah Lightbody in 1789 and in 1796 they moved to the location of his mill in Styal, Cheshire. Descendants lived in Styal, Manchester and elsewhere in England. Includes history of the family's textile business.
Channel 4's The Mill captivated viewers with the tales of the lives of the young girls and boys in a northern mill. Focusing on the lives of the apprentices at Quarry Bank Mill, David Hanson's book uses a wealth of first-person source material including letters, diaries, mill records, to tell the stories of the children who lived and worked at Quarry Bank throughout the nineteenth century. This book perfectly accompanies the television series, satisfying viewers' curiosity about the history of the children of Quarry Bank. It reveals the real lives of the television series' main characters: Esther, Daniel, Lucy and Susannah, showing how shockingly close to the truth the dramatisation is. But the book also goes far beyond this to create a full and vivid picture of factory life in the industrial revolution. David Hanson has written an accessible narrative history of Victorian working children and the conditions in which they worked.
In 1789 Hannah Lightbody, a well-educated and intelligent young woman of means, married Samuel Greg and found herself at the centre of his cotton empire in the industrial heart of England. It was a man’s world, in which women like Hannah were barred from politics, had few rights and were expected to be little more than good, dutiful wives. Struggling to apply herself to household management, Hannah instead turned her attention to the well-being of the cotton mill workers under her husband’s control. Over the next four decades she fought to improve the education, health and welfare of cotton girls and pauper apprentices at the mill. Her legacy helped turn the north-west into the pioneering heart of reform in Britain. Here, the story of Hannah’s remarkable life is told for the first time.
This pioneering 18th century cotton mill, complete with working water wheels and looms once belonged to the wealthy Greg family. It houses the most powerful working water wheel in Europe and two 19th century mill engines. Styal Village was built by the Gregs to house the mill workers and is still a thriving community.
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.
In the early 19th century, when it was the policy of many of the poorhouses and workhouses to deter paupers from applying by making the conditions inside harsh and unpleasant, two boys set out on a journey to Hackney Workhouse in London. Their starting point was in the pleasant Cheshire countryside, where they were apprenticed to the cotton mill built by Samuel Greg in 1784. Children as young as nine would be employed there as scavengers, piecers, mule doffers or can tenters. These jobs could be just as unpleasant and difficult for a poor child as those we may have heard of, such as chimney sweeps and match girls. Quarry Bank Mill was some 200 miles north of London and the boys had to sneak out unnoticed and then attempt to walk all the way. It was likely that these enterprising travellers took advantage of the drovers' roads and the newly developed ""motorways"" of the times--the canals. Perhaps they were lucky enough some days to hitch a lift; their general direction of travel taking them to Beartown, the Potteries, Dunstable Downs and, eventually, to London. Whatever challenges they encountered along the way, archived evidence shows that they made it. Runaway apprentices had become a problem for society during the years of the Industrial Revolution--so what had prompted Thomas and Joseph to do such a hazardous thing? What happened to them on their long journey? Did they receive any help? Or were they chased relentlessly wherever they ran, since what they were doing was illegal in the eyes of the authorities? This is the story of their adventure and it concludes with the events in the Middlesex courthouse, known then as the Old Sessions.
This book reveals for the first time the importance of the role of the east Cheshire textile industry in the establishment of the factory system in Britain.
Can making things smaller make the world a better place? No Local takes a critical look at localism, an ideology that says small businesses, ethical shopping and community initiatives like gardens and farmers’ markets can stop corporate globalization. These small acts might make life better for some, but they don’t challenge the drive for profit that’s damaging our communities and the earth. No Local shows how localism’s fixation on small comes from an outdated economic model. Growth is built into capitalism. Small firms must play by the same rules as large ones, cutting costs, exploiting workers and damaging the environment. Localism doesn’t ask who controls production, allowing it to be co-opted by governments offloading social services onto the poor. At worst, localism becomes a strategy for neoliberal politics, not an alternative to it. No Local draws on political theory, history, philosophy and empirical evidence to argue that small isn’t always beautiful. Building a better world means creating local social movements that grow to challenge, not avoid, market priorities.
How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.
