Abstract

Abstract:

This article focuses on the British cotton manufacture in the second half of the eighteenth century, showing that the industry's mechanization across this period was a literary as well as a material process. Through an analysis of British writings on the cotton trade, the article traces how this literature of mechanization called on interlinked systems of race and gender to produce a fiction of British technological and industrial mastery. When representing the Indian cotton industry, these writings contrast the supposedly masculine labor of ingenious British invention with Indian textile laborers whose work, framed as feminized, irrational, and anti-technological, was thereby rendered obsolete. The article further explores how British spinsters were crucial intermediaries in the literary and material process of mechanization. These womens' labor, transferred from linen and wool to cotton, appropriated the work of Indian women and enabled the British textile industry to claim the power of cultivation. Narratives of mechanization that echoed those used to degrade the Indian textile industry then represented British spinsters as ineffective and unproductive when not assisted by new machineries. These narratives contributed to British women textile workers' displacement by technologies that reproduced their labor.

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