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Technological progress in the spinning sector of Britain’s cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution and the “Engels’ pause”
- 1 Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, led by artificial intelligence, has profoundly reshaped contemporary production methods and daily life while exerting a substantial influence on the labor market. In this context, reexamining the historical impact of technological progress on economic development and the labor market—and drawing lessons from the past—holds significant value. By digitizing the original wage ledgers from Lumford Mill (1811) and Belper Mill (1835) and using this newly created dataset as a basis, this study investigates changes in wage levels and labor structures between the water-frame era and the spinning-mule era. This analysis offers a new explanation for the emergence of Engels’ pause during the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, the findings indicate that technological progress in Britain’s cotton-spinning sector during the Industrial Revolution led to a labor structure characterized by a large cohort of low-income, unskilled workers alongside a relatively small group of high-income, skilled workers. This configuration created a disparity between labor productivity growth and real wage increases, ultimately precipitating Engels’ pause within the sector.
Keywords
Industrial Revolution, wage gap, labor structure, Engels’ pause
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Cite this article
Ge,B. (2025). Technological progress in the spinning sector of Britain’s cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution and the “Engels’ pause”. Journal of Applied Economics and Policy Studies,18(4),8-16.
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