Social and Economic Implications
The power loom reduced demand for skilled handweavers, initially causing reduced wages and unemployment. Protests followed its introduction. For example, in 1816 two thousand rioting Calton weavers tried to destroy power loom mills and stoned the workers. In the longer term, by making cloth more affordable the power loom increased demand and stimulated exports, causing a growth in industrial employment, albeit low-paid. The power loom also opened up opportunities for women mill workers. A darker side of the power loom's impact was the growth of employment of children in power loom mills.
Read more about this topic: Power Loom
Famous quotes containing the words social and, social, economic and/or implications:
“A man’s social and spiritual discipline must answer to his corporeal. He must lean on a friend who has a hard breast, as he would lie on a hard bed. He must drink cold water for his only beverage. So he must not hear sweetened and colored words, but pure and refreshing truths. He must daily bathe in truth cold as spring water, not warmed by the sympathy of friends.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.”
—Nicolai A. Berdyaev (1874–1948)
“When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)