Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

textiles. One of the great technological innovations of the medieval period was the spinning wheel, which replaced hand spinning. This invention appeared around 1280 in Europe, probably disseminating from the Middle East. The methods of spinning did not change until the eighteenth century. Significant innovations began in 1738, when Lewis Paul patented a new method of spinning using rollers to replace human hands to draw out the fibers being spun. The machine did not work well, however, and it was the innovations of Richard Arkwright and James Hargreaves that truly revolutionized spinning.
    In 1769 Arkwright, one of the dominant figures of the Industrial Revolution, patented his “water frame,” which was a huge improvement over Lewis’s machine. He formed a partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, who were hosiery manufacturers. In 1771 they built one of the world’s first factories, at Cromford. The new machines were powered by water, but Arkwright later made the crucial transition to steam power. By 1774 his firm employed six hundred workers, and he expanded aggressively, eventually setting up factories in Manchester, Matlock, Bath, and New Lanark in Scotland. Arkwright’s innovations were complemented by Hargreaves’s invention in 1764 of the spinning jenny, which was further developed by Samuel Crompton in 1779 into the “mule,” and later by Richard Roberts into the “self-acting mule.” The effects of these innovations were truly revolutionary: earlier in the century, it took 50,000 hours for hand spinners to spin one hundred pounds of cotton. Arkwright’s water frame could do it in 300 hours, and the self-acting mule in 135.
    Along with the mechanization of spinning came the mechanization of weaving. An important first step was the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733. Though it initially simply increased the productivity of hand weavers, its most enduring impact would be in opening the way to mechanized weaving. Building on the flying shuttle,Edmund Cartwright introduced the power loom in 1785, a first step in a series of innovations that would lead to machines replacing manual skills in weaving as they were also doing in spinning.
    The English textile industry not only was the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution but also revolutionized the world economy. English exports, led by cotton textiles, doubled between 1780 and 1800. It was the growth in this sector that pulled ahead the whole economy. The combination of technological and organizational innovation provides the model for economic progress that transformed the economies of the world that became rich.
    New people with new ideas were crucial to this transformation. Consider innovation in transportation. In England there were several waves of such innovations: first canals, then roads, and finally railways. In each of these waves the innovators were new men. Canals started to develop in England after 1770, and by 1810 they had linked up many of the most important manufacturing areas. As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, canals played an important role in reducing transportation costs for moving around the bulky new finished industrial goods, such as cotton textiles, and the inputs that went into them, particularly raw cotton and coal for the steam engines. Early innovators in building canals were men such as James Brindley, who was employed by the Duke of Bridgewater to build the Bridgewater Canal, which ended up linking the key industrial city of Manchester to the port of Liverpool. Born in rural Derbyshire, Brindley was a millwright by profession. His reputation for finding creative solutions to engineering problems came to the attention of the duke. He had no previous experience with transportation problems, which also was true of other great canal engineers such as Thomas Telford, who started life as a stonemason, or John Smeaton, an instrument maker and engineer.
    Just as the great canal engineers had no previous connection to transportation, neither did the great road and railway engineers. John McAdam, who invented tarmac around 1816, was the second son of a minor aristocrat. The first steam train was built by Richard Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick’s father was involved in mining in Cornwall, andRichard entered the same business at an early age, becoming fascinated by steam engines used for pumping out the mines. More significant were the innovations of George Stephenson, the son of illiterate