Until late in the eighteenth century, cotton fabric had been a luxury good woven on handlooms in Indian villages. But by 1790, British inventors had begun to create new machines that spun cotton into thread at a rate that human hands could not approach. The machines were less expensive to acquire and operate than the human hands, too. Within seven decades, Manchester factory workers running the new machines could make cloth five or ten times faster than laborers alone working by hand.
