eavers of cloth and the spinners of yarn: ten spinners were required to produce enough yarn needed by one weaver. James Hargreaves (d. 1778), a weaver and carpenter, eliminated that problem in 1764 with his spinning jenny, a mechanical spinning wheel that allowed the spinners to keep up with the weavers. Five years later, a barber named Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) built the water frame that made it possible to spin many threads into yarn at the same time. Ten years after that Samuel Crompton (1753-1827), a spinner, combined the spinning jenny and water frame into the water mule, which, with some variations, is used today. The end of the long wars against Napoleon did not usher in a period of peace and contentment. Although both agricultural and industrial production had greatly, if unevenly, increased during the wars, the total national debt of Great Britain had nearly quadrupled since 1793. Of the total annual public revenue after 1815, more than half had to be employed to pay interest on this debt. Furthermore, the abolition of Pitt's income tax in 1816 meant that the debt burden fell on consumers-many of them with low incomes-and on industrialists. The archaic and regressive nature of the national taxation system, along with a mounting scale of locally levied poor-law rates, which fell heavily on middle-income groups, provoked widespread anxiety and criticism.The postwar economy and society The postwar period was marked by open social conflicts, most of them exacerbated by an economic slump. As the long-run process of industrialization continued, with a rising population and a cyclic pattern of relative prosperity and depression, many social conflicts centred on questions of what contemporaries called "corn and currency," agriculture and credit. Others were directly related to the growth of factories and towns and to the parallel development of middle-class and working-class consciousness.The agriculturalists, who were predominant ...
