THE ULSTERCONFLICT competition from English and Scottish cotton, to introduce a new wet-spinning process into his mill and to adapt it for flax-spinning (which previously could only be done by hand). The experiment was a great success and within five years there were 12 flax mills in Belfast. Farmers found it more profitable to grow flax than other crops and there was a ready supply of labour (including the ex-cotton spinners) available for training. The manufacturers continued to rely on handloom weavers for the production of linen because there was a lack of power looms capable of weaving fine linen cloth and because the hand weaving system was very cheap. It was not until the early 1860s that steam weaving was introduced on a large scale. The linen magnates relied on women and children for spinnings, and this meant the early establishment of a low level of wages in the industry. Wage rates did not rise until power looms were introduced, and the factory weavers were always better paid than the spinners and had better conditions (in fact the position of weavers in relation to spinners was the reverse of that prevailing in the cotton industry). The linen masters made no effort to improve conditions for the spinners; they introduced no safety devices into the spinning mills, and the atmosphere was permeated with flax dust which reduced life expectancy to about 45 years. Due to this exercise of «extreme» laissezfaire capitalism, the transformation of the Belfast textile industry was rapid: i,n 1832 there had been 19 cotton mills in and around Belfast and 1 flax mill. Within five years there were 15 flax mills and 6 cotton mills. The number of flax mills increased to 18 in 1840, 24 in 1852 and 32 in 1861 when there were only 2 cotton mills; in 1836 there were 2,000 employees in the linen industry, in 1862, 15,000; by 1835 over half the total exports from Belfast were linen, and Belfast was the first port in Ireland in the value of its trade, though second to Dublin in tonnage. Thirty years earlier Belfast's share of Ireland's total exports, in value, had been 17%. Outside Ulster the economic effects of the Union fell most heavily on the lowest class: the landless labourers and those with only a small holding of land (« cottiers »). This class had grown rapidly during the latter part of the 18th century due to the introduction of a certain amount of subsistence farming, ecouraged by the Irish parliament to stop what it thought was a deleterious drift away from tillage to pasturage, and to the spread of linen manufacture out of Ulster into the rest of the country where these activities helped to supplem_~nt 73
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