Robert Owen: The Cottonspinner

Robert Owen was one of the most successful cotton spinners of his day. A man of modest birth, Owen went to work at age ten. When he was twenty, he was in business for himself, producing cotton thread on machines called spinning mules. One morning, he entered his small establishment and read a newspaper advertisement for manager of a large cotton spinning mill. For reasons that even he could not explain, Owen grabbed his hat and went to the counting house of Mr. Peter Drinkwater to apply for the situation.

Drinkwater was so impressed with this audacious young man of twenty-one that he made him manager of one of the most advanced spinning mills of the day, at a salary out of all proportion to the other applicants. This move eventually led to Owen becoming a partner in, and manager of, a cotton spinning mill in New Lanark, Scotland, where he carried out one of the most extraordinary social experiments of all time.

This John Winning watercolour of the mills and village of New Lanark, c.1818, was but one of a series commissioned by Robert Owen.

Owen used his situation at New Lanark to improve the lives and working conditions of those he employed. He was a major industrialist during an era when the laboring class was exploited by the capitalist system. Owen demonstrated that improving the lot of workers was not only the right thing to do, but was also quite profitable. He was a capitalist who was also a remarkable human being.