Lancashire mills close as American cotton stops

Date

1862

Where

Manchester, United Kingdom

What happened

Closed

Event

18 of 174

By the beginning of 1862 Lancashire cotton mills were closing and one-third of the families in one cotton town were on relief. Middling Orleans cotton, bought by merchants for 8d a pound in 1861, rose to 27d by October 1862. In 1860 the region's 2,650 mills had employed 440,000 people, and the United States had supplied about five-sixths of the cotton imported into Britain.