Vivien Teasdale's concise and informative guide to the textile industry will be absorbing reading for anyone who wants to learn about its history or to research the career of an ancestor who was a textile worker.
In a clear and accessible way she takes readers through the technical, economic and social aspects of the story. She gives a graphic account of the extraordinary growth of the industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and of its decline in the twentieth. In the process she covers the themes and issues that family and local historians will need to understand in order to pursue their research.
She describes the inventions that transformed the manufacture of cloth - the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the power loom - but she also gives a keen insight into working life in the factories and into the close-knit communities that grew up around them. And she introduces the reader to the variety of national and local records that are available for genealogical research - from census returns, websites and publications to company records and registers, regional archives and museums and the many other resources that can yield fascinating information about the industry and those who worked in it.