The Partitioning of Space

The differing physical layouts of British and German textile mills in the late nineteenth century furnished contrasting stage settings—true "foundations"—for labor's transmission. Technical manuals of the nineteenth century treated the selection of mill architecture as part of the "science" of manufacturing.^[135] Modern British woolen and worsted mills stereotypically were arranged like closed, defensive fortresses: the various rooms for spinning, for assembling the warps, and for weaving formed a ring enclosing a central courtyard or "mill yard." The entrance gate, often set under an archway, offered the only opening from the outside that led into this yard and into the workrooms (see Figure 6). Otherwise, the factory presented a solid barrier to the surrounding world, sometimes with no windows on the ground floor.^[136] The layout could also call upon a row of workers' dwellings

[134] J. Slater Lewis, The Commercial Organization of Factories (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1896), Chapter XVI, "The Entrance Gates and the Gatekeeper," pp. 141–143.

[135] Evan Leigh, The Science of Modern Cotton Spinning (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1873), Vol. II; Elbourne, op. cit., p. 19. For an earlier period, see Andrew Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), p. 33.

[136] See the chapter on "Modern Mill Layout" in D. H. Williams, Textile Factory Organization and Management (London: Emmott & Co., 1934). Williams shows that the fortress design could be employed in "rationalized" mills, where each processing room was located around the perimeter for the most efficient throughput and movement of raw materials, as well as in haphazardly organized older mills, where the stages of processing the materials were not necessarily assigned sequentially to adjacent workrooms. Utility for production neither necessitated nor excluded the design. Williams's book deals with smaller mills, but the same design held for such giant enterprises as Titus Salt's Saltaire. For other examples, see Leafield mills, in E. Philip Dobson and John B. Ives, A Century of Achievement: The History of James Ives & Company Limited (London: William Sessions, 1948), p. 47; Plan of Bleach Works, Barnsley, 1895, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, York; Benyon's mill, Holbeck, Leeds, RCHME; Mssrs Blackburn mill, Batley, plan at Kirklees Archives.

Figure 6.
Model British Weaving Mill
Source: D. R. H. Williams,  Textile Factory
Organization and Management  (Manchester:
Emmott & Co., 1934)

on one or more sides of its perimeter to form part of the barricaded zone. Naturally, these houses on the boundary had no openings into the mill yard.^[137]

The fortress-like enclosure of a mill yard by the workrooms appeared in the design of mills in Lancashire and elsewhere in the northwest, once factory design had come into its own.^[138] The arrangement became an emblem not only in the actual conduct of manufacturing but in the fancies of literature. The frontispiece to Andrew Ure's famous tract The Philosophy of Manufactures , published in 1835, portrayed a factory whose wings were shaped to enclose a courtyard. The assumptions of this graphic depiction achieved verbal expression. Ure, an advocate of the mill system's satanic regimen during the youthful phases of industrial growth, emphasized the textile workers' encapsulation by referring to the hapless operatives as "factory inmates."^[139]

To be sure, the enveloping design occurred more frequently in built-up urban areas, where the need to mark off one's own territory and to guard against intrusions was greater than in the countryside, where isolated mills, which expanded incrementally, sometimes consisted of small, scattered buildings, without a comprehensive model. Therefore the castle design was far from universal and, indeed, was realized in pure form in only a minority of cases.^[140] Yet it represented something of an architectural stereotype, a

[137] Deepdale mill, Preston, Preston Mill Book, Preston Library Archives.

[138] See Manchester Library Archives, William Higgins & Sons, Salford, Manchester, "Plan and Elevation of a Flax Mill," July, 1851. Sylvia Clark, "Chorlton Mills and Their Neighbors," Industrial Archaeology Review Volume II, Number 3 (Summer 1978), p. 209; Jennifer Tann, The Development of the Factory (London: Cornmarket Press, 1970), pp. 17, 34; Brunswick mill, Manchester, 1838, Houldsworth cotton mill, Stockport, 1867, and Murray's mills, Manchester Archaeology Unit, and annotation to file, p. 21; Brookfield mill, Moor Hall mill, Springfield mill, and Deepdale mill in Preston, Preston Mill Book, Preston Library Archives; for an example of a mill that put warehousing on its ground floor, without windows, see Manchester Archaeology Unit, Brunswick mill.

[139] Ure, op. cit., pp. 353, 374, 404. For a similar usage, see Doherty, editor, op. cit., p. vii. The word inmate in this era referred to a permanent occupant or indweller of a place. O.E.D. , 2d ed, Vol. 5,p. 307. In The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd , published in 1724, Daniel Defoe used the workshop portal to classify England's workers into two kinds: "Labourers Without-Doors" and "Labourer Within-Doors." Reprinted in Stephen Copley, editor, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 144. Among the home weavers, an expression for being in a factory was standing "within the walls." Testimony of Joseph Coope, Committee on Woollen Manufacture, April 23, 1806, PP 1806 III, 1806. The emphasis put on the division between the interior and the exterior of the mill could influence factory bookkeeping. At Strut's mill in Derbyshire, the wages books surviving from the 1870s for those assigned to factory upkeep are divided into two sets, for workers who labored on the exterior of the mill and for those who were inside, although in some instances their tasks were otherwise the same. Manchester Library Archives.

layout which appeared when unprompted by the environment.^[141] For instance, Sir Titus Salt in the 1870s built his mill in the middle of an undeveloped parcel of land large enough to accommodate an entire town, yet he, too, adopted the fortress structure.^[142] This arrangement struck German observers of British developments as representative of British thinking.^[143] Once it was crystallized in factory layouts in the north of England, the British carried it to contexts where land values, the landscape, and the infrastructure were far different. For example, in his treatise on mill construction William Fairbairn presented a blueprint for building a woolen factory in the open countryside of a foreign country, Turkey. He incorporated the classic sealed yard into the design of the U-shaped building itself.^[144] The Platt Brothers' plans for integrated cotton mills in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century came in various sizes, but they arranged the workrooms in an unbroken circle around a secured yard.^[145] The transference of this pattern into such diverse habitats offers a hint that it conformed, not to the physical requirements of the surroundings, but to a cultural model.

Apart from their structural emphasis on control of access points, British mills were distinguished from German ones by the attention they gave to the design of the main portal. The entrance exterior was some-

[140] It was not feasible to accentuate control over access points when the building was used for the so-called "room and power system," under which several small businessmen rented out portions of a single mill. See Burnley Library, Archives, Elm Street mill, D74.

[141] For examples of enclosed buildings in the shoe trade, see the Shoe and Leather Record , January 1, 1892, p. 10, and March 4, 1892, p. 550.

[142] See plan of Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, York. On Salt's choice of unoccupied territory, see L. Cooper, Great Men of Yorkshire West Riding (London: The Bodley Head, 1955), p. 111. For another example where the design was not intended to conserve land, see LRO, DDX 1129, Kirkham Flax Mill, 1865.

[143] Ludwig Utz, Moderne Fabrikanlagen (Leipzig: Uhlands Technischer Verlag, 1907), p. 282. Another German manual on industrial architecture, published in 1901, judged that British designers had a distinctive way of breaking up the monotonous lines of factory buildings with adjoining wings: British mills, they concluded, "unite practical considerations with those of taste." Wilhelm Rebber, Fabrikanlagen: Ein Handbuch für Techniker und Fabrikbesitzer (2d ed. Leipzig: B. F. Voigt, 1901), p. 94.

[144] William Fairbairn, Treatise on Mills and Millwork (London: Longmans, Green, 1861). What interests us here is not only the "natural fact" that the castle design occurred with a certain statistical frequency in Britain. We are also interested in the "cultural fact" that the design served as an ideal the builders and owners held before themselves, although they hardly carried out this ideal under all circumstances.

[145] Platt Brothers and Company, Particulars and Calculations Relating to Cotton Ginning, Opening, Carding, Combing, Preparing, Spinning, and Weaving Machinery (Manchester: Platt Brothers, ca. 1918), pp. 324–325. See also "Plan of Cotton Mill for Abroad," Textile Manufacturer , Jan. 15, 1891, pp. 4 ff.

times flanked by imposing towers or crowned by intricate ornamentation.^[146] On the inside, the entrance hallway might feature extra doors which managers used as backup devices to seal off access to the main workrooms or, from the other direction, access to the main gate. This design appeared in the very earliest mills. The Poor Man's Advocate investigated a spinning mill in 1832 where the gates were "numerous, being placed one within the other, in order, we suppose, that if any of the wretched inmates should escape through the first they may be secured by the next."^[147] Similar arrangements appeared in later facilities. At the West Vale textile works near Halifax, constructed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, owners even installed a special lever for the gatekeeper which ran from his office perch to a second door on the inside of the entry corridor, permitting him to inspect the arrivals a second time in the corridor and decide whether to let them proceed.^[148]

What information did the factory's design encode? Let us extract the elementary structure behind the visible architecture by mapping the passages between rooms on the premises. Figure 7 delineates the apertures between the compartments of the illustrative floorplan.^[149] The diagrams reveal, first, that the fortress design could turn the mill yard into a nodal point. The yard served not just as an unloading or storage area but as a connector for human traffic. In fact, movement even between work rooms that were contiguous frequently had to flow through the central yard. Each of the major rooms is organized as a self-sufficient space, which opens to the others via an interchange that serves every room in the

[146] See sketches and descriptions of entrances to Park mill, Hartford mill, and Alliance mill in the second, documentary volume of N. K. Scott, "The Architectural Development of Cotton Mills in Preston and District," Master's thesis, University of Liverpool, 1952. Charts of Ellar Carr Mills.

[147] Doherty, editor, op. cit., p. vii.

[148] Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, York, courtesy of Colum Giles. For a description of a similar arrangement in Preston, Lancashire, see Elizabeth Roberts's interview with Mr. G1P, born 1903, p. 96. A machine oil salesman who traveled from mill to mill in the Colne Valley shortly before the First World War described in his memoirs their shuttered atmosphere. On approaching them, he remembered, "You didn't go into an office to be received decently—you had to rattle a little trap door. A head would come out and say 'What's it about?" W. Farrar Vickers, Spin a Good Yarn (Leeds: MT Co., 1978), p. 19. The style of reception suited a bolted tower more than a modern business concern. Even during this late era, if workers had to stay late on payday to collect their cash, they called this "detention." Yorkshire Factory Times , April 25, 1902, p. 4.

[149] I owe this technique to Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, who present it in The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Chapter 4, "Buildings and Their Genotypes."

Figure 7.
Traffic Structure of Model British Mill

complex. In sum, once workers negotiated the entry passage into the facility, the design gave them easy access to every corner of the interior. This basic principle underlay the design of some mills, such as that of the Blackburns in Batley, Yorkshire, even when at first glance the mill buildings did not seem to be arranged as a castle, but all of whose rooms nonetheless fed into two courtyard passages.^[150] The layout created an encompassing perimeter while permitting rapid movement in the interior.

Surveillance of the central yard could give a comprehensive view of important traffic at a glance.^[151] To take advantage of this, British textile

[150] Plan at Kirklees Archives.

[151] William Strutt's Belper Round mill, completed in 1813, divided the circular interior into eight segments and placed an overseer in the center with a direct view of each part, "like a spider at the heart of his web." R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), p. 221. But Belper Round Mill was unique. The British textile mills of classic design differed from Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon because employers sought to control the threshold and observe movement within the main yard rather than to bind workers to the location of their machines.

directors occasionally incorporated large lookouts or jutting bay windows into their mill offices. These impressive windows did not face away from the factory perimeter for an enjoyable view, but looked instead toward the interior mill yard.^[152] At Grecian mills in Bolton, Lancashire, the management offices had such an obtrusive bay window facing the main gate that it may well have shunted entering traffic to the side.^[153] At Bean Ing mills in Leeds, Yorkshire, the surveillance windows were placed at the curved tip of a projection that pointed toward the middle of the inner yard.^[154] A visitor to a coarse cloth factory at Knightsbridge during the 1840s described a more elaborate contrivance at a rotunda-like factory: "On the summit of the building, at a considerable elevation, is a small square room, provided with windows on all four sides. From this an extensive view may be obtained in every direction."^[155] Of course, a simple window peering inward could serve as the observation site almost as well: the strategy was to position the management complex so that it could receive vendors and customers from without but also scan the interned laborers within.^[156]

When the Germans constructed their facilities, they consciously imitated other, superficial features of British mill design, such as styles of ornamentation.^[157] The Germans also followed the English methods of

[152] See, for example, Learoyd Brothers, Huddersfield, "A Modern Fancy Worsted Mill," Textile Manufacturer , December 15, 1896, p. 457.

[153] Bolton Library Archives, ZTA/10, T. Taylor & Son. For another example, see Murray's mills, Manchester Archaeology Unit.

[154] Colum Giles, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, unpublished manuscript, p. 20.

[155] George Dodd, Days at the Factories: Or, the Manufacturing Industry of Great Britain Described (London: Charles Knight, 1843), p. 285.

[156] See E. Blackburn, op. cit., p. 10, and Judy Lown, Women and Industrialization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 37. For an example of employers using their office window to observe a confused demonstration in the mill yard, see Yorkshire Factory Times , September 25, 1903.

In the north of England the passage to the factory system coincided in some districts with the heyday of violent Chartist conflict, for which there is no close parallel during the industrial transition in Germany. A volatile setting may have increased interest in the control of labor among early British factory employers. But the passing moment of struggle does not clarify the precise modes of spatial control nor the reasons for their reproduction throughout the century; for this, an explanation must call upon the definition of labor as a commodity.

[157] Alex Moll, 950 Jahre Oerlinghausen (Oerlinghausen: Loewe, 1986), p. 50. Gustav Baum, Entwicklungslinien der Textilindustrie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der bautechnischen und maschinellen Einrichtungen der Baumwoll-Spinnereien und Webereien (Berlin: M. Krayn, 1913), p. 83.

transmitting power from the steam engine to the machines.^[158] But they incorporated different structural principles into the layouts of the buildings themselves. Their factories did not arrange the workrooms to cordon off the outside world and impound laborers inside. Where German mill owners fenced in their property, as was often the case, this did not form an integral part of the design of the building itself.^[159] Rather than arrange workrooms as a fortress to accentuate the frontier between outside and in, the German facilities emphasized the constriction of movement once laborers were engaged in the labor process. Except for the essential transport of materials, the German building layout segregated the principal workrooms from each other and from the ancillary rooms that housed processes such as carding raw cotton or preparing warps for the looms. Moving from one corner of the mill to another required workers to proceed through intermediate chambers of the interior. Figure 8 reproduces the floor plan of a German mill. Figure 9 diagrams its basic structures.^[160] In contrast to the British mills, traffic does not converge on a nodal point but flows among links on a chain. There is no "center" from which the privileged observer can inspect traffic on the premises as a whole, yet the lack of central oversight is balanced by greater obstacles to movement between distant points.^[161] Counterfeit instances of symmetrical fortress-like structures appear in Germany.^[162] With one plan, sketched in 1849 for

[158] Wolfgang Müller-Wiener, "Die Entwicklung des Industriebaus im 19. Jahrhundert in Baden," diss., Karlsruhe, 1955, p. 76.

[159] The factory rules in German mills frequently specified that workers should enter and leave the factory only through a designated door. The design of the mills, unlike that of those in Britain, did not make the injunction superfluous. Decker, op. cit., p. 213; HSTAD, Landratsamt Mönchengladbach, 703, Kloeters & Lamerz; Germany, Jahres-Berichte der königlich preussischen Regierungs- und Gewerberäthe und Bergbehörden für 1889 (Berlin: W. T. Bruer, 1890), p. 302.

[160] See, too, Stadtarchiv Gera, Schulenburg und Bessler, Zwötzen, 1909; floor plans in Kreisarchiv Karl-Marx Stadt-Land, Stadtrat Limbach III 10d, Nr. 1139.

[161] The factory rules issued by textile employers in Germany forbade the hired hands to trespass in rooms outside their own work spot, even when the machinery was turned off and there was no danger of accident. For the lower Rhine wool industry, see Decker, op. cit., p. 214. Elsewhere: Elisabeth Plössl, op. cit., p. 243; Stadtarchiv Greiz, B 5975, Kap.IV, Nr. 65, C. G. Lorenz, ca. 1887; Marie Bernays, "Auslese und Anpassung der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen Grossindustrie: Dargestellt an den Verhältnissen der'Gladbacher Spinnerei und Weberei' A.G. zu Mönchengladbach," Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik Volume 133 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1910), p. 185; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Flöha, Nr. 4038, G. F. Heymann Spinnerei, Gückelsberg, 1869.

[162] For the absence of the fortress structure, see Utz, op. cit., p. 275, and Ludwig Utz, Die Praxis der mechanischen Weberei (Leipzig: Uhlands technischer Verlag, 1907), charts; Stadtarchiv Mönchengladbach, 5/418, floor plan for Buchaly & Herbertz from 1909, and 5/187, floor plan for Bloem & Remy from 1902; Leipziger Monatschrift für Textil-Industrie , 1910,Nr. 8, pp. 235 ff.; Edward Beyer, Die Fabrik-Industrie des Regierungsbezirkes Düsseldorf vom Standpunkt der Gesundheitspflege (Oberhausen: Spaarmann, 1876), spinning mills in Mönchengladbach; Allgemeine Deutsche Ausstellung auf dem Gebiete der Hygiene und des Rettungswesens (Berlin, 1883), M. May & Co. in Mönchengladbach; Hans-Peter Schwanke, "Architektur für Stadt, Gesellschaft und Industrie: Das Werk der Krefelder Architekten Girmes & Oediger 1892–1933," diss., Bonn, 1987, p. 650. For mills in less urbanized areas, see floor plans for L. B. Lühl & Söhne in Gemen, 1913, Heuveldop & Söhne, Emsdetten, at the Westfälisches Textil-Museum. The firm Schulenburg und Bessler in Zwötzen had a factory with multiple entrances (plan from 1909 in Stadtarchiv Gera). The layout of buildings around a central, enclosed yard also typified farm estates in Germany, although these complexes had numerous entrances into the buildings. Schwanke, op. cit., p. 710.

Figure 8.
Model German Weaving Mill
Source: Ludwig Utz,  Moderne Fabrikanlagen
(Leipzig: Uhlands technischer Verlag, 1907)

Figure 9.
Traffic Structure of Model German Mill

a Saxon village, the castle layout may have fit an aesthetic ideal of a noble court, but it actually contained multiple entrances and was ill adapted for forming an impenetrable perimeter.^[163] With another, the Spinning and Weaving Factory Ettlingen in Baden, erected in 1838, the constructor designed the mill according to the same plan he had drawn up earlier for an army barracks.^[164] The mill was inserted in a complex that created numerous openings and did not direct traffic through the central court. This was representative: the editor of one set of German mill plans even boasted that an exemplary weaving building was accessible from three separate points after workers had entered the grounds.^[165] When large German complexes were erected at once around a central space, such as the Flax Mill of Schoeller, Mevissen, & Bücklers in Düren, they could have emphasized the enclosure of workers and observation of their movement through a central yard. Instead, they opened up onto the adjacent gardens and fields.^[166] In Britain, the fortress design could be employed in "rationalized" mills, where each processing room was located around the perimeter for the most efficient movement of raw materials, as well as in haphazardly organized older mills, where the stages of processing the materials were not necessarily assigned sequentially in adjacent work rooms.^[167]

German commentators believed that contrasts in building materials and climate could not account for differences in structural design between their country and Britain. Taste, they said, determined the ultimate format.^[168] As early as 1844, the engineer Ludwig Kufahl of Berlin observed a crucial difference between British and German plans:

[163] Staatsarchiv Dresden, Ministerium des Innern, Nr. 5771. Analogously, see the plan of the Facilides cotton printing and spinning mill with multiple entrances despite the arrangement of rooms around a yard, in Siegfried Kress, "Die Bauten der sächsischen Kattundruck-Manufaktur," diss., Technische Hochschule Dresden, 1958, p. 152.

[164] Müller-Wiener, op. cit., p. 21.

[165] A. Knäbel, Die Tuchfabrikation und der Zeugdruck (Leipzig: Karl Scholtze, 1882), pp. 186–188.

[166] The depiction of this factory complex on the company letterhead accentuated its openness and the easy passage from outside. Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv zu Köln, Kölner Unternehmer und die Frühindustrialisierung im Rheinland und in Westfalen 1835–1871 (Köln: Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, 1984), p. 76. This raises a separate issue for cross-national investigation, to wit, the principles governing not only the construction of the building itself but the perspective by which to represent the completed edifice.

[167] See the chapter on "Modern Mill Layout" in Williams, op. cit., p. 3.

[168] Der praktische Maschinen-Constructeur, Bau-und Betriebs-Anlage für Spinnereien und Webereien (Leipzig: Baumgärten, 1875), p. 1.

I am familiar with the example of an extremely large flax spinning mill in Leeds.  . . . With very scrupulous concern this building ensures above all that the workers can be watched over with complete ease. With us this very important point is often neglected. In fact, one could say that our factory buildings often appear to have been deliberately laid out to hinder surveillance of workers. For this one cannot combine every conceivable kind of work process together; but this is by no means necessary, just so the various jobs are grouped in such a way that a suitable control is possible and so that raw materials pass through the hands of the workpeople in the proper order, proceeding in their conversion from a raw condition to a completed manufacture.^[169]

Kufahl did not think that work processes should be combined or connected to a single open space simply for the sake of comprehensive oversight of workers from afar. He considered it sufficient to organize traffic to move components through the mill in a logical sequence.^[170] The German factory designs were "cellular," with numerous partitions and no centralized pathway for movement between chambers.

The fortress layout in Britain rested upon a combination of technological limits and opportunities. It took the liberty of breaking up the total production space of a factory premises into smaller units to form the fortress wings. Given the engineering techniques of the day, this represented a useful way of partitioning the land parcel. The width of work rooms in multistory spinning mills had in any case been limited by reliance upon iron frameworks to support the weight of the building. Rooms were long and narrow, a shape that was easy to configure around a large court. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, an increase in the size of machines and in the scale of production made it preferable to unify floor space.^[171] Cotton spinning

[169] Ludwig Kufahl, "Ueber die Anlage von Fabrikgebäuden," Zeitschrift für praktische Baukunst , Volume 4 (Berlin: Allgemeine deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1844), p. 30.

[170] Of course, as British designers themselves emphasized, the fortress design was also compatible with arrangement of workrooms for efficient throughput. Williams, op. cit., pp. 3 ff. On the relative absence in Britain of textile mills designed from the start for production flow, see Scott, op. cit., p. 104. German technical writers sometimes presented comprehensive plans for large factory estates, in which the production process is fit, not into a single building, but into a number of small structures. German plans for a complete spinning and weaving facility, including dyeing and finishing, laid out the buildings on large grounds with a symmetrical design, but the units were not arranged around a perimeter to enclose the production processes. Knäbel, op. cit., pp.174, 203.

[171] Frank Nasmith, Recent Cotton Mill Construction and Engineering (Manchester: John Heywood, 1909), pp. 10–11.

mules, for example, reached a length of 140 feet, so that the width of new buildings had to triple to organize aisle space efficiently.^[172] Meeting this requirement became possible only with changes in construction methods. The introduction of steel girders and new techniques for supporting weight in the 1890s permitted the development of huge, squarish rooms that used space efficiently but were no longer arrangeable around a yard.^[173]

These innovations in engineering changed the visible edifice of the labor process in newly constructed spinning facilities in Britain. Yet the principles of the underlying structure were preserved and manifested in fresh ways. The cavernous new buildings built in the British towns that were still expanding production were distinguished by an absence of dividing walls between the work processes.^[174] Managers in the Bolton cotton trade, for instance, suggested that the preparatory processes be housed on the first floor without boundaries between the drawing, slubbing, and jack frames and the carding engines.^[175] At Gil mill, expansion of the mill allowed the preparatory and spinning processes to be installed in the same room as the weaving machines without partitions. By contrast, German mills of equal capacity retained internal walls between departments.^[176] This became a characteristic difference between British and German mills that did not escape the notice of contemporaries. A technical writer based in Manchester presented a cotton mill plan in 1897 borrowed from the Continent but made a suggestion on how to adapt the foreign blueprint to British expectations: "The supervision and management of the mill is greatly facilitated," he said, if "the whole of the machinery can readily be

[172] Presentation by Harold Hill on "Influences Arising from the Employment of New and Improved Machines," Official Record of the Annual Conference of the Textile Institute Held at Bolton, June, 1927 (Leeds: Chorley & Pickersgill, 1927), charts following p.57; Scott, op. cit., p.72. In spinning departments, a width of forty meters became commonplace: Baum, op. cit., p.90.

[173] Duncan Gurr and Julian Hunt, The Cotton Mills of Oldham (Oldham: Oldham Cultural and Information Services, 1989), p.8. Auxiliary work rooms could also form a perimeter around the main building, as at Hargreaves's Victoria mills, Bolton, plan in Bolton Library Archives.

[174] Nasmith, op. cit., pp. 10–11.

[175] Presentation by Hill, op. cit., p.60. Only the scutchers were walled into a separate room, due to the need to isolate the danger of fire. For other examples, see Textile Recorder , November 15, 1883, p. 157 for the plan of Stalybridge Mills Co., Oldham.

Of course, not all new mills needed such gigantic rooms or required multistory buildings that used ground space efficiently, so the fortress enclosure could be carried over into some of the latest designs. For examples, see Platt Brothers and Company, op. cit., p. 323; Bolton Library Archives, J.G. & C.Hargreaves, Victoria Mills, p. 11.

[176] Baum, op. cit., p.81; Utz, op. cit., pp. 258, 264.

seen. If desired  . . . the internal division walls can be removed and columns substituted."^[177] As with the fortress design, the undivided British layout in giant mills depreciated control over the rapid circulation of workers once they were inside the mill, but it lent the observer a sweeping view of their movement.^[178] In contrast to the "cellular" design of German factories, the British designs were "circumferential," emphasizing the outer boundary but not partitions within.

The definition of labor as a commodity did not conjure the factory layouts out of thin air, but started from the technical preconditions of building design. Despite changes in these requirements in the late nineteenth century, the tangible materials of production could still be sculpted into shapes that carried the same implications for the treatment of labor as a commodity.^[179] Mill architecture and rituals for entering the factory in Germany and in Britain reified contrasting fictions about the employment relation—again, the disposition over labor power versus the appropriation of labor incorporated into products. In Germany, the production process was conceived as the continuous transformation in time of labor power into a product. In this process the worker's labor activity was consumed inside the factory owner's domain, so the divide between inside and out

[177] Theodore Sington, "Plan for a Continental Cotton Mill," in his Cotton Mill Planning and Construction (Manchester: published by the author, 1897), unpaginated.

[178] British managers expounded their jurisdiction over factory workers in expressions involving the "eye." For illustrations, consult "Cotton Mill Organization," Journal of the British Association of Managers of Textile Works Volume II (1910–1911), p. 37; autobiographical statement by Joseph Wilson, born 1833, in Joseph Wilson, Joseph Wilson: Life and Work (London: Lund Humphries & Co. [1923]), p. 29. Workers referred to the "eagle eye" and "the proverbial 'lynx-eye' " of the employer. Yorkshire Factory Times , March 21, 1890, Apperly Bridge and October 12, 1894, p. 5; Dermot Healey's interview tape 655, female weaver from Darwen, born 1890, lines 565 ff. British employers conceived their knowledge and superiority in terms of eyesight: "It should always be remembered that 'the eyes of a master are worth more than the hands of a man.' " Cited in Textile Manufacturer , January 15, 1903. See also S. J. Daniels, "Moral Order and the Industrial Environment in the Woolen Textile Districts of West Yorkshire, 1780–1880," Ph.D. diss., University College, London, 1980, p. 249; Burton, op. cit., p. 171. An emphasis on surveillance does not necessarily mark greater management control of the shop floor. British employers sometimes resorted to visual monitoring as an ineffective substitute for direct command over the labor process. See Dyke Wilkinson, Rough Roads: Reminiscences of a Wasted Life (London: Sampson Low, Marston, & Co., 1912), p. 19.

[179] The taken-for-granted character of the agents' understanding of labor as a commodity froze neither institutional nor architectural forms in place. The same specification of labor could be embodied in a changing technical environment. It did not rule out change, but ordered it. For an analysis of the adaptation of technical requirements to cultural models of space, see Betsy Bahr, "New England Mill Engineering: Rationalization and Reform in Textile Mill Design, 1790–1920," Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1987, p. 19.

did not become marked as the crucial zone of subordination.^[180] The layout of the German mills corresponded to an emphasis on the overlooker's responsibility for attaching the worker to the machine and a comparative depreciation of controls at the perimeter of the building. In Britain, by contrast, the workers retained ownership of their labor power but conveyed labor through products that were appropriated; since the workers' labor was not incorporated into the employers' domain through a continuous process in time , it was incorporated at a discrete moment through the ritual event of entering the factory. Rather than being transformed in the factory, labor was merely circumscribed and observed at a distance, by emphasizing the boundary between the factory and the world outside. Both the centripetal paths for traffic in older British mills and the atrophy of room partitions in the newer cotton spinning mills relaxed controls over rapid movement. Within the German factory, by contrast, the workers were segregated in compartments that curtailed passage between various corners of the mill. Their activity itself was appropriated in space.^[181]

Because German and British factory buildings concretized information about the labor transaction, they could take on the task of imparting and reproducing—truly, "holding in place"—definitions of labor among the

[180] By the turn of the century, when German rules for discipline in the mills generally followed a standardized format, their titles revealed the center of their interest. Could it have been purely accidental that they were not called "factory ordinances," as in Britain, but "labor ordinances"? Stadtarchiv Rheine, Nr. 183, Gewerbeinspektor Münster.

[181] Theft of materials from German textile mills appears to have been a frequent occurrence, partly because home workers in the putting-out system had accustomed themselves to appropriating materials to supplement their official wage. Many late-nineteenth-century German factory ordinances specified that workers suspected of stealing materials or tools were subject to frisking by managers. Despite a similar legacy of domestic production, British codes from the same era seem to have remained silent about such personal examinations. Could the scrutinizing principle incorporated into British mills have obviated body searches? The design of German mills was consistent with an attempt to control the illegal removal of materials from the premises through the ongoing disposition over the body of the worker. The British workers' press considered it rare for workers even to be asked to open their lunch baskets upon exiting. Yorkshire Factory Times , October 11, 1889. For references to German workers pilfering materials, see Gladbacher Zeitung , May 11, 1871; Ernst Barkhausen, Die Tuchindustrie in Montjoie, ihr Aufstieg und Niedergang (Aachen: Aachener Verlags- und Druckerei-Gesellschaft, 1925), p. 102; on the practice of body searches, HSTAD, Geilenkirchen 88, 1899, P. W. Blancke; Emsbach, op. cit., p. 320; Staatsarchiv Dresden, Amthauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Nr. 16, "Fabrikordnung," ca. 1858, p. 230. On the tradition of embezzlement among domestic weavers, see Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization Before Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 53–54; and for both wool and cotton in Britain, see Alfred P. Wadsworth and Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), pp. 393, 395, 399.

workers. To receive this knowledge, the participants did not study messages; they enacted and lived them. In the critical mind of the analyst, the tendency for a conformation between architecture and accounting, between spatial and temporal demarcations, makes for a charming coincidence; in the experience of the producers it created an encompassing constellation. For those who lived through the procedures of entry and the partitioning of space under the factory roof, concepts of labor became influential not because they were embodied in literature but because they were literally embodied. The enclosed mill yard and internment of workers in a centripetal space characterized factories in other British trades, including leather-making and sewing.^[182]Vide et crede: the fictive inventions of labor as a commodity were written in stone.