1 Though textile history has a recognized tradition of scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, it is an area of study that shades off easily into other disciplines and interests: industrial economics, sociology, demography, anthropology, museum studies and the history of technology, to mention only the most obvious. My problem in venturing on this survey has, therefore, been to recognize proper limits. After some thought I have decided to avoid definitions and concentrate on what is most valuable in our inheritance and most interesting in recent and future work. Regular references to source materials will show the practical possibilities for future research. To make my material digestible, I have broken it down into four sections.

2 The principal focus of research in Europe and North America has been on the industrial town and region. There are several fairly obvious reasons for this. The area is one that the researcher can cope with in terms of travel and quantity of materials; there have been traditionally strong regional loyalties, not least of which have been within the universities, and the region was often more or less coincident with the national industry, such as Lancashire with cotton, Lyons with silk, Norfolk with the new draperies, etc. This has been given renewed academic respectability by Sidney Pollard's identification of the process of industrialization as essentially a regional process.

3 Consequently most of the major British textile regions have been more or less well covered—Lancashire, Yorkshire, East Anglia, the West Country, East Midlands, Devon and so forth. A very sound academic tradition was established with A.P. Wadsworth and Julia Mann's The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire (Manchester, 1931) and has continued down to Pat Hudson's The Genesis of Industrial Capital...the West Riding Wool Textile Industry (Cambridge, 1986). It builds on the solid nineteenth century foundation manifest in works like Edward Baines' History of the Cotton Manufacture (1833), John James' History of the Worsted Manufacture (1857), and William Felkin's History of the Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (1867), as well as a fairly prolific Victorian literature on invention, innovation and trade.

4 In much the same way, and inspired by similar Victorian traditions, American historians originally focused on the major New England textile centres but with rather more emphasis on the factory colony than on regional economic development. The best items have recently been listed and annotated by Clare Sheridan, Merrimack's Librarian, in "Textile Manufacturing in American History: A Bibliography," Textile History 18 (1987). The factory colony lead to an early interest in some themes, notably social structure and relations.

5 There are syntheses of the large bibliography on British cotton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in S.D. Chapman, Cotton in the Industrial Revolution, 2nd ed., (London, and D.A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market 1815-96 (Oxford, 1979), and on wool in D.T. Jenkins and K.G. Ponting, The British Wool Textile Industry 1770-1914 (Manchester, 1982). Silk has been Natalie Rothstein's subject for thirty years, while linen has been worked on for some years by Negley Harte of University College, London. Neville Bartlett's Carpeting the Millions offers a useful survey of Britain's carpet industry since the eighteenth century, while Clifford Gulvin has written the story of The Scottish Hosiery and Knitwear Industry 1680-1980 (Edinburgh, 1984). I have a contract with Manchester University Press to complete a study on hosiery and knitwear in the twentieth century. Unfortunately there is nothing in the pipeline on lace, textile printing, dyeing or machine building despite excellent materials being available, especially the Platt records in the Lancashire Record Office. My impression is that Americans have been rather less interested in synthesizing industrial studies, at any rate in the last two generations. There is, however, a very strong bibliography to build on, and there are several important works, notably Caroline Ware's Early New England Cotton Manufacture (Boston, 1931) and Cole and Williamson's American Carpet Manufacture (1941).

6 Scholarly enterprise has left some conspicuous gaps and thinly-covered areas. The most obvious are the great cities, London and New York, which because of their size and complexity threaten to overwhelm the most ambitious researchers. The cities were, of course, major centres of production as well as distribution. Work is proceeding on a number of sectors, particularly Natalie Rothstein of the Victoria and Albert Museum on silk, and Beverly Lemire, University of New Brunswick, and John Styles, Bristol University, on London court records. There is a good bibliography on London textile printers. Turning to the smaller neglected centres, David Dickson of Trinity College, Dublin, is working on eighteenth century Dublin merchants, but the excellent notarial registers give scope for a much bigger study which would cover textile printing and the fashion industries. The eighteenth century fire insurance policies offer great scope for much more research in London and most other British centres.

7 The Industrial Revolution has long been the favourite period of British economic and social historians. Again, there are some fairly obvious reasons. Historians, though they seldom admit it, tend to focus on their country's periods of greatest achievement or eminence, no doubt encouraged by their readership and publishers. Moreover, readable scripts are most abundant and accessible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Consequently the mediaeval period has only a handful of devotees, while there is relatively little work being done in the early modern period and even less on the twentieth century. British university faculties are focused on the period from the Industrial Revolution because of their gearing to social sciences, where there is limited interest in earlier periods. This does not excuse the neglect of the period since World War I, on which there is an increasingly abundant documentary evidence, as well as what may be secured from oral testimony. Some possibilities are indicated by D.C. Coleman's Courtaulds. An Economic and Social History, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1969-1980) which is based on the firm's abundant archives relating to the artificial silk industry and to diversification in the 1960s. Courtaulds also has an important American component in the form of the American Viscose Corporation.

8 Recent history requires the researcher's willingness and facility to go out and meet present and retired leaders of industry and suffer the frustration of being cut off from vital evidence for reasons of what is politely referred to as "business confidence." In reality the reason is as often connected with business embarrassment. The most scandalous case occurred some thirty years ago when Coats Paton, now Coats Viyella, refused to sanction the publication of a doctoral thesis by Jock Hunter on the Glasgow-based multi-national thread-manufacturing enterprise J.&P. Coats. In the last five years there has been a dramatic improvement in Coats' attitude, and A History of J.&P. Coats, vol. 1 covering the years 1830-1896, is to be published soon. Volume 2, covering the years 1896-1960, may follow.

9 Certainly my own experience in researching the development of British hosiery and knitwear since the 1960s has not been very reassuring in this respect. Charlotte Erickson's British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery 1850-1950 (Cambridge, 1959) depicts hosiery as the archetypal industry of small-scale family firms. In setting out to discover what has happened in the last generation, in a period of takeovers by international conglomerates (Courtaulds, Coats Paton, and the Dawson Group) and growing meritocracy, I was impressed that the industry is rather less secretive than it used to be. Industrialists are often friendly if approached with acceptable credentials, but "hard" information is still difficult to elicit. Gradual penetration of the in-group enables the academic researcher to discern the key developments, interpret the trade journals and identify the most informative people for interviewing, but this is emphatically not an area for young or inexperienced researchers.

10 In recent years North American universities seem to have lost some of their earlier interest in textile history, at any rate of their own continent, while the museums, though increasingly staffed by people with higher degree qualifications, have not shown so much interest in twentieth century America. One exception that shows exciting possibilities is Claudia Kidwell and Margaret Christman's Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Smithsonian, 1974). Other research results for the same theme are shown in Maggie Walsh's article "The Democratization of Fashion: Women's Dress Pattern Industry," Journal of American History 66 (1979). The archives of the great departmental stores and wholesalers must open up a major area for research, although discussion of those possibilities is best left under the rubric "consumers and artifacts."

11 An exception must obviously be made in the case of William Lazonick of Harvard University who, in a string of recent publications on the decline of the British cotton industry in this century, has focused on structural rigidities. He identified some of the constraints that prevented the industry changing the horizontally segregated, highly specialized and competitive structure inherited from last century to vertically integrated forms of enterprise. He passed somewhat cursorily over the earlier attempt to reorganize, or "rationalize," the industry by the Bank of England, but this has now been the subject of an excellent doctoral dissertation by J.H. Bamberg, part of which is summarized in an article in Textile History 19 (1988). The vertical restructuring of the United States industry since the 1960s is the subject of a Harvard Ph.D. thesis by Steven Cobrin, but there seems to be no recent study on the migration of the textile industry to the South.

12 With biography and business history, we might appear to be on firmer ground again. Certainly there is a long tradition of writing in this genre, particularly in the United States where management schools took an early hold and where business leaders have been characteristically less retiring than in Europe. The Victorian hagiography provides no secure foundation on which to build but has left a pile of material on which to draw. Among the most frequently quoted on the British side are Robert Owen's autobiography (1857), French's Life and Times of Samuel Crompton (1860), Hodder's Life of Samuel Morley (1887) and the privately published memoir Sir Jacob Behrens 1806-1889 (1925). On the American side we have a comparable selection of inventors, manufacturers and merchants. George White's Memoir of Samuel Slater (Philadelphia, 1836) and Robert Winthrop's Memoir of Nathan Appleton (Boston, 1861) stand out.

13 Business history and biography began in earnest on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s. George Unwin's Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights (1924) generated much interest in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, leading to valuable contributions like Fitton and Wadsworth's The Strutts and the Arkwrights (Manchester, 1957), Eric Sigsworth's Black Dyke Mills (Liverpool, 1958) and W.G. Rimmer's Marshalls of Leeds, Flax Spinners (Cambridge, 1966). Serge Chassagne and I tried our hands on the first comparative study, European Textile Printers in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Peel and Oberkampf (London, 1981). The tradition was followed in Mary Rose's The Greggs of Quarry Bank Mill (Cambridge, 1986) and the late R.S. Fitton's The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune (Manchester, 1989), but it now appears to be running out.

14 Evidently some of the best work has been done in this area, but it is disappointing to see how much is concentrated on the Industrial Revolution. It is fair, however, to add that Marguerite Duprée's painstaking work has now resulted in Lancashire and Whitehall(Manchester, 1987), a two-volume edition of the diaries of Sir Raymond Streat, who was Secretary of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce from 1920 to 1940 and Chairman of the Cotton Board from 1940 to 1957. The prime importance of his diary is that it illuminates the world of industrial diplomacy, government-industry relations and, more generally, a quarter century of the Lancashire cotton trade in decay. The Dictionary of Business Biography, 5 vols. (1984-6) offers another approach to recent developments. It contains seventy-five entries for textile manufacturers who were eminent during the last century (1850-1950) including several previously obscure entrepreneurs. Twenty-five of the seventy-five entries are for the cotton industry and fourteen for the woolen; the rest are dispersed among a variety of textile activities. A Scottish Dictionary of Business Biography is also forthcoming. Such pioneer work illuminates the way for further research but there seems to be little more in the wings despite the deposit in Manchester Public Library of important business records like those of Tootals. However, the present state of knowledge is being surveyed by twenty to thirty authors in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Western Textiles.

15 Led by enthusiasts at Harvard, and with business archives suffering less destruction than in Europe, the Americans have been particularly prominent in this area. Some of the studies cover sectors of the industry absent from British bibliographies, especially machine building as is the case with G.S. Gibb on The Saco-Lowell Shops (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) and R.T. Navin in The Whitin Machine Works (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). Despite the industry leaving New England, high quality research has been maintained with books like Jonathan Prude's The Coming of the Industrial Order (Cambridge, 1983), Barbara Tucker's Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry (Cornell, 1984), and most recently Robert Dalzell's Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, 1987). The Lowell conferences are now the main platform for such research.

16 It is when we turn to themes that the variations in scholarly coverage become most striking. Studies of regions, national industries, and firms have laid the necessary foundations for understanding, but we need to pursue themes to bring out the full significance of our subject matter. It will be easiest to take some of the principal themes in turn.