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Radcliffe was ready to commence buisness for himself and by the year 1789 he was well established and employed many hands both in spinning and weaving as a master manufacturer.
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Radcliffe was operating a factory employing a thousand workers.
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Only one mill in five in the important industrial city of Manchester was in the hands of its original owner.
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Thus ran a report on working conditions in the cotton industry in 1824.
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By 1830, women and children made two-thirds of the cotton industry's labor.
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The poor law act of 1834, established workhouses for the jobless poor people. The jobless poor was forced to live there.
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In the cotton factories in the 1838, children under 18 made up 29 percent of the total workforce, children as young as 7 worked 12-15 hours per day, 6 days a week, in cotton mills.
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By the 1840s, only 10 percent of British industrial firms employed more than five thousand workers, 43 percent had fewer than one hundred.
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In 1842, the coal mines act forbade the use of boys younger than ten and women in the mines
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By 1850 in Britain at least, the kind of traditional entrepreneurship that had created the industrial revolution was declining and was being replaced by a new business aristocracy. This new generation of entrepreneurs stemmed from the professional and industrial middle classes, especially as sons inherited the succesful businesses established by their fathers.
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According to the 1851 cencus in Britain, there were 1.8 million agricultural laborers and 1 million domestic servants but only 811,00 wokers in the cotton and woolen industries. And one-third of these were still working in small workshops or at home.
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In 1851, fully 40 percent of the female workforce in Britain consisted of domestic servants.