The English Woollen and Worsted Industries. By E. Lipson. (A.
and C. Black. 10s. 6d. net.)—This is the first volume of a series of histories of English industries, which promises to be highly interesting and useful. Mr. Lipson, the general editor, naturally begins with our oldest and most characteristic national industry, the woollen trade. Ho sketches its history and describes its primitive processes and the various inventions by which the manufacture was transformed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The closing chapter on the geographical distribution of the trade in successive periods is specially instruc- tive. The cloth manufacture, the author shows, began in the towns, but gradually spread out to the villages, partly in order to escape the too drastic regulations of the gilds. Many of the old towns were ruined by their Ode, despite all their efforts to maintain their trade monopolies. In the eighteenth century the industry migrated from East Anglia and the West Country to the North. Mr. Lipson does not think that lack of coal or water-power was the main reason for this migration. He is inclined to trace it to the conservatism of the employers, who were prosperous and careless, and of the workmen, especially in Wiltshire, who had a short-sighted dislike of all new inventions. The Yorkshire woollen industry owed much to the example of the new cotton industry in Lancashire.
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