,000 | 1880 463,309,000
1820 9,775,000 | 1892 743,046,104

In the silk industry the influence of machinery is complicated by
several considerations especially affecting this manufacture. Although
the ingenuity and enterprise of the Lombes had introduced complex
machinery into silk throwing many years before it was successfully
applied to any other branch of textile industry, the trade did not
grow as might have been expected, and the successive increments of
great mechanical invention were slowly and slightly applied to the
silk industry. There are special reasons for this, some of them
connected with the intrinsic value of the commodity, others with the
social regulation of the trade.

The inherent delicacy of many of the processes, the capricious
character of the market for the commodities, the expensive production
of which renders them a luxury and especially amenable to the shifts
of taste and fashion, have preserved for artistic handicraft the
production of many of the finer silk fabrics, or have permitted the
application of machinery in a far less degree than in the cotton and
woollen industries.

Moreover, the heavy duties imposed upon raw and thrown silk, which
accompanied the strict prohibition of the importation of manufactured
silk goods in 1765, by aggravating the expenses of production and
limiting the market at the very epoch of the great mechanical
inventions, prevented any notable expansion of consumption of silk
goods, and rendered them quite unable to resist the competition of the
younger and more enterprising cotton industry, which, after the
introduction of colour-printing early in the nineteenth century, was
enabled to out-compete silk in many markets.

Even in the coarser silk fabrics where weaving machinery was
successfully applied at an early date, the slow progress in "throwing"
greatly retarded the expansion of the trade, and after the repeal of
the duty on imported silk in 1826 the number of throwing mills was
still quite inadequate to keep pace with the demands of the
weavers.[76] Subsequent improvements in throwing mills, and the
application of the ingenious weaving machinery of Jacquard and later
improvers, have given a great expansion to many branches of the trade
in the last fifty years.

But the following statistics of the consumption of raw and thrown silk
from 1765 to 1844 indicate how slight and irregular was the expansion
of the trade in England during the era