The Derwent Valley, England, Where the Industrialization of America Began

In 1835, Samuel Slater of Webster, MA, died a millionaire (worth ca. $40 million today) and part owner of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company (AMC), incorporated just four years earlier in Manchester, NH. Slater had come a very long way since he was born in 1768 into a farming family in Belper, Derbyshire, England, where he later served a 6-year apprenticeship in one of the earliest water-powered cotton spinning mills. Slater’s “owner” was Jedediah Strutt, a business partner of Richard Arkwright, who is credited with inventing the water-powered spinning frame and operating it on an industrial scale by an organized workforce in the Cromford Mill, 8 miles north of Belper. Slater emigrated to the United States in 1789 and one year later built the first water-powered spinning frame in America from memory alone, all contrary to British law. “Slater the Traitor”, as he was known by the British, became a cotton mill owner and industrialist who developed the Rhode Island System of workforce organization and manufacturing. This in turn inspired the Waltham/Lowell System of vertical integration and “Mill Girls” in the mills of Waltham, Lowell & Lawrence, MA, and the AMC in Manchester, NH.

Martin Jeffries is a polar scientist, Chair of the Polar Research Board of the U.S. National Academies, and an Osher at Dartmouth member. His childhood home was in Manchester, U.K. — "Cottonopolis" and the centre of the global cotton textile industry in the 19th Century. Since he retired, Martin has been

exploring the role of Manchester and Liverpool in the slave trade, slave ownership, and the industrialization of the UK based on cotton produced by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the USA.

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