Soon these processes were mechanized using water power, until the steam engine came along to make flying shuttles really fly in these huge cotton mills.
The cotton mills of England were standing idle and the workers were starving, and any blockader who could outwit the Yankee fleet could command his own price in Liverpool.
In 1868, after learning from his time working in his father's banking firm, a 29-year-old TATA bought an old oil mill and converted it into a cotton mill.
London's financial sector may contribute only a few percentage points of Britain's total economic output, but it defines the country, and its sense of prosperity, in much the same way that cotton mills and trading ships once did.