Robert Owen

Robert Owen arrived at the New Lanark mills in 1800 and found two thousand workers labouring fourteen hours a day in conditions that had formed them—in his precise diagnostic language—for nothing but exhaustion, hostility, and degradation. He did not exhort them to virtue. He redesigned the environment. He reduced working hours, raised wages, refused to employ children under ten, built schools that taught curiosity rather than obedience, and created communal spaces for the workers and their families. The mills became the most profitable cotton operation in Britain. The evidence was unambiguous: treat workers well, invest in their development, share the productivity gains, and both workers and enterprise thrive. Owen publicised the results exhaustively, welcomed thousands of visitors, and testified before parliamentary committees. The other mill owners did not adopt his methods, not because the evidence was unclear but because the competitive structure of the textile industry made adoption irrational for any