In 1574, Queen Elizabeth issued a royal proclamation requiring her subjects to wear knitted caps on certain dates. This decree was one of eight sumptuary laws dictating what kind of clothing commoners were allowed to wear, the permitted colors, and how luxurious the clothing could be. The laws were very specific, describing what kinds of fabric, colors, and furs were allowed, even limiting the choice of buttons. Naturally, the upper class was exempt from such laws.
All of society was concerned with keeping the poor from spending too much money on clothing but the personal reasons varied from preventing peasants from falling into debt to the more obvious motive of keeping the riffraff from imitating their betters. Shakespeare referenced the clothing restrictions in several of his plays, such as in King Lear when a nobleman insults a servant, calling him a ‘three-suited, … filthy worsted-stocking knave’. (Act 2, Scene 2).
As for Queen Elizabeth, there is no reason to doubt that she supported the maintenance of class differences, and she was probably genuinely concerned about preventing the poor for going into debt needlessly from buying clothes in a useless effort to emulate their betters—but her primary motivation was to placate the powerful textile guilds. The guilds supported the queen politically in exchange for her guaranteeing their market.
Shortly after the proclamation concerning the wearing of caps, Reverend William Lee in the village of Calverton noticed a woman spending long hours knitting caps to comply with the new law. Exactly who the woman was depends on which flavor of the legend you prefer: it was either his wife, his mother, or his sweetheart. Considering that, as curate, Lee only received a tenth of the salary paid to the parish priest, he was forced to live in a small house owned by the church. (Since he couldn’t afford a wife and the house was too small to live with his mother, I think it was probably the last of the three options.)
Lee spent another two years improving both the speed and the quality of the machine to the degree that several working models were in production, producing coarse cloth faster than was capable by human labor alone. Seeking to expand his business, William Lee went to London and began commercial operations. His new enterprise caught the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who visited the shop and examined the machinery for herself. After she expressed disappointment with the coarseness of the cloth, Lee further improved the machinery to the point where it could produce fine silk cloth. Lee presented the queen with a pair of silk stockings hoping for a patent and her royal patronage.
To his request, the queen answered, “Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Lee took his machines to Paris where the French King similarly rebuffed him. Lee died in poverty, and the industrial revolution got off to a slow start.
While Queen Lizzie was probably more interested in keeping the guilds’ support than her having any fear that the machine might put workers out of work, this is still a great example of the fear of creative destruction—the fear that new technology will harm the economy by eliminating existing jobs. Though this fear has always been irrational, it persists today. At least once a week someone tells me they refuse to pump their own gas or use self-checkout registers in grocery stores because those actions eliminate jobs.
The fear of creative destruction is why the downtown department stores fought the building of malls, which in turn were against online retailers. It is the current reason why trains without coal or a firebox still have firemen (though still called firemen, they are usually engineers in training), why our major shipping ports are not modernized, and why many people fear the inevitable age of self-driving trucks on the highway. That the low wages paid to checkers in grocery stores will be offset by the higher pay of designers, builders and repairmen of automated checkout computers is rarely considered—most people still fear that new technology will create poverty by eliminating jobs.
In the long run, however, these innovations lower the cost of goods for the consumers, saving them enough money that more goods can be purchased. Increased purchasing power will power invention of newer, better goods, thus creating new jobs. While thousands of current truck drivers will inevitably be replaced by computers in the coming decades, the driverless trucks will lower transportation costs, creating new jobs in the process. The process will be painful for many of today’s drivers, but a half century from now, people will wonder why we were hesitant.
This process has been going on for centuries, but we just forget about it because we enjoy the new technology at cheaper costs. I’m not typing this on my new IBM Selectric typewriter by the light of a kerosene lantern, my phone isn’t plugged into the wall, and I don’t take pictures on a Polaroid.
I'm not typing this on a Royal manual typewriter for whom the QWERTY keyboard was invented to prevent the most frequently used keys from being right next to each other and jamming when pressed by a typist typing too fast. You know, for millennia the vast majority of the world was born to a future that was inevitably the same as their fathers and mothers. Technological change was terribly rare. I loved James Burke's two BBC TV series, "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed". Lately Mike Rowe's "Six Degrees" has done much the same thing, showing how inventions/technology, events and people have connected to create new and innovative things. But such change is often over very long periods.
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