The textile industry has never been in just one place. Its geographic center has shifted dramatically over centuries, moving from pre-industrial India and China along ancient trade routes, to the river valleys of England and New England, then to the American South, and finally to the massive export hubs of East and South Asia that dominate production today. Each move followed the same basic logic: access to cheap power, cheap labor, or both.
Pre-Industrial Centers: India, China, and the Trade Routes
Long before mechanized factories existed, India was the world’s textile powerhouse. Four major production clusters drove the industry: the Coromandel Coast in southeastern India, Bengal in the northeast, Gujarat in the west, and Punjab in the north. These regions produced cotton and silk fabrics that were traded across the globe. Gujarati weavers in the 17th century were already customizing their techniques for Middle Eastern buyers, showing how sophisticated and export-oriented the industry was centuries before industrialization.
These textiles moved along the Silk Roads, a network of overland and maritime routes connecting Asia to Europe. Cities like Xi’an and Hangzhou in China, Bukhara in Uzbekistan, Aleppo in Syria, and Venice in Italy served as critical trading hubs where merchants exchanged cloth alongside spices, metals, and other goods. Silk, cotton, and wool all flowed through these corridors for over a thousand years.
England’s Cotton Revolution
Manchester and the surrounding region of southern Lancashire became the birthplace of industrial textile production. Manchester had been active in the wool trade since the 16th century, exporting cloth to Europe via London. By 1620, the city had shifted to weaving fustian, a fabric blending linen and cotton. This early cotton industry exploded after 1770 when mechanization took hold.
Geography dictated where mills could operate. Early factories ran on waterpower, and roughly 90% of British watermills sat below 200 meters in elevation, typically on gently graded floodplains along moderately sized rivers. Small upland streams lacked the drainage area to generate reliable power, and locations above 300 meters were severely disadvantageous. When even the best river sites couldn’t keep up with demand (a cold, dry stretch in the early 19th century reduced water flow across the British Isles), steam power took over, and Manchester’s access to cheap coal via canal became a decisive advantage. The first canal reached Manchester in 1762, carrying coal from Worsley, and by 1776 it connected the city to Liverpool and the Mersey, giving cotton manufacturers a direct line to imported raw materials and export shipping.
New England Mill Towns
The American textile industry started in the 1790s in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where Samuel Slater built a water-powered cotton mill based on British designs, financed by Providence industrialist Moses Brown. The model spread quickly. In 1813, a group of wealthy investors called the Boston Associates raised $400,000 to establish a textile mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, and then built what became the most famous mill town in American history: Lowell, Massachusetts, founded in 1821 at the falls of the Merrimack River.
The Boston Associates didn’t stop there. They built mill towns across New England wherever rivers provided reliable waterpower:
- Massachusetts: Lowell, Chicopee, Lawrence, and Holyoke
- New Hampshire: Manchester, Dover, and Nashua
- Maine: Saco, on the Saco River
These towns were purpose-built around factories, with housing, churches, and shops constructed to support the workforce. For much of the 19th century, New England was the undisputed center of American textile manufacturing.
The Shift to the American South
Starting in the mid-1920s, the U.S. cotton textile industry relocated to the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. By the end of the 1930s, this area had replaced New England as the center of American cotton production. Southern mill owners held a clear advantage in labor costs over their northern competitors, and the arrival of electric power removed the old dependency on river sites. Charles Cannon of Cannon Mills openly credited the Duke family’s Southern Power Company as essential to building his operation in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
Small, family-owned mills dotted the landscape. Towns like Marion, Gastonia, Shelby, Lincolnton, and Burlington in North Carolina, along with Spartanburg and Greenville in South Carolina, became defined by textile production. Marion alone saw three mills open between 1909 and 1916. These weren’t just factories but entire communities, with mill villages where workers lived, shopped, and even fielded professional minor league baseball teams that became sources of local pride. The industry’s peak came in the early 1990s, after which plant closures and layoffs hit in two waves: one in the mid-1990s and a second in the early 2000s, driven by global competition and trade liberalization.
Europe’s Specialized Clusters
While mass production moved across the Atlantic, parts of Europe maintained textile industries by specializing. Prato, Italy, near Florence, has produced fabrics and yarns since the Middle Ages and remains one of Europe’s largest textile districts. Its model is distinctive: production is divided among numerous small and medium-sized enterprises, each focused on a specific step in the process rather than vertically integrated factories.
Prato also pioneered what would now be called circular textile manufacturing. In 1850, a local technician named Giovanni Battista Mazzoni designed machinery for carding and spinning recycled fabric scraps and used garments. Today, roughly a quarter of the district’s revenue comes from recycling over 100,000 tons of post-consumer clothing and textile waste each year. The district operates a specialized industrial aqueduct for recycling processing water, a system unique in Europe.
Where Textiles Are Made Today
The global textile trade was worth $837 billion in 2024, and it is overwhelmingly concentrated in Asia. China dominates, exporting $268 billion worth of textiles that year. Bangladesh ranked second at $52.9 billion, followed by Vietnam at $49.8 billion. Together, these three countries account for the bulk of world textile exports.
Within China, the province of Zhejiang is particularly central. The Keqiao District of Shaoxing City is home to China Textile City, the country’s largest textile marketplace. Shaoxing’s textile industry became prominent in the 1970s and has expanded steadily since. Bangladesh’s production is heavily concentrated around Dhaka, its capital, though the city became infamous in 2013 when a garment factory building collapsed, killing over 1,134 workers and injuring more than 2,000, highlighting the safety costs of the industry’s relentless cost pressure.
Many of the former textile centers in the American South and New England have reinvented themselves. Cities like Charlotte, Greensboro, Greenville, and Spartanburg, once built on mills, have diversified into finance, healthcare, and logistics. The old mill buildings in places like Lowell are now museums and apartments. The physical infrastructure of textile production has largely moved overseas, following the same pattern it always has: toward cheaper labor, cheaper energy, and fewer regulatory constraints.