The kiss of death or a flight of fancy? Workers' health and the campaign to regulate shuttle kissing in the British cotton industry, c. 1900-52

Historians of industrial illness and injury continue to debate the reasons for the increasing regulation of dangerous occupations across the global economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many social historians have emphasized the prolonged struggles of labour activists to secure protection and compensation in the face of professional indifference and frequent collusion between employers and governments. This article suggests that the uneven progress in legislation to restrict hazardous technologies in the American and European textile trades cannot adequately be explained in terms of capital -- labour conflict. New England prohibition on the suction shuttle registered the success of an effective coalition by health and industrial campaigners who used the press to raise concerns about tuberculosis and community as well as workplace welfare. Manufacturers were also inclined to adopt new self-threading technologies. Similar concerns have been raised by both medical officers and labour activists about steaming and other technologies in British cotton textiles before 1914, though the risks associated with the suction shuttle were effectively dismissed by government investigators. Lancashire firms were reluctant to invest in alternative technologies while trade union officials and members committed to established skills and wage incentives took only limited interest in the question before the 1940s.