This question was inspired by the Foreword to the 2nd edition of Lord of Rings in which Tolkien reminisces about Sarehole Mill in his childhood (circa 1900). This means that his bucolic memories of the mill would have occurred after the industrial revolution and after the mill had installed a steam engine in 1852. Yet evidently Sarehole was not a [satanic]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/dark-satanic-mills-listed-as-world-heritage-sites-9247390.html) factory system with hundreds of exploited workers crammed into a building. It was apparently a family industry with two corn millers.
I've been reading E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, and he does talk about how the satanic Cotton Mills were the "pace making industry of the industrial revolution" (chapter 6). How common was it that steam power was put in service of smaller industries like Sarehole, which were located very close to the heartlands of the industrial revolution (Birmingham)?
Were all 'satanic' mills (i.e. mass labourers working in poor working conditions) powered by steam engines, If so, is there a narrative of history that says that technology led to different social/economic relations? However, Sarehole seems to contradict this, as an example of steam technology that didn't alter the social logic of the mill.
I hypothesized that the difference may be because Cotton was subject to a global market (and thus producers needed to exploit workers more to get more profit and compete with other producers) whereas the corn mill would presumably be selling to a local and stable market. On the other hand, Thompson notes that "In the early 1830s the cotton hand-loom weavers alone still outnumbered all the men and women in spinning and weaving mills of cotton, wool, and silk combined". Would the hand weavers and the factory mills be selling to the same market?
Steam engines were a source of power that was mobile. The first ones ( Newcomen) of the first half of the 18th c. were inefficient, but solved the difficult problem of pumping out water from coal mines. They succeeded because they could use coal "fines" for fuel, the tiny bits of coal that were hard to transport and so hard to sell, and tended to pile up near the mine. As steam engines were improved ( James Watt) their use started to spread to other places, like tin mines in Cornwall. Towards the end of the century they began to be used for something other than pumps: like powering steamboats ( James Rumsey, John Fitch, William Symington) or stamping coins .
But though a steam engine were modernized and improved to be a very good source of power that could be placed where needed, water mills stayed very important as well. Over-shot wheels became breast wheels, and then after 1830, became turbines. Businessmen building mills- especially textile mills- would try to take advantage of water power whenever they could. The textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts were water powered, and the shops building guns at the armory at Harper's Ferry were water powered. And of course there were far more people who knew how to build water mills than who knew how to build steam engines.
The adoption of steam engines for industrial power grew during the 19th c. , and it was pretty uneven for the first forty years. The greatest determining factor seems to have been, logically enough, the distance from the coal face. The further a lump of coal had to travel, the more expensive it was to use a steam engine. When railroads greatly improved transport of fuel, steam engines became more useful . Because they were mobile, it was easier to site and design a factory to use one- running a mill with water required getting the water to the mill, whereas running it with stem meant carrying coal to the steam engine. And sometimes it was risky depending upon water: a river could freeze in the winter, run dry in the summer, and flood high enough in the spring to damage things: Harper's Ferry would see multiple floods smash up its equipment.
But water power did not go away. Water mills could be quite cost effective, especially for small operations, and sometimes operated into the 20th c.. They could mill grain , and do other tasks, even be modernized with turbines, become small hydroelectric plants.. An interesting example of a small waterpowered shop in England would be the Finch Foundry, now a museum ( and, for what it's worth, well worth the small detour to see if you're taking a trip to see Stonehenge) , which used a fairly small stream to power the tilt hammers and grinding wheels needed for manufacture of things like shovels, hoes, and rakes, which were then packed into wagons and sold by traveling salesmen direct to farmers.
Rex Pope: Atlas of British Social and Economic History Since c,1700