From the 1840’s onwards, several textile mills (for cotton spinning and weaving) were created in Rio de Janeiro County and in the outskirts of some adjacent cities of the Brazilian capital. It was, in fact, the beginning of an industrial growth not only in the textile industries, but also in several branches of industrial activity, which were stimulated by the general growth of slave coffee plantation economy, the population increase in the capital and in provinces of Southeastern Brazil (which also implied in the expansion of the internal market) and the adoption of several measures for industrial stimulus by the Imperial government. These textile mills were established in the fluminense region by foreign merchants (who usually operated in the import-export trade) as a strategy to diversify their capital in a more favorable conjuncture for industrial investments of great magnitude, employing free and salaried workers.

Consequently, the objective of this paper is related to the study of the dimension and nature of the textile mills established in the fluminense region, which means the attempt to understand their characteristics as a specific type of industrial establishment and its technical and productive organization. An element which immediately attracts our attention is the localization of these textile mills outside of the urban areas due to their necessity to make good use of natural water falls or those artificially created from the waters of a voluminous river. Evidently, the water power created motion for the operation of spinning and weaving machines and this hydraulic mechanism was the most relevant technological attribute of the fluminense textile mills until the early 1880’s, when steam power was introduced in this and other industrial branches.

The fluminense textile mills did not have the condition to become a germination pole of a new industrial technology to other branches of transformation activities, as happened in England in the very beginning of the nineteenth century. Also, the utilization of hydraulic machines indicated the limits of industrial activity in a social context in which export agriculture and slave labour still predominated. Nevertheless, the accentuated decline of slavery and slave society in Brazil, in the 1880’s, would allow the emergence of new possibilities of development for textile mills and other industrial branches with the introduction of steam engines and the exponential growth of industrial production.