Harle Syke Mill gave its looms to workers and rented them power

Harle Syke Mill near Burnley opened in 1857 as a single integrated weaving company, the Haggate Joint Stock Commercial Company, built by 64 local shareholders — 45 of them weavers, 28 of those unable to read or write — who had each bought in at £10 a share to fund a 300-loom operation. When the American Civil War cut off raw cotton supplies in the early 1860s, the Lancashire Cotton Famine idled mills across the region and Harle Syke's centralized weaving business collapsed with the rest.

The mill's fixed capital — the building, the boiler, the steam engine and the line-shafting that drove every loom from it — was useless without cotton to weave, but it was also the one thing none of the shareholders could individually afford to replace if the company folded and sold it off piecemeal.

In 1865 the company restructured itself from a manufacturer into a landlord of space and power: it distributed its roughly 300 looms directly to shareholders at five looms per share, making each of them the outright owner of their own small weaving operation, and the company itself stopped making cloth and instead rented these new tenant-manufacturers room on the factory floor and mechanical power off the shared steam engine and line shaft — collecting rent per loom rather than profit per bolt of cloth.

Split loom ownership among shareholders, making each a tenant who rented floor space and steam power from the mill, turning one fragile business into many resilient ones.

Splitting loom ownership made many small, resilient businesses instead of one fragile one.

Each tenant could start and stop production independently as cotton supply fluctuated.

The mill kept the steam engine, the asset with economies of scale, and metered it by rent.

Rental income was steady regardless of which tenant's cloth sold, so the model grew.

When a demand shock kills your core business, strip down to the asset customers can't own alone and rent it to smaller operators, even your own workforce.

Tenant firms multiplied: the mill housed 900 looms by 1903 and 1,700+ by 1906, sharing one 700hp engine, and ran this way until 1959. The room-and-power mill became the standard structure of Lancashire's Pennine weaving towns — Nelson, Burnley, Colne and Padiham all filled with buildings run this way — letting thousands of small weaving firms operate for decades without any of them ever owning or running a steam engine.