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Despite depressions in the cotton industry and the effects of the trade cycle (Britain's economy underwent a long-term depression between 1873-1896) and increased competition, particularly from Japan, the British cotton industry reached its zenith in this period, and Lancashire confirmed its status as the world's cotton-making machine. The very peak of British cotton cloth production came in 1913, when the combined output of the British industry reached 7,075,000,000 (7 billion) square yards of cloth. But within a few short years, the world would be a very different place, and the British cotton industry would begin its rapid decline.

The spirit of enterprise and inventiveness which had fuelled the Industrial Revolution seemed to have flagged by the time the cotton industry's "Indian Summer" came. Many British cotton companies continued to weave on Lancashire looms, whilst in America the Northrop automatic power loom sped the production of cloth. When J.H. Northrop tried to interest British textile machine makers in his invention for an 'automatic' loom (which removed the need for the weaver constantly handling the shuttle) they showed little interest in the idea. It was left to Northrop to patent the idea in the US in 1894, with the first automatic looms only slowly introduced to Britain in 1902. The British cotton industry was also slow to adapt ring spinning, perhaps best summed up in the phrase "Stubborn Mules". Ring spinning had been employed in the US for more than a century, but was not adopted by the British cotton industry wholesale until the 1950s.

Much of the textile machinery manufactured in Britain was not manufactured to standard sizes, as was often the case in the United States, so the interchangeability of components and upgrading was far more difficult and more expensive in Britain than in America. American textile machinery was arguably less solidly built but cheaper to replace and that enabled the US cotton industry to constantly update and improve its productivity, while British manufacturers tended to stick with their old machinery. The larger American home market also meant that "economies of scale" (savings made by large-scale production) achieved by the use of modern technology (such as automatic looms and ring spinning) were more cost-effective in America.

World War I and the ensuing social and political changes it brought would change Britain's cotton industry (and other staple industries such as coal, steel and heavy engineering) forever. Wiithin a few decades of its dramatic peak, would come one of the "greatest retreats in industrial history", as the British cotton industry began a dramatic decline from which it would never recover.

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