Textile manufacture during the industrial revolution based on silk?

Silk production was easily mechanized in England in the XVIII century which made me wonder.
Could have silk replace cotton as the main material of the textile industry if the induatrial revolution happened in a warmer region with silk clothing tradition like Italy or China?
 
Silk production was easily mechanized in England in the XVIII century which made me wonder.
Could have silk replace cotton as the main material of the textile industry if the induatrial revolution happened in a warmer region with silk clothing tradition like Italy or China?

I know nothing about China, but you have to take into account the sheer amount of human labor that goes into breeding-feeding-harvesting the silkworms. In Italy, even in the silk-producing regions, silk was fated to remain as an upperclass textile simply because the raw material itself had such a high cost.

Remembering my own 7th grade school experience of tending to the worms -and putting it together with tales from people of my grandparents's generation- I would bet on silk production to not be sufficient to fuel the first industrialized textile industry (if the new industrial products are less luxurious-looking than the old ones they won't fetch the same prices, and given the amount of raw product available, it seems unlikely that it would be "wasted" on those lower-status textiles).
 
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Silk production was already a kind of pre-industrial manufacture, it benefited less from the introduction of machinery than cotton. However, silk weaving certainly was a part of industrial revolution: here's an example.
 
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