Robert Owen

Robert Owen (1771 to 1858) was a Welsh mill owner and social reformer whose New Lanark cotton works in Scotland became a model for cooperative industrial welfare, including improved housing and Great Britain's first infant school. His later writings and cooperative communities helped found the worldwide consumers' cooperative movement, and Owenite publications of the late 1820s were among the first in English to use the word socialist, earning him recognition as a founding figure of British socialism.