"the coming of industrial order." a review article

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

"The Coming of Industrial Order." A Review ArticleThe Coming of Industrial Order. Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts 1810-1860 byJonathan PrudeReview by: Kristine BrulandComparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1988), pp. 388-393Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178841 .

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"The Coming of Industrial Order." A Review Article KRISTINE BRULAND

Balliol College, Oxford

The Coming of Industrial Order. Town andfactory life in rural Massachusetts 1810- 1860, by Jonathan Prude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Jonathan Prude's The Coming of Industrial Order describes and analyses the diffusion of industrialization into Dudley and Oxford, two small rural town-

ships lying in the southern part of Worcester County, Massachusetts. Founded in the early eighteenth century, by 1810 these communities had evolved

slowly from a type of subsistence yeoman economy, with important elements of customary co-operative labour, into a component of an increasingly commercial regional economy. Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, clothing tended to be homemade, diet was based on local produce, and the

pace of technical change in agriculture was very slow. However, various

types of social fissure were emerging, caused by geographical separation (which affected local administration), sectarian differences, and population movement. The latter was large: "The early nineteenth century hinterland

fairly hummed with Yankees passing across the landscape," with aggregate turnover of household heads reaching almost 65 percent between 1800 and 1810. In 1810, therefore, it was by no means a cohesive community which faced the rapid economic change of the next twenty years.

"At one time or another in the two decades after 1810, some twenty textile mills went up in Dudley and Oxford." The attraction was the local streams, and though some mills failed they were quickly replaced. At the same time there was a sharp growth in nontextile businesses: "The economic landscape of these communities was deeply and irrevocably recast." Now all industrialization processes are singular, at least at community level. But this was more than usually so, since the entrepreneurial driving force of change was one man, Samuel Slater, "the Arkwright of America".

Samuel Slater was an immigrant who had worked for the mill owner Jedediah Strutt in Derbyshire from the age of 15. At Strutt's he acquired a technical expertise, in particular with Arkwright equipment, which dis-

tinguished him sharply from other U.K. emigrants at that time. The signifi- cance of his emigration lay in the fact that Arkwright machinery required considerable construction and operating skills; the "manager and machine

0010-4175/88/6111-2932 $5.00 ? 1988 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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"THE COMING OF INDUSTRIAL ORDER'' 389

builder" thus played a crucial role in production. This problem had emerged with stark clarity in the United States, where Arkwright equipment, like Compton's mule, had diffused rapidly but unsuccessfully, since recipients could neither assemble nor operate the machines.'

The task of acquiring this expertise for the United States attracted much attention at the end of the eighteenth century. As David Jeremy has shown, it was tackled at the highest level: "From Philadelphia, the Federal capital from 1790 to 1800, emanated the most vigorous endeavours, several of which were linked with Hamilton and his assistant at the Treasury, Tench Coxe."2 One of Coxe's agents, Andrew Mitchell, was in fact apprehended in England in possession of models and patterns of Arkwright equipment, which were confiscated.

At this critical conjuncture in U.S. economic development, Samuel Slater was attracted to Rhode Island to construct a carding machine with which he had been familiar at the Strutt works. He made the most of this situation of commercial and technological opportunity, becoming a joint owner of the mill. From his expanding operations, a circle of employees, relatives, and contractors rippled out, carrying the new technology. He was thus not only the first to make the Arkwright process commercially feasible in the United States, but his business operations formed, as David Jeremy has rightly remarked, "the single most fruitful node of technology diffusion in American cotton manufacturing before 1812."3 It was thus no minor figure who set up operations in Oxford, Massachusetts, in January 1813.

Slater rapidly expanded his plants in Dudley and Oxford; the initial spin- nery was followed by a woolen mill and a further cotton spinning factory. Extensive ancillary facilities were constructed or bought: dyehouses, stores, houses, cottages, boarding houses and farmland. So "by 1830 he possessed nearly two thousand acres of real estate in Dudley and Oxford, making him by all odds the biggest single property owner in either township."4

But this was only the leading edge of economic change in the townships. Its first accompaniment was agricultural transformation, consequent upon in- creasing commercialisation. In turn, agrarian change had a paradoxical effect, namely to encourage investment in non-agricultural activities. In part this was simply because deeper familiarity with the market made such investments seem more normal. But the augmented interest in nonfarming ventures also arose because post-1810 commercialisation frequently left local yeomen in deep trouble.5

' D. J. Jeremy, Transatlantic Industrial Revolution. The Diffusion of Textile Technologies Between Britain and America, 1790-1830s, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 76.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 90. 4 J. Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),

50. 5 Ibid., 53.



390 KRISTINE BRULAND

The problems of agriculture stemmed from a combination of small farm size and price movements which were large and more or less unpredictable; thus returns were low and "a thickening haze of indebtedness" characterised local agriculture. Nontextile, nonagricultural enterprises grew from 39 in 1801 to 128 in 1831. By far the biggest growth category was "shops," meaning not simply stores, taverns, and so on, but blacksmithies, nail-making works, shoemaking shops, a bakery, a stove factory, chaise and bobbin making works, and a textile machinery works. Most were small, owner-operated enterprises, but involvment in the new commercial economy went further than this, via forms of equity investment, especially in textiles: "Some ninety- three men besides Slater and his associates put up money for at least a dozen separate textile villages between 1810 and 1830."6

The new "industrial order" thus had three basic economic characteristics: "First, the increased, but still significantly limited, commercial involvement of agriculture. Second, the dramatic expansion of small business establish- ments, and third, the appearance of manufactories along the streams of the two communities."7 This new order gave rise to conflicts and accommoda- tions with social values and institutions which "changed more slowly or not at all." The conflicts had what might be called an internal aspect, concerning struggle within enterprises over forms and intensities of work, for example, and an external aspect in which enterprise objectives conflicted with those of the citizenry over social issues, public expenditure, and access to public resources. Tracing the forms and courses of these conflicts, over two genera- tions, and the delineation of the "terms of truce" on which they were accom- modated if not resolved, are a core objective and achievement of Prude's work.

In the first generation after 1810, both agriculture and nontextile business were characterised by a mix of custom and innovation in economic organisation and objectives. In nontextile town enterprises, for example, "work schedules, division of labour, technologies-these are all obvious aspects of the regimen. .8 ."8 But on the other hand, discontinuous work survived, seasonality affected the rhythm of work, and a great deal of customary prac- tice remained. The distinction between textile and nontextile enterprise was thus not simply one of size, capital stock and so on; it was also that "local manufactories pursued market priorities with a single-minded enthusiasm un- matched by most nontextile business."9

A particularly interesting aspect of Prude's analysis is the way in which he shows that the context of, and responses to, textile industrialization in these towns were shaped not so much by this profit imperative as by the ideology

6 Ibid., 60. 7 Ibid., 100. 8 Ibid., 108. 9 Ibid., 110.



"THE COMING OF INDUSTRIAL ORDER" 391

which was used to "explain and defend these new institutions." The ideology was one in which mills were identified with social reform and moral improve- ment; in Slater's mills it took the form of a paternalism which had its roots in the Strutt mills back in Derbyshire.

Profitability nevertheless formed the constraint within which paternalism could operate, and this generated pressures and resistance within factories. Absenteeism, sabotage, an easily-defeated strike: These phenomena are shared with most early industrialising communities. The aspect of operative resistance which really stands out in Dudley and Oxford is labour turnover:

"aggregate arrivals and departures. . . dipped below 100% of the annual labor force . . . only twice between 1813 and the mid-1830s, whereas the mean aggregate turnover stood at 162.7 percent."10

Conflict between the factories and the town as a whole was more sporadic, focussing on specific issues: riparian customs and dam building, organisation of school districts, turnpike construction and access, and so on. These dis- putes, in which Slater figured persistently, were not outstanding in them- selves, yet gave rise to a remarkable outcome-nothing less than the creation of a new town. In June, 1831, a petition was presented to the General Court in Boston seeking the incorporation of a new township, to be called Webster, and formed from parts of Dudley and Oxford. Some 85 percent of the signato- ries were employees of Samuel Slater, who was clearly behind the initiative, though not himself a signatory. The new township just happened to enclose the three Slater mill villages: "Tired of wrestling with Dudley and Oxford, Slater had decided to create a new town for his mills."

The seond generation of the industrial order developed, therefore, within a new civic context. The three towns continued to experience rapid economic and demographic change. Sharp population increase was bolstered by the arrival of immigrants; by 1860, less than 65 percent of the population was native American. At the same time, the occupational structure altered sharply, with farmers becoming but 13 percent of the labour force-in 1860, nearly 70 percent were textile operatives, labourers, or shoemakers. The population and occupational changes were linked, and connected also to the concentration of non-American inhabitants in the new town of Webster: "By the 1850s, three- quarters of all workers inside local mills were first- and second-generation immigrants from another country . . . thus Webster, with its dense aggrega- tion of mills and comparatively small farming sector, persistently registered the largest contingent of non-American inhabitants."11

Among the workers of these communities, the second generation brought an increased use of the vote as a form of articulating grievances-the towns returned significant votes for the Workingmen's party (three times the state

10 Ibid., 144. " Ibid., 190.



392 KRISTINE BRULAND

average vote) and, in the case of Oxford, for Massachusetts Democrats. Within the textile sector, labour activity was constrained by sharply increased rates of labour turnover: Aggregate annual turnover averaged nearly 250 percent from the two Slater mills for which data is available. At the same time, the nature of civic administration and leadership shifted, with those in political authority combining "to a greater degree than at any time since the revolution . . . wealth with townwide prestige and administrative power"912 Town-business conflict was reduced principally because an enhanced role was granted to businessmen in town administration, while the scope of public funding was widened to include roads, bridges, and so on, which were of direct benefit to local business. It "became legitimate for mill masters to propose that their interests and the public 'benefit' coincided."

"There is evident in all this a kind of adaptation," remarks Prude in a concluding passage. This conclusion is a justified one: At the end of fity years of tension and sometimes conflict, an accommodation had been reached, not simply between the actors in the economic scene, but between a changed economic realm and its social milieu.

The Coming of Industrial Order makes a distinctive contribution to our

understanding of the diffusion of this process in two senses. On the one hand, Prude has deployed with great skill the resources and historiographic techniques normally associated with the literature on community studies to show how industrialization occurred at a "micro" level and the responses it evoked. While there are a number of such studies which examine the emer- gence of industrial occupations in rural communities,13 there is little or nothing on the impact of full-blown industrial techniques on communities. More- over, he is quite right to emphasize that industrialization should not be equated with urbanization. On the other hand, Prude has made a contribution to our conceptual understanding of industrialization as such. Industrialization processes are characterized above all by complexity, and for too long this has seemed to dictate historiographic strategies which emphasize one or, at best, a few aspects of change. For many years, the historiography of industrialization has overemphasized the economic sides of all this, particularly technological change and investment. Where social aspects have been ap- proached, they have either been seen from a sociological perspective or a Marxist one in which the formation of "capitalist relations of production" has been depicted at quite an abstract level.14 Prude's work successfully inte- grates economic change with a detailed account of social organisation and transformation, to present a notion of industrialization "not as a single ho-

12 Ibid., 243. 13 For example, V. Skipp, Crisis and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1978), which examines the growth of craft occupations in five parishes near Birmingham in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

14 See, e.g., I. T. Berend and G. Ranki, The European Periphery and Industrialization 1780- 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). More successful is William Lazonick, "The Subjection of Labor to Capital," Review of Radical Political Economy, (Spring) 1978.



"THE COMING OF INDUSTRIAL ORDER' 393

mogenous development but as a blend of different changes-or more pre- cisely, as a blend of changes and lack of changes."15 His concept of industrialization is one which emphasizes rather than suppresses complexity. Her- bert Kisch remarked some years ago that How social institutions affect the economic process and how in turn they are effected by it, remains, in many respects as yet, an "empty economic box". Nevertheless, this particular relationship stands at the centre of economic history. 16

Prude has made a big step toward filling this particular box. If one has reservations, they concern specifically economic issues which might have been more fully developed. For example, the question of labour turnover stands out in these townships, especially when considered in a comparative context. 7 But what was the impact of this on the managerial practices of Slater and his fellow textile entrepreneurs? Was it significantly different from other textile areas in the United States, and, if so, were wage rates affected? Does the evidence on turnover, or the availability of alternative occupations throw any light on Habakkuk's hypotheses? Beyond this, there are questions about the nature of textile production in these townships. A central aspect of textile production, especially in spinning, both in Britain and in countries

facing British competition, was choice of product. Yarn, for example, is a

highly differentiated product, and the choice between coarse, medium, and fine in the output of yar had important consequences for choice of technique, production, organisation, and so on. Understanding product-type has been shown to be central to an understanding not only of the U.K. industry but also of the pattern of diffusion of textile production outside of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century; 8 this aspect of the matter is relatively neglected in Prude's work. To carry on carping, one might mention a neglect of Slater's market, of his relationships with outworkers (which are treated at best sketch- ily), and of the interrelationships among local businesses (who did the bobbin- makers sell to? what was made at the textile machinery works, and for whom?). In general, technico-economic issues are the weakest aspect of Prude's study, though the reader is in the happy position of being able to consult David Jeremy's excellent Transatlantic Industrial Revolution, which treats relevant technical matters in considerable detail. It should be said, however, that even in its weaknesses, The Coming of Industrial Order is a considerable work which stakes out a number of guideposts for future re- search on the diffusion of industrialization in the nineteenth century.

15 Prude, op. cit., p. xi. 16 H. Kisch, "The textile industries in Silesia and the Rhineland: a comparative study in

industrialization (with a postcriptum)," in P. Kriedte, et al., Industrialization Before Indus- trialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 194.

17 Back in Derbyshire, for example, the Strutt records from Belper and Milford indicate an annual turnover of about 16 percent between 1805 and 1812. See R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758-1830, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), ch. 9.

18 See, e.g., Lennart Sch6n, "British Competition and Domestic Change: Textiles in Sweden 1820-1870," Economy and History, XXIII: , 61-76.



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