Capitalism and industrialization in New England, 1815-1845

Journal of American History

Volumn 84, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 1334-1353

  Weil, François ^a  

^a ÉCOLE DES HAUTES ÉTUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0343749144     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2568084     Document Type: Review

References (97)

1. Caroline Farrar Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings (Boston, 1931), 3.
2. Diane Lindstrom, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region (New York, 1978);
3. Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885 (New York, 1983);
4. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (New York, 1984);
5. Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana, 1988);
6. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1984);
7. Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885 (Princeton, 1987);
8. Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (New York, 1994).
9. Thomas C. Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York, 1981);
10. Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1990), 9-14;
11. Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago, 1992).
12. Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism;
13. Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (New York, 1983).
14. Robert F. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), x.
15. See Private and Special Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, vol. VII: From May 1830, to April 1837 (Boston, 1837);
16. Private and Special Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, vol. VIII: From January 1838, to May 1848 (Boston, 1848). I am grateful to Pierre Gervais for pointing out a similar contemporary use of the term "associates" in New Jersey.
17. On Massachusetts corporations, see Edwin Merrick Dodd, American Business Corporations until 1860 with Special Reference to Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1954);
18. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).
19. Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, 1858), iii, v, 19-20.
20. On Appleton, see Frances Gregory, Nathan Appleton: Merchant and Entrepreneur, 1779-1861 (Charlottesville, 1975).
21. Gregory herself uses the expression "Boston Associates" without defining it. [Abner Forbes], The Rich Men of Massachusetts: Consisting of a Statement of the Reputed Worth of About Two Thousand Persons: With Brief Sketches of Nearly Fifteen Hundred Characters (Boston, 1852), 150;
22. [Thomas L. V. Wilson], The Aristocracy of Boston, Who They Are, And What They Were (Boston, 1848);
23. William Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1893). Wilson uses the term "associates" in regard to Nathan Appleton.
24. See [Wilson], Aristocracy of Boston, 5.
25. James C. Ayer, Some of the Uses and Abuses in the Management of Our Manufacturing Corporations (Lowell, 1863);
26. Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 1607-1860 (New York, 1949), 460;
27. Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1964);
28. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture.
29. Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (1935; New York, 1969), 31, 37, 39-42, 243-47.
30. Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts Ibid., 39-42.
31. Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town: A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts Ibid., 5.
32. Other Smith College studies include Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Shutdowns in the Connecticut Valley: A Study of Worker Displacement in a Small Industrial Community (Northampton, 1934);
33. Margaret E. Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750-1820 (Northampton, 1939).
34. Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England's Mill Girls and Magnates (New York, 1949), 96-114;
35. Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York, 1943).
36. Richard S. Tedlow, "Business History in the United States: Past Accomplishments and Future Directions," Annali di storia dell'impresa (Milan), 1 (1985), 387-408.
37. Relevant titles in the Harvard Studies in Business History include George Sweet Gibb, The Saco-Lowell Shops: Textile Machinery in New England, 1813-1849 (Cambridge, Mass., 1950);
38. Evelyn H. Knowlton, Pepperell's Progress: History of a Cotton Textile Company, 1844-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1948);
39. Carl Seaburg and Stanley Patterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764-1854 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971);
40. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite.
41. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York, 1979), 10;
42. Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982), 51;
43. Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870 (Middletown, 1980), xii-xiv, 4, 196n5.
44. See also Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (New Haven, 1989), 12.
45. Works in intellectual or cultural history are not any more specific. See John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, 1976), 64, 71;
46. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979), 98-103;
47. Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (1975; Baltimore, 1982), 3-93.
48. Richard Candee, "Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System," in Essays from the Lowell Conference on Industrial History 1982 (The Arts and Industrialism) and 1983 (The Industrial City), ed. Robert Weible (North Andover, 1985), 17-18;
49. James Montgomery, A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America (Glasgow, 1840), 13-14;
50. Samuel Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in the United States (Boston, 1863), 73.
51. Robert Varnum Spalding, "The Boston Mercantile Community and the Promotion of the Textile Industry in New England, 1813-1860" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1963), 4.
52. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 5-25;
53. Gregory, Nathan Applelon, 171, 181.
54. This essay is part of a research project on the comparative social history of industrialization in New England and the South. See Francois Weil, "Usines en ville. Histoire sociale d'une entreprise textile américaine, la Dwight Manufacturing Company, 1841-1930" (Factories. Social history of an American textile company: Dwight Manufacturing Company, 1841-1930) (Ph.D. diss., Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1991).
55. Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism, 52-55;
56. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, 1983);
57. Richard D. Brown, Urbanization in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1790-1830 (Springfield, 1962);
58. Michael Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972);
59. Jesse Chickering, A Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts from 1765 to 1840 (Boston, 1846).
60. Mason Green, Springfield, 1636-1886 (Springfield, 1888), 258, 297, 336-59; 358-59;
61. Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 28-29;
62. Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 93-97.
63. "Dwight Business, 1803-1823," folder, box 1, Pepperell Manufacturing Company Papers (Special Collections, Baker Library, Graduate School of Business, Harvard University, Boston, Mass.);
64. [Wilson], Aristocracy of Boston, 15.
65. Benjamin W. Dwight, Descendants of John Dwight of Dedham, Massachusetts (2 vols., New York, 1874), II, 865-906;
66. Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 97-99;
67. Charles Wells Chapin, Sketches of the Old Inhabitants and Other Citizens of Springfield of the Present Century (Springfield, 1893), 92-94.
68. [L. L. Johnson], Chicopee Illustrated (Chicopee, 1896), 34;
69. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon (4 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1969), I, 234;
70. Josiah Gilbert Holland, History of Western Massachusetts (2 vols., Springfield, 1855), II, 43-44.
71. Green, Springfield, 337-41, 358-59;
72. Chapin, Sketches of the Old Inhabitants, 79-80;
73. John Michael Cudd, The Chicopee Manufacturing Company, 1823-1915 (Wilmington, 1974), 225.
74. Edmund Dwight to Jonathan Dwight, Nov. 3, 1823, "Dwight Business, 1823, " folder, box 1, Pepperell Manufacturing Company Papers;
75. Cudd, Chicopee Manufacturing Company, 225, 234-43.
76. Cudd, Chicopee Manufacturing Company, 225, 234-43.
77. Stephen Salsbury, The State, the Investor, and the Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 19, 45-58, 334n72;
78. Gregory, Nathan Appleton, 277-78;
79. Josiah Quincy, A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston, during two centuries: from September 17, 1630, to September 17, 1830 (Boston, 1852), 284-86.
80. Salsbury, State, the Investor, and the Railroad, 80-92, 95-96, 351-52n12;
81. Holland, History of Western Massachusetts, I, 417;
82. Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 263-64;
83. Salsbury, State, the Investor, and the Railroad, 134-35, 138-40, 366n29.
84. Private and Special Statutes, VII, 96-97, 200-201, 579;
85. Private and Special Statutes, VIII, 188;
86. Arthur L. Eno Jr., Cotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts (Lowell, 1976), 69-93.
87. On Thomas Handasyd Perkins, see Seaburg and Patterson, Merchant Prince of Boston.
88. [Forbes], Rich Men of Massachusetts;
89. [Wilson], Aristocracy of Boston.
90. See also Dalzell, Enterprising Elite;
91. Jaher, Urban Establishment;
92. Story, Forging of an Aristocracy;
93. Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen.
94. Spalding, "Boston Mercantile Community and the Promotion of the Textile Industry in New England," 65-78;
95. John William Lozier, Taunton and Mason: Cotton Machinery and Locomotive Manufacture in Taunton, Massachusetts, 1811-1861 (New York, 1986);
96. Richard Candee, "Early New England Mill Towns of the Piscataqua River Valley," in The Company Town: Architecture and Society in the Early Industrial Age, ed. John S. Garner (New York, 1992), 115.
97. Spalding, "Boston Mercantile Community and the Promotion of the Textile Industry in New England," 68, 91-92, 109-11.