The Coming of Industrial Order

Download or read book The Coming of Industrial Order written by Jonathan Prude and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1985-10-31 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of antebellum industrialisation in several communities in rural Massachusetts illuminates what industrialisation meant in the early to mid nineteenth-century. Jonathan Prude probes the tensions produced by the conflict between innovation and the received attitudes and institutions that still shaped daily existence. Two connected but discrete areas of tension emerged: that between workers and managers within certain manufacturing establishments (especially textiles), and between manufacturers and the communities in which they were located. The book demonstrates that antebellum industrialisation had a rural as well as an urban dimension and that, far from being the untroubled process described by some historians, it was a phenomenon characterised by deep conflict.