Download An Atlantic Industrial Revolution

An Atlantic Industrial
Revolution
Lesson Themes & Goals
• Goals:
– Critical analysis of Industrial Revolution
• Different theories of American social and economic
development
• Jefferson vs. Hamilton
• Experience of women at Lowell mills
– Connections between industrial and slave labor systems
– Connections to World History, Atlantic World
– Connections to U.S. and North Carolina
Founders’ Ideas on Early
American Society & Economy
Jefferson
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Agricultural society is best
Farmers more pure and moral
“Labourers in the earth are chosen
people of god”
Keep manufacturing in Europe
Industrial workers are dependent,
bad manners
Strong republic based on
independent farmers
Anti-urban philosophy
Anti-Federalist
republican
Democratic-Republican
Hamilton
• Pro-manufacturing
• Federalist
• Supports strong federal
govt.
– Defense
– Pro-national bank
• Commercial republican
– Commerce, port cities
– Roads
– manufacturing
Part I: Industrial Revolution in
Britain, 1760-1850
• What shape did industrial development
take in Britain?
• What advantages did Britain have that
made it the center of I.R.?
– Water, coal for power
– Artisans to build machines
– Available labor – why?
– Raw materials – from where?
– Markets for sales – where?
What was new
about the
Factory?:
Working outside of home
Traveling to work
Working with strangers
Different way of life
Different gender roles
Rules of dress, time
Attitude of coldness
Work hours
Enclosed space
Accidents
Time was controlled, monitored
Child labor
Bad conditions, health
Mass production
What was new about the Factory?:
Machines, Technology, Water Power
Work Bell, Work Time –
Regimentation, outside control
of workers’ time
Factory Images
More than one part of manufacturing
process in the same building or place
Supervision;
Supervisors
Factory Images
Child labor
Women workers
Making the Factory
Definition: “The term factory, in technology,
designates the combined operation of many
orders of workpeople, adult and young, in
tending with assiduous skill a system of
productive machines continuously impelled by a
central power.”
Andrew Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures (1835), 13
What was new about the Factory?:
• Power machinery, introduced processby-process over about 100 years
machinery
power
• Capital costs
• Location
materials
factory
• Structure
• Continuous operation
finance
• (with people around) workers
• Need for new skills, esp. machine
builders and repairmen
transport
transport
market
Factory Discipline
• Emphasis on Profit
• Higher profits = discipline
– long workday of continuous labor by all
hands
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regular attendance
punctuality and sobriety
attentiveness to task
continual industry by schedule (eat, relieve self, work when you
don't feel well)
– no rowdiness, distracting conversation, wandering away from
machine
– no rebellion against authority or conditions
Focus on Time: The Mill Clock
Clocks became
much more
common after
Industrial
Revolution
Clock at an
industrial mill
Victorian clock from Pyemore Mill, near Bridport, Dorset
J.M. Richards, The Functional Tradition in Early Industrial Buildings, 109
What Came before Industrial
Revolution?:
Previous Forms of Production
• Medieval Guilds: secret knowledge of arts
and crafts
• Household production: production of cloth
and textiles, shoes, and other goods within
household
• System of master, apprentice, family labor
• Had control over pace of work, seasonal,
took on as much work as necessary at a
time
From Household to Factory
Household production:
Why do people like to
work from home in
today’s society?
Spinning wheel; making yarn at home
Hand loom; making cloth at home
The U.S. Experience
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Textiles first
New England, NY, PA
Merchant capital
Stole British technology
Women from farm
families – “mill girls”
• Cotton from southern
slave plantations
• Made cheap clothing
for middle, working
classes, and slaves
Textiles in North Carolina
• Many companies moved
from north for cheaper
labor
• Closer to cotton grown by
slaves, then farmers &
sharecroppers
• Textile labor: typically
white women, children,
and families
• Racially segregated
• Agreement between
white owners and white
workers to exclude black
workers from factory work
and relatively better pay
Atherton Cotton Mills, Charlotte
Atherton Workers
Problems of Industrial Society
• Based on readings:
– Hopes and promises dashed
– Wage complaints
– Comparisons to slavery
– Living conditions
– Women’s place in society, how they are
viewed
– Issues of freedom and control
– Working hours and conditions
– Women resisted: journals, paper, letters
Opposition to Factory System
• British Luddites
British Opposition to Factory
System
• Popular fight for social change and
political representation
– Correspondence Committees
– Parliamentary Reforms
– Anti-monarchical ideas
– Whig, then Labor Party in Britain
– Labor Movement
– Fabians
– Revolutionaries
Summary of British Industrial Rev.
• A new type of manufacturing based on control
and supervision of workforce within new factory
worksite.
• Higher profit margins based on control of work
pace, wages per hour, and separation of
workers from other alternatives of support
• Use of new machine technologies, organization,
finances (capital)
• Different forms of opposition to industrial work by
early generations of workers
Part 2: Atlantic Industrial
Connections
Can a slave be considered an industrial
worker?
Why? or Why not?
Slavery and industrial society overlapped.
How were they connected?
What effects did slave systems have on
American industrial society and working
class?
Close-up of Painting
Comments?:
Possible Student Selection
Student Comments:
Which of these aspects of industrial production
have connections to the wider Atlantic world?
machinery
materials
transport
workers
power
factory
transport
finance
market
Slave trade
transported
slaves
throughout
Atlantic
World –
majority of
slaves
outside U.S.
Connections
• How was the Atlantic plantation system
connected to I.R. in Europe and U.S.?
• Was the sugar plantation “industrial”?
• Were slaves “workers”?
• Was the trade in slaves “industrial” in
nature?
• What, besides technology and wages,
defined the Industrial Revolution?
African Slave Factory: Industrial?
Slave Ship: Industrial?
Cuban Sugar Mill: Industrial?
Sugar
Plantation
Industrial?
Sugar Mill
Industrial?
The Ship: Industrial?
• A factory
at sea
• Discipline
• Control
• Hierarchy
• Economic
profit
• Engaged
in Atlantic
trade
Consumption, Production,
Finance
• Relationship between new forms of
industry and new forms of consumption
• New forms of popular consumption fueled
and reinforced the development of
industrial production – slave and free
• New forms of banking, finance, insurance
to fund and secure Atlantic trade
• Examples: sugar plantations, rum, coffee,
tea, tobacco, cotton
The Coffee House:
meeting place, banking, dealing, consumption
New Forms of Consumption
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Cheap sugar, textiles, guns, rum
Not just for royalty anymore
Growing middle-class conspicuous consumption
But also working-class consumption
Coffee houses – places to talk politics
Sugar – cheap calories for factory workers
Cheap goods for Atlantic Trade
New consumption patterns tightened
relationships, both positive and negative
Pirates
• What do pirates represent?
Link to National Geographic article on
Blackbeard’s ship, recent archaeological
work on the underwater wreck
Blackbeard the Pirate
Blackbeard and North Carolina
• Blackbeard hijacked French slave ship La
Concorde off Caribbean island of
Martinique; set slaves free
• Ship had been used for at least 3 slaving
voyages, around 500 slaves each
– 61 died on Middle Passage on last voyage
– 16 crew members also died
• Blackbeard plundered ships in triangle and
Atlantic/Caribbean trade
Atlantic Resistance to Power?
• Pirates represent rare form of interracial
lower-class solidarity who fought Atlantic
industrial system
• Problem of racism - usually divided white
working-class from slaves and free blacks
in Atlantic world
• White workers defined as not slaves
• Whites gained prestige, small level of
comfort & consumption, wages for not
being slaves
Popular Resistance
• There were a variety of popular responses
by people around the Atlantic in times of
economic change
– During feudalism
– Reused during transition to industrial
economy
– Used to attack or undermine authority of
masters (of different kinds – slave masters,
industrial owners, middle class)
Mumming and Masquerade
Mumming was
tradition of
masquerade in
feudal and modern
Europe
Usually around
harvest or Xmas
time
A night when it was
ok to challenge
lord’s or
master’s authority
Lord or master
expected to share
wealth or abundance, “the treat”
Luddites in England
Luddites reused tradition
of popular local protest and
masquerade to protest new
industrial system
Luddites smashed new
industrial factories and
machines to protest control
and power of new industrial
system
Often worked at night, in
masks, costumes, under
cover of darkness
Signed protest letters as
“Ned Ludd”
Modern Mumming in Philly
Modern Mummers Day Parade in Philadelphia every New Year’s Day
History of Public Resistance
and Performance
• Context of owner surveillance and control – attempts
to limit gatherings in groups, fear of slave revolt
• Slaves, free blacks, post-slavery black Americans
celebrated Emancipation Day as reminder of
continued fight for racial, social, and economic
equality
• Claiming public sites or spaces when they did not
have any formal power or rights
• Examples
– John Canoe or Jonkonnu
– Pinkster and Negro Election Day
– Public religious, political, musical expression
• Often poked fun at whites through dress and mimicry
Everyday acts of resistance –
What are they talking about?
Slavery in Age of Revolution
• Revolutionary and Enlightenment beliefs had great
impact on slavery – liberty, freedom, equality, natural
rights
• Adam Smith – free labor and markets are best
• Lord Dunmoore – slaves would be freed if they fought for
Brits during Am. Revolution
• Some upper south owners freed slaves after Am.
Revolution
• Northwest Ordinance, 1787 – slavery banned from NW
territory
• Gradual Emancipation in northern states in late 18th- and
early 19th centuries
Resistance: Atlantic Abolitionists
• Britain developed strong abolitionist movement
• Quakers in 18th and 19th centuries
• William Wilberforce and reformers in Parliament –
British slave trade abolished, 1807
• Abolition of slavery in colonies, 1830s
• Strong working-class support for abolition,
despite fears of textile unemployment
• British: if they could abolish slavery, then it was
right thing for U.S. to do
• Advocated “free trade” and “free labor” instead of
slave labor
• Critics of “free labor” said it wasn’t truly free either
Abolition: Common White Fears
• Abolition raised questions and fears about
ex-slaves
– Are blacks capable of being free?
– Can they live peacefully with whites?
– Will they work if not forced to? – assumed
they were naturally lazy
– Will they work for wages?
– Will they assimilate into society?
– Fears of sexual relations with whites – racial
mixture
French and Haitian Revolutions
• Circulation of revolutionary ideals
throughout Atlantic
• Impact of French Rev. on slaves in Haiti
and other Atlantic slave societies
• Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804: only
successful slave revolt
• Haitian Revolt and Republic inspired
slaves throughout Atlantic
• Struck fear in whites – worst possible
outcome in white minds
Effects of Issues of Slavery and
Wage Labor in the Atlantic
World?
Zombies!
• What is a zombie?
Zombies: Atlantic Radicals?
• Product of Atlantic economic, social, and cultural
history and connections
• Loosely based on West African and Haitian
vodun (voodoo) religious practices, combined
with Christian and other influences
• Africa – Caribbean – Britain – U.S. – World
• Stories and myths - critical of power, control,
loss of freedom
• Began under slavery
• Emancipation as evolving issue – new forms of
power and control – wage labor, colonialism, Jim
Crow, Cold War,…
Film, White Zombie, 1932
• Meaning?
Fela Kuti, Zombie, 1977
• Nigerian Afrobeat
musician
• Influenced by U.S.
Black Power
movement
• Anti-colonial activist
• Activist for Nigerian
democracy, against
govt. repression
Michael Jackson’s Thriller
• What is the message of Thriller?
• How does Thriller deal with white fears?
Image of Integration:
The American Dream
Image of Integration: Public Culture
Image of Religious Mystery:
Black Christianity and Folk Traditions
Image of Black Urban Culture:
Street Performance
Summarize Major Issues that
Defined Atlantic Industrial World
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Production for profit
Control and discipline of work
Control of time
Control of space
Movement and trade of primary resources
in exchange for finished industrial goods
• Growth of middle classes in ports and
industrial centers
• Growth of working-class/slave populations
Connections
– New forms of power, control, and profit in the Atlantic
World
– Connections between slavery and industrial capitalism
– Popular forms of resistance to power and economic
exploitation
– Wage labor developed within context of Atlantic
Economy and African enslavement – wage workers
compared to slaves
– Possibilities of cross-racial resistance
– Problems of white fears: of loss of control and power
(slavery)
– Emancipation movements and continuing importance
of issues of race, power, freedom in Atlantic and world
history
Continuing Questions: Ideological &
Political Effects of Industrialization
• Growth of working-class movement at
same time as abolitionist movement
• Free labor ideas – for whites or for
everyone?
• Are industrial workers free?
• Would political rights solve economic and
social problems?
• Do colonial subjects and slaves have
rights?