Pacific Mills in New England and the South: Comparative case studies of regional industrial development

This dissertation uses the communities in which one textile corporation operated as case studies to analyze the process of regional industrialization in New England and the Southeast. While dealing with up to eight separate locations, the primary focus is on four communities: Lawrence, Massachusetts; Columbia and Lyman, South Carolina; and Carrboro, North Carolina. Embracing a comparative framework, the dissertation attempts to place southern industrial development within its national economic context and to isolate the interaction of these two regional systems with one another.;The first half of the dissertation uses Pacific Mills' activities in Lawrence to examine the business, technology, and labor networks developed by the New England textile industry in the second half of the nineteenth Century. Part two of the dissertation uses the southern communities to illustrate the variety of methods by which entrepreneurs developed the textile industry in the Southeast, focusing on business organization, technological change, and labor policies.;The dissertation concludes that the New England textile industry entered a transitional state in the mid-nineteenth century, becoming increasingly competitive, with ever widening regional, national, and international networks being brought to bear on developing local economies. The strength of the regional networks established in New England affected the ability of other regions, like the South, to industrialize. Southern entrepreneurs could either form networks of their own that were capable of competing against and working with the New England networks, or they could be engulfed by the expansion of northern based corporations. In every case, local industrial development in the South was forced to respond to existing and extra-regional economic systems in order to gain entry. The nature of industrial development in the South in terms of business organization, technological change, and labor policies was then, to a great extent, shaped not by southern society, culture, or history, but by the existing national capitalist system.