THE BEGINNINGS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICA: PAWTUCKET, RHODE ISLAND, 1672 - 1829

The industrial revolution, that period in the history of the Atlantic economies from roughly 1750 to 1850, marks the most sweeping and important change in recorded human history. The long transition from handcraft to machinery manufacture ushered in a world of recognizable modernity, reorienting the essential relationship between nature and humanity, imposing new structures of power and authority, and redefining old ones, altering the cultural matrices in which men and women lived their lives. At the center of the industrial revolution was the factory system--understood as a system of interconnected machines linked to a central power source. Through the work of Richard Arkwright in the 1760s, the factory system made its first appearance in Great Britain in the cotton-yarn industry.; It was Arkwright's system which Samuel Slater brought to Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1790. Pawtucket thus became the first American village to experience the effects of the factory system. But Pawtucket experienced those effects as a settled community, a village with artisan and farming traditions stretching back over a century. Those traditions structured the village's response to the factory system. But the village and its inhabitants did more than just respond. By their own choices, they helped to shape their own history.; Over the course of a generation. Pawtucket was transformed, but that transformation did not entail complete rupture with the past. From 1790 to 1829, cotton-mill owners introduced an economy that was both industrial and capitalist. But along side that new economy, older forms of household and artisan production survived. As the factory system extended its hold, mill owners helped to introduce new definitions of time, work, and leisure while seeking greater political power and cultural influence. But mill owners did not remake Pawtucket wholly in their own image, nor did they do so with that confident and self-assertive intentionality we associate with nineteenth-century manufacturers.; Not all Pawtucket residents embrace the new economy. Opposition took a variety of forms and assumed a variety of meanings. Household farmers who maintained a non-market economy well into the nineteenth century, had long opposed the unrestricted damming of rivers, for dams flooded arable farm land and obstructed the passage of migratory fish. Some farmers came to fear the encroaching power of mill owners, whose mills, dams, and waterpower canals fundamentally altered the landscape, and whose social presence seemed to threaten a social order delicately balanced between industry and agriculture. Artisans, whose skills were central to the new industry's success, responded in mixed fashion--some actively supporting the textile industry, others more skeptical, others yet strongly opposed. It was the latter, informed by a deeply egalitarian sensibility, who would constitute the labor movement of the 1830s. Mill workers in this period moved from individual expressions of discontent to collective opposition in the strike of 1824, the first strike in the American textile industry and the first of any kind in which American women participated. The collective nature of that opposition could not sustain itself, but the larger point remains. Pawtucket's mill owners could not make their history just as they pleased. Mill workers, artisans, and farmers set limits to the power of the mill owners and in setting those limits, consciously contributed to the making of history.