THE LABOR PROCESS IN AN EARLY TEXTILE MACHINERY SHOP: WORKERS AT THE DAVIS & FURBER COMPANY OF NORTH ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS, 1830-1860

This dissertation is a micropolitical study of work organization, craft persistence, and capitalist development in a little-studied branch of the industrial labor process, the manufacture of woolen machinery. Focusing on the various partnerships associated with the Davis & Furber machine shop of North Andover, Massachusetts between 1830 and 1860, it draws on methods of manual records linkage and industrial archeology to reconstruct the technology and social relations of production, analyze the changing composition of the work force, reconstitute the personal careers of a number of machinists, and explore their roles outside the workplace in an industrializing community. The impact of more rationalized administrative and accounting techniques on authority relationships within the prevailing system of decentralized inside contracting receives particular attention. Principal sources are the records of the Davis & Furber company and manuscript census schedules, supplemented by the papers of other textile machinery shops, local vital and tax records, directories, newspapers, genealogies, obituaries, and selected physical artifacts.;However, the labor process at Davis & Furber did not remain static. This study discusses the cross-cutting changes that tended to concentrate additional power over production in the persons of the shop owners while simultaneously preserving for some machinists areas of residual autonomy that underpinned their vision of an artisans' republic. By examining an important but relatively anonymous trade in the context of a relatively small firm and a village rather than an urban setting, the traditional community study has here been recast as the ecology of an occupation.;Because industrial capitalism developed unevenly, the specific nature of work in various occupations cannot simply be extrapolated from such leading sectors as textile mills or government arsenals. Rather than deskilling the labor force as a whole, many early techniques of capitalist production and work organization still allowed clusters of skilled workers to maintain some degree of individual or collective control over aspects of the manufacturing process. Artisanal perspectives rooted in the experience of combined mental and manual work were transposed into early machine shops through initial recruitment of workers with craft backgrounds to the new trade.