This unique study determines, by means of rigorous quantitative analysis, how cycles in New England cotton textile profits, output, borrowing, and capacity affected investment--and therefore industrial growth--during the nineteenth century. The firms studied were transitional forms between owner-managed companies and the modern corporation. From primary sources, Paul McGouldrick has constructed standardized balance sheets and income statements for each company year by year. A painstaking comparison with a much broader sample of companies shows that trends and cycles in profit rates for companies studied were typical of the industry.

Of the growth of manufacturing in early nineteenth century New England.--The growth of cotton textile production after 1815.--The use of a "long run" learning function, with application to a Massachusetts cotton textile firm, 1823-1860.

A part narrative, part analytical reconstruction of the history of the New England textile industry during the 19th century. The author examines industrialization from the point of view of both management and labour exploring their struggle in terms of class, culture and power.

During the first half of of the nineteenth century the United States emerged as a major producer of cotton textiles. This paper argues that the expansion of domestic textile production is best understood as a path- dependent process that was initiated by the proetction provided by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812. This intial period of protected ended abruptly in 1815 with the conclusion of the war and the resumption of British imports, but the political climate had been irreversibly changed by the temporary expansion of the industry. After 1815 nascent manufacturers sought to protect the investments they had made by lobbying Congress. Their efforts had an important impact on the provisions concerning cotton textiles in the tariff bill of 1816, and during the 1820s manufacturers won increasingly strong protection, culminating in the passage of the Tariff of Abominations' in 1828.

A lavishly-illustrated social history of the manufacture that did most to transform the character of New England and of America.

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.