The Coming of Industrial Order : Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 Book

This study of antebellum industrialisation in several communities in rural Massachusetts illuminates what industrialisation meant in this period and context. 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.