Assignment 4/18

idek anymore

The Regional Dimension of Market Revolution

• Market revolution: national in scope, but with important regional variations

  •  manufacturing and industrial revolution in New England, northeastern cities

  •  commercialization of farming driven by transportation revolution in northwest

  •  cotton revolution in south

• Result: regional economies, but with increasing economic integration  between northeast and northwest as processes worked in tandem 

• Laid groundwork for political sectionalism

What is a Market Revolution?

• Not just more economic activity, but a new market orientation

  • Detaches people from local markets, connects them to distant commercial markets

  • for-profit, cash farming displays subsistence and safety-first farming

What is a Market Revolution?

• Leads to: rising debt, rising risk, increased opportunities, increased consumption, increased dependency on factors beyond local control

• Also new way of organizing work, new kind of relationship between worker and employee

• Gives rise to social reform movements

What is a Market Revolution?

• Undermines patriarchy, charges gender roles in complicated ways

  • New domestic ideal for urban middle class

  • More women and children in manufacturing workforce

  • Radicalizes women as workers, reformers, feminists

The Northern Economy before 1815

• The eighteenth-century composite farm

  • Goal: competency

  • Means: safety-first agriculture, Yankee ingenuity (Puritan work ethic)

  • Households and neighborhoods: the borrowing system

  • Stable, patriarchal social order

The Northern Economy before 1815

• Pre-industrial manufacturing

  • The workshop system

  • The putting-out system (outsourcing?)

Economic and Political Impact after the War of 1812

• Spark to manufacturing and economic independence

• Native tribes pushed out, opening the northwest to unhindered white settlement

• Clay’s master plan:  

  • American System

  • The Second National Bank

  • The Tariff of 1816

  • Internal improvements

  • Bottom line: government policy underwrote market revolution

Labor is the source of value

Transportation before 1815

• Overland travel

  • bad roads

  • high freight costs

  • long travel times

• River travel

  • one way trips easy enough

  • the steamboat

  • But benefits uneven: must live near river

Transportation Revolution

• Surge in western population, but limited access to eastern markets

• Canal boom: the Erie Canal, 1825

  • 364 miles long, 40 ft wide, 4 ft deep

  • Linked Great Lakes to Albany and NYC

  • Transformed the northern economy

Consequences in the old northwest

• population explosion

• boom in canal building

• Mechanizm: the McCormick reaper

• raised standard of living, increased dependency on credit, distant markets

  • Impact on communities and households

• Consequences in the northeast

• end of safety-first farming

• enabled urban growth, manufacturing

• provided growing domestic market for manufactured goods

• integrated northwestern and northwestern economies, which grew in tandem

• Impact on communities and households

Industrial Revolution: British Origins

• What made it possible?

  • capital (money) from merchant class

  • mass markets

  • mechanized productions

  • cheap free labor (wage labor)

The Lowell Mills

• Francis Cabot Lowell

  • Integrated productive processes (cleaning, spinning, weaving) under one roof at Waltham mills (powered by water)

  • By 1836, 17,000 workers, mostly women and girls

The “culture” and significance of the Lowell Mills

(very strict schedule)

Mill Girl, 1850

Significance of Mill Girls

1. Female labor helped keep production costs down, which made goods cheaper, which was tied to middle class growth 

2. reshaped society and brought more women into the workplace

Summary (before)

• slow transportation

•  many things produced in households

•  produced outside the home in a workplace economy

•  most americans lived in rural areas

• women in domestic sphere

Summary (after)

• better transportation (railroads, ect.)

•  rise in factory system

•  urban growth

•  some women worked outside the home in factories

Impact of Industrialization

• Destroyed artisan class (skilled laborers)

• Segregation of work from life

  • Pre-Industrial workshops

    •  masters and workers “like a family”

    •  work and living same space 

    •  social lives integrated

  • Industrial system

    •  masters absent, workers in boarding class

    •  neighborhood segregation 

    •  socialized segregation: class-based values, conflict surrounding forms of leisure (drinking)

Impact of Industrialization

• undermined patriarchal family

  • children owning more wages, more independent

  • altered outlook and lives of women

• time and work discipline

  • adjusting to industrial rhythms

  • led to further calls for reform

• religious ferment, social reform, utopian experimentation

Market Revolution and Community - Northern response to industrial and commercial transformation

• wealthy upper class profited

• artisans attempted to reject it

• many victims (women, children immigrants)

• gave rise to new forms of community. new religious movements

Market Revolution and Community - Southern response to industrial and commercial transformation

• expanded slavery

• dependent on northern factories

Social Hierarchy

1. Industrial Capitalists

2. Middle Class

   Wage Laborers

3. working poor

   immigrants

   free blacks

Important Inventions

steam engine

textile machine

railroads

cotton gin