American economic history has traditionally been told as a narrative of industrialization and affluence collapsing into globalization and industrial decay. Offering a reappraisal of this pattern, Manufacturing Catastrophe traces the successive rise and fall of the whaling, textile, garment, electronics, and high-tech industries in Massachusetts over the past two hundred years. It shows how business, labor, and political leaders repeatedly mobilized the lure of crisis-cheap labor, low taxes, and generous manufacturing subsidies-to pull and push both capital and workers across the continents, repeatedly remaking the pioneering industrial cities of Fall River and New Bedford. Workers-ranging from migrating Azorean seamen to British weavers to Quebecois farmers-and capitalists-including mobile manufacturers, globetrotting whalers, and multinational conglomerators-participated in the creation of regional growth and, with it, American industrial ascendance. Exploring the paradoxical and recurring coexistence of high unemployment and labor shortages in these cities, this book explains why recovery and growth have not necessarily translated into long-term prosperity. In doing so, it illuminates how economic catastrophe was, ironically, a critical ingredient in the making of America's industrial hegemony.
Manufacturing Catastrophe tracks the history of industrialization, deindustrialization, and globalization in Massachusetts over the past two centuries. It is a history of wrenching economic transformation as told from the perspective of everyday people: European peasants traveling the oceans in search of industrial work, runaway factory owners venturing out in search of cheaper labor abroad, and harried local policymakers trying to recover from repeated bouts of economic cataclysm. For those concerned about the future of American industry in the face of global competition, it provides critical lessons on how some of America's pioneering industrial cities have weathered the tempests of economic upheaval and industrial rebirth.
In this elegantly written, thoughtful first book, Nichols presents a micro-study of the New Bedford-Nantucket region in Massachusetts as it passed through several stages of industrialization between 1800 and 2020.
