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So, in an effort to prevent the knowledge of advanced manufacturing from leaving the Empire, the British banned the emigration of mechanics, skilled workers who knew how to build and repair the latest textile machines. Great Britain hoped to maintain its economic advantage over its former colonies in North America. In the late 1790s and early 1800s, Great Britain boasted the most advanced textile mills and machines in the world, and the United States continued to rely on Great Britain for finished goods.

Their domestic productivity increased the quantity of goods available for sale in country towns and nearby cities. All this manufacturing took place on the farm, giving farmers and their wives control over the timing and pace of their labor. They also wove blankets, made rugs, and knit stockings. Farm women spun woolen thread and wove fabric. The most common part-time occupation, however, was the manufacture of textiles. Some, especially those who lived in Connecticut, made parts for clocks. Many made brooms, plaited hats from straw or palm leaves (which merchants imported from Cuba and the West Indies), crafted furniture, made pottery, or wove baskets. Some farming families engaged in shoemaking (or shoe assemblage), as noted above. Much of this part-time production was done under contract to merchants. Putting-out work proved a welcome source of extra income for New England farm families who saw their profits dwindle from new competition from midwestern farms with higher-yield lands. Most of the year they tended fields and orchards, ate the food that they produced, and sold the surplus. Therefore, they could not demand-and did not receive-high wages. They had not spent years learning and perfecting their craft and did not have ambitious journeymen to pay. The families who participated in the putting-out system were not skilled artisans. This process proved attractive because it whittled production costs. A different group of families cut pieces of leather for the uppers, while still another was employed to stitch the standardized parts together. In the case of shoes, for instance, American merchants hired one group of workers to cut soles into standardized sizes. They used the putting-out system, which the British had employed at the beginning of their own Industrial Revolution, whereby they hired farming families to perform specific tasks in the production process for a set wage. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, merchants in the Northeast and elsewhere turned their attention as never before to the benefits of using unskilled wage labor to make a greater profit by reducing labor costs. People came to the shop, usually attached to the back of the master artisan’s house, and there the shoemaker measured their feet in order to cut and stitch together an individualized product for each customer. After sufficient time as a journeyman, a shoemaker could at last set up his own shop as a master artisan. An apprenticeship would be followed by work as a journeyman (a skilled worker without his own shop). In colonial times, people bought their shoes from master shoemakers, who achieved their status by living and working as apprentices under the rule of an older master artisan. The production of shoes provides a good example. FROM ARTISANS TO WAGE WORKERSĭuring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, artisans-skilled, experienced craft workers-produced goods by hand. From its origin in New England, manufacturing soon spread to other regions of the United States. In return for their labor, the workers, who at first were young women from rural New England farming families, received wages. The operations of these mills irrevocably changed the nature of work by deskilling tasks, breaking down the process of production to its most basic, elemental parts.

In addition to the mechanization and centralization of work in the mills, specialized, repetitive tasks assigned to wage laborers replaced earlier modes of handicraft production done by artisans at home. As never before, production relied on mechanized sources with water power, and later steam, to provide the force necessary to drive machines. These mills introduced new modes of production centralized within the confines of the mill itself. Industrialized manufacturing began in New England, where wealthy merchants built water-powered textile mills (and mill towns to support them) along the rivers of the Northeast. Northern industrialization expanded rapidly following the War of 1812.

(credit “1807 photo”: Project Gutenberg Archives)

Learning factory three rivers ma