BETH ENGLISH. A Common Thread: Labor, Politics, and Capital Mobility in the Textile Industry. (Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2006. Pp. x, 236. $39.95

Abstract

The “common thread” in Beth English's study of the American textile industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the Dwight Manufacturing Company. Founded in Chicopee, Massachusetts, shortly before the Civil War, the Dwight Manufacturing Company was unusual in that, unlike so many of its regional competitors, it had established a southern subsidiary outside Gadsden, Alabama, by 1896. This “early step in the process of textile industry globalization,” according to English, offers an “effective framework through which the dynamics of capital flight can be explored on local, state, and trans-regional levels simultaneously” (p. 2). A business history that includes thoughtful analysis of critical labor issues, this book seeks to do more than describe the often intricate workings of a single corporation. English maintains that the story of the Dwight Manufacturing Company and others like it offers valuable lessons to modern Americans who face the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs to foreign competition. The result is a solid work that illustrates admirably the reasons behind the rise and fall of the textile industry in both the North and the South. Unfortunately, however, as an historical work with implications for today, English's conclusions offer little comfort to those who support improving global labor standards in the twenty-first century.