Employers and Labour in the English Textile Industries, 1850–1939 ed. by J. A. Jowitt, A. J. McIvor

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 525 technical help as the provision of cost and output projections, the supply of machinery and all ancillary equipment, and the supply of drawings and blueprints. And notjust expertise and technology were provided, but managers and workers as well. While not numerous, British workers played a significant role because of their skills, and it now seems that British labor may well have remained important in European industrialization beyond the early period. While British workers provided a great deal of technical information and advice, there were problems. The chief technical problem was outright incompetence, while the biggest social problem in hiring the British was, not surprisingly, drunkenness. Bruland describes an active, predatory, market-seeking British textile-engineering industry willing to provide the vast array of information, equipment, and labor without which a modern Norwe­ gian mechanized textile industry could not have been constructed so rapidly. But was the experience of the Norwegian firms representa­ tive of a more general European experience? Bruland believes that the Norwegian experience was not an anomaly and that the technology transfer process offered to Norway was routine for British firms. Further case studies of such transfers need to be conducted before one can definitely say that the Norwegian example was indeed representative of all European textile industrialization. And if this should prove to be the case for other industries as well, then the transmission mechanism for later Continental industrializa­ tion will be seen as the entrepreneurial British capital-goods industry. Ironically, in seeking new markets overseas, this industry was largely responsible for creating the industrial infrastructure of future competitors. This excellent study of technology diffusion in Norway points out the need for further inquiries into technology transfer at the company level. Richard A. Voeltz Dr. Voeltz is assistant professor of history at Cameron University and the author of German Colonialism and the South West Africa Company. Currently he is studying the relationship between technology and European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Employers and Labour in the English Textile Industries, 1850—1939. Edited by J. A. Jowitt and A. J. Mclvor. London and New York: Routledge , Chapman & Hall, 1988. Pp. xviii + 239; tables, notes, bibli­ ography, index. $55.00. This collection of essays on labor and industrial relations in the textiles sector of northern England only partly succeeds in its declared objectives. The editors are aware of the need to break free from the traditional mold of labor history and to cast the relationship between TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 526 Book Reviews employers and workers in a broader conceptual framework. The sexual division of the employee class and the influence of different product specialities, skills, and market pressures, together with the influence of employers’ organizations and strategies, are recognized to be of crucial importance in any understanding of the complex pattern of industrial change and the shifts in workplace relations that inevitably accompany it. Some of these concerns are reflected in the book. The origins and effects of employers’ organizations in the cotton and wool industries from the late 19th century to 1939 are faithfully recorded; so too are the trials and tribulations of trade unions in the Yorkshire worsted textile industry and in the Lancashire cotton trade. Special attention is paid to skill and the sexual division of labor in cotton textiles and silk within the West Riding and Lancashire. Interesting themes emerge, notably discussions of the evolution of bureaucratic and institutionalized forms of labor management down to the 1930s, the influence of employer welfarism, the reasons for the retardation of trade unionism in the West Riding worsted industry, the varying fortunes of organized labor in cotton spinning and finishing, and the influence of patriarchal authority on the nature of, and importance attached to, female work. It would be churlish not to welcome the extra detail provided here about the fortunes of the textile industries in such a crucial period of change in England’s industrial fortunes. The more we know of the employers’ attitudes, in particular, the more we will be able to judge the reasons for labor’s action and reaction; the more we learn of the work and wages on offer to differing classes of employees, the more...