Industrialization: Good and Bad

Abstract

As these two studies demonstrate, the old debate over the impact of the Revolution on working-class standards of life is alive and well (notwithstanding the current position of some economic historians that there was no Industrial Revolution). That debate has had such memorable junctures as the exchanges some thirty-five years ago on Britain's Revolution between R. M. Hartwell, staking out the optimistic position, and E. J. Hobsbawm, speaking for the pessimists. On the American side, one central aspect of the debate, the issue of artisan has commanded particular attention in more recent years, largely because of the efforts of historians to characterize artisan resistance to early-nineteenth-century metropolitan industrialization as an expression of class consciousness.' In their own separate ways, the books by Farley and Way challenge this labor paradigm and thereby add to the older debate on the Revolution's impact. Farley joins the optimists by minimizing the magnitude of artisan deskilling, exploitation and suffering, and attendant militant working-class consciousness. Way, in contrast, upholds the pessimistic position with a vengeance, but his own exploitation model is even more directly dismissive than Farley's interpretation of the artisan republican paradigm. Farley's book is a short, concise history of the United States Arsenal at Frankford, Pennsylvania (just north of Philadelphia), from its origin in 1816 to 1870, during which period the arsenal's production of small-arms ammunition developed from handicraft manufacture to systematic industrialized production, and toward the end of which over two hundred civilians were employed in jobs at various skill levels (p. xv). Drawing largely on unpublished