Metropolitan Industrialization

Abstract

Abstract Between 1825 and 1850, New York became the most productive manufacturing city in the United States-the metropolitan center of a manufacturing complex that reached as far south as Delaware and that by the late 1840s was probably the fastest-growing large industrial area in the world.1 These extraordinary developments utterly changed the city’s crafts, but in ways very different from those evoked by the usual images of early industrial growth. Huge firms absorbed thousands of craft workers-but did not eradicate the city’s small producers. New, highly sophisticated steam-powered machines thundered in the factory districts-but most of New York’s largest manufacturers intensified the division of labor already underway rather than invest in labor-saving machinery. Although a few, rapidly growing trades dominated the city’s manufacturing economy, hundreds more remained, leaving New York with a manufacturing sector of almost baffiing diversity. Then, as now, Americans looked elsewhere to interpret the coming industrial era. Nevertheless, at midcentury the most productive manufacturing center in the nation was neither a mechanized contrivance like Lowell nor a single-trade boomtown like Lynn, but a metropolitan labyrinth of factories and tiny artisan establishments, central workrooms and outworkers’ cellars, luxury firms and sweatwork strapping shops.