Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England by Theodore Steinberg

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 155 ville or the Tennessee River, but there is no discussion of the full region. Given the focus on economic and industrial development, this is somewhat understandable, but even Hubert Wilhelm’s chapter on cultural landscapes focuses on the zone of cultural contrasts in the Old Northwest. Although this volume rehashes some familiar themes, overall it presents fresh perspectives on an American region and links the significant changes in the Ohio valley to its central geographic feature. Craig E. Colten Dr. Colten, associate curator of geography at the Illinois State Museum, directed the museum’s “Harvesting the River” exhibit in 1989 and has several articles forthcoming on environmental change and material culture on the Illinois River. Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters ofNew England. By Theodore Steinberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xv+ 284; illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $34.50. Lowell, Massachusetts, is one of the most studied and written about industrial cities in the world. Since World War II alone, a diverse range of excellent historical works have addressed the city’s architec­ ture, mills and machine shops, water and steam power systems, ethnic neighborhoods, working class, and enterprising elite. And deservedly so, for, more than any other industrial center, Lowell became a showplace of industry and a model of large-scale manufacturing enterprise in 19th-century America. Indeed, some argue that Amer­ ica’s Fordist style of mass production traces its roots to the large integrated mills that began to appear there during the early 1820s. In Nature Incorporated, Theodore Steinberg adds a fresh dimension to Lowell’s rich stable of published histories. Yet, in all fairness, his book is about much more than Lowell. In eight chapters and an epilogue, Steinberg investigates the environmental source of Lowell’s vaunted industrial power—the Merrimack River—and in the process introduces the reader to the history ofa region that stretches from the river’s sources in New Hampshire’s “Lakes Region” to its mouth at Newburyport, Massachusetts. Along the way the mighty Merrimack coursed through Franklin, Concord, Hooksett, Manchester, and Nashua, New Hampshire, as well as Lawrence, Haverill, and New­ buryport, Massachusetts. While all these communities enter into Steinberg’s portrait of the area’s industrial ecology, Lowell ultimately looms largest. The key decisions to exploit the Merrimack’s tremen­ dous waterpower effectively began there and, to a large degree, the events that led to the region’s decline as the nation’s leading textile producer centered there as well. 156 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The central insight of Nature Incorporated is “that industrial capitalism is not only an economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well” (p. 11). Steinberg maintains that, from the outset of their mill-building activities, Lowell’s merchant proprietors (the so-called Boston Associates) and their agents sought to commodify nature. “Simply put,” he observes, “this was a process whereby nature—all things and relations in it—was conceived of, acted upon, and valued primarily for its capacity to be exchanged at market for profit” (p. 13). Accordingly, the Boston Associates sought to control every aspect of production, including the water that powered their many mills along the Merrimack. In Steinberg’s view, a Lowell paymaster named Ithamar A. Beard captured the associates’ guiding philosophy when he stated that “the first thing in every society is order; without it nothing can be done” (p. 63). For Steinberg the theme of order and control emerges as a key factor in understanding why the associates acted as they did. It explains their “determination to shape the physical setting of their mill towns” and “their neatly planned factories and boardinghouses. It surfaced in the tightly regimented schedule and routine they created for their workers. And it emerged in the carefully controlled path they prescribed for water” (pp. 75—76). During the halcyon days between 1821 and 1836, the associates seemed content to build mills, towns, and waterworks and watch the profits roll in. However, as competition intensified and demands for more and more production increased, the associates sought to control not just their immediate mill sites but the very sources that fed the Merrimack River...