Technology and Power in the Early American Cotton Industry: James Montgomery, the Second Edition of His “Cotton Manufacture” (1840), and the Justitia Controversy about Relative Power Costs by David J. Jeremy

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 185 1790s are not included. These items could have been found by a personal search of major repositories for early American imprints (e.g., the Library Company of Philadelphia). Although this bibliography may be useful to scholars who do not have access to the standard bibliographies, it cannot be recommended to librarians and specialists as indispensable to their history of technology collections. Darwin H. Stapleton Dr. Stapleton is director of the Rockefeller Archive Center. He has published two bibliographies: Accounts ofEuropean Science, Technology, and Medicine Written by American Travelers Abroad, 1735—1860 (1985) and The History of Civil Engineering since 1600 (1986). Technology and Power in the Early American Cotton Industry: James Montgomery, the Second Edition ofHis “Cotton Manufacture” (1840), and theJustitia Controversy about Relative Power Costs. By David J. Jeremy. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990. Pp. xiv + 348; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $38.00. David Jeremy’s new edition of two classic texts in the held of early industrialization is informed by the literature on comparative AngloAmerican technological development—a vein that he has mined before and whose riches are demonstrably not yet played out. The principal document reprinted isJames Montgomery’s revised account of processes and costs in the cotton mills of Britain and the United States during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Montgomery’s remarks on the relative economy of steam and waterpower touched off a series of acerbic exchanges between advocates of these supposedly irrecon­ cilable power generation systems; a diligent research assistant has exhumed the literary missiles bred by the various combatants, which are republished here in their entirety for the first time. While this edition may certainly be read as a work of textile history alone, Jeremy’s commentary also indicates its relevance to the continuing debate over the Habakkuk thesis on technological change and the relative costs of such factors as capital, labor, or energy. As “the single most important contemporary source for the tech­ nology and economics of American cotton manufacturing prior to 1850” (p. 43), Montgomery’s treatise should already be familiar territory to investigators of this topic. The numerous minor revisions he contemplated for an abortive second edition have been incorpo­ rated into the original text on the basis of a surviving annotated copy at Harvard University’s Kress Library. Jeremy’s gloss on the text delineates the parameters of Montgomery’s expertise, which was accumulated in the mills of his native Glasgow and as superintendent of the York Manufacturing Co. at Saco, Maine, between 1836 and 1843. His exposure to establishments outside the scope of his personal 186 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE experience was more limited, a fact that may have colored his judgments about the textile industry in Rhode Island and Philadel­ phia. Partly for the edification of former countrymen concerned about potential American competition, Montgomery compiled copi­ ous information about mill construction, power transmission, machin­ ery arrangements, labor conditions and productivity, power require­ ments, and comparative operating costs. Getting toward the bottom line, his transatlantic observations disclosed that vertically integrated New England mills using waterpower and specializing in relatively coarse goods could boast greater throughput, but he also emphasized the superior quality of comparable British products—judgments that representatives of the United Kingdom’s iron and steel industry would echo several decades later. The 1840 edition contained only a few direct comparisons of steam and waterpower costs in the American context. However, a Rhode Island mill engineer, Charles T. James, pounced on these estimates, writing under the pseudonym of “Justitia.” James special­ ized in turnkey operations, establishing steam-powered fine-goods mills at economically distressed coastal locations. (Interests in Newport, Rhode Island, had questioned the machinist Aza Arnold about just such a project as early as 1827.) During the course of James’s career as a consultant and promoter, which ended in 1853 when he foundered after floating the Atlantic Delaine Mills at Providence, he also conducted a running skirmish with Boston capitalists who bankrolled large manufacturing and development corporations comparable to the one that employed Montgomery. AfterJustitia’s initial salvos several other combatants also entered the fray with additional evidence on the side of waterpower; Jeremy identifies one of...