TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 691 Divisions of Labour: Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth Century Britain. Edited by Royden Harrison and Jonathan Zeitlin. Brighton, Sussex, and Champaign: Harvester Press and University of Illinois Press, 1985. Pp. ix + 254; tables, notes, index. $29.95. The contributors to this volume of essays are, in the main, former students of the Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick. They are members of a wider distinguished group, a “staff/student literary co-operative” that has produced Albion’s Fatal Tree (1975), The Independent Collier (1978), and Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (1981). These books testify to the value of freestanding but interrelated research projects in the humanities and social sciences. The essays are concerned with responses to changes in job owner ship and skill levels consequent on technological change in a variety of 19th-century trades, some marginal, some mainstream: cabinetmak ing, baking, sailmaking, pottery, shipbuilding, and engineering/ compositing. Response took various forms and occurred on several levels. The book, as coeditor Royden Harrison points out in his excellent introduction, is about “skill” and “the skilled.” It links the labor-aristocracy debate to the debate concerned with the division of labor, which sees the workplace as a battleground on which the existing division of labor is to be preserved or redefined. Workers’ attempted control of the supply of skilled labor through standard wage rates, closed shops, insistence on apprenticeship, and the reduction of the standard working week and overtime are instanced in these essays. So too are examples of workers’ attempts to maintain or stimulate demand for their labor through new manning levels and, in collusion with employers, through trying to eliminate competition. But a particular skill can become irrelevant, as Hirsch shows in his article on sailmakers. For them, as for handloom weavers or blacksmiths earlier in the 19th century, “genuine skill” became an irrelevance as technological innovation combined with market forces made the craft marginal. Most of these men failed to become part of the new division of labor defined by the introduction of new materials and machines. In cases where technological innovation was less dramatic, as in baking and compositing, the bargaining power of the skilled, as McKay and coeditor Jonathan Zeitlin demonstrate, was not necessar ily diminished. The potters, on the other hand, the subject of Whipp’s essay, were divided and subdivided in a labyrinth of specialization according to the section of the trade to which they belonged as well as to the size of the firm in which they were employed. Forms of subcontract involving men, women, and children further bedeviled labor organization. The master craftsman in the potting shop, sliphouse, and oven who could claim membership in the aristocracy of labor had little in 692 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE common with the batter and bailer of clay whose wages were barely at subsistence level. Such divisions within a trade were reflected, too, in the ability to retain privilege within a changed environment. McClel land and Reid show how the shipyard boilermakers adopted a policy of inclusion in relation to the hoíders-on and rivet boys and one of exclusion for platers’ helpers. There is a wealth of detail in this book; too much, perhaps. The essays, suffering from a surfeit of minutiae, lack the felicity of expression that one has come to expect from the hand of Royden Harrison. Argument is too easily lost in a welter of itemization and description. Nonetheless, the book deserves attention for the new case-study material that is brought to light and, in particular, for Harrison’s introduction and Zeitlin’s carefully argued comparison of engineers and compositors, in which he manages to retain shape and argument despite the detail. Jennifer Tann Dr. Tann is director of the Centre for Continuing Education at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making 1801—1885. By Judith A. McGaw. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Pp. xv + 439; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $40.00. The papermaking industry was only a small component of Britain’s industrialization. In 1770 it contributed 0.4 percent...