4 - Power and the People

Summary

Comparing the industrializing systems of Britain and North America sets the stage for understanding the contingencies that shaped the eventual solidification of English manufacturing processes. Contrasting organizations of labor, power sources, and business organization demonstrates the particularity of the British case, as well as the larger trends in which it participated. In nineteenth-century Britain, in several instances, worker unrest led manufacturers to adopt steam power, which then began to demonstrate the advantages usually ascribed to its adoption. A series of conflicts between labor and capital - including the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, the 1811–1817 Luddite rebellion in Yorkshire’s woolen districts, and a series of strikes in the 1820s leading to the adoption of the Iron Man self-acting mule, demonstrate the complicated, back-and-forth relationship between technical and social change.