Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2009
Differences in the relative supply of labour, land, power and raw cotton differentiated the American from the British cotton industry and contributed to contrasting patterns of costs, technological development, productivity performance and business organisation. Before 1840 American cotton masters, in general, were faced with less plentiful and less elastic supplies of labour than their counterparts in Britain. Yet there were, nevertheless, sharp contrasts in the labour markets faced by the water-powered Lowell corporations in the 1820s and 1830s and those in urban centres such as Philadelphia, quite apart from the peculiarities of labour markets in the Southern states. Equally in Britain, although the factory system evolved against a background of relative labour surplus, there were imperfections in regional labour markets, especially where water power was used. Inevitably, therefore, in early industrialisation there emerged an array of labour and related technological strategies tailored to meet local, as opposed to purely national, conditions.
Disparities in the evolution of business institutions, of technology and of product strategies cannot be understood exclusively in terms of differing price relativities. Similarly, national and regional dissimilarities in the development of labour management also need to be set in a wider context. The cultures and capabilities of family firms in the cotton industries of Britain and the United States were inseparable from their community cultures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and this symbiosis extended to the management of labour. Thus networks that underpinned financial and commercial arrangements, on either side of the Atlantic, were also a feature of labour relations, the arrangement of work and of training.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.