Leonard N. Rosenband

SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Social Capital in the Early Industrial Revolution “The arst rule” of France’s paperworkers was “to be the despotic masters of their bosses.” Journeymen across early modern Europe forged associations to control hours, output, and the identity of their shopmates. Short-lived or venerable, these combinations turned the world of production upside down. An anonymous memoire from France raged that “the master [papermakers] are like slaves of the journeymen and workers.” In 1771, an alarmed observer recast this levelling in political terms: “The journeymen paperworkers form a sort of little republican state in the midst of the monarchy.” This muscular republic had deposed the hierarchy formally inscribed in the craft. The state was concerned, too. Writing in 1772, a provincial ofacial in the Auvergne worried about “a republic of inferior workers, accustomed to laying down the law to the masters.” He knew that the paperworkers’ association deaned their social responsibilities and shaped their patterns of mutual assistance. It was the journeymen’s civic body, and the persistent measure of more than one civic tradition in the trade. Master papermakers and journeymen did not perceive themselves as members of a craft community with a single set of interests. For Putnam, medieval craft guilds were distant nurseries of effective political reform in modern Italy. More precisely, in his inouential study, Making Democracy Work, Putnam contends that the craft communities were incubators of social capital. As he understands it, social capital amounts to the “norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement” at the base of responsive, democratic government. These connections, he argues, were

Comparing combination acts: French and English papermaking in the age of revolution

In 1796, both France and England banned combinations among paperworkers. Most notably, these measures read as if they issued from a single pen. The twin efforts outlawed the coalitions and covenants that enabled the journeymen to organize strikes and walkouts, influence wages or output quotas, restrain the manufacturers’ latitude in hiring, and burden, even fine, unco-operative masters. By linking the lived experience of the labour process and the law, this article explores the real grit of comparative history. In doing so, it reveals the risk of emphasizing national industrial culture in the age of manufactures and nascent mechanization. It also suggests the shortcomings of Foucauldian analysis and metaphors when they are brought to the ground, that is, the actual shopfloor struggles and everyday relations of papermaking. Moreover, this article contends that authorities in Paris and London brewed a subtle blend of intervention and retreat in the governance of the trade. In the end, however, the effective regulation of papermaking, from below, survived the sister combination acts. Mechanization tipped the balance in favour of the manufacturers, but the workers’ tactics and habits of resistance persisted into the new era.

The Competitive Cosmopolitanism of an Old Regime Craft

‘‘If the French Duties be taken off,’’ Sir Theodore Janssen claimed in 1751, ‘‘undoubtedly most of the [English] Mills which are imployed in the making of White Paper, must leave off their Work.’’ 1 Janssen knew that English producers had failed tomatch the high quality and low cost of French reams. Thus the need for customs barriers: ‘‘Wise Nations,’’ he concluded, were ‘‘fond of encouraging Manufactures in their Infancy.’’ 2 A competitively priced French product, a sheltered English market, and a technologically tardy English industry all reverse familiar eighteenth-century formulas. But English leads and French lags in the age of Wedgwood andMontgolfier reflect the trade under consideration. The speckled, gray reams furnished by English papermakers fell far short of the creamy, white sheets fashioned by their French rivals. Competitive poaching and cooperative ventures across the Channel provided English papermakers with the knowledge and technique to close the gap. Whether covert or open, these transfers suggest the limits of models that propose distinct, divergent paths of economic and technological development.3 Indeed, the industrial advance of Europe generally failed to honor political boundaries; instead, regional arcs of

Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological Reader. Vol. 78: London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology (review)

Maria Paula Diogo is a professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the New University of Lisbon. She co-coordinates the major research center in Portugal in the field of the history of science and technology (CIUHCT). She is associate editor of the journalsHoST and Engineering Studies and a member of several international research networks. She is currently working on Portuguese engineering and engineers in Africa (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

John U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World

Although John U. Nef never reduced European history to the pursuit of ever more “heat energy,” there were moments in his many works when it seemed so. For Nef, coal was the mainspring of European and especially British ascendancy, the impulse behind the mechanization that he feared had taken command of human destiny. Moreover, the heat energy released by atomic weapons seared his imagination; the scholar who had centered the industrial revolution on a vast shift in humanity’s ability to mobilize the earth’s storehouse of energy now trembled before this destructive power. Thus the peculiar tension that haunted Nef ’s collected essays, The Conquest of the Material World, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1964. A celebration of Europe’s increasing proficiency in mining and metallurgy, it was also the search for a moral compass that would prevent our selfdestruction in a burst of mushroom clouds. Nef was born in 1899, hailed from Chicago’s professional elite, married into even greater wealth, and counted himself among the generation that “grew to maturity during and just after the first World War.”1 Freed from financial constraints, he relished open touring cars during his European ventures, and his descriptions of the pleasures of Cap d’Antibes conjure up F. Scott Fitzgerald. Above all, he was a collector: Nef lined the walls of his apartment with original works by modern masters, filled his memoirs with a lineup of creative luminaries from T. S. Eliot to R. H. Tawney, Robert Hutchins to Jacques Maritain, and Marc Chagall to Artur Schnabel, and C L A S S I C S R E V I S I T E D

The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (review)

clearly differentiated them from judicial infants and social children. At a particular chronological age, men with property in their own labor had to be recognized as citizens with full adult rights” (296). Why, when, and where did they “have to”? The second half of the book emphasizes school systems. An unannounced theme is a variant on social-control theory of the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 5 is titled “Worlds of Social Control: Civilizing the Masterless Poor.” Miller emphasizes “civilizing” and “self-governance,” but control rears its head in attempts “to ‘civilize’—or make docile and inductive the labouring poor” (149). Every society attempts to transmit culture, but efforts in that direction are not the same as social control. Nor is civilizing a synonym for control. From a variety of purposes enunciated for schools (165), Miller emphasizes a particular kind of imposition: “Above all, however, they [schools] tried to moralize children” (220). Was not the arst purpose to instruct? There is no reason to prefer Miller’s explanation over others. Miller’s concentration on the writings of theorists obscures certain developments. Until late in the nineteenth century, most schools were in the hands of the church or itinerant schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. A missionary impulse prompted not just Protestants but also Catholics after the Council of Trent to “educate the countryside.” The demand for schools outstripped the ability of central institutions to provide them. Moreover, students took messages different from what organizers intended. Miller provides little discussion of these popular forces.

Productivity and Labor Discipline in the Montgolfier Paper Mill, 1780–1805

The daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of production in the Montgolfier paper mill, one of the largest in eighteenth-century France, are examined here. Based on the comments of pioneer manufacturers, historians have been led to believe that early industrial work was irregular and unpredictable. The Montgolfiers as well complained of undependable workers. Yet their own output registers reveal a pattern of regular productivity unaided by advanced machinery or steam power.