Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2009
Among the various methodological prescriptions of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most useful for labor history are his advisories on social change, on the anxieties and tensions attending a society's transition from one geographical scale to another. Labor's experience in the United States offers a case in point. The nation's transformation from a preindustrial to an industrial society entailed, in addition to the inexorables of accelerated urbanization, industrial expansion, and market extension, certain fundamental changes in the conditions of labor. Industrialization restructured the geography of labor markets, revised principles of wage determination, fomented sectarian division in the ranks of labor, and soured the relations between labor and capital. These structural changes led, in turn, to the inevitable responses of, among others, worker combination, protest, industrial violence, and a splintering in the ranks of labor.
Any synthesis of the sort attempted here does a disservice to the Literatures on which it depends for the simple reason that space precludes comprehensive citation. I trust, therefore, that my abridged set of references offers a hint of the richness of this literature and of my rather sizable debt to historians, sociologists, economists, and geographers, cited and not.
1 Giddens, Anthony, “Structuration Theory: Past, Present and Future”, in Bryant, Christopher G.A. and Jary, David (eds.), Giddens' Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation (London, 1991) pp. 201–221Google Scholar.
2 Among others, Gutman, Herbert, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; and Commons, John R., History of Labor in the United States (4 vols.; New York, 1935)Google Scholar.
3 Brody, David, “The Old Labor History and the New: In Search of an American Working Class”, Labor History 20 (1979), pp. 111–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On scales of analysis, various essays in Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al. (eds.), The Micro-Macro Link (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.
4 Shorter, Edward and Tilly, Charles, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Hobsbawn, E.J. and Rudé, George, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; and Gutman, Herbert, “The Workers' Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age”, in Morgan, H. Wayne (ed.), The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal (Syracuse, N.Y., 1963), pp. 38–68Google Scholar.
5 Carville Earle and Leonard Hochberg, “Varieties of Geohistorical Social Science”, in Geographical Perspectives on Social Change (Stanford, forthcming).
6 Gutman, “The Workers' Search for Power”, pp. 38–68.
7 Giddens, “Structuration Theory”, pp. 20–21; Pred, Allan, Place, Practice and Structure: Social and Spatial Transformation in Southern Sweden, 1750–1850 (Totowa, 1986), pp. 5–31Google Scholar; Gregory, Derek, “Contours of Crisis? Sketches for a Geography of Class Struggle in the Early Industrial Revolution in England”, in Baker, A.R.H. and Gregory, D. (eds.), Explorations in Historical Geography: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 68–117Google Scholar.
8 The spatial lessons of the general strike are examined in some detail later in the essay; citations are reserved to that discussion.
9 On the limits of cross-scalar inference, see Rose, Gillian, “Locality Studies and Waged Labour: An Historical Critique”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N.S. 14 (1989), pp. 317–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Giddens, “Structuation Theory”, pp. 201–221; idem, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the History of Structuration (Berkeley, 1984); John Urry, “Time and Space in Giddens' Social Theory”, in Giddens' Theory of Structuration, pp. 160–175. On markets and the rise of capitalism, Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1957), pp. 163–219Google Scholar; North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert P., The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 On early-modern markets and their contemporary analogues, Earle, Carville, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford, 1992), pp. 173–235Google Scholar; Lebergott, Stanley, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800 (New York, 1964)Google Scholar; Lewis, W. Arthus, “Reflections on Unlimited Labour”, in DiMarco, Luis Eugenio (ed.), International Economics and Development: Essays in Honor of Raull Prebisch (New York, 1972), pp. 75–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And more generally, Lenger, Friedrich, “Beyond Exceptionalism: Notes on the Artisanal Phase of the Labour Movement in France, England, Germany, and The United States”, International Review of Social History 36 (1991), pp. 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Of the several stages of labor-market evolution, the second is the least well known. This story of unskilled labor's golden age therefore is pieced together from a variety of sources later cited in full.
13 I am prepared to argue that labor markets were transformed by the advent of new managerial practices in response to large-scale industrial production; that does not imply assent, however, to a model of societal transition from industrial to monopoly capitalism. See Edwards, Richard, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Noble, David F., America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.
14. These imperfections in product and labor markets are standard fare in neoclassical microeconomics and are discussed in most texts introducing that field.
15 Taylor, George Rogers, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; North, Douglass C., The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961)Google Scholar; Carville Earle and Changyong Cap, “The Rate of Frontier Expansion in American History, 1650–1890”, in Geographic Information Systems and the Social Sciences: A Handbook, in Carville Earle, Leonard Hochberg, and David Miller (Basil Blackwell, forthcoming).
16 On the macrohistorical paradox of protectionism in this period, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 455–459. Paul A. David makes the neoclassical case against the benefits of tariff protection, albeit after 1824 when the foundations for industrialization were already in place; in “Learning by Doing and Tariff Protection: A Reconsideration of the Case of the AnteBellum United States Cotton Textile Industry”, in Technical Choice Innovation and Economic Growth: Essays in American and British Experience in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1975), pp. 95–173.
17 Nettles, Curtis P., The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Lindstrom, Diane, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.
18 McKee, Samuel Jr, (ed.), Alexander Hamilton's Papers on Public Credit, Commerce and Finance (New York, 1934), pp. 177–276, esp. pp. 206–208Google Scholar.
19 On the debate over cheap labor or dear, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 173–236, 325–328, and 406–416; David, Technical Choice Innovation, pp. 19–91. For the social and political implications of wage structure, see the acute observations of Montgomery, David, “The Working Classes of the Pre-industrial American City, 1780–1830”, Labor History 9 (1968), pp. 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 173–236, 315–328, and 406–416.
21 Montgomery. “The Working Classes”, pp. 3–22; Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (2 parts; Washington, 1975), pp. 24–37; U.S. State Department, Digest of Accounts of Manufacturing Establishments in the United States, and of Their Manufacture (Washington, 1823)Google Scholar; Allen, Zachariah, The Science of Mechanics (Providence, R.L., 1829), p. 347Google Scholar; Field, Alexander J., “Sectoral Shift in Antebellum Massachusetts: A Reconsideration”, Explorations in Economic History 15 (1978), pp. 146–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dublin, Thomas, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and Prude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar.
22 Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 24–37.
23 Groves, Paul A., “The Northeast and Regional Integration, 1880–1860”, in Mitchell, Robert D. and Groves, Paul A. (eds.), North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Totowa, N.J., 1987), pp. 198–217Google Scholar.
24 On the fragility of skilled-unskilled alliances into the 1820s, see Shelton, Cynthia J., The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787–1837 (Baltimore, 1986)Google Scholar; Lenger, “Beyond Exceptionalism”, pp. 9–10; Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 400–445. More durable coalitions emerged in the 1830s (signaling, I suspect, the transition from asymmetric to autonomous labor markets); see Montgomery, “The Working Classes”, pp. 21–22.
25 Earle, Carvilte and Cao, Changyong, “Frontier Gosure and the Involution of American Society, 1840–1890”, Journal of the Early Republic 13 (1993), pp. 163–180CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Bensel, Richard F., Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar; Niemi, Albert W. Jr, State and Regional Patterns in American Manufacturing, 1860–1900 (Westport, Conn., 1974)Google Scholar.
27 On the agrarian involution of the Southern economy after 1840, see Earle, Carville, “The Price of Precocity: Technical Choice and Ecological Constraint in the Cotton South, 1840–1890”, Agricultural History 66 (1992), pp. 25–60Google Scholar.
28 Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 24–37, 134, 139; U.S., Census of Population: 1950, Vol.1: Number of Inhabitants (Washington, 1952), pp. 32–33Google Scholar.
29 The process of labor-market segmentation has its American origins in the rise of autonomous urban labor markets in the period 1840–1890; after 1890, segmentation involves the qualitatively different process of internalization of labor markets within the firm. See Edwards, Contested Terrain; Doeringer, Peter and Piore, Michael, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar; and Scott, Allen J., Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 27–35Google Scholar.
30 On lagged responses to labor markets, see Hobsbawn, E.J., “Custom, Wages, and WorkLoad in Nineteenth-Century Industry”, in his Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York, 1964), pp. 244–270Google Scholar.
31 It is ironic that the post-1870 advance in unskilled wages, rooted as it was in competitive labor markets, has generally eluded neoclassical economists who dwell instead on unionization, wage levelling, and the free rider. See, for examples, Ulman, Lloyd, The Rise of the National Trade Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1955)Google Scholar; Eichengreen, Barry, “The Impact of Late Nineteenth-Century Unions on Labor Earnings and Hours: Iowa in 1894”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 40 (1987), pp. 501–515CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Douglas, Paul H., Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (Boston, 1930)Google Scholar.
32 On strikes, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 417–423; on unions and Gompers' remarks, Commons, History of Labour, 2, pp. 175–181.
33 The elimination of seasonal wage differentials and the convergence of skilled and unskilled wages in the 1870s are suggestive of labor-market transition from rural hegemony to urban autonomy and subsidiary markets more (unskilled) or less (skilled) competitive. Ozanne, Robert, Wages in Practice and Theory: McCormick and Internal Harvester, 1860–1960 (Madison, Wisc., 1968), pp. 3–21Google Scholar; Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 414–416, 440–441. On the advance and retreat of labor's united front between 1860 and 1878, see Ware, Norman J., The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895: A Study in Democracy (Gloucester, Mass., 1959), pp. 1–21Google Scholar. One source of the front's fragility was the exotic mixture of ideologies which included, among others, a healthy dose of nineteenth-century market “liberalism” a view not unappealing for unskilled workers in increasingly competitive labor markets. Rogers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1974), pp. 40–46, 156–157Google Scholar. Sheftner, Martin nibbles at the edge of these issues in “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century”, in Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R. (eds.), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986), pp. 197–276Google Scholar; and Olssen, Erik, “The Case of the Socialist Party that Failed, or Further Reflections on an American Dream”, Labor History 29 (1988), pp. 416–449CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The quiescence of the unskilled after 1873 has more to do with rising wages and market power than with the “peasant-like” impotence ascribed to them by Graziosi, Andrea, “Common Laborers, Unskilled Workers, 1880–1915”, Labor History 22 (1981), pp. 512–544, esp. 519, 525–527CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 This section on Gilded Age worker protest is based on Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 346–377.
35 Gutman's thesis of the declension of labor power is inverted in the large cities of industrializing America, Gutman, “The Workers' Search for Power”, pp. 38–68. The simultaneous ascension of marginalist economics and autonomous, if variably competitive, labor markets seems not altogether fortuitous. Bell, Daniel, “Models and Reality in Economic Discourse”, in Bell, Daniel and Kristol, Irving (eds.), The Crisis in Economic Theory (New York, 1981), pp. 46–80, esp. 47–52Google Scholar.
36 Douglas, Real Wages in the United States, pp. 174–184.
37 Ozanne, Wages in Theory and Practice, pp. 26–33, esp. 32.
38 On oligopsonistic conditions in Chicago's farm implements industry, see Ozanne, Wages in Theory and Practice, p. 32. On the adoption of McCormick's wage strategies in other industries, ibid., pp. 26–33.
39 For more details and sources of the general strike, see Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 378–399.
40 Weibe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), pp. 11–43Google Scholar.
41 Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States; Garloch, Jonathan E., “A Structural Analysis of the Knights of Labor: A Prolegomenon to the History of the Producing Classes” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Rochester, 1974)Google Scholar; Earle, Geographical Inquiry, pp. 428–432.
42 Ibid., pp. 432–445; Weinstein, James, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.
43 Bennett, Sari, “Continuity and Change in the Geography of American Socialism, 1900–1912”, Social Science History 7 (1983), pp. 267–288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism', Kolko, Gabriel, “The Decline of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century”, in Weinstein, James and Eakins, David W. (eds.), For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959–1967 (New York, 1970), pp. 197–220Google Scholar.
45 Dillon, Patricia and Gang, Ira, “Earnings Effects of Labor Organizations in 1890”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 40 (1987), pp. 516–527CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eichengreen, “The Impact of Late Nineteenth-Century Unions”, pp. 501–515. These essays suggest that wage leveling across classes of skill is indicative of union impact on unskilled free-riders, but leveling could just as easily have resulted from competitive markets for unskilled labor.
46 Among others, Nelson, Daniel, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, Wise, 1975)Google Scholar; Noble, America by Design; and David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America.
47 Korver, Ton, The Fictitious Commodity: A Study of the U.S. Labor Market, 1880–1940 (Westport, Conn., 1990), pp. 23–42, 107–122, esp. 38Google Scholar. Edwards, Contested Terrain; and Graziosi, “Common Laborers, Unskilled Workers”, pp. 1–21.
48 Thompson, C. Bertrand, The Theory and Practice of Scientific Management (Boston, 1917), pp. 37–40Google Scholar; Nelson, Managers and Workers, pp. 68–78.
49 Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 143–145; Graziosi, “Common Laborers, Unskilled Workers”, pp. 533–534.
50 Noble, America by Design, esp. p. 300; Korver, The Fictitious Commodity, p. 74.
51 On manufacturing wages and market imperfections in the 1950s, see Gottsehalk, Peter, “A Comparison of Marginal Productivity and Earnings by Occupation”. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 31 (1978), pp. 368–378CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Historical Statistics, Part 1, pp. 143–145.
53 Earle, Carville and Bennett, Sari, “The Geography of Worker Protest in the United States”, Journal of Geography 82 (1983), pp. 15–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the intraurban geography of segmented labor markets, see Allen J. Scott, Metropolis.
54 The scalar instantiation of labor markets might also be regarded as a version of transactional behavior in which firms internalize transactions until their marginal costs equal the transaction costs on the open market – or, in unvarnished prose, until the savings from labor exploitation are exhausted. See Coase, Ronald, “The Nature of the Firm”, Economica 4 (1937), pp. 386–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott, Metropolis, pp. 27–35. Transactional-cost models tell us very little, however, about the historical preconditions for the internalization of transaction costs within firms (after 1900) or within cities (after 1840) – that is, about scalar transition.
You have
Access
