The Coming of Industrial Order : Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860

This study of antebellum industrialisation in several communities in rural Massachusetts illuminates what industrialisation meant in the early to mid nineteenth-century.

Jonathan Prude probes the tensions produced by the conflict between innovation and the received attitudes and institutions that still shaped daily existence.

Two connected but discrete areas of tension emerged: that between workers and managers within certain manufacturing establishments (especially textiles), and between manufacturers and the communities in which they were located.

The book demonstrates that antebellum industrialisation had a rural as well as an urban dimension and that, far from being the untroubled process described by some historians, it was a phenomenon characterised by deep conflict.