Synopses & Reviews
This book explores the development of a provincial textile industry in colonial America. Immediately after the end of the Great Migration into the Massachusetts Bay colony, settlers found themselves in a textile crisis. They were not able to generate the kind of export commodities that would enable them to import English textiles in the quantities they required. This study examines the promotion of domestic textile manufacture from the level of the Massachusetts legislature down to the way in which individual communities organized individual productive efforts. Although other historians have examined early cloth production in colonial homes, they have tended to dismiss domestic cloth-making as a casual activity among family members rather than a concerted community effort at economic development. This study looks closely at the networks of production and examines the methods that households and communities organized themselves to meet a very critical need for cloth of all kinds. It is a social history of cloth-making that also employs the economic and political elements of Massachusetts Bay to tell their story.
Synopsis
For the last three decades, social historians who studied early America expanded older interpretations of colonial economy and society to include family, social position and gender as legitimate topical themes. During that same period, economic scholars have used social historians' community and household studies to explore rural self-sufficiency, the development of commercial agriculture and the Atlantic sea trade. Despite the recent use if family household economics to explore and explain colonial economy and society, most have entirely neglected one of the most fundamental early American industries: domestic textile production.
Colonial historians have previously used information about wool, flax and hemp in broad based arguments about the productive side of the colonial economy, yet few have considered textile production a significant colonial economic activity. As a result, textile-producing networks, construed as either economics or social phenomenon, have largely gone unnoticed.
This study draws from a broad array of sources including the probate inventories of Essex and Suffolk County, Massachusetts, extant account books, trial transcripts, court records and material culture. Combined with a working knowledge of cloth-making, those records reveal that domestic textile production was a major form of social organization, especially in early Massachusetts. Textile-reproducing networks clearly served to draw households, neighborhoods and regions together in particular ways. From the processing of fibers to the finishing of cloth, intense cooperation and an extensive system of corporate labor were key elements of textile production. Simply put, no one gender or age wasresponsible, rather a confluence of females and male as well as young and old laborers were necessary to the ensure the success of the industry.