Crisis Capital: Industrial Massachusetts and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1865-Present

Abstract

“Crisis Capital” offers a local history of global capitalism and a global history of local economic development, exploring how the global movements and political struggles of industry, labor, and capital created, destroyed, and repeatedly reconfigured the southeastern industrial core of Massachusetts. By dissecting the succeeding rise and fall of the whaling, textile, garment, electronics, and high-tech industries over the past one-hundred-fifty years, it challenges one of the master narratives of modern economic development: the oft-repeated story of how nineteenth-century industrialization, urbanization, and capitalist expansion collapsed into twentieth-century de-industrialization, globalization, and urban decay. Industrial Massachusetts, it argues, did not simply “rise” in the nineteenth century only to “fall” in the twentieth, but was made and un-made over and over again—besieged and begot by the swirling global movements of migrant labor and mobile capital. From migrating Azorean seamen, British weavers, and Quebecois farmers to globetrotting whalers, New York mobile manufacturers, and Asia-bound garment producers, “Crisis Capital” explores the industrial development of Massachusetts as a function of myriad actors’ attempts to navigate the tempests of economic globalization. In so doing, “Crisis Capital” highlights the seemingly paradoxical ways Massachusetts business, government, and labor leaders discovered they could use economic crisis to reorder the global geography of capitalism to their advantage. From the lure of low rents and free factory space to the appeal of cheap labor and abundant industrial financing, crisis became a crucial means for pulling and pushing both capital and workers across the continents. Moreover, “Crisis Capital” explores how these strategies of crisis exploitation have since been adopted by states and nations around the world. By analyzing the global history of industrial Massachusetts, “Crisis Capital” thus provides not only a new take on the classic “rise-and-fall” narrative of industrialization, but a sense of how global capitalism was historically pulled together: namely, through the meshing of myriad local economies, like Massachusetts, each seeking to use crisis itself to entice capital from competing locales. The so-called “race to the bottom,” it argues, is no contemporary bugaboo, but a structural facet of how industrial capitalism has expanded over the last two centuries.