Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795-1850 (review)

Students of early American industry are familiar with the significant relationship between the early-nineteenth-century decline of the West Indies trade and the transfer of capital into manufacturing and transportation ventures. The West Indies trade spanned more than 150 years, with much regional variation in products and complex networks of exchange. The Connecticut River Valley, with trade controlled primarily from Hartford and Middletown, was one of the most important regions. Restraints on trade with Britain cut off many imports, stimulating American manufacturing between 1806 and 1815, and some of the valley's subsequent preeminence in the manufacture of precision metal and wood products was initially funded by the region's West Indies merchants.

In a thoroughly researched, well-written, and concise book, anthropologist Janet Siskind explores changes in class and culture that accompanied the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism in central Connecticut. Her framework is chronological and ideological, with extensive use of primary evidence from which she builds an argument about new class differences emerging from the very different relations inherent in merchant trading, on the one hand, and factory management, on the other.

Availability of primary documents led her to somewhat atypical but important actors in this story. The Watkinsons, wealthy middle-class English merchant manufacturers who emigrated to Middletown in 1795, entered the West Indies trade in its last stages. By 1850, some among them had achieved preeminence among Hartford's factory owners and social elite. To cover the emergence of factory management and corporate culture based on new wage relationships with workers, Siskind shifts her focus to the Collins brothers, collateral relations of the Watkinsons, whose Collinsville axe works became among the best in the world. She returns to the Watkinsons as examples of how Hartford's elite combined charity, religion, and a belief in individual responsibility to implement a worldview in which poverty was less a by-product of capitalism or limited family connections than of an insufficient application of hard work.

Siskind's central argument, though somewhat scattered throughout the text and footnotes, addresses the relationship between manufacturing innovations and class relations. During the era of merchant traders, she notes, profit and labor costs were not explicitly recognized, and accounting was based on the cash exchange-value of goods. Though wealthier than most other citizens, merchants were not distinct as a class whose interests opposed those of farmers or craftsmen. Siskind associates the emergence of factory work by the 1840s with the recognition of profit as an increase on capital largely achieved by controlling labor costs, and with the rise of corporate ownership whose demands for dividends required more profit than older partnership arrangements.

In this argument, mechanization was primarily a function of producing things faster with less skills, thus allowing for more employment of immigrants and controlling the cost of scarcer skilled labor. Class distinctions—including the imposition of elite values on worker lifestyles—sharpened as controls increased. Some of these points, such as those concerning evolving definitions of profit, provide excellent context but are not original to Siskind's book. The links she makes between de-skilling, mechanization, and forms of industrial ownership are more original, but are also somewhat overstated, and appear less applicable to all forms of industry than Siskind suggests. Although familiar with a fairly extensive literature on the Collins Company's axe-making innovations, she downplays the skills needed to run the new equipment and the associated reduction in unhealthy grinding operations. More significantly, she ignores improved product quality, and consequently increased sales and profits, as a competitive factor in technological improvements.

Despite these weaknesses, Rum and Axes is valuable for its detailed examples of trading and factory management practices, and for the insights Siskind provides into the merchant family values that were so important when family partnerships and personal reputations were the backbone of business...