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  • Craft Capitalism: Craftworkers and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840 – 1872
  • Ken Cruikshank (bio)
Robert B. Kristofferson. Craft Capitalism: Craftworkers and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario, 1840 – 1872. University of Toronto Press. x, 328. $29.95

In this well-researched and provocative book, Robert Kristofferson invites historians to reconsider the nature of mid-Victorian industrialization, using detailed evidence from the city of Hamilton. Through the use of individual biographies and collective census data, city directories and local newspapers, he constructs a portrait of an industrial city shaped by craftsworkers, men who bridged ‘the pre-existing crafts world and the world of modern capitalism in ways that they understood built on the positive aspects of both.’

This is a social and cultural history of Hamilton’s industrial development, which emphasizes the critical importance of the material reality of craft mobility. Kristofferson shows that craftworkers operated almost 90% of Hamilton’s manufacturers, no matter what size. He draws on studies of migration to suggest why industrial development might look different in places such as Hamilton. Craftsworkers who were displaced from the industrializing core resettled in the colonies to recreate the economic world they were losing. And, he contends, for a time and on the margins of the industrial world, they succeeded.

The artisanal origins of industrialists in turn influenced and sustained workers’ conceptions of masculinity, workplace authority, success, and self-improvement. For the most part, they saw the coming of industrial capitalism not as a threat to their livelihoods, but as an opportunity.

Kristofferson insists, more than Michael Katz and perhaps more than Bryan Palmer, on emphasizing continuity over change in Hamilton’s development. Craftsworkers, in this account, were neither proletarianized nor even on the defensive by the early 1870s. They were rightly confident that they had played an important role in the development of their community, if wrongly confident that they would continue to do so.

Although Kristofferson cites work such as that of Philip Scranton approvingly, his overall analysis is inconsistent with work that emphasizes the significance of industrial diversity to the development of modern capitalism. He instead argues that Hamilton’s industrialization by the early 1870s can be characterized by a single ‘variant’ – craft capitalism. Craft ideals of mutualism and masculinity influenced all industrial [End Page 283] concerns, whatever their size or level of mechanization. And, it is clear, this variant of capitalism would be subsumed by the end of the century, giving way to a system that would ‘marginalize flexible specialized enterprise and the social world it spawned.’ I found this conclusion disappointing, for, whatever he sometimes claims, Kristofferson is asking historians only to change the chronology of their linear approach to the industrial revolution and the emergence of modern industry, not explore the complex ways that flexible specialized enterprise and mass production factories, and the social worlds they spawned, may have co-existed and interacted.

Although Kristofferson may promise a more nuanced and original account than he sometimes delivers, Craft Capitalism is still an important and well-documented work that challenges historians to reconsider some of the ways in which we characterize mid-Victorian industrialization.

Ken Cruikshank

Ken Cruikshank, Department of History, McMaster University

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