American economic history has traditionally been told as a narrative of industrialization and affluence collapsing into globalization and industrial decay. Offering a reappraisal of this pattern, Manufacturing Catastrophe traces the successive rise and fall of the whaling, textile, garment, electronics, and high-tech industries in Massachusetts over the past two hundred years. It shows how business, labor, and political leaders repeatedly mobilized the lure of crisis?cheap labor, low taxes, and generous manufacturing subsidies?to pull and push both capital and workers across the continents, repeatedly remaking the pioneering industrial cities of Fall River and New Bedford. Workers?ranging from migrating Azorean seamen to British weavers to Quebecois farmers?and capitalists?including mobile manufacturers, globetrotting whalers, and multinational conglomerators?participated in the creation of regional growth and, with it, American industrial ascendance. Exploring the paradoxical and recurring coexistence of high unemployment and labor shortages in these cities, this book explains why recovery and growth have not necessarily translated into long-term prosperity. In doing so, it illuminates how economic catastrophe was, ironically, a critical ingredient in the making of America's industrial hegemony.

Shaun S. Nichols is an Assistant Professor of History at Boise State University. He is a native of Fall River, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Part I: From Farm to Factory, From Ship to Loom
Chapter 1: The Irrational Revolution: The Failure of Early Massachusetts Industrialization
Chapter 2: Economies in Motion: Crisis and Industry in the Whaling City
Chapter 3: Labor in Motion: The Peopling of Industrial Massachusetts
Part II: From Cloth to Clothes, From Crisis to Prosperity
Chapter 4: Un-Making Industrial Massachusetts: Labor and Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization
Chapter 5: Cut from the Same Cloth: The Remaking of Industrial Massachusetts
Chapter 6: Towards Free Migration: The Reopening of Industrial Massachusetts
Part III: From the Needle to High Tech, From Massachusetts to the World
Chapter 7: Towards Free Trade: Globalization from the Ground Up
Chapter 8: Reconstructing Industrial Ascendance: Massachusetts and the Reordering of American Capitalism
Chapter 9: Industrial Twilight? Massachusetts and the Reordering of Global Capitalism
Chapter 10: The "New" Economy: Making High-Tech Massachusetts
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index