The Product Cycle and New England Textiles
Technological change and product life cycle concepts can be used to explain the concentration of cotton textile production in Southeastern New England during the industry's period of rapid innovation in machinery and machine tool design. Boston was the center for an agglomeration of high technology industries that were attracted by each other and the local resource pool of skilled mechanics and entrepreneurs. The movement of the textile industry to the Southeast, which took place after 1880, is linked to technological change in the product cycle that substituted unskilled labor for skilled labor and high technology inputs. The phrase "Yankee ingenuity " has be-come a part of the English language. If New England no longer holds all the good mechanics in the United States, there was a time when she came so near it that the term "New England mechanic " had a very definite meaning over the whole country [Roe, 1916, p. 109]. The nineteenth century industrialization process in the United States was quite unbalanced geographically. The major manufac-turing industries were highly concentrated in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, while the South lagged far behind. The textile industry is the example most often used to illustrate this imbalance. It was centered in New England during the nineteenth century but moved "belatedly " to the Southeast in the twentieth century. Most histories of the industry cite abundant water power and merchant capital as reasons for the original New England location, and the low wages and less restrictive labor laws in the South are said to explain the relocation. This paper argues that the textile industry became highly concentrated in Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island during the nineteenth century because of localization economies re-sulting from close proximity to the source of technological change in the industry. Textile firms, machinery builders, and entrepreneurs formed an agglomeration of skills and other resources which made firms more *I wish to thank Roger Bolton, John R. Meyer, and Christine Hekman for ideas and criticism, and a referee of this Journal for valuable suggestions. Work on this paper
- DOI
- 10.2307/1885664
- Volume
- 94 (4)
- Pages
- 697
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