Mastering Iron
The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868
336 pages
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66 color plates, 10 halftones, 2 line drawings, 8 tables
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7 x 10
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© 2012
Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry.
In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel.
Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.
Craig E. Colten, Louisiana State University
“Anne Kelly Knowles has molded a thoroughly original geographic analysis of the emergent iron industry in nineteenth-century America. She rolls out a sweeping national portrait through a series of stunning maps and thoroughly satisfying prose before hammering out the diverging regional patterns through an examination of individual company records. Her insights both challenge and build upon prior historical interpretations. This is exactly what great historical geography should be.”
Charles Dew, Williams College
“Anne Kelly Knowles’s Mastering Iron will immediately take its place as one of the landmark works in the industrial history of the United States. Its merits are many: the research in both primary and secondary sources is thorough and thoughtful; the writing is consistently clear, vigorous, and engaging; and she asks the right questions about her subject and provides compelling answers. The result is the most analytically sophisticated geographic portrait we have ever had of this critically important, amazingly diverse, and grossly understudied American industry.”
Robert Gordon, Yale University
“Anne Kelly Knowles brings a new approach to our understanding of American ironmaking by coupling geography with the history of technology. Through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Americans transformed their underdeveloped ironworks into a major industry in the world economy. They borrowed the technology and organization techniques of the highly successful works in South Wales, only to discover that differences in natural resources, geography, weather, climate, and community structure thwarted direct technology transfer across the Atlantic. Knowles draws on her experience in Wales and her skills as a geographer to show us the barriers that had to be overcome by the American entrepreneurs and their immigrant workers. She introduces us to the people involved, and with an array of beautiful maps, shows us who went where and what had to be moved about by canals and railroads to achieve the success in ironmaking that would be the foundation of the subsequent American world-class steel industry.”
David R. Meyer, Washington University in St. Louis
“Scholars have extensively documented the United States’ rise to world leadership in the iron and steel industry in the late nineteenth century, but their neglect of the antebellum iron industry left a puzzle. By standards of the superior British, French, and German industries, America’s iron industry was woefully uncompetitive. Anne Kelly Knowles brilliantly resolves the puzzle through her use of theory and rich archival evidence covering the period between 1800 and 1868. From this she fashions a richly textured story of the challenges of the antebellum actors to develop the practices and technologies of the iron industry, their search for mineral resources, and their struggles to market iron. Knowles unequivocally demonstrates that by the end of the Civil War the iron industry was poised to exploit the possibilities of the territorial expansion of the dynamic national economy.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography | Economic Geography
History: American History
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