The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900

Description

Combining the perspectives of anthropology and social history, Professor Reddy traces the transition from precapitalist to capitalist culture in the French textile industry from 1750 to 1900. He shows how and why a new conception of the social order based on the idea of the market began to emerge, and examines the attendant political and social conflict. Focusing on the northern regional centres in France which led the movement toward mechanisation, the author - employs the methods of cultural anthropology to find that even by 1900 French textile labourers had failed to develop a social identity commensurate with the idea of wage labour. This discovery leads him to a critique of the market idea that suggests radical and prevalent interpretations of the social history of industrialisation as well as of the concept of 'class consciousness'. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Figures and Maps List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction Part One: A World Without Entrepreneurs, 1750–1815 1. Commerce as Conflict An Entrepreneurial Riot The Guild As Antientrepreneur The Politics of Proto-industrialization The Myopia of Physiocracy The Mysteries of Production The Missing Ingredient 2. The Design of the Spinning Jenny Engineering as Folklore A Design for Social Change Machines as Poor Relief Machines That Steal Bread 3. New Terms and Old Practices Abstract Equality Productivity and Social Class Balance Sheets and Contracts Odd Assortments of Machines Ambitious Weavers The New Status Quo Part Two: Uses of The Market Idea, 1816–1851 4. The First Crisis of Management Careers Open to Talent Selling Upward Mobility An Increment of Control The Anatomy of a Slump Theory and Practice at the Mule 5. Spinners on Guard The Prefects' Coalition Paying For Steam Disorderly Weavers Experiments With Refusing Work The Larger Context 6. Visions of Subsistence A Base Line of Comparison Function Versus Moral Existence Imaginary Budgets Wages and Families The Rhetoric of Subsistence From Rhetoric to Legend Fourier on Guard 7. A Search for Identity Oil Lamps and Hidden Scales The Coming of a New Word A Revolution in Pay Procedures Limiting Cases Uncertain Harvest Part Three: Unquestioned Assumptions, 1852–1904 8. The Clock Time of the Second Empire Liberalism By Decree Imperial Empiricism Gradgrind in the Factory The Plasticity of Labor The Strike's New Form 9. The Moral Sense of Farce Desrousseaux's Delivery The Farcical In Practice From Farce to Politics What People Make of Words 10. Little Insurrections A Detail and its Meaning A Ritual Jacquerie The Success of Guesdist Indifference A Total Victory in Defeat The Liberal Box Conclusion Notes Bibliographical Note I. Manuscript Sources II. Published Primary Sources III. Secondary Sources on the French Textile Trade Iv. Recent Studies of Industrialization Index