Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution.

Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution. By John Bezis-Selfa. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 279. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-3993-0.)

John Bezis-Selfa has produced a well-organized, meticulously researched, and thought-provoking account of eighteenth-century ironmaking in eastern British North America. He concentrates primarily on the relationships between ironmasters and the interconnected roles of slaves, indentured servants, and free (mostly white) labor in the iron industry. He frames his discussion in terms of three interrelated and simultaneous revolutions: the early industrial revolution, the American Revolution, and something he refers to as the "industrious revolution." The latter is defined as "a gradual transformation in how peoples of the early modern North Atlantic world organized, conducted, and valued work--on which both the industrial revolution and the American Revolution rested" (p. 1). While a counterargument certainly could be made that the so-called industrious revolution itself rested on the intensely competitive economic struggle that accompanied industrial-scale iron production, Bezis-Selfa is less concerned with establishing primacy among the revolutions than with illustrating connections between them. He does so in an engaging manner, frequently allowing the players in this industrial drama to speak for themselves; hardly a paragraph goes by without a direct quote from a contemporaneous source. Since the documentary record is so heavily biased toward the literate "adventurers" who capitalized and managed the industrial plants, the author attempts to balance the archival ledger by suggesting motives behind the sometimes defiant actions, and rare correspondences, of the ironworkers who manned the furnaces and forges. Some readers may object to these conjectures, but they are at least reasonable and constitute an admirable attempt to provide a voice for the principal but mute actors who actually produced iron.

After a succinct introduction explaining the methods and format of the book, Bezis-Selfa sets the stage for his thesis in the first chapter by presenting an overview of the iron industry from 1620 to 1830. His descriptions of the various processes required to produce iron, from charcoal making to ore mining to tapping the blast furnace, are cogently presented. So also are the backbreaking and dangerous nature of the iron enterprise and the unique time-and labor-dependent tasks of successfully running a furnace.

The book is then divided into two parts. The first, entitled "Iron and Empire: The Colonial Era," begins with the failed attempts to create an iron industry in Virginia and New England. Successful enterprises in the Chesapeake and middle colonies from 1715 until the American Revolution follow. Especially valuable--and one of the book's primary contributions--is a detailed description of the role of unfree labor, particularly of slaves but also of convicts and indentured servants. Bezfs-Selfa persuasively demonstrates how adventurers had to modify slave labor by emphasizing various incentives, such as instituting "overwork" cash bonuses, and how slaves were selectively employed so as to induce free white laborers to work more efficiently. Ironically, this loosening of the bonds of industrial slavery made it all the more resilient. The second part of the book, "Iron and Nation: The Early Republic," discusses the iron industry from the American Revolution to 1830. Particularly interesting is the portrayal of industrial paternalism in the Chesapeake, which echoed the agrarian South, and the subsequent transition from a slave-dependent to a free white ironmaking labor force.

Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution is a book to be reckoned with. John Bezis-Selfa has fashioned a valuable, eminently readable, and ultimately stimulating contribution to early American industrial and labor history.

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga 

NICHOLAS HONERKAMP