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 recu
