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Until recently, scholarship on industrialization treated Africans and African Americans as peripheral to that process. Industrialization was considered a peculiarly European or Western innovation that owed little to the rest of the world and especially to blacks in the New World. This bias was not simply one of race. It was also one of class. The masses of working-class and poor whites were also excluded from consideration of the key dynamics of technological and social change. Historians of American technology privileged the deeds of famous inventors like Eli Whitney, Samuel F. B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Cyrus McCormick, and Henry Ford. Over the past several decades, however, scholars have gradually revamped our understanding of the industrial revolution from the vantage point of the working class as well as consumers of the products of technological innovations. As such, they have also illuminated the myriad ways that African Americans both influenced and were in turn influenced by the industrial revolution.
Teachers of the industrial revolution are now able to draw upon a growing body of knowledge that treats race, class, and technology as tightly interwoven themes in African American and U.S. history. Accordingly, this essay offers a brief outline of the ways that race and technology shaped the early enslavement of Africans in the New World; the work of bondsmen and women during the antebellum era; and especially the increasing urbanization of the African American population during the industrial age. For classroom purposes, however, teachers should find this essay most useful for organizing discussions around the interplay of class, race, and technology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
From the outset of their enslavement, Africans brought a substantial body of technological know-how to the New World. Before the advent of the international slave trade, West African societies had developed diverse trade, manufacturing, and agricultural economies. In colonial America, enslaved Africans not only lived, worked, and fought closely with whites, but shared important knowledge that enabled Europeans to survive and thrive on the southern terrain. Africans entered the low country of colonial South Carolina with knowledge of rice planting, hoeing, processing, and cooking techniques. They planted rice in the spring by creating a hole in the ground with the heel of their foot, planting the seed, and...