Content area
Full Text
Lou Martin, Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural Industrial Workers in West Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2015)
Hancock County, sandwiched between the Ohio River and the Pennsylvania state line in northern West Virginia, provides the backdrop for Lou Martin's fascinating study of 20th century rural-industrial workers. Pottery and tinplate manufacturing firms were introduced into this Appalachian landscape in the 1890s as industrialists "searched for places where they could tap pools of low-wage first generation" workers. (5) The resulting interplay between industrial and preindustrial traditions and practices formed the basis of a distinct rural working-class culture, wherein a developed sense of localism worked against the establishment of more traditional forms of class consciousness. Unlike their urban counterparts, industrial workers in Hancock County remained largely opposed to the goals of the New Deal coalition, such as the expansion of the welfare state and national trade unionism. Martin traces the contours of their rural-industrial culture into the 1980s, when restructuring prompted crises for rural and urban industrial workers alike.
The international processes of capital mobility, industrialization, and deindustrialization feature prominently. While the reader is treated to a rich tableau of working-class life, movingly captured through a combination of oral history and archival research, Martin is clear: we are witnessing but a brief moment in a much longer story of Schumpterian creative destruction. Industries that once thrived in cities and towns throughout North America and Europe have moved to areas of the globe with depressed labour costs and lower rates of unionization. "Meanwhile, in places like Chengdu, China, a new generation of factory workers is emerging and developing a new rural-industrial culture." (12) Martin's work will be of particular interest to scholars examining the history of global capitalism.
Several factors influenced the rise...