Industrial Lowell and the Dawn of the Anthropocene

Abstract

ABSTRACT Established in 1823 as an industrial enclave, Lowell, Massachusetts, was described by a network of canals that diverted waterpower to an array of integrated cotton textile mills. The qualitative advances in engineering and materials science, which drew from and propelled the productive consumption of industrialisation, were particularly manifest in the construction, equipping and powering of Lowell’s mills. Industrialisation re-shaped European and American societies, ecologies and environmental systems. Recent research has adopted the term Anthropocene to describe the distinct era of planetary history that corresponds to that Euro-American industrial revolution in textile manufacturing. Beyond the most obvious input of human labour, a variety of material inputs — wood, iron, limestone, clay — drove that industrial production, each linked with a cascade of effects some distance from the point of production. While the socio-cultural impact of Lowell as a manufacturing centre has been explored in regard to its hydropower and labour forms, how that productive consumption remade social and ecological environments, in unintended but highly consequential ways, remains under-theorised.