The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg

1108 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE natural world lies at the core of the activity we call science” (p. 125), he also objects to studies of Lavoisier that fail to acknowledge the transdisciplinary range of his research interests. Lavoisier resolved this apparent contradiction by invoking carefully articulated method­ ological criteria for determining what kinds of knowledge qualify as science. Holmes is understandably if unconvincingly reluctant to assign such criteria a consequential role in his accounts of science. The second challenge has to do with the influence that the traditions of analysis Holmes describes exerted on Lavoisier as he was formulating his new concepts and theories. It is a measure of Holmes’s success that one regrets he did not go further in connecting these two parts of his study, for there is good reason to believe that Lavoisier’s antiphlogistic chemistry evolved directly out of the inves­ tigative traditions Holmes describes. In 1766, while actively cam­ paigning for election to the Academy of Sciences, Lavoisier read a second paper to the academy on the analysis of gypsum. In his opening comments he declared that Rouelle’s contributions to the theory of salts, which he called “the greatest advance in theoretical chemistry since Stahl,” provide “the foundation for all the explana­ tions that appear in this memoir” (Oeuvres Lavoisier 3:128). Holmes would object were I to say that the pre-Lavoisier traditions of experimental analysis he focuses on provide the interpretive key to the Chemical Revolution, but that is not far from the truth. Arthur Donovan Dr. Donovan is head of the humanities department at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and adjunct professor of history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has published extensively on 18th-century chemistry and is now writing a biography of Lavoisier. The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg: Craft and Class in the Industrial Revolution. By Michael J. Neufeld. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Pp. xiii + 245; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $42.00. Michael Neufeld’s book analyzes the intricate relationship between craft and class consciousness in 19th-century Germany. Designed as a case study of Nuremberg’s skilled metalworkers, his work addresses a central question of labor history and in so doing benefits from an implicit comparative perspective. Why, he asks, did Nuremberg’s skilled metalworkers—and, by implication, German workers more generally—support industrial unionism toward the end of the 19th century, while their British and American counterparts clung to exclusive craft unions far more firmly? In answering this question, Neufeld first provides a detailed description of the transformation of the metal industry from one TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1109 characterized by artisanal workshops to one dominated by factory production. Nuremberg is a town particularly well suited for such an investigation, because it was one of the leading centers of metalwork­ ing in Germany throughout the period. Neufeld offers a very informative survey that is especially convincing because it carefully differentiates between the many single crafts being dealt with and, at the same time, clearly separates the effects of capitalist control (e.g., via the putting-out system) and industrialization. By paying close attention to the changes of labor processes in the course of the Industrial Revolution, Neufeld also enriches our understanding of the history of technology. His analysis of the world of the skilled metalworker is by no means limited to the shop floor, however, but also includes numerous other facets of the “journeyman’s world.” The author distinguishes two main phases of the changes brought about by the industrialization of the metal trades. From the mid-1830s to the late 1860s, the artisanal features were largely eroded and the foundations for industrialization were laid. When the guild system was finally abolished in 1868, “the oldjourneymen’s world, which had survived centuries of change and struggle, was rapidly disappearing” (p. 71). The following four decades saw the emergence and enormous success of industrial unionism among skilled metalworkers in Nurem­ berg. Neufeld provides a detailed account of this development from “hesitant beginnings” to “maturation.” What he tries to show is how craft consciousness shifted from being an obstacle to class conscious­ ness throughout much of

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