Horwitz's student Steinberg

and his book, Nature, Incorporated

Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (first published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1991 and reprinted in Cambridge University’s Studies in Environment and History series in 1994) began as Theodore (Ted) Steinberg’s dissertation. His advisors were David Hackett Fischer, Morton Horwitz, and Donald Worster.  Steinberg’s thesis was that “industrial capitalism is not only an economic system, but a system of ecological relations as well” (11).  This idea goes beyond the obvious but important recognition that environment constrains social and economic choices, toward a more subtle discussion of how “the natural world came to represent new sources of energy and raw materials…perceived more and more as a set of inputs.” Steinberg mentions environmental historians William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant in this context, but the thrust of his argument develops Horwitz’s theme discussed previously of “an instrumental conception” of both resources and “law that sanctioned the maximization of economic growth” (16).  A critical issue in Horwitz, which Steinberg picks up, was that this sneaky institutionalization of common law and the attitudes toward ownership and the public and private sectors that spring from it has distributional consequences.  So the point is not only that over time it became “commonly assumed, even expected, that water should be tapped, controlled, and dominated in the name of progress,” but that the rewards of this control legitimately belong to the few, to the exclusion of the many.

Steinberg’s narrative of the beginning of textile milling in Massachusetts called attention not only to the contested nature of all the changes the mills tried to make to the flow and control of rivers like the Charles, but also to how much these changes owed not to free competition in the market, but to government interference through the courts.  Despite the regular complaints of area farmers, by 1795 people in the Charles valley believed “their natural rights stolen from them, and their best property at the mercy of one or two Millers, still the luck favorites & likely to remain, so long as the rage for Factory at every place, whether others sink or swim, continues the rage of Government” (37).  Along the way, Steinberg’s story brushed up against several interesting people (Nathaniel Ames, Robert Owen, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens), whose personal reactions to what they saw in the Charles and Merrimack valleys would have added an interesting dimension to the account.

Steinberg continued the story with accounts of the Boston Associates’ campaign to control Lake Winnepissiogee, the destruction of fisheries and the capitalists’ attempt to reintroduce and manage what was formerly a common good, and the problem of industrial and urban pollution in the rivers controlled by the industrialists.  Each of these topics have been expanded by others, along the lines Steinberg suggested.  The only flaw in the book, for me, is the Thoreau-ian wrapper Steinberg adds at the beginning and end.  Clearly Thoreau was horrified by what he saw on his river journeys, but I don’t think Steinberg makes a strong case that Thoreau represents either a mainstream reaction at the time or any type of viable alternative.  At the end, Steinberg admitted that “greater command over…nature in general, had its positive points.” But, he concluded, “this aggressive, manipulative posture toward the natural world [is] a problem that penetrates to the core of modern American culture” (271).  This conclusion stepped beyond the scope of the book, and although Steinberg may have felt that it was implied by his approach, it was not a natural end to the story and required either a leap of faith or a prior agreement and understanding that made the book’s very valuable argument irrelevant.

The book has gone on to become a classic in the environmental history of America and the early industrial revolution. As Cronon’s books Changes in the Land and Nature’s Metropolis and Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange are each the foundations for chapters of my American Environmental History, so is Nature, Incorporated. My chapter adds a bit more about the beginnings of corporations and the shift from community service to shareholder enrichment, using the story of the Warren Bridge lawsuit in Boston. And I add a bit toward the end, expanding on the idea of economic externalities with the Pemberton Mill disaster of 1860. Then, to conclude on a positive note and counteract the idea that this story was inevitable, I return to Robert Owen and describe what he did with his life after Nathan Appleton and Francis Cabot Lowell visited him in New Lanark in 1811.