Book Launch!
Book Launch of Robert Sweeny’s Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? Montreal, 1818-1849.
August 11th, 7:30 p.m.
The Ship Pub
Our choice to industrialise has changed the world more than any other decision in human history, yet the three prevailing explanations – the technical (new energy sources), the Marxist (new social relations) and the neo-liberal (people became more industrious) – are inadequate in making sense of this fundamental change. We chose to industrialise because thought preceded action. People developed completely new ways of thinking about the world on three levels: how we should relate to each other, to property and to nature?
Sweeny uses the rich source material of Montréal, the first colonial city to industrialise, to reveal the importance of both new gender relations and qualitatively different environmental practices. The focus is on the personal and familial decisions that tens of thousands of people made before the first factories were built. We see how all that was solid melted into air, as people abandoned a centuries-old moral economy for a liberal one.
Informed by four decades of scholarship, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? is a politically engaged argument about history, a sustained reflection on sources and method in historical practice, and a powerful critique of liberalism when it really was new.