misleading to summarize this work in a way that implies unanimity. One finding, however, commands "almost universal agreement," in the words of William Sewell, namely that "skilled artisans, not workers in the new factory industries, dominated labor movements during the first decades of industrialization." One study after another announces the dominant influence of artisans—in France, England, and America alike—as its organizing theme. "This book is about a community of artisans," writes Robert J. Bezucha in his study of silk workers in Lyons, "who organized in order to resist proletarianization and consequently found themselves at the barricades." Joan Scott launches her study of French glassworkers in the same way: "This book ... analyzes the experiences of artisan glassblowers as their trade was transformed by mechanization from a highly skilled art to a semiskilled operation." Nineteenth-century radicals in England were "artisans, skilled craftsmen, privileged outworkers, and, less often, small tradespeople," according to Calhoun.

Nor did the establishment of the factory system immediately alter this pattern. In New England, "artisan protest inspired factory protest," according to Alan Dawley; in industries where this artisanal background was lacking, militant unions failed to appear. In Cincinnati, according to Steven J. Ross, the working-class movement continued to be led by artisans, even in the I870s and I880s. These artisans claimed to represent the "middle classes," as one of them put it, and hoped "to prevent the encroachments of both ... the extremely rich and the extremely poor." "Despite the profound economic changes that followed the American Civil War," Herbert Gutman writes, "Gilded Age artisans did not easily shed stubborn and time-honored work habits." Even in the factory, artisans often retained control of the rhythm and design of production; and it was their resistance to employers' attempts to introduce a more complicated division of labor and to replace skilled craftsmen with operatives, as much as the fight for higher wages and shorter hours, that shaped working-class radicalism right down to the end of the nineteenth century.

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