Abstract
Capitalism is founded on the unequal relationship between capital and labor. This relationship and the expansion and accumulation of capital and labor power comes to characterize a logic that influences everyday life and values. Texas, in Baltimore County, Maryland, was a quarry town established in the middle of the nineteenth century to quarry and burn limestone in a time of expanding industry and an expanding nation. Primarily Irish immigrants and later African Americans were employed to toil in this hazardous and grueling industry. The town was created to house the workers, and a community was formed and eventually destroyed. David Harvey’s theoretization of the urbanization of capital details the logic and process of capitalism and is used to understand this trajectory and how life in Texas was influenced by capitalism. Reading the material and spatial record from this theoretical perspective highlights not only the operations of the quarry, but more so, their impact on life and how they aligned social relations in town to facilitate capitalism. Through such an analysis, daily interactions at several different sites can be compared and situated within a wider social, economic, and political context and unequal power relationships. With this framework, the built landscape and material culture show patterns of residential differentiation and class fragmentation and stratification that were essential for the success and perpetuation of industry. Studying Texas in this manner building on Harvey demonstrates the utility and necessity of using such a totalizing approach to examine capitalism in historical archaeology.
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Fracchia, A., Brighton, S. (2015). Limestone and Ironstone: Capitalism, Value, and Destruction in a Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Quarry Town. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_6
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