Company Towns: Concepts, Historiography, and Approaches

Abstract

Under the headline ``The Last Company Town,'' Newsweek reported in 2011 the fate of Scotia, California, a town founded in the nineteenth century by the Pacific Lumber Company in the redwood forests of northern California.1 In the hands of a Wall Street hedge fund, the town was slated to be sold and with it a distinctive way of life---characterized by the report as ``a time when employers provided everything''---destined to end. Yet the same article noted the revival of the company town model in other industries in the United States and around the world, and it cited the transformation of the corporate campuses of Google and Facebook, in California, and the recent establishment of new factory towns in China. A creation of industrialization and capitalist expansion, company towns have proven resilient organizations. Company towns first appeared in Europe and North America with the industrial revolution, as a way to make manufacturing or mineral extraction possible in isolated areas and in places without easy access to established urban centers, and as devices to gain access to a stable labor force. As industrialization and capital investment expanded, company towns also emerged in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, and colonial territories throughout Asia---where they often acted as pioneering devices in broader Europeanizing efforts---as well as in China and Japan.2 These settlements received many names: single enterprise communities, mill towns, factory villages, and enclaves; they have been called colonias industrialles in Spain, cités ouvrières in France, Arbeitersiedlungen in Germany, bruk communities in Sweden, and villas obreras and cidades-empresa in South America.3