One might think that enough has been said about the history of the early American iron industry. Business and economic historians have considered its methods of production, technologies, markets, financing, and business forms. Other historians, notably Robert S. Starobin in 1970 (Industrial Slavery in the Old South, New York: Oxford University Press) and Ronald L. Lewis in 1979 (Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715–1865, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), have examined the southern industry's use of slaves as production workers. And yet, as John Bezís-Selfa's Forging America shows, for all this attention, an original perspective on the industry can still produce useful and provocative insights into its history.

Forging America takes readers down some fascinating paths of historical investigation. It is primarily concerned with the contributions of coerced labor—slaves and indentured servants, of course, but also even wage-workers— in the making of iron and the iron industry in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia during the colonial period and the first decades of independence from Great Britain. These contributions were, Bezís-Selfa argues, crucial to the success of the industry and of the early republic. As workers toiled in the industry, they shaped and were, themselves, shaped by an evolving relationship between gender and work and by changing conceptions of masculinity in the arena of heavy and dangerous labor.

A central theme of the book is the distinction between the “industrial revolution” and the “industrious revolution.” Unlike the former and more familiar term, the “industrious revolution” had to do with a transformation in habits of and attitudes toward work. In Bezís-Selfa's view, the two revolutions were linked in a symbiotic relationship, each one reinforcing the other, with profound consequences not only for the American economy but also for the national culture. And inspiring and propelling the two revolutionary transformations was the coercion of labor juxtaposed against the contradictory secular and religious ideology of liberty and free will. In this sense, Forging American is a study of the formation of a type of mentalité. This mentalité, Bezís-Selfa argues, developed alongside, complemented, and reinforced an ideology of revolutionary action that erupted in the American colonies' struggle for independence from Great Britain and continued long after, extending, according to him, even to the present day.

When Ronald Lewis pioneered the study of slave labor in the colonial South's heavy industry, few if any historians thought there was much point to looking at the use of slaves in the North's ironworks. Enslaved workers therefore played only an incidental role in histories of the iron industry of the northern colonies. As Bezís-Selfa demonstrates, their near absence from that historical narrative was a significant error of omission. Slaves worked at virtually every step of the pig and bar iron production processes, including the most highly skilled jobs, and there were undoubtedly many of them. Underlying these conclusions is Bezís-Selfa's work in the business records of southern and northern ironworks. Most of these records bear the fingerprints of generations of historians who first worked in them, especially the records of the Maryland and Virginia ironworks explored by Ronald Lewis. Still, these records have limitations and, although slaves are known to have constituted the greatest part of the labor force at most ironworks in Maryland and Virginia, the magnitude of their contribution to ironmaking in the North is, notwithstanding Bezís-Selfa's assertion of their centrality, less certain.

For all the book's considerable strengths, including the extensive base of research in manuscript sources on which its argument rests, it has some curious and distracting short-comings. For economic historians the most significant of these problems is the fact that Bezís-Selfa makes virtually no systematic use of quantitative evidence to support the book's claims concerning the productivity of slave labor and comparisons between free labor and slave labor productivity and work time at specific ironworks. The absence of such data, in the otherwise impressive body of evidence used to reach conclusions about these aspects of iron making would not especially matter, were these aspects of the industry and its labor force not inherently quantitative in nature.

Akin to this deficiency is the problem of Bezís-Selfa's use of rather nebulous figures to support his argument, particularly his assertion that the colonial iron industry's workforce included “thousands” of slaves. The basis for this number is nowhere documented. The lack of a more precise figure is particularly regrettable because, essential to Bezís-Selfa's argument for the vital importance of enslaved labor to the development of the iron industry and to the industrialization of the United States, would be a reasonably firm estimate of the number of enslaved workers and a comparison of how their numbers compared to the numbers of free ironworkers.

Forging America is a provocative book, which is more in the way of an argument, in places a polemic, than simply a laying out of a set of findings and conclusions based on an extensive base of evidence. In places the book far over-reaches its research, nowhere more so than in its brief conclusion, which offers observations concerning recent and current international morality and unsupported assertions of fact concerning the resonances of the book's themes into the late nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first. Notwithstanding such occasional lapses into presentism and polemics, Bezís-Selfa has written a compelling and often a persuasive book that makes some valuable contributions to our knowledge of the sociology and culture of iron-making during the colonial and early national periods.