Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865

Acknowledgments

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s This book attempts to understand how the United States evolved from a relatively backward economy with little technological innovation in 1790 to a leading economy with widespread technological dynamism in 1865. The project has a long genesis. As a graduate student informed by such seminal thinkers as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Joseph Schumpeter and by the rich economic history literature, I concluded that technological innovation was at the core of longrun economic development and that innovation and the institutions shaping it evolved together. Economic history was too narrow to understand such innovation ; business and technological history were indispensable. I initially explored the nineteenth-century evolution of U.S. sewing and shoe technologies, which led me to conclude that innovation followed paths that created and spread techniques along with organizations, markets, occupations, and other institutions to develop and use those techniques. Paths in many industries supported each other, making possible a trajectory that propelled development in whole economies . This insight led to the effort in this book to understand how paths of institutionally structured learning within and across industries shaped the technologically dynamic economy of 1865. Knowledge of how economies developed, like the technological knowledge that informed that development, is a social product, and my research has benefited from interactions with many scholars. William Parker and Robert Heilbroner were particularly important in shaping my first book and my approach to research. These great economists, who both died in the past decade, combined a focus on significant issues, a critical eye to orthodoxies, superb scholarship, powerful yet graceful writing accessible to the public, enormous support for other researchers, and a deep commitment to human welfare. I dedicate this book to their memory. Many scholars have perceptively commented on parts of the manuscript or related papers. The book gained greatly from the insights of John Berry, John K. Brown, Michael Edelstein, Naomi Lamoreaux, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Edward Nell, Nathan Rosenberg, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Kenneth Sokoloff, David Weiman, Gavin Wright, and my colleagues at the University of Vermont. I learned a lot from seminars at Columbia, the New School, Northwestern, Stanford , UCLA, Yale, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Vermont, and meetings of the Economic History Association, the Business History Conference , and the Economic and Business Historical Association. Merritt Roe Smith and an anonymous reviewer for the Johns Hopkins University Press critiqued the whole manuscript, and though I doubtlessly have not addressed all their concerns satisfactorily, the book is much clearer and richer because of their efforts. My work could not have been conducted without those critical institutions that allow research to proceed and see the light of day: libraries, universities, and presses. Dozens of librarians directed me to sources, including those at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland, and at state archives in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York. University librarians at Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Harvard Business School, New York University, Stanford, UCLA, and University of Vermont offered enormous assistance. Without the contributions of librarians at the New York Public Library, the American Precision Museum, the Rhode Island Historical Society, and especially the Hagley Museum and Library, essential evidence would have remained unearthed. Sabbaticals at the University of Vermont and visiting scholar appointments at Stanford and UCLA provided time and place for research.I thank Bob Brugger at the Johns Hopkins University Press for his editorial direction and Elizabeth Gratch for her many clarifications of the manuscript. Finally, for the past fifteen years, Floria Thomson has supported every aspect of the project, joining me in ten libraries, commenting on each stage of the manuscript , and telling me when enough was enough. xiv Acknowledgments Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age This page intentionally left blank ...