The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830–1910 by Gordon M. Winder (review)

In many ways, the McCormick reaper seems to epitomize triumphal narratives of American expansion, enterprise, and economic growth in the nineteenth century. Previous scholarship has portrayed the reaper as a transformative technology that helped foster western grain production across the Midwest and the Great Plains. Economic historians including Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. have argued that demand for new machinery in these western markets inexorably led small regional equipment producers to evolve into massive, vertically integrated corporations, with Chicago’s International Harvester Company (IHC) as the prime example. In this volume, Gordon Winder makes a case that the truth is both much more complex and a great deal more fascinating. Rather than accept the story that IHC cultivated about its own rise to prominence, Winder urges us to see the reaper, first patented by Cyrus McCormick in 1834, as “a creature of network arrangements among enterprises rather than as a creation of a particular genius or national industry” (3). Instead, the reaper offers the author a platform to make broader claims about the role of business networks to account for the emergence of modern corporations like IHC at the turn of the twentieth century. McCormick was not alone in riding the reaper to riches, but instead surrounded by competition that opened myriad regional markets spanning the United States, Canada, as well as Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Chapter 2 examines the regional structure of the harvester manufacturing industry in the period between 1830 and 1880. Before the 1880s small firms were able to sustain lucrative businesses by licensing patents from other manufacturers or by imitating the innovations of competitors. These regional firms benefitted from laws that allowed patent holders to negotiate territorial agreements, which encouraged the diffusion of new technology across the nation and international markets. Small regional manufacturers also worked with farmers to adapt machinery to local landscapes. Chapter 3 examines the role of regional subcontractors in supplying smaller firms with metal parts, a service that allowed harvester manufacturers to overcome the seasonal labor constraints created by agricultural labor markets. The undoing of these regionally dispersed firms began in the late 1880s when Chicago’s Deering and McCormick firms and Toronto’s Massey-Harris began manufacturing using engineer-designed steel parts that small firms could not replicate. In Chapter 4, Winder is careful to argue that the merger of Deering and McCormick to create IHC was not a result of vertical integration. Rather, vertical integration only occurred after the previous licensing regime collapsed.

Some of the book’s best insights are contained in Chapter 5, which explores representations of the reaper during world’s fairs and competitions through an examination of catalogues and trade ephemera. Countless scholars have explored the cultural significance of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but Winder suggests that these events were particularly important for manufacturers showcasing their products on the international stage. Presenting a new piece of machinery to international audiences could be a mixed blessing to a manufacturer. To their benefit, McCormick’s design won international acclaim for the company in 1851, opening opportunities to broker patent licensing relationships with international manufacturing firms. On the other hand, displaying machinery proved an expensive proposition that enabled competitors to emulate new designs. Chapter 6 abandons the international scene to focus on the correspondence of one reaper manufacturing firm. In this chapter, Winder’s analysis of the papers of the Dayton S. Morgan Company offer some valuable perspective about the business networks of a small reaper company, but the chapter stands a bit outside of the narrative flow of the rest of the text. In the conclusion, the author reiterates the main arguments, historicizing the birth of corporations like IHC in the context of the collapse of the previous licensing regime.

A text that deftly blends the methodologies of business history, historical geography, and cultural...