Economic History as Technological History: George Rogers Taylor's The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860

This essay reviews 1951 classic study by George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. From the perspective of more than fifty years, the book has held up very well and it continues to provide the best introduction to the development and consequences of transportation changes in the nineteenth-century United States. But Taylor's work also surveyed other and larger general patterns of economic and technological development in the years before the Civil War, demonstrating the influence of currents within field of economic history during the formative years of the emerging discipline of the history of technology.