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  • The Roots of American Industrialization
  • Mary H. Blewett (bio)
The Roots of American Industrialization. By David R. Meyer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+333. $45.

Historical geographer David R. Meyer challenges the traditional interpretations of early industrialization, insisting that beginning in the 1790s a prosperous agricultural sector in the northeast both created capital and provided markets for early industrial growth. Meyer addresses a "puzzle" about early economic development: If, as the conventional arguments go, farmers in the east were impoverished and the vast majority of the population lived in areas with primitive transportation, where did developing small industry find markets? Not in the midwest or south until the 1840s, or in export trade. And even in 1860 two-thirds of the population in the east remained rural.

According to Meyer, antebellum rural growth resulted from the increase in intensive specialized farming households near Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which prospered from urban markets and purchased the products of light industry. Thus, in regional and subregional metropolises "agricultural and industrial transformations were integrated, mutually reinforcing processes" (p. 6). "As eastern agriculture was transformed, local farm communities increased their engagement with the market economy. Wholesalers and retailers . . . transmitted through price signals information about changing nonlocal demand for agricultural products. Farmers strategically determined supply responses. . . . As farm productivity rose, surplus rural labor entered eastern factories. . . . [G]rowing farm prosperity (slower during 1790-1820) supplied capital and provided lucrative markets for local, subregional, and interregional manufactures" (p. 8). [End Page 837]

In addition to drawing a sharp contrast to the image of farm youth escaping decline or bailing out of rural households, Meyer presents a classic picture of multiplier effects. How, then, does he handle the relationship between technology and culture? While "standard reasoning" suggests that technical innovations occurred in cities, he argues from data on patents per capita that "inventions" outside metropolises outpaced "inventiveness" or the search for market advantage in them (pp. 65-66). He suggests that this might be explained by the presence in rural counties of "urban places" such as the "Boston Region Shoe Complex." This pre-1830 industry in agriculturally unproductive Essex County is characterized not by technical changes but by rising productivity through division of labor, the centralization of management, and the development of a major market in the slave South. Shoe factories would wait on the inventiveness of I. M. Singer of Cambridge.

Likewise, the power loom, perfected by the Boston Manufacturing Company at Waltham, represented only one of eight elements of the astute business plan (a plan not adopted by Providence investors, to their woe) shaped by social networks of investors, managers, and mechanics: inventiveness by urban investors rather than rural invention. Another element was the decision to pay "premium wages . . . to attract high-quality laborers" (p. 118), a part of the business plan that flies in the face of worker protest in 1832 and 1834—and current historiography—but without comment.

Meyer's first chapter sets out his aim of revising previous interpretations and considering evidence for his argument, which rests almost entirely on secondary sources. He presents little new evidence on that burgeoning growth in rural areas near Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1790 to 1860 and its market connections with industrial production. He does not explore or explain how his alternate thesis intersects with the extensive historiography on the transition to the market or early industrial development, a debate hardly confined to farm impoverishment. Indeed, his economic theory places him in conflict with many historians also trying to identify the origins of market capitalism.

Connecticut seemed the perfect combination of productive agriculture and small industries, such as hats, tinware, and brass works. Yet Hartford and New Haven did not industrialize, serving rather from 1790 to 1820 as a "subregional metropolis" for New York City, as did the shoe-making towns in Essex County and the mill towns of Rhode Island for Boston. Surprisingly for a book presenting a revisionist argument, The Roots of American Industrialization is largely descriptive, detailing how Meyer reorders and synthesizes the literature from the perspective of spatial relationships.

Mary H. Blewett

Dr. Blewett, professor emerita of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell...

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