Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele (review)

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele's Manufacturing Advantage charts the rise of American manufacturing from the revolutionary period through the Mexican-American War. The shift was dramatic, as she frames it in the conclusion: How did the early United States transition from an overwhelmingly agricultural nation dependent on foreign countries for cloth and arms to the top prizewinner at the 1851 London Crystal Palace exhibition? Schakenbach Regele's answer is government support for industry. She connects the rise of manufactures to what she calls "national security capitalism," arguing that key early American industries—textiles and guns—developed in large part due to government investment.

Schakenbach Regele's interpretation benefits from her awareness of the many different forms government "stimulus" can take. She describes government contracts for guns and textiles as well as a wide range of other kinds of subsidies and policies, painting a picture that goes well beyond most accounts of government support for industry in the period. Among her examples are the 1819 Treaty of Florida (chapter 4), which yielded an infusion of cash for the Boston Associates at a critical time for the growth of the Waltham-Lowell Complex. When John Quincy Adams negotiated to acquire Florida, he agreed that the federal government would assume $5 million of American citizens' claims against Spain. Some $1.8 million of this total went to New England, and more than half of this provided what Schakenbach Regele calls "venture capital" for the Boston Associates.

The overarching portrait painted by Schakenbach Regele is of an early "military-industrial complex" (p. 3). This complex played an immediate role in securing the young nation and also shaped the emerging system of political economy in distinctive ways. As Schakenbach Regele writes in the introduction, though the relationship between government and the economy was "everywhere in flux, American statesmen took for granted that the government would have some role in the economy." They believed in the need for an "interventionist state to provide security and access to markets" (p. 5).

Schakenbach Regele's evocative comparisons to later periods will be interesting for scholars and even more fruitful for teaching the period. For example, historians of technology will find that her discussions of government contracts for arms and textiles invite comparisons with the emergence of Silicon Valley. Similarly, she discusses early trade negotiations in Latin America as a precursor to the "dollar diplomacy" of the twentieth century (chapter 5).

The emergence of what contemporaries called the "American System of Manufactures" is well-tilled terrain, but scholars of the period will find fresh insights in Schakenbach Regele's thoughtful volume. She persuasively argues that in a period when the federal government remained quite small, it nonetheless provided crucial support for the emergence of manufacturing.

I came away from Manufacturing Advantage convinced that the federal government shaped early American manufacturing in many more ways than I had previously understood. Just how this fits into the broader economic history of the period remains unresolved, and the book should present an opening for dialogue between historians and economists. Schakenbach Regele draws only slightly on the field of economic history, but her work invites more engagement, and with it a better understanding of how important these early forms of government stimulus were to the industrializing economy.