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

Over the last twenty-five years, historians have revised our understanding of the federal government in the early national and antebellum periods, describing an activist state that sought to build the institutions necessary to administer and govern the growing country. In Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele builds on the existing literature regarding state-building in early America and adds a national security perspective. She examines the development of "national security capitalism: a mixed enterprise system in which government agents and private producers" strove to ensure economic and military independence through the domestic manufacture of war materials from the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War (p. 2).

Regele traces the development of technical proficiency, the growth of capacity, and the evolution of relations with the federal government in the textile and firearms industries. The opening chapter, which describes the challenges of clothing and arming federal troops in the aftermath of the American Revolution, deftly links two industries not often considered together and highlights the obstacles the executive branch faced as it tried to transform former colonies dependent on Great Britain into a self-sufficient nation. Regele next recounts the early debates over the appropriate relationship between the government and military-related industries, arguing that American military-industrial policy was rooted in decisions made during the 1790s. The period of embargo and war with Great Britain boosted domestic industry, and the territorial expansion that followed the War of 1812 provided additional stimulus. U.S. firearms and textile manufacturers, assisted by government representatives, soon tried to sell their wares in the emerging markets of Latin America. By the 1840s, American textile makers were looking to Asia for new markets but needed diplomatic help. The negotiation of a favorable trade treaty with China and the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain both facilitated trade with Asia. War with Mexico in 1848 opened a vast new territory for cotton cultivation and boosted the domestic market for firearms.

Manufacturing Advantage is a useful introduction to textile and firearms manufacturing in the early national and antebellum periods. It describes the products in both industries and includes two glossaries with related terms. It also identifies the major producers and the key manufacturing regions and explains why they became centers of industry. Notably, virtually all of the producers Regele examines were located in New England. There is little discussion of how attitudes and policies regarding government assistance to military-related industries might have differed by geographic region, especially as the nation moved closer to civil war.

The book also surveys the full range of policy tools the government used, both at home and abroad, to promote and assist the two different industries. Many of those tools, including the issuance of patents, the easing of limits on the immigration of skilled labor, the theft of foreign intellectual property, and the negotiation of favorable trade deals, remain popular options for governments to aid industry today. In this well-written and imaginatively conceived study, Regele convincingly demonstrates the existence of a symbiotic relationship between the government and military-related industries before the U.S.-Mexican War in which the government directed military power and conducted diplomacy in the service of industry, and industrial development bolstered federal power.