The Roots of American Industrialization (review)

David Meyer begins this impressive study of antebellum industrial development in the United States by citing the conflicting visions for the American economy posed by Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Whereas Franklin considered the rise of manufacturing as the mark of an agriculturally poor nation, Hamilton championed the rise of productivity in both manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Not only was Franklin mistaken, Meyer claims, but the legions of historians afterward who claimed the mutual exclusivity of agricultural and industrial development also failed to appreciate the early history of manufacturing and its debt to productive farmers. Throughout his work, Meyer attempts to set the record straight and in the process has provided a convincing model of America's early industrial revolution.

In the first half of this work, Meyer highlights the significance of a strong agricultural sector to laying the foundations for later growth. In the period from 1790 to 1820, he argues, productivity on farms released labor to commercial and manufacturing operations, thus supplying both food and people to the emerging seaboard cities. As the "seedbeds" of industry, states like Connecticut continued to show increases in agricultural productivity at the same time that local entrepreneurs began to specialize in production and extend their reach beyond local markets and into growing urban centers. In the end, Meyer argues, the cotton textile centers of Providence, Philadelphia, and Boston all developed with "distinctive industrial paths rooted in separate constellations of merchant capital, mechanic skills, technology, products, and labor organization" (p. 96). Although it was an urban phenomenon, Meyer attributes the simultaneous rise of textile manufacturing cores in these areas to slow accumulation of people, goods, and capital facilitated by prosperous farms in each region's hinterland.

The dominance of eastern manufacturing is the focus of the second half of the book, which chronicles growth from 1820 to 1860. Rather than a "take off" in manufacturing, Meyer describes an urban core that is well equipped to handle increases in population generated by immigration, entrepreneurs prepared to reach markets well beyond their immediate surroundings, and transportation networks that easily absorbed the steady increase in traffic. One almost gets the sense that there is no industrial "revolution" at work here but, rather, a realization of a region's potential that had been decades in the making. For example, Meyer suggests that Connecticut manufacturers dominated national markets in brass manufacturing by the 1850s because they tapped into preexisting social networks, "facilitating information flow and allowing them to mobilize substantial capital to expand firms or start new ones" (p. 277). These networks did not appear overnight; they were rooted in the social ties among farmers, professionals, and merchants that had helped build a prosperous agricultural sector in the period before 1820. This pattern was repeated over and over again in various industries across the Northeast as the continued growth in both agricultural and manufacturing productivity "generated broad-based manufacturing demand and supported capital accumulation to fund infrastructure and industrial expansion" (p. 188).

Although he begins the book by contrasting Franklin and Hamilton's views on manufacturing, this is really the last time that individual Americans show up in Meyer's work. There is the occasional appearance by an entrepreneur such as the Connecticut clockmaker Eli Terry or Rhode Island's Samuel Slater, but these actors take a backseat to their commodities and the role of developing markets in urban cores along the East Coast. This emphasis, along with the heavy quantitative flavor of the argument, might steer some historians away from The Roots of American Industrialization. This is unfortunate, as Meyer dispels many of the assumptions of self-sufficiency and agrarian isolation so near and dear to devotees of the "market revolution" approach to this period. He presents farmers as market-conscious actors, moreover, and views their participation in the diversification of the East Coast's economy as one of choice rather than one of necessity or dependency. In order to bolster these claims, Meyer relies upon copious amounts...