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Book Review
| Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry. By Lawrence A. Peskin. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiv, 294 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7324-X.)
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| Much has been made of late about early nineteenth-century industrialization and the rise of a market society. Lawrence A. Peskin reminds us about the long-term buildup of interest in domestic manufacturing in North America and the important role of promoters in creating an ideological and institutional base of support for that transformation. He directly chides the Marxian and classical economist schools for their reliance upon impersonal forces, redirecting our attention to some well-known figures such as Tench Coxe and Mathew Carey, as well as networks of less-known merchants, mechanics, and manufacturers. |
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Manufacturing Revolution begins with the British economic system of the 1760s, in which the role of colonists was to supply raw materials and purchase manufactured goods. Peskin depicts the rapid unraveling of that British system under pressure of the nonimportation and other actions of the revolutionary crisis by merchants and mechanics alike, although those two groups did not necessarily share similar reasons for promoting domestic manufacturing, as becomes evident over the course of the book's story. Political independence hastened calls for economic independence, although the Revolution left an ambiguous legacy of possibilities and also severe economic problems. |
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