| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Philip Scranton. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 415. $39.50.

In this book, Philip Scranton meaningfully relates such diverse phenomena as the fraternal "shop culture" of mid-nineteenth-century machine shops, the style-conscious consumerism spawned by the manufacture and sale of downmarket jewelry and upscale furniture around the turn of the century, the federal government's shaping of mandated accounting standards and forbidden trade-governance tactics by the 1920s, and much else. Scranton's achievement builds on his earlier monographs, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia 1800–1885 (1983) and Figured Tapestry: Production Markets, and Power in Philadephia Textiles, 1885–1941 (1989). There, Scranton treated Philadelphia's labor, social, business, urban, and technological histories as a unified industrial history. Here, he extends this approach to a range of industries and a set of cities stretching from Providence to Philadelphia and west to Chicago. This carefully researched, theoretically informed, and imaginatively structured book will command a broad readership. 1

Scranton's central aim is to establish the strength, vitality, and significance of specialty production as conducted by small and large firms. Three sections based on national census data (1890, 1909, 1923) make a powerful claim that specialty manufacturing accounted for perhaps half of the national's total value added in manufacturing (p. 17), an equal share of employment, and economic growth second to none. Biographies of individual entrepreneurs, their firms and associations, and the associated development of industrial districts anchor this volume. Scranton illuminates topics that have found favor recently among business historians, especially those going beyond Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s writings on managerial capitalism and the rise of big business. . . .

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