| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lawrence A. Peskin. Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry. (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 294. $49.95. David R. Meyer. The Roots of American Industrialization. (Creating the North American Landscape.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 333. $45.00.
The delineation of prime movers or forces in the economic and industrial development of the United States during the antebellum period is a bygone exercise. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union, U.S. scholars sought and found lessons on economic modernization in the American past that ostensibly proved the efficacy of markets over state planning. Construct transportation systems (as Americans built railroads) to enable market activity and spawn manufacture; rely on advantageous exportable commodities, as Americans grew cotton, to generate income for commercial and industrial progress: these were notions prominently offered at the time as keys to U.S. economic history and recipes for other nations. In recent decades, scholars have instead emphasized the unevenness of development and the very diversity of economic pursuits, and the issue of causality has been cast to the side. With their attention to "origins" and "roots," the books under review appear as throwbacks to an earlier literature. However, neither author engages in a crusade. While they share a prime concern for the genesis of American industrialization, they have also written remarkably dissimilar books.	1
Advocacy is critical to Lawrence A. Peskin. His book is devoted to early spokesmen for industrial development, a group of "revolutionaries" in his estimate, whose publicizing "played an important role in jump-starting large-scale American manufacturing" (pp. 1, 223). Peskin traces the first promotion of industry to the 1770s. With increased taxation on British imported goods, various voices arose on behalf of colonial production of wares; some took care to picture such manufacture as complementary to the British trade system, while others argued in anticipation of independence. At least one society emerged to offer awards for mechanical invention. With the outbreak of armed conflict, the Continental Congress and state governments considered measures and offered bounties for the manufacture of iron and guns. The Revolutionary War-era discussion, however, did not spur development, capital and labor scarcities effectively limiting any advance.	2
In the decade after independence, Americans tentatively embarked on greater market production of leathers, shoes, nails, rope, soap, beer and ale, and sugar and initiated ventures in textile manufacture. More notably, promotion of industry became pronounced, with the writings of such proselytizers as Matthew Carey and Tench Coxe, the formation of trade associations to press for protective tariffs, and the creation of societies devoted, as their titles variously indicated, to the "Encouragement" and "Establishing" of "Manufactures" and "Useful Arts." Peskin analyzes the positions and ideologies of the promanufacture advocates of the period and casts them as neither "liberal" nor "republican" but rather as "neomercantilist." Early promoters of industry proposed that the new nation be economically independent and administered by a strong central government and have a positive balance of trade and harmonious commercial, agricultural, and industrial sectors. To reinforce his portrayal, Peskin notes the strong merchant presence in the promanufacture movement and the shared interests of commercial wealth with artisans and journeymen. Peskin finds a similar worldview among late eighteenth-century promoters of productive agriculture (such as David Humphreys).	. . .

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