Reviewed by Seth Rockman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

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Reviewed by Seth Rockman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Seth Rockman, Brown University

Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry. By Lawrence A. Peskin. Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 312 pages. $ 49.95 (cloth). Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution. By John Bezís-Selfa. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 304 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
Despite the centrality of new manufacturing technologies to England's eighteenth-century history and the importance of English trade goods to colonial consumerism, the Industrial Revolution sounds more like an artifact of an outdated textbook than a useful way of understanding social change in early America. When the word industrial makes a rare appearance in the pages of this journal, it is usually modified by "pre-," so as to describe the rural character of colonial society. Yet with some slight repackaging, the notion of an Industrial Revolution has utility for scholars interested in the history of American capitalism and labor in the period before the Boston Associates erected a factory at Lowell. Lawrence A. Peskin showcases "industrial revolutionaries" (1), men who exhibited a will to manufacture far earlier than they had a way. Though their leading product was verbiage, the advocates of manufacturing created cultural legitimacy for the technological innovations that would follow. In John Bezís-Selfa's account, an industrious revolution propelled the early American iron industry by giving investors a new way of understanding time and money as well as new strategies for disciplining labor. Together, these two volumes argue against tracing American economic development to the invisible hand of the marketplace, innate human acquisitiveness, and the irresistibility of technology. To the contrary, Peskin and Bezís-Selfa make state power and coercive violence indispensable to early American industrial growth.	1
In a smart volume that inaugurates a new book series in cultural and social history approaches to economic topics, Peskin explores the political economy of American manufacturing from the heyday of the first British Empire in the 1760s until the sectional divide over tariffs in the 1830s. Over this lengthy period, three arguments remained constant in the rhetoric of manufacturing's advocates. First, American industry would promote social harmony, whether by providing employment for the poor or by creating beneficial synergies among different regions and interests. Second, manufacturing offered a potent means to accomplish political ends, from compelling Parliament to rescind its unjust taxation schemes to furnishing the infant United States with a meaningful independence. Finally, the government would have a sizable role to play in advancing American manufacturing via bounties, tariffs, and laws of incorporation. Most striking in Peskin's account is the persistence of a fundamentally mercantilist political economy throughout the period when new laissez-faire ideas were on the ascent.	2
In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, American essayists and commentators viewed the British economic system as mutually beneficial to periphery and center. This system was truly colonial: Americans would grow raw materials, carry them across the sea to England, and consume the manufactured goods that England sent back. But rather than viewing this arrangement, especially the restrictions on American manufacturing, as exploitative, American writers celebrated cooperation and "reciprocal dependence" (44). The imposition of the Sugar and Stamp acts in 1764 and 1765 struck Americans as a deviation from mercantilism, and colonists cast themselves as the conservative defenders of the political liberties and the economic orthodoxies so clearly under attack in London. For the colonists the nonimportation movement and its accompanying celebration of domestic production sought to bring Parliament back to its mercantilist senses. With his characteristically wry wit, Peskin notes that this mode of protest primarily generated "pro-manufacturing rhetoric rather than a flood of American-made goods" (38). Yet, this rhetoric was not without consequence, for it offered urban mechanics and their allies a glimpse of American economic and political independence. "Developmentalists," Peskin explains, "increasingly came to see the protests against British taxation not as an effort to return to the old tenets of the British system but as the springboard to a new postcolonial economy based on domestic production at least as much as on overseas trade" (30).	. . .

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