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Professor of History
John.Heitmann@notes.udayton.edu
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Recent Scholarship & Works in Progress
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Meyer, David R. The Roots of American Industrialization Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 333 pp., $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7141-7 hardcover Publication Date: May, 2003
According to one traditional interpretation, New England's 19th century transition away from agriculture to manufacturing was the consequence of declining soil fertility and the rise of more productive farms to the West. In his The Roots of American Industrialization, David R. Meyer takes issue with this view by retelling this familiar story using a framework that brings together themes and analysis from urban, agricultural, and economic history. Meyer, a Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, argues that it was not so much agricultural decline, as sustained agricultural prosperity, that played the critical role in the emergence of a manufacturing base centered around Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and to a lesser degree Baltimore during the late Antebellum period. In sum, Eastern farmers operated with considerable acumen, and shifted from less profitable to more profitable products; their productivity gains and surpluses contributed in a significant way to capital formation, market expansion and manufacturing start-ups. In sum, within a given regional sphere agrarian activity symbiotically interacted with concurrent urban growth, and consequently highly capitalized factories were established whose products increasingly found national markets. This process was far from even, however, and Meyer goes into great deal of detail to demonstrate just how complex this history can be. The author divided this work into two periods, 1790 to 1820 and then 1820 to 1860. Why 1820 was used as a cut-off date was never explained, although it follows from his focus on transportation technologies, and the fact that it was only in the later period that canals and the railroad influence the course of the economy. Claiming that his analysis moves chronologically forward beginning with 1790 rather than starting with assumptions borne from an understanding of things as they existed in 1860, Meyer provides the reader with some powerful insights. For example, his careful dissection of transportation, and the place of the wagon and road in forging the early American economy, led to several conclusions that clearly made sense. His historical reconstruction of agricultural developments in a variety of settings was analytically powerful. Social networks were not neglected. Additionally, the author's excellent characterization of the New England textile industry should be of use to students exploring this topic. Drawing on numerous secondary sources but few primary manuscript sources, the author
constructed numerous charts and tables that invaluable to any comprehensive understanding of
Antebellum America. If there is a weakness, it is in the rather ponderous prose that makes reading this
work tiresome and difficult. Graduate-level students will find this book useful, and indeed contained in it
may be the seeds of new questions concerning a most important subject.
John Heitmann University of Dayton
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