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The Roots of American Industrialization. By David R. Meyer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiii + 333 pp. Tables, figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00. ISBN: 0-801-87141-7.
Industrialization in the antebellum Northeast, U.S. history textbooks tell us, was a result of the region's declining agriculture, which pushed farmers off the land into factories or forced them to migrate west. At the same time, transportation improvements enabled midwestern farmers to ship their crops east, exacerbating the agrarian decline of the eastern states and accelerating the region's industrial growth. According to geographer David R. Meyer, this standard portrait requires sharp revision. In The Roots of American Industrialization, he argues that it was the prosperity of eastern agriculture that sparked the industrial transformation of the antebellum era. Once a manufacturing base had been established in the East, moreover, the region's urban metropolises further fueled demand and supplied capital. Finally, within each industry, entrepreneurs developed a variety of innovative organizational, technological, and marketing strategies to ensure that the region retained its premier industrial position and eventually expanded into national markets.
In the first part of his study, Meyer argues that between 1790 and 1820 "significant changes" in commerce, agriculture, and manufacturing "set the stage for faster growth from 1820 to 1860" (p. 281). Foremost among the changes was the increasing commercialization and prosperity of eastern agriculture, which led to a growing rural population and labor force and to rising per...