Economic History as Technological History

In 1951, Holt, Rinehart and Winston published a book by economic historian George Rogers Taylor that was quickly hailed as a landmark: The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. Thus wrote Richard Overton in the American Historical Review: “To say merely that this is a good book is a gross understatement.”{1} Generations of historians have echoed this sentiment, and it is a rare scholar of American transportation history who has not used Taylor’s study as the launching ramp for his or her own research. I know I am not the only historian of technology whose 1968 Harper Torchbook edition is now dog-eared and worn. Yet Taylor’s volume considered much more than the development of American transportation during a forty-five-year period: it provided an overview of economic development in the United States during those pivotal years at the outset of its industrial revolution.

The Transportation Revolution appeared as volume 4 in a series, The Economic History of the United States, edited by Henry David, Harold Faulkner, Louis Hacker, Curtis Nettels, and Fred Shannon. Eight of the nine volumes originally projected were published, and several served the precise purpose of the editors—namely, that of synthesizing the existing scholarship on the developing American economy. At least two other titles in the series were widely read and exercised significant influence on multiple generations of students and scholars: Paul Gates’s The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860, and Edward Kirkland’s Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860–1897.{2} These three volumes reflected the intense interest among postwar economic historians in nineteenth-century American economic growth. Prime evidence of this is Harvard’s Center for Research in Entrepreneurial History, which flourished through the efforts of such scholars as Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Fritz Redlich, and Hugh Aitken.{3} But Taylor’s approach in The Transportation Revolution is especially emblematic.

Born in the small central Wisconsin town of Beaver Dam, Taylor earned his initial degree in economics at the University of Chicago in 1921. His first position at Earlham College in 1923 was followed a year later by an appointment at Amherst. He earned his doctorate at Chicago in 1929 with a thesis on agrarian discontent in the Mississippi Valley preceding the war of 1812, and he spent nearly his entire career at Amherst, the last twenty-six years as George D. Olds Professor. His research included the role of tariffs and the development of banking, and he also edited the Problems in American Civilization series that Amherst’s American civilization department developed and that Heath published and distributed widely. In 1965, he moved to the position of senior resident scholar at the Eleutherian Mills– Hagley Foundation. While there, he published a seminal two-part article on “The Beginnings of Mass Transportation in Urban America” and edited, with Lucius Ellsworth, a compilation of papers titled Approaches to American Economic History.{4}

Yet, all his other work notwithstanding, Taylor’s reputation rests upon The Transportation Revolution. This 400-page study manages to cover a complicated era of economic and technological development with wonderful ease and beautifully clear writing. After opening with a short chapter on the nature of merchant capitalism in the young republic, he devoted six chapters to transportation: five examined roads and bridges, canals, steamboats, railroads, and the merchant marine, with another reviewing the changes in cost and speed of transportation. But these took Taylor less than halfway through his study. The next two chapters focused on domestic trade (surveying not just the patterns and volume of trade, but also the comparative advantages of the different modes of transportation) and foreign trade. Then Taylor turned to manufacturing for two chapters, one of which was devoted to the factory system; and then to workers for another two chapters, in which he discussed the emergence of wage labor. The final chapters covered banks and financial institutions, money and prices, and the role of government. A concluding section reviewed the national economy that had begun to develop by 1860. Taylor noted that the economic axis of the country exhibited a “new orientation,” one in which “the great cities of the East no longer faced the sea and gave their chief attention to shipping and foreign trade. Their commerce centered increasingly now at the railroad stations rather than at the docks . . .” (p. 398). A fully national structure was not completely in place, but huge strides had been taken in all key areas of the economy.

The Transportation Revolution is clearly the work of an economic historian, as evidenced by the appendix of statistics on various aspects of economic activity—and many of the subjects Taylor dealt with remain central concerns for those working in these fields. Yet it is also apparent that Taylor was interested in questions of wider interest to other sorts of historians, including those studying technology. In that sense, this book demonstrates one of the principal academic influences that helped shape the history of technology as it formally emerged after 1955: scholarship in economic history. Taylor was more interested in the consequences of technology than in its origins, and he measured many of those consequences in economic terms, using very solid research. Yet we do not find a deterministic account in Taylor. And his book seems to recognize the significance of technological change as a subject worthy of attention.{5}

For historians of technology, Taylor’s discussion of transportation, and the priority he ascribes to it, best reflects this outlook. His decision to structure the book as he did sent a signal that reached beyond the ranks of specialists in transportation history. Indeed, this emphasis on transportation constituted an important and original contribution by Taylor to the literature on economic and (as it would turn out) technological history. He set forth the argument that the economic changes of the first half of the nineteenth century were tied to the development of internal transport, and then he demonstrated the revolutionary or transformational consequences of those changes. While he examined the basic technological developments related to the growth of each mode of transport, his main goal was to show how newfound capabilities for moving people and goods proved pivotal for the development of the economy.

This idea hardly seems earth-shattering now—and it was not completely unknown before Taylor—but neither was it self-evident. In a review in Pennsylvania History, for example, historian Louis Hunter observed that

the distinctive feature of Professor Taylor’s treatment is the emphasis on the development of transportation, to which approximately one-third of the text is devoted. In his preface the author defends this emphasis on the grounds that “transportation developments were so revolutionary and . . . so fundamental to the economic growth of the country.” Yet one can argue with equal force that developments in manufacturing during these decades were hardly less revolution-ary and fundamental. To have allotted six chapters to the one theme and but two to the other seems to me a little extreme, but since Professor Taylor handles the two on manufacturing with such skill I shall not press my complaint unduly.{6}

The point is, however, that Taylor believed that the changes in transportation were the key feature of economic development during this forty-five-year period, thereby elevating the significance of technology in accounts of economic change. It is important to realize that Taylor’s book appeared before publication of many of the specialized studies that raised our estimation of the role of transportation in the history of economic and technological development. True, Taylor could draw upon the handful of solid histories of individual railroad companies by authors such as Edward Hungerford, Paul Gates, and Edward Mott; he also had Robert Albion’s works on maritime history and Hunter’s own classic account, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technical History (Taylor thanked Hunter in the acknowledgments).{7} And as the notes and bibliography demonstrate, Taylor utilized a solid base of books and articles by many others. But many now-standard works had not yet been written: John Stover’s and Robert Fogel’s studies of railroads, Carter Goodrich’s on canals, Harry Scheiber’s books and articles on internal improvements, and Alfred Chandler’s initial articles and book on the role of railroads in the nation’s business and economic history all were in the future.{8} Certainly, Taylor’s argument concerning the essential importance of transportation to economic growth provided a necessary foundation for the many scholarly studies of transportation that emerged from the mid-1950s onward.

Hunter’s comment also draws attention to the portions of Taylor’s study that were not focused on transportation. It is easy to forget that Taylor opened his book with chapters on transportation in order to emphasize his point, but then explored topics that moved in other directions; he was interested in the much wider question of the overall pattern of economic development during these early decades of the U.S. industrial revolution. And several points can be made about his efforts. First, he sought to highlight patterns and connections. Thus Taylor was concerned not only with the interrelatedness of transportation and manufacturing, but also with the interconnection of capital and workers and with the overall linkage of the government with the economy. He made the last point in a number of places throughout the book by highlighting the ways in which government activities shaped all manner of economic activities. For those who harbored a nostalgic affection for a time when government did not interfere with business, he noted that “the following pages which describe the actual practice of governmental intervention lend no support to those who place the heyday of laissez faire in the United States during the period of this study” (p. 354).

The Transportation Revolution also foreshadowed the ways in which historians of technology would eventually attempt to analyze and understand the changes taking place in the United States after 1800. This is most apparent in Taylor’s discussion of the factory system. His account is perhaps not as nuanced as we would now offer, given several generations of additional scholarship. Not surprisingly, he adopted the classic account of Eli Whitney’s role in the American system of manufactures—Robert Woodbury’s correction came later.{9} And in his discussion of labor, he followed John R. Commons’s approach to workers and unions. Today, we would be more inclined to ask about those who used the technology—factory workers as well as those citizens who relied upon the transportation system—and less inclined to focus on the supply of innovations. But in more general terms, Taylor’s analysis of the factory system and of most of his other subjects stands the test of time. Subsequent scholars have fleshed out the details, but the outline still holds.

Without intending to do so, Taylor presented aspects of the process of economic development between 1815 and 1860 in ways that set the stage for the central concerns of historians of technology. This is not surprising, perhaps, since he examined those pivotal years in which the momentum of industrial and technological change grew into a process that was seemingly permanent. And within that process, transport and manufacturing became two of the enduring issues for technological historians. Agriculture only was not addressed in Taylor’s volume, but that omission is a product of the structure of the series itself, which featured a separate volume on the subject. Thus we find in Taylor’s book attention to the factory, to innovations in textile technology, and to the workforce—topics that under the umbrella of the American system of manufactures animated so many of SHOT’s members and so much of Technology and Culture‘s audience during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one also finds in Taylor’s work comments and analysis that align with later scholarly developments; for example, his attention to the role of public policy resonates as an increasingly significant thematic focus among present-day historians of technology. Taylor’s reference to alternative ways of organizing corporate manufacturing enterprises foreshadowed the findings of Philip Scranton, while his discussion of the importance of state and local governments in the development of transportation opened the door for the ideas developed by Colleen Dunlavy and William Childs.{10}

But perhaps most importantly, Taylor presented his analysis of transportation and economic development against a broader context that included social as well as economic factors. As he described the nation’s situation in his final chapter,

Americans of that age, especially in the northern states, met the rapidly developing opportunities for material gain with unusual energy and enthusiasm. The spirit of adventure, aggressiveness, and willingness to make sacrifices in the hope of economic advantage, which characterized American merchants in the foreign trade and drove settlers to develop the West so rapidly despite all obstacles and uncertainties, also dominated the businessmen who played so active a part in planning, organizing, financing, and managing the new ventures in transportation and manufacturing. (p. 394)

This description is not only reminiscent of the views of nineteenth-century America developed by economic historian Thomas Cochran and social historian Daniel Boorstin, but it also anticipated Eugene Ferguson’s discussion of the technological community of the mid-Atlantic region during these years. All of these scholars shared an interest in the way that values and outlooks helped drive economic and technological developments.{11}

Overall, Taylor’s analysis has held up amazingly well; in fact, few historical studies have possessed such staying power. The durability of this book merits special recognition, as others have also noted. In another retrospective essay published in Business History Review thirty years ago, Harry Scheiber and Stephen Salsbury—themselves noted scholars of American transportation history—correctly remarked that “few scholarly works have defined an era and provided a conceptual framework for its analysis more successfully than Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860.”{12} This still holds true. One reason is Taylor’s impressively accurate and careful research and his grasp of the literature of his field as of 1950. Writing in American Economic Review, John Hutchins remarked that he had “found very few statements of fact or of interpretation with which to quarrel.”{13} Certainly, recent scholarship has altered some of Taylor’s interpretations, refined some of his statistical analysis, and clarified certain of the events he examined, yet the general conclusions underlying his study remain impressively useful. Indeed, a review of Taylor’s fifty-page bibliography and careful footnotes helps us to appreciate both the volume and the type of research that had already touched upon technological topics at mid-century, and upon which the modern historiography of technology would build after 1960. Taylor’s work, in the end, laid out many of the topics that would attract the attention of historians of technology during SHOT’s formative period. For this and many other reasons, it remains a classic in our field.

1. Richard C. Overton, review of The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, by George Rogers Taylor, American Historical Review 57 (1952): 701–3.

2. Paul Wallace Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York, 1960);

Edward Chase Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860– 1897 (New York, 1961).

3. See Jonathan R. T. Hughes, “Arthur Cole and Entrepreneurial History,” available online at http://www.h-net.org/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHprint/v012/p0133-p0145.pdf (accessed 13 August 2007).

4. Taylor’s contributions to the Problems in American Civilization series (known to a generation of students as “Heath Pamphlets”) included Jackson versus Biddle: The Struggle over the Second Bank of the United States (1949); Hamilton and the National Debt (1950); The Great Tariff Debate, 1820–1830 (1953); and The War of 1812: Past Justifications and Present Interpretations (1963). “The Beginnings of Mass Transportation in Urban America” was published sequentially in the summer and autumn 1966 issues of Smithsonian Journal of History. The edited volume with Ellsworth was Approaches to American Economic History, published for the Eleutherian Mills–Hagley Foundation by the University Press of Virginia in 1971. Biographical information is from American Men of Science, 11th ed. (New York, 1968), 8:1588.

5. See especially Taylor’s discussion of domestic trade, pages 159–61.

6. Louis C. Hunter, review of The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, by George Rogers Taylor, Pennsylvania History 19 (1952): 384–85.

7. Edward H. Hungerford, The Story of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 1827–1927 (New York, 1928), Men and Iron: The History of the New York Central (New York, 1938), Daniel Willard Rides the Line: The Story of a Great Railroad Man (New York, 1938), Men of Erie: A Story of Human Effort (New York, 1946); Paul W. Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1934); Edward Harold Mott, Between the Ocean and the Lakes: The Story of Erie (New York, 1908); Robert G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York, 1939), Square-Riggers on Schedule: The New York Sailing Packets to England, France, and the Cotton Ports (Princeton, N.J., 1938); Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technical History (Cambridge, Mass., 1949).

8. Key works published subsequent to The Transportation Revolution include John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865–1900: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955) and American Railroads (Chicago, 1961); Robert W. Fogel, The Union Pacific Railroad: A Case in Premature Enterprise (Baltimore, 1960); Carter Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890 (New York, 1960); and Alfred Dupont Chandler, Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) and The Railroads, The Nation’s First Big Business: Sources and Readings (New York, 1965); see also Harry N. Scheiber, “Internal Improvements and Economic Change in Ohio, 1820–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1962).

9. Robert S. Woodbury, “The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts,” Technology and Culture 1 (1960): 235–53.

10. Philip Scranton, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885–1941 (Cambridge, 1989) and Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, N.J., 1997); Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, N.J., 1994); and William R. Childs, The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century (College Station, Tex., 2005).

11. Thomas C. Cochran and William C. Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York, 1942); Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, 1845– 1890: The Business Mind in Action (Cambridge, 1953); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958), The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1965), and The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community (New York, 1978); and Eugene S. Ferguson, “The American-ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 3–24.

12. Harry N. Scheiber and Stephen Salsbury, “Reflections on George Rogers Taylor’s The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860: A Twenty-five Year Retrospect,” Business History Review 51 (1977): 79–89.

13. John G. B. Hutchins, review of The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, by George Rogers Taylor, American Economic Review 42 (1952): 622–23.