Manufacturing and Urbanization



Manufacturing and Urbanization

Manufacturing during Colonial Period

This entailed the application of new manufacturing processes and ultimately the development of new products, and was fostered by technical change in the transportation and communication sectors, in the extractive sectors producing raw materials (agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and mining), and by the growth and increased density of population. All of these factors, along with the availability of improved techniques within manufacture itself, affected the economic viability of specialized industrial production and the forms it took. So too did war, tariff policy, and the development of a financial infrastructure capable of facilitating the assemblage of large amounts of capital.

Most of the American economy during the colonial period consisted of subsistence agriculture. Overlaid upon this were commercial agricultural activities specific to particular regions (grain in the middle colonies, tobacco in the Chesapeake, and rice and indigo in the South), shipbuilding, fishing, and maritime trade. Most manufacturing was done at home and, if not at home, tended to be small-scale and located in the countryside. Aside from shipbuilding, the colonial period witnessed commercial manufacturing activity in the tanning of leather, milling of lumber, smelting of iron ore and forging of iron products, and grinding of grain. Most of this activity served local markets. High-value items were typically imported, usually from England (Field, 1987).

Although British navigation laws, which governed trade within the Empire, were biased against the development of colonial industry, their architects intended the colonies to serve as a source of intermediate goods. Thus, some early-stage manufacture was actually fostered by the system. The refining and further manufacture of iron products was discouraged in the colonies and banned outright after 1750, but smelting was not so encumbered. This was partly a matter of weight: It was prohibitively expensive to ship unsmelted iron ore as opposed to pig iron to England.

The big money in the colonial period lay in export activities: sending tobacco, dried fish, naval stores, and ships to Europe, trading guns and rum for slaves on the West African coast, and provisioning the colonies with manufactures from England and the sugar islands of the Caribbean with slaves, foodstuffs, horses, and lumber. The vast bulk of imports to the colonies came from England, and most of these we remanufactured goods. At the time of the American Declaration of Independence, the radical transformation of the textile and iron industries generally identified as the Industrial Revolution in England was only just beginning, with many of the necessary preconditions, technological and other, already established. Still, the English were far ahead of the Americans and, even adding in the cost of transportation, could deliver finished textile and iron goods to the colonies more cheaply than the colonies could make such goods themselves (Chandler, 1977).

During the Revolutionary War

During the Revolutionary War, trade with Europe was disrupted, creating pressures for self-sufficiency that provided some protection and stimulus to American manufactures. As a consequence of the peace settlement of 1783, the newly independent states again had access to cheap imports of British ...