This interesting and carefully crafted book is a journey into terrains at once familiar and yet (it turns out) insufficiently investigated. Lawrence Peskin's project here is to survey a singular line of support that percolated from the 1780s into the 1820s (with trace elements extending longer) on behalf of manufacturing. Although aspects of the story are surely well known, he manages to provide new leverage on the subject.

Committed to probing rhetorical strategies as much as underlying processes, Peskin is drawn into fine-grained exegeses of discourses attaching to the assorted associations that emerged beginning in the late eighteenth century to back manufacturing as a precious centerpiece of the early national political economy. Led by figures such as Mathew Carey, Tench Coxe, and David Humphreys, and drawing in some measure on Revolutionary Era homespun and nonimportation movements, these organizations reflected handicraft and agricultural interests along with the central influence of merchants. Put side by side, the associations might well evince different inflections (not least around the vexing issue of tariffs). But Peskin maintains that overall their articulated positions comprised “neomercantilism.” While melding liberal endorsement of acquisitiveness and economic innovation with republican distaste for luxury, reverence for productivity, and notions of common good, neomercantilism for Peskin also embraced received mercantilist conventions by urging national economic independence, intersectoral coordination, and a vigorous governmental role in orchestrating economic developments (pp. 5–6).

For Peskin, this cluster of ideas and leanings was the conceptual framework for manufacturing in the new nation: the “intellectual origins,” as he says, behind those arguing that manufacturing could and should be harmonized with commerce and agriculture and (the corollary proposition) that making things was potentially every bit as vital to the young country as trading goods or harvesting crops. Because, moreover, he characterizes such promanufacturing arguments as possessing substantial traction in the milieu, Peskin likewise casts these “intellectual origins” as enjoying a potent role in fostering the manufacturing in fact taking root in the new United States.

There is much that is fresh and freshly valuable in this discussion. Peskin's early pages, for example, usefully underscore the subversive dimensions of Revolutionary Era nonimportation projects. He suggests persuasively that, to the extent these were tied not just to restrained consumption but also to calls for manufacturing and hence to the colonies' own emergent mercantilist priorities, nonimportation directly challenged British policies that sought to constrain the American colonies to serving simply as markets and sources of raw materials. At the same time, Manufacturing Revolution helpfully highlights the central role of merchants in backing manufacturing during the period he covers, while simultaneously (through its handling of the opening years of the nineteenth century) reminding us of the flip-flop that occurred after 1800 in partisan Federalist and Republican support for this strand of the economy.

Above all, Peskin's evocation of neomercantilism allows him to bring into clarifying focus a particular and consequential framework of ideas, a salient and significant leitmotif, arcing across the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Yet it is worth noting that some of the very reasons Peskin explores this intellectual structure—specifically, the coherence and persistence he ascribes to neomercantilism—also raise questions about his perspective. Thus, although Peskin occasionally cites the agricultural South as slotting into a regional division of labor compatible with neomercantilism, the decidedly northern thrust of his analysis implies a geographic lopsidedness in the neomercantalist outlook that might have been more fully addressed. So too, there existed centrifugal tugs, intermittently invigorated by politics, among agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing interests, as well as their proponents, during these decades. By the same token, manufacturing itself harbored divisions across the faultline of wage labor.

Now Peskin notices the intersectoral tensions. And he certainly recognizes the swelling restiveness of wage laborers. But in this latter context, he fixes perhaps too heavily on the emergent import of large factories and too little on the friction-generating effect of the general striving for heightened productivity (within and without factories) that characterized the spread of industrial capitalism—and that arguably formed the heart of industrialization in the young Republic. Peskin thus tends to bypass the full extent to which the journeymen's struggle to retain their independence conflicted with the campaign for national economic autonomy he is foregrounding; and he consequently declines to consider fully the related ironic possibility that industrial capitalism itself was actually at some odds with neomcercantilism. At a broader level, and taking both sectoral and intramanufacturing divisive pressures into account, one might ask whether it might not have made sense for Peskin to pivot his narrative more around the fundamental bracketings of neomercantilism: around why it was in truth not more entrenched rather than around its reach. This might in turn have encouraged this student of rhetoric to dig even deeper than he does into the intentionally ideological character—the willful stress on ongoing lack of contradictions—attached to the language of neomercantilism.

Yet this remains an intelligent and substantial study. Affirming the place of ideas in the brew of factors fashioning economic practices, Manufacturing Revolution illuminates an intellectual trajectory that at the very least helps us understand the portentous commitments to manufacturing surfacing in the originating years of the Republic.