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The American Reaper - Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910 (Paperback)
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The American Reaper - Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830-1910 (Paperback)
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The American Reaper adopts a network approach to account for the
international diffusion of harvesting technology from North
America, from the invention of the reaper through to the formation
of a dominant transnational corporation, International Harvester.
Much previous historical research into industrial networks focuses
on industrial districts within metropolitan centres, but by
focusing on harvesting - a typically rural technology - this book
is able to analyse the spread of technological knowledge through a
series of local networks and across national boundaries. In doing
so it argues that the industry developed through a relatively
stable stage from the 1850s into the 1890s, during which time many
firms shared knowledge within and outside the US through patent
licensing, to spread the diffusion of the American style of
machines to establishments located around the industrial world.
This positive cooperation was further enhanced through sales
networks that appear to be early expressions of managerial firms.
The book also reinterprets the rise of giant corporations,
especially International Harvester Corporation (IHC), arguing that
mass production was achieved in Chicago in the 1880s, where
unprecedented urban growth made possible a break with the
constraints felt elsewhere in the dispersed production system. It
unleashed an unchecked competitive market economy with destructive
tendencies throughout the transnational 'American reaper' networks;
a previously stable and expanding production system. This is
significant because the rise of corporate capital in this industry
is usually explained as an outworking of national natural
advantage, as an ingenious harnessing of science and technology to
solve production problems, and as a rational solution to the
problems associated with the worst forms of unregulated competition
that emerged as independent firms developed from small-scale,
artisanal production to large-scale manufacturers, on their own and
within the separate and isolated US economy. The first study
dedicated to the development and diffusion of American harvesting
machine technology, this book will appeal to scholars from a
diverse range of fields, including economic history, business
history, the history of knowledge transfer, historical geography
and economic geography.
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