![]() ![]() Before the 1880s small firms were able to sustain lucrative businesses by licensing patents from other manufacturers or by imitating the innovations of competitors. McCormick was not alone in riding the reaper to riches, but instead surrounded by competition that opened myriad regional markets spanning the United States, Canada, as well as Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.Ĭhapter 2 examines the regional structure of the harvester manufacturing industry in the period between 18. Instead, the reaper offers the author a platform to make broader claims about the role of business networks to account for the emergence of modern corporations like IHC at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather than accept the story that IHC cultivated about its own rise to prominence, Winder urges us to see the reaper, first patented by Cyrus McCormick in 1834, as “a creature of network arrangements among enterprises rather than as a creation of a particular genius or national industry” (3). In this volume, Gordon Winder makes a case that the truth is both much more complex and a great deal more fascinating. ![]() have argued that demand for new machinery in these western markets inexorably led small regional equipment producers to evolve into massive, vertically integrated corporations, with Chicago’s International Harvester Company (IHC) as the prime example. Previous scholarship has portrayed the reaper as a transformative technology that helped foster western grain production across the Midwest and the Great Plains. In many ways, the McCormick reaper seems to epitomize triumphal narratives of American expansion, enterprise, and economic growth in the nineteenth century. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |