Industrializing America is a deft and elegantly written survey of the evolution of the nation's economy through the nineteenth century. What is particularly striking about the book as a whole is the remarkable ease with which Licht incorporates a vast array of historical research on the economy, the polity, society, race, gender, class, as well as technology and industrial geography. -- Michael A. Bernstein, University of California, San Diego.

Previous books on the industrialization of America have focused either on the industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century or on the rise of big industry in the second. In this groundbreaking study Licht provides a new perspective by focusing on industrialization first as a product and then as an agent of change. As population expansion and greater market activity fueled manufacture, he explains, industrialization led to greater social and economic developments as well as crises that required a more administered political economic order.