Abstract
This chapter turns to an exploration of New York’s antebellum manufacturing sector, its aggregate size, and its industrial composition. One principle prediction of many models of urban economic geography is that the proportion of the population engaged in manufacturing will increase with city size. Analysis of 1860 census manufacturing employment data demonstrates that this was very much the case in the United States on the eve of the Civil War. It is not surprising, therefore, that New York City was an important mid-nineteenth century manufacturing center. The proportion of the population working in manufacturing industries in New York was among the highest across U.S. cities. Contrary to what a naive application of an abstract economic model might have led us to expect, however, the concentration of manufacturing employment in New York was not the highest among large U.S. cities. Metropolitan Boston, for example, with only about three-quarters of metropolitan New York’s population, had a larger manufacturing workforce. Thus, New York’s manufacturing sector was unsurprisingly large but, from a purely theoretical perspective, anomalously small.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The employment concentration ratio for an industry in a location is generally defined as the percentage of local employment in that industry divided by the percentage of total national employment in the same industry. Occasionally, as in this instance, because some data required for the standard definition are not available, the industrial employment percentages will be calculated with respect to the total population of the locality and the nation.
- 2.
The geographic foci of this chapter are the three large northeastern metropolitan regions of the antebellum United States, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, each consisting of a central county and its surrounding, industrialized counties. This regional perspective is appropriate because some important industries were attracted to the vicinity of large urban markets but needed either waterpower or more space than they could afford in the central city. Many firms in such industries located in what are now “suburban” counties (Stott, 1989).
The three metropolitan regions are defined as follows.
New York: New York and Kings Counties, NY, and Hudson, Essex, and Passaic Counties, NJ.
Philadelphia: Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Philadelphia Counties, PA, and Camden County, NJ.
Boston: Essex, Norfolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, and Suffolk Counties, MA.
The source for all of the data in this chapter is the 1850 Census (U.S. Department of the Interior, 1990). In general reference to 1850 data is most appropriate for the purposes of this chapter because that year was exactly at mid-century and was tabulated before Americans began to adjust their commercial relationships in anticipation of possible Civil War. Because county-level employment data for specific industries are more reliable and more readily accessible for 1860, however, some of the discussion refers to conditions in that census year.
- 3.
The statistical relationship is more apparent graphically using logarithms rather than the underlying numbers. The relationship between the logarithms also reflects the tendency for county manufacturing concentration ratios to rise faster than linearly as population increases.
- 4.
The estimated regression equation is
$$\begin{aligned} \text{Log}\left( {\text{Concentration}\,\text{Ratio}} \right)\text{ = } & -\text{5}\text{.39 + 0}\text{.43}\,\text{Log}\left( {\text{Population}} \right) \\ & \, \, \left( {\text{0}\text{.30}} \right)\,\,\,\, \, \left( {\text{0}\text{.03}} \right) \\ \text{R-squared = } & \text{0}\text{.12} \\ \end{aligned}$$Standard errors in parentheses. The shaded area on the chart is the approximate range of one standard error.
- 5.
The regression residuals for New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Hamilton, OH, (Cincinnati) counties illustrated in Fig. 5.1 are all positive, albeit within one standard error. More tellingly, perhaps, all of these observations are above the fitted line and there are no very large counties below the line. An alternative statistical specification, which included a log population squared term, did, indeed, have a better fit.
$$\begin{aligned} {\text{Log}}\left( {{\text{Concentration}}\,{\text{Ratio}}} \right){ = } & 1 5. 7 5- 4. 2 8\,{\text{Log}}\left( {\text{Population}} \right){ + 0} . 2 6\,{\text{Log}}\left( {\text{Population}} \right)^{ 2} \\ & \left( {1.30} \right)\,\,\left( {0.28} \right)\quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \quad \left( {0.016} \right) \\ \text{R-squared = } & \text{0}\text{.27} \\ \end{aligned}$$Under this specification, the residuals for New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are negative but, again, by less than a standard error.
- 6.
The data in this and subsequent paragraphs are drawn from (U.S. Department of the Interior, 1865). Caution is necessary when attempting to draw conclusions from this source about county-level characteristics of specific manufacturing sectors because enumerators’ definitions of industries apparently varied from place to place.
- 7.
Note that these concentrations ratios reflect industry-specific employment as a percentage of the total manufacturing workforce rather than as a percentage of total population as in previous applications of this statistic in this chapter.
- 8.
Except when otherwise indicated the material in this section on shipbuilding is taken from Albion (1939).
- 9.
This estimate is based on the assumption that each for each industry listed in Table 6.3, that the amount by which the industry’s concentration ratio in New York exceeds that of the higher ratio of Philadelphia’s and Boston’s represents the proportion of industry employment in New York connected with the shipbuilding industry. For example, the concentration ratio for the steam engine industry was 1.34 in New York and 0.76 in Philadelphia. This industry accounted for 2.76% of total U.S. employment. The percentage of total metropolitan manufacturing workforce employed in this industry, therefore, was 3.71% in New York and 2.1% in Philadelphia. If New York’s percentage had been the same as Philadelphia’s, there would have been 2,690 individuals employed in the industry instead of 4,753. I assume that the difference between these two numbers, or 2,063, to be the number of New York steam engine makers supplying the steamboat building industry.
- 10.
The statistics for the ladies clothing industry probably do not include small custom dressmaking businesses, which would have been enumerated in the “millinery goods” sector. At the time the latter term referred to more than hat-making and included custom-made dresses and a variety of accessories. New York’s 7.27 concentration ratio in the millinery industry may, however, have presaged the future importance of the ladies’ garment industry in the City’s industrial economy.
- 11.
The cotton goods industry employed about the same number of people as the men’s clothing industry, while capital invested per worker in the former was $810 compared to $237 in the latter (U.S. Department of the Interior, 1990).
- 12.
Sean Wilentz defines a manufactory as “oversized workshops that gathered between five and ten skilled workers with a few boys and women to produce, by hand, large lots of light consumer goods” (Wilentz, 2004, p. 31).
- 13.
Information from 1909 provides the best representation of the industrial and geographic structure of the U.S. economy at the end of the “displaced nineteenth century” because this was the last census of manufacturing undertaken during the 1815–1924 period before wartime mobilization. Reproducing statistics equivalent to those presented in Table 6.2 was not possible because the data on individual industries were reported on the county level for the 1860 census and on cities with populations over 50,000 in 1910. This makes it impossible to present information for identically defined metropolitan areas for the two census years. Further, between 1860 and 1910 Chicago and St. Louis rose to the near the top of the U.S. urban hierarchy and the boundaries of the City of New York were expanded to encompass The Bronx, Kings, Queens, and Richmond Counties. The New York, Philadelphia, and Boston “metropolitan areas” in Table 6.4 consist of the respective central cities and all other cities with 1910 populations greater than 50,000 that lie within a one-hour drive of the central city in 2015. There were no such cities near Chicago and St. Louis at the time. Data for the New York metropolitan area include statistics for Yonkers, NY, and Bayonne, Elizabeth, Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, Passaic, and Patterson, NJ. Data for Camden and Trenton, NJ, were consolidated with Philadelphia. And metropolitan Boston included Brockton, Cambridge, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, Somerville, and Worcester, MA.
References
Albion, R. G. (1939). The Rise of New York Port (1815–1860). New York: Scribner’s.
Baer, W. N. (2008). The Economic Development of the Cigar Industry in the United States.Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing.
Ben-Atar, D. (1995). Alexander Hamilton’s Alternative: Technology Piracy and the Report on Manufactures. The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 52(3), 390–391.
Bruegel, M. (2002). Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cole, A. H., & Williamson, H. F. (1941). The American Carpet Manufacture: A History and Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cronon, W. (1991). Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton.
Davis, P. (1949). The Development of the American Glass Industry (pp. 42, 73). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Duranton, G., & Puga, D. (2003). Micro-foundations of Urban Agglomeration Economies (NBER Working Paper 9931).
Freedley, E. T. (1859). Philadelphia and Its Manufactures: A Hand-Book Exhibiting the Development, Variety, and Statistics of the Manufacturing Industry of Philadelphia in 1857. Philadelphia: Edward Young.
Greeley, H. E. (1872). The Great Industries of the United States—Being an Historical Summary of the Origin, Growth, and Perfection of the Chief Industrial Arts of This Country—Quarries. Retrieved from Stone Quarries and Beyond http://quarriesandbeyond.org/articles_and_books/great_industries.html.
Hoover, E. M. (1937). Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lee, A. M. (1937). The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument. New York: Macmillan.
Liebowitz, S. (2015, August). Paradise Lost: The Payment of British Authors in 19th Century America. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2676048.
Marshall, A. (1895). Principles of Economics (Vol. 1, 3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan.
Mendeslsohn, A. D. (2015). The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire. New York: New York University Press.
Prus, M. J. (1990). Mechanisation and the Gender-Based Division of Labour in the US Cigar Industry. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 14, 63–79.
Putnam, T. R. (2015). Joseph Long’s Slops: Ready-Made Clothing in Early America. Winterthur Portfolio, 49(2 and 3), 63–91.
Smith, W. E. (2001). Anthony Trollope in America: A Brief Survey of His Publishing History. The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 62(3), 479–500. Retrieved from Princeton. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.62.3.0479.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A9ff77e87fa95eef5c4f731f41f079ff9.
Stott, R. (1989). Hinterland Development and Differences in Work Setting: The New York Region, 1820–1870. In W. Pencak & C. Wright (Eds.), New York and the Rise of Capitalism: Economic Development and Social and Political History of an American State, 1780–1870. New York: The New York Historical Society.
Stotz, L. (1938). History of the Gas Industry. New York: Stettiner Brothers.
Tebbel, J. (1963). The Compact History of the American Newspaper. Portland, OR: Hawthorn Books.
Tebbel, J. (1972). A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Volume I: The Creation of an Industry, 1630–1865. Ann Arbor: R. R. Bowker.
Tebbel, J., & Zuckerman, M. E. (1991). The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
U.S. Department of the Interior. (1865). Manufactures of the United States in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
U.S. Department of the Interior. (1990). Abstract of the Statistics of Manufactures according to the Returns of the Seventh Census. New York: Norman Ross Publishing.
Wilentz, S. (2004). Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zakin, M. (2003). Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gurwitz, A. (2019). Manufacturing Employment at Mid-Century. In: Atlantic Metropolis. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13351-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13352-8
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)