Tag: Book Review

Book Review: Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848

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Book review by Kyle B. Carpenter

In her debut monograph, Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, Lindsay Schakenbach Regele produced an outstanding history of Early American capitalism. She argues that the American arms and textile industries became the focus of policymakers’ efforts to create national security after the American Revolution in order to protect the United States from reconquest and move on from dependence on British manufactured goods. An excellent political economy of Early America, the book shows the clear connections between the American state and business interests from the moment the United States declared its independence. It also hits on the major themes of national security, nationalism, and U.S. territorial and economic expansion. I found the book to be a joy to read as it contributes a valuable new concept, is tightly organized and always stays on point in its argumentation.

Schakenbach Regele offers historians of American political economy a new concept: national security capitalism. She defines it as “a mixed enterprise system in which government agents and private producers brokered solutions to the problems of international economic disparities and war.”[1] A forerunner to Eisenhower’s notion of the military industrial complex, national security capitalism neatly summarizes that the United States never completely adhered to free-market capitalism. Federal subsidies, government contracts, and protectionist tariffs for the arms and textile industries ensured the United States could withstand international conflict. The concept usefully provides a shorthand for future historians to utilize without having to delve into the depths of the connections between state and business in Early America on their own. Schakenbach Regele did all the work and wrapped it in a neat three-word concept.

In terms of its construction, Manufacturing Advantage is chronologically organized and adheres to its tightly woven argument. She begins the book with the supply nightmares George Washington faced during the Revolution and uses Valley Forge to ground her argument in the reality of shortages of clothing and arms. The framers of the constitution, keenly aware of the war’s supply problems, included executive powers for presidential cabinets and staffing to bolster manufacturing without having to wait for congressional legislation. Schakenbach Regele then takes the reader through all the formative decisions made by succeeding presidents and their cabinets from Washington to Polk, hitting all the major events from the embargo under Jefferson, the War of 1812, expansions into Latin America, and finally the U.S.-Mexico War. In each chapter, the author sticks tightly to her argument by explicitly showing how policymakers supported the arms and textile industries.

In fact, my one critique of the book is that it may at times be too tightly organized. Some sections of the book could benefit from the narrative loosening up to explore the broader context. For example, in chapter 6, “Industrial Manifest Destiny,” the author gives a brief background of the United States’ expansion into Oregon and Mexico but spends most of the chapter’s focus on changes to the Ordnance Department. I think this section of the book had an opportunity to expand a bit to explain the continued British and French presence in Texas and how it enflamed U.S. nationalism. Since nationalism was a key element in the unity between the state and manufacturing industry, further exploring the context of rising nationalism might help make the argument even more forceful.

My critique is merely how to make an excellent book even better. Manufacturing Advantage remains an incredible contribution to the history of Early American capitalism and political economy.  Its conceptual framework and organization make it an accessible read for any scholar interested in the topic.

[1] Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776-1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 2.

Book Review: The Dead March

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Patrick Troester is a PhD Candidate in History at Southern Methodist University. His dissertation project studies the evolution of identity and political power in the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands by examining borderland violence and the ways in which the region’s diverse peoples struggled over its meanings. More information can be found at www.patricktroester.org

Review of Peter Guardino, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017

Peter Guardino’s new book presents a masterfully constructed transnational account of one of the most influential, yet least discussed events in North American history: the Mexican-American War. While many authors have sought to examine this conflict from both Mexican and U.S. perspectives, none have approached the depth, breadth, and nuance that Guardino has achieved here. Although he spends significant time on traditional military and political themes, the bulk of the narrative focuses on reconstructing the experiences of ordinary people from both countries, constantly illustrating the ways in which the war’s social and cultural history is essential for understanding what happened on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. Not only does The Dead March offer perhaps the first truly trans-national history of the war, but it does so in a volume that is both accessible to general audiences and deeply relevant to professional historians.

Throughout the book, Guardino builds a sustained and compelling case against a myth that has long haunted interpretations of the Mexican-American War in both countries. This myth suggests that Mexico lost the war primarily because it lacked the stability and national unity of its northern neighbor. Guardino, on the other hand, shows that the war’s outcome had far more to do with the economic and social disparities between the two countries. An assortment of geographical, political, and social forces combined to give the U.S. a strong material advantage. At the same time, costly mobilization efforts, a violent U.S. occupation, and the U.S. Navy’s blockade of Mexican ports compounded Mexico’s already dire economic situation and aggravated its internal conflicts. The loss of revenue from import duties crippled the financially strapped Mexican state, while the war’s demands further burdened a society already living on an economic knife-edge. Given this harsh reality, Guardino shows that the fierce and sustained resistance that Mexicans made against the U.S. invasion was nothing short of remarkable. Working to overcome deep internal divisions and constantly weighing the stark realities of personal and family survival, Mexicans from all walks of life contributed to and participated in the war effort. In doing so, they unequivocally declared and demonstrated their Mexican nationalism. “In short,” Guardino concludes, “Mexico lost the war because it was poor, not because it was not a nation” (367).

More broadly, Guardino uses the Mexican-American War as a lens through which to compare and contrast the two countries as they approached the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite their vast economic, social, and cultural differences, Guardino highlights the key similarities that Mexico and the United States shared. Most importantly, national identity and central state authority were new and fluid forces in both countries. Nationalism was tightly bound to other pre-existing forms of identity, such as regionalism, religion, family, ethnicity, and race. The war’s outcome has led many historians to mistakenly assume a great deal more cohesion and unity than actually existed in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. This in turn has helped reinforce the false dichotomy between a supposedly strong U.S. nation-state and a deficient Mexican one. However, Guardino clearly illustrates that regionalism, partisan conflict, class and racial anxieties, and political violence were rife in both countries at this time. Indeed, the strikingly parallel paths that Mexico and the U.S. followed in the aftermath of the war underline this point. Although the conflict boosted nationalism in the short term, its results enflamed existing conflicts over what each nation aspired to be, leading both countries into massively destructive civil wars.

Although much material in this book will be familiar to both U.S. and Mexican historians, Guardino also presents a great deal of valuable original research. In addition to expertly synthesizing large bodies of scholarship from both sides of the modern border, he draws on his own deep archival evidence from regional and national archives in Mexico, the U.S., and Spain. The most compelling of this original work uses military court records and other sources to reconstruct the complex processes through which the Mexican nation mobilized itself for war. Especially enlightening are Guardino’s treatments of the gendered politics of conscription to the regular Mexican Army, the multi-layered efforts that organized volunteer units in central Mexico, the previously ignored violent resistance with which Mexico City’s residents met the U.S. invaders, and the harsh experiences of the U.S. Army deserters who formed the San Patricio battalion.

Map of Mexico 1847

If there is anything to critique in this book it is that Guardino seems far more comfortable dealing with central Mexico than with the its northern borderlands. Guardino’s expertise on central Mexican politics, especially his previous work on popular participation, allows him to examine the central Mexican war effort in exceptional detail. However, his treatment of the North sometimes lacks the same richness and complexity. Guardino’s task here is made all the more difficult by the fact that much popular participation in the North was small-scale and decentralized, and northerners were never called upon to assemble large National Guard units like those that defended the capital in 1847. In the grand sweep of this expansive study, this is a minor weakness.

Altogether, The Dead March offers a deeply researched and skillfully written narrative that simultaneously shows the Mexican-American War from both sides, while doing justice to the complexity and humanity of those who lived it. It is a much-needed addition to the growing bodies of scholarship in both Mexico and the United States that have begun the difficult work of re-evaluating this conflict and weaving it into national histories that have long sought to marginalize its importance. Guardino’s work represents a major step forward in that effort and provides an invaluable launching point for further research.

Book Review: Tejano Tiger

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Kyle B. Carpenter is a PhD Student in SMU’s William P. Clements Department of History

Thompson, Jerry D. Tejano Tiger: José de los Santos Benavides and the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1823-1891. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2017. Pp. 414. $29.95.

Texas A&M University Press and the Texas Book Consortium

Jerry Thompson’s Tejano Tiger chronicles the life of Santos Benavides of Laredo, Texas.  With a narrative that spans the man’s entire lifetime, the book offers a window into how the U.S.-Mexico War, U.S. Civil War, French intervention in Mexico, Reconstruction politics, and industrialization all impacted the people living on the Rio Grande.  Santos Benavides had a hand in all of these significant events.  As a politician, he adapted quite quickly to the U.S. political system, becoming mayor of Laredo in 1856 and a Texas state house representative in the 1870s.  He also fought Indians, Union soldiers, and Mexican revolutionaries as a combatant in the various conflicts on the border.  Further, he took advantage of the border conflicts and contestations to make savvy real estate and business decisions to build a prominent mercantile house with the Benavides name.  Through boosterism, politicking, smuggling, violence, and bribery, Santos navigated crisis after crisis to do what he thought best for Laredo and himself.  Thompson does a masterful job weaving an engrossing and intriguing narrative of a truly transnational border figure from a wide variety of sources.

Thompson’s source base is astounding.  Santos Benavides did not leave a memoir or extant journal, so the author had to piece together his biography from an assortment of manuscript and archival sources.  From the national archives of the United States and Mexico, regional archives in Texas and Nuevo Leon, down to local archives in Laredo and Nuevo Guerrero, he cites over fifty different manuscript collections, not to mention a wealth of newspaper and secondary source research.  The painstaking hours of research into the lives of people who surrounded Benavides during his life allows Thompson to paint a beautiful and nuanced picture of the man and the borderland in which he lived.

Thompson’s narrative style blends the disparate source base together in a clear, complete whole.  He skillfully keeps Santos at the center of story even though most of his sources engage Benavides peripherally.  Thompson also navigates convoluted border crises with aplomb.  For example, the complex intersections of the U.S. Civil War and French intervention created an atmosphere of chaos along the border.  Thompson, however, finds a narrative balance through the relationship between Santos Benavides and Nuevo Leon governor Santiago Vidaurri.  Benavides fought as an officer for the Confederacy in South Texas while Vidaurri tepidly supported the French imperial push into Mexico.  Through their relationship, Thompson demonstrates the many ways the conflicts in the United States and Mexico overlapped along the border.

The Benavides-Vidaurri relationship is just one of the ways Thompson maintains a transnational scope in the book.  Though the border remains a constant and important concept in the book, the author has no delusions that it was a firm division between two nation-states.  In fact, Thompson constantly shows the international movement of people and goods across a porous, open border.  The central themes for entire chapters center on border crossing.  Chapter four explores how essential the Mexican cotton trade was for the Confederacy, chapter six investigates the complex process of peacemaking after civil war, and the concluding chapter, nine, tracks Santos’s abilities as an international diplomat facilitating peaceful relations between Mexico and the United States.  For Thompson, border crossing was a central theme of Santos Benavides’s life.

Thompson’s masterful biography elicits further questions and offers new paths for historical exploration.  For example, according to Thompson, the Benavides matriarch and her daughters played very important roles in the family’s ranching and mercantile businesses.  Following his sources down that path could reveal a significant analysis of women’s role and their power in the borderland.  Additionally, straying farther from Thompson’s central figure would allow historians to draw out and uncover important research projects.  For instance, when the Confederacy dissolved, angry soldiers roamed around the borderlands wreaking havoc around Brownsville.  A militia made up of Mexican Juaristas helped restore law and order in the city, protecting the lives and property of Anglo-Americans (p. 205).  Why were Juaristas flexing power in and around Brownsville?  What dynamics drove them there?  How did the people of Brownsville react?  Why was Santos Benavides not demanding order from his former charges?  The author cannot cover everything and the book already comes in at 414 pages including notes, bibliography, and index, but it provides a spark for exciting research avenues in nineteenth century borderlands history.

Overall, Tejano Tiger remains a remarkable biography of an important transnational border leader.  The life of Santos Benavides supplies great insight into how an elite conservative Tejano navigated the border in a most tumultuous time.