ABSTRACT
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Cyrus Hall McCormick and his family sold an enormous number of harvesting machines to farmers. Theirs was a growing transnational business focused on the mechanical harvesting of wheat, rye, barley, timothy, and grass using horsepower. 1 Their machinery simultaneously epitomized the mechanization of the American environment, abundance and a perpetual harvest, and the achievement of the technological sublime, outcomes that buttressed the superiority of settled cultivation, which constituted a key claim within settler nation building. The reaper was marketed as an adjunct to the pastoral ideal and was systematically combined both with images and stories of modernization related to the railroad, steamship, and telegraph and with depictions of ‘others’ using an Orientalist lens designed to produce narratives of a march toward civilization and cultivation. Cultural geographer Mona Domosh has shown how, from the beginning of the 1880s, the McCormick catalogues turned this story of the ‘civilizing machine’ into a narrative of America’s ‘civilizing mission.’ To achieve this, the catalogues featured both the ‘flexible racism’ embedded in this imperialist project and the rhetoric of a ‘civilizing commerce’: the machines of US manufacturers were sent out to conquer the world, bringing peace and plenty and eradicating savagery, as part of a US business mission. 2 In that rhetoric, Cyrus Hall McCormick and his machines were central actors claiming to reshape the world.
