This book examines the business and production networks in North America’s nineteenth-century harvesting machinery industry.2 The growth of this industry is interwoven with the unparalleled historical expansion of commercial farming and farm mechanization in the U.S.A., and has been central to interpretations of the rise of corporate capitalism inside the U.S. space economy. The story of the American reaper (Figure 1.1) explains the rise of corporate capitalism in the U.S.A. as an outworking of national natural advantage, as an ingenious harnessing of science and technology to solve production problems, and as a rational solution

to the problems associated with the worst forms of unregulated competition. The American reaper story has itself developed, from a set of popular ideas about U.S. comparative advantage and character, to a matter of scholarship in business and economic history. Nevertheless, it is a story in need of revision.