Chapter in Perspective

A new industrial order arose in the late nineteenth century. Machine-driven mass manufacturing for a new nationwide market, produced by a regimented factory work force, replaced the oldereconomy of farms, local merchant businesses, and small factory towns. A network of industrial systems linked the economy as never before. New business strategies and structures coordinated and controlled it. And workers struggled to adjust. Like the captains of big business, they too began to organize. This industrial order made the United States the dominant economic power on earth.