Description
Robert Lewis documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites at the city’s outskirts, started to build factory districts there with the assistance of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were in the end more consequential, Lewis demonstrates, than any person achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, Chicago Made establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial The us.