One Hundred Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture.

Reviewed by John A. Agnew

Many students of American economic history now see the 1890s as a crucial decade in the long-term transformation of the American economy from a set of local and regional economies in the early nineteenth century into a truly national one in the twentieth. The history written about this "incorporation" has been partial to the pivotal role of the trusts, the importance of tycoons, the development of railroad and agribusiness enterprises, and the growth of investment banking. The "other side" of the process - the making of national consumer markets - has received much less attention. This may be because of a supply-side bias but it may also owe something to the difficulty of bringing …