This week's readings focus on the technology of manufacturing. They suggest that the largest technological advancements made during this period were not so much in the products being produced, but the means of production. I found it a bit hard to recognize just how significant these changes were. Consider, for example, last week's video about gun-making: for the most part, the notion of goods being produced laboriously by skilled craftsmen seems so foreign to us in this modern age of mass production. A modern gun isn't a unique product resulting from weeks of work; it comes off an assembly line along with thousands of others just like it.

Cowan describes the outcome of the changes in the manufacturing style as, in Eli Whitney's words, "expedition, uniformity, and exactness". The process itself was known either as "armory practice" or the "American system of manufacture". The former name results from the origins of the principle: with Eli Whitney and Simeon North's factories for producing firearms. These practices then spread to other industries; Cowan discusses several examples such as clock-making and sewing machines, but I'll omit the details.

It isn't particularly surprising that these innovations began in the arms industry, because of the government support. The government's willingness to pay in advance for the muskets made it possible for Whitney to develop the necessary machinery, as well as saving him from his financial troubles. Therefore, the government played a critical role in this technological and economic transition. It may not necessarily have been their intent to do so, and certainly was not their only intent (they did, after all, need the muskets and pistols for their anticipated upcoming war), but does present the important question of what the government's role in technological development should be.

Thomas Jefferson's letters argue against the idea of factories and industry, and in favor of agriculture instead. He makes his arguments on what might be described as a philosophical or moral basis, not on an economic one.