There were large factories in the United States before 1880—businesses that were heavily capitalized, employing several thousand workers each. But over the next two decades an altogether new type of business, a new scale of doing business, swept over the American landscape. Once conditions were in place—including a nationally integrated railroad infrastructure, new technologies of mass production, and increasingly concentrated, urbanized markets—economic transformation happened with astonishing speed, over a dozen years or so, running from the late 1880s through the 1890s. In this short span, in a series of industries, new businesses were organized and old businesses reorganized to create enterprises that encompassed huge manufacturing plants spread over several geographic locations, coupled with nationalized systems of distribution and marketing. Big business thus joined mass production to mass distribution and in the process fostered mass consumption.

Mass Production.

The industrial...