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U.S. Textile Industry Location 1880-1900
- Doane, David (Oakland University)
- Oakland University
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Abstract
This project comprises three databases containing data on firms, products, costs. inputs, outputs, and technology for 448 products made by 70 textile manufacturing firms surveyed over the period 1888-1890 in 16 states and published in the Seventh Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Vol. I (1892).
The firms' names and locations (except region: north or south) were originally hidden, in order to obtain cooperation in revealing firms' competitive data to the U.S. Commissioner of Labor. However, scholars have since discovered most of the textile mill names through careful matching of information in the report with other sources (see Doane pp. 51-54). Identification of each firm permitted augmenting the data (e.g., transportation costs) using other sources.
Data were assembled by Doane for his doctoral dissertation research, which analyzed shifts in textile manufacturing after 1880. He evaluated statements by economic historians about the causes of the decline of northern manufacturing. His goal was to evaluate common assertions against empirical evidence in an explicit argument form grounded in economic theory. To this end, he used many data sources to measure and compare manufacturing cost, productivity, and quality of textiles made by firms located in the northern and southern regions.
Doane transformed and augmented the Commissioner's data, adding categorical variables and imputed costs (transportation, interest, depreciation) to the Commissioner's original data. To adjust for varying cloth width (and thereby facilitate product comparison, classification, and coding) Doane transformed the Commissioner's cost per linear yard to cents per square yard.
Originally (1968-1970) the data were keypunched onto IBM cards. In 2019, Doane (then retired from a 44-year academic career) converted, cleaned, and reformatted his data to Excel format to make them available to modern scholars. The resulting databases comprise three Excel spreadsheets:
Doane Data B: Cost Per Linear Yard.xlsx (448 products, 41 variables, B1, B2, ... , B42) Doane Data C: Cost Per Square Yard.xlsx
(448 products, 51 variables, C1, C2, ... , C52) Doane Data F: Total Cost for Each Textile Mill (70 firms, 36 variables, F1, F2, ... , F32) -
Weighting
Product data are unweighted. However, scholars could, if desired, weight by firm size or other characteristics. -
Technical Information
Response Rates: This project comprises three databases containing data on firms, products, costs. inputs, outputs, and technology for 448 products made by 70 textile manufacturing firms surveyed over the period 1888-1890 in 16 states and published in the Seventh Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Vol. I (1892). The U.S. Commissioner of Labor surveyed 84 firms, but 14 had so much missing information that analysis would not be productive. The resulting 70 firms and 448 products in these databases are best viewed not as a sample, but essentially as a population of all the known U.S. textile manufacturers at the time.
Firm names and locations (except region: north or south) were originally hidden, in order to obtain cooperation in revealing firms' competitive data to the U.S. Commissioner of Labor. However, scholars have since discovered most of the textile mill names through careful matching of information in the report with other sources (see Doane pp. 51-54). Identification of each firm permitted augmenting the data (e.g., transportation costs) using other sources. -
Technical Information
Presence of Common Scales: Data include ratio data (e.g., cost, cloth parameters) and categorical data (e.g., region, product name, state). Each database is intended to be largely self-documenting so that variable types will be apparent.
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1888-01-01 / 1890-12-31Time Period: Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1888--Wed Dec 31 00:00:00 EST 1890 (Late 19th century)
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1888-01-01 / 1890-12-31Collection Date(s): Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 1888--Wed Dec 31 00:00:00 EST 1890 (compiled and augmented 1969-1971)
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13 U.S. states in 3 regions
Smallest Geographic Unit: 13 US States in 3 regions
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other~~
The U.S. Commissioner of Labor, Carroll D. Wright, documented his methods in extraordinary detail. His meticulous efforts made his two-volume reports in 1889 and 1890 of exceptional value to scholars. Carroll also was the first to use machine tabulating methods in compiling and transforming the data. It is worth reading more about this extraordinary individual and the methods used in his census of manufacturing (particularly textiles, which are the subject of our data).
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Doane, David P. “Regional Cost Differentials and Textile Location: A Statistical Analysis.” Explorations in Economic History 9, no. 1 (1971): 3–34.
Update Metadata: 2019-08-01 | Issue Number: 1 | Registration Date: 2019-08-01
Doane, David; Oakland University (2019): U.S. Textile Industry Location 1880-1900. Version: V0. ICPSR - Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.3886/E111026