Thomas A. Kinney. The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xi + 381 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7946-9, $49.95 (cloth).

Although ‘horse and buggy’ usually connotes a quainticon of the preindustrial world, The Carriage Trade by ThomasA. Kinney shows that horse-drawn vehicles were anything butquaint. Carriage and wagon making was a major nineteenth-centuryindustry, employing by 1890 130,000 employees in 13,000 firmsproducing $200 million in value (p. 262). These firms were leadersin production, management, and marketing innovations. Kinney’sstraightforward account shows how mechanization, interchangeability,and rationalization changed the nature of