Arts and ChartsMain MenuIntroductionAn Age of PanicsNineteenth Century TrackAn Age of EconomicsTwentieth Century TrackGalleryCreditsDaniel Platt and Rachel Knecht3ebb098c099a4564606054ddd3beb814ce8f359d
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12017-07-20T08:57:20-07:00Corporate Connections7plain2017-09-03T09:58:58-07:00After the Civil War, American businesses began to consolidate into larger and more complicated organizational forms. In many industries, like railroads and steel production, owners discovered that there were advantages to be realized by integrating the many different aspects of their business – extraction, transportation, manufacturing, and marketing, for example – into one corporate unit. Doing this successfully often required developing new ways of visualizing industrial processes and mapping the lines of communication between far-flung managers, offices, and departments.
Business charts became an important technology of corporate integration. These graphics were not merely technical, however. They told a story about how individual corporations functioned. Note how over time, the relationships they depicted became more directional and self-contained, presenting the large firm as a complex machine with interlocking parts in constant motion. Yet as corporations stretched themselves across the national canvas, these charts began to tell a broader story about the workings of the economy generally. Economic events in one place – a spike in Texas oil prices or a dip in New York employment – could be understood as the consequence of subtler changes earlier in a tangled economic chain.