Question
How did all American car manufacturing happen to get established in Michigan?
Answer
There are probably specific, contingent explanations based on unique conditions, local histories and biographies, but there are also some general spatial distribution patterns in the history of American innovation. These general conditions are what made Detroit a highly probable location for the auto industry. Specific contingent elements of history made it the actual location, beating out other theoretically plausible locations (in a counterfactual history sense).
Innovation generally happens at the periphery, not at the center, subject to constraints of infrastructure readiness and transportation (wagon trails, canals, navigable rivers and lakes, railroads, roads). So you want to track the technology-based urbanization frontier, not the absolute settlement frontier.
Because the periphery was moving rapidly during a period when technology was also evolving rapidly you can see the innovation frontier move through history.
As the American frontier pushed westwards between the 17th and 20th centuries, each new American innovation took root somewhere along wherever the frontier happened to be at the time.
The textile industry grew near Lowell, Massachusetts around for example, around the 1820s.
Plank roads, an 1840s innovation, began a little further west in Syracuse.
Post-civil war, the steel industry grew near Pittsburg. The oil industry, which started growing a little later, took root in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio (Cleveland in particular). It may seem like a strange coincidence that the raw materials happened to be where the frontier was at that time, but that's backwards thinking. Whatever opportunities the land around the frontier afforded, would have been developed to the extent of available technology.
Though the transcontinental railroad had been completed by mid 19th-century, much of the region west of Chicago was still the Wild West. Detroit was sort of the logistic edge of the expanding technology-based civilization growing west. So Detroit was in the right place at the right time.
It's a very rough sort of explanation, and there's lots of caveats and exceptions to the general pattern, but basically this is the foundational reason.
Continuing the pattern, the aerospace industry ended up in southern California, as did the electronics and computer industries. After that, the spatial patterns become muddy of course, since the edge was reached. Center periphery dynamics in America became as complex as in the old world, and harder to map out.
Innovation generally happens at the periphery, not at the center, subject to constraints of infrastructure readiness and transportation (wagon trails, canals, navigable rivers and lakes, railroads, roads). So you want to track the technology-based urbanization frontier, not the absolute settlement frontier.
Because the periphery was moving rapidly during a period when technology was also evolving rapidly you can see the innovation frontier move through history.
As the American frontier pushed westwards between the 17th and 20th centuries, each new American innovation took root somewhere along wherever the frontier happened to be at the time.
The textile industry grew near Lowell, Massachusetts around for example, around the 1820s.
Plank roads, an 1840s innovation, began a little further west in Syracuse.
Post-civil war, the steel industry grew near Pittsburg. The oil industry, which started growing a little later, took root in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio (Cleveland in particular). It may seem like a strange coincidence that the raw materials happened to be where the frontier was at that time, but that's backwards thinking. Whatever opportunities the land around the frontier afforded, would have been developed to the extent of available technology.
Though the transcontinental railroad had been completed by mid 19th-century, much of the region west of Chicago was still the Wild West. Detroit was sort of the logistic edge of the expanding technology-based civilization growing west. So Detroit was in the right place at the right time.
It's a very rough sort of explanation, and there's lots of caveats and exceptions to the general pattern, but basically this is the foundational reason.
Continuing the pattern, the aerospace industry ended up in southern California, as did the electronics and computer industries. After that, the spatial patterns become muddy of course, since the edge was reached. Center periphery dynamics in America became as complex as in the old world, and harder to map out.