Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy: Why the history of “innovation” is a con

The Duke story is false: mid-century business historians fabricated it to accord with the theory of creative destruction, developed by libertarian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Duke’s true “innovation” came not in the 1880s, when the cigarette machine transformed the production process, but in the 1890s, when business corporations shed the fetters of state regulation and radically redefined themselves. Advanced business and history students obliged by writing two articles for the Harvard Business Review that applied the theory of creative destruction to historical entrepreneurs, among them Duke.

Source: bostonreview.net