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Author: Cathy D. Matson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 398
ISBN-13: 9780271027111
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have focused their attention on understanding the early American economy. This text enters the resurgent discussion by showcasing the work of leading scholars who represent a spectrum of historiographical and methodological viewpoints.
Author: Edwin J. Perkins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1988
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780231063395
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe colonial era is especially appealing in regard to economic history because it represents a study in contrasts. The economy was exceptionally dynamic in terms of population growth and geographical expansion. No major famines, epidemics, or extended wars intervened to reverse, or even slow down appreciably, the tide of vigorous economic growth. Despite this broad expansion, however, the fundamental patterns of economic behavior remained fairly constant. The members of the main occupational groups - farmers, planters, merchants, artisans, indentured servants, and slaves - performed similar functions throughout the period. In comparison with the vast number of institutional innovations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, structural change in the colonial economy evolved gradually. With the exception of the adoption of the pernicious system of black slavery, few new economic institutions and no revolutionary new technologies emerged to disrupt the stability of this remarkably affluent commercial-agricultural society. Living standards rose slowly but fairly steadily at a rate of 3 to 5 percent a decade after 1650. (Monetary sums are converted into 1980 dollars so that the figures will be relevant to modern readers.) For the most part, this book describes the economic life styles of free white society. The term "colonists" is virtually synonymous here with inhabitants of European origin. Thus, statements about very high living standards and the benefits of land ownership pertain only to whites. One chapter does focus exclusively, however, on indentured servants and slaves. This book represents the author's best judgment about the most important features of the colonial economy and their relationship to the general society and to the movement for independence. It should be a good starting point for all - undergraduate to scholar - interested in learning more about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This popular study, lauded by professors and scholars alike, has been diligently revised to reflect the tremendous amount of new research conducted during the last decade, and now includes a totally new chapter on women in the economy. Presenting a great deal of up-to-date information in a concise and lively style, the book surveys the main aspects of the colonial economy: population and economic expansion; the six main occupational groups (family farmers, indentured servants, slaves, artisans, great planters, and merchants); women in the economy; domestic and imperial taxes; the colonial monetary system; living standards for the typical family
Author: John J. McCusker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-01-01
Total Pages: 538
ISBN-13: 1469600005
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy the American Revolution, the farmers and city-dwellers of British America had achieved, individually and collectively, considerable prosperity. The nature and extent of that success are still unfolding. In this first comprehensive assessment of where research on prerevolutionary economy stands, what it seeks to achieve, and how it might best proceed, the authors discuss those areas in which traditional work remains to be done and address new possibilities for a 'new economic history.'
Author: Sean Patrick Adams
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
Published: 2009-12-01
Total Pages: 449
ISBN-13: 1421400510
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA look at the role of state policies in North-South economic divergence and in American industrial development leading up to the Civil War. In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, “Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!” With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation’s coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia’s leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country’s leading producer. Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia’s failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature’s overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania’s more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields. Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development.
Author: Price V. Fishback
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-09-15
Total Pages: 634
ISBN-13: 0226251292
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe American economy has provided a level of well-being that has consistently ranked at or near the top of the international ladder. A key source of this success has been widespread participation in political and economic processes. In The Government and the American Economy, leading economic historians chronicle the significance of America’s open-access society and the roles played by government in its unrivaled success story. America’s democratic experiment, the authors show, allowed individuals and interest groups to shape the structure and policies of government, which, in turn, have fostered economic success and innovation by emphasizing private property rights, the rule of law, and protections of individual freedom. In response to new demands for infrastructure, America’s federal structure hastened development by promoting the primacy of states, cities, and national governments. More recently, the economic reach of American government expanded dramatically as the populace accepted stronger limits on its economic freedoms in exchange for the increased security provided by regulation, an expanded welfare state, and a stronger national defense.
Author: Brian Phillips Murphy
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2015-06-04
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 0812247167
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the state of New York, home to the first American banks, utilities, canals, and transportation infrastructure projects, Building the Empire State examines the origins of American capitalism by tracing how and why business corporations were first introduced into the economy of the early republic.
Author: Christopher W. Calvo
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780813066332
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Contesting the assumption that early American economists were committed to Adam Smith's ideas of free trade and small government, this book provides a comprehensive history of the nation's economic thought from 1790 to 1860, tracing the development of a uniquely American understanding of capitalism"--
Author: Robert J. Gordon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-08-29
Total Pages: 785
ISBN-13: 1400888956
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.
Author: John J. McCusker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 387
ISBN-13: 052178249X
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Author: Strother E. Roberts
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-06-28
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 081225127X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFocusing on the Connecticut River Valley—New England's longest river and largest watershed— Strother Roberts traces the local, regional, and transatlantic markets in colonial commodities that shaped an ecological transformation in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Reaching deep into the interior, the Connecticut provided a watery commercial highway for the furs, grain, timber, livestock, and various other commodities that the region exported. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy shows how the extraction of each commodity had an impact on the New England landscape, creating a new colonial ecology inextricably tied to the broader transatlantic economy beyond its shores. This history refutes two common misconceptions: first, that globalization is a relatively new phenomenon and its power to reshape economies and natural environments has only fully been realized in the modern era and, second, that the Puritan founders of New England were self-sufficient ascetics who sequestered themselves from the corrupting influence of the wider world. Roberts argues, instead, that colonial New England was an integral part of Britain's expanding imperialist commercial economy. Imperial planners envisioned New England as a region able to provide resources to other, more profitable parts of the empire, such as the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Settlers embraced trade as a means to afford the tools they needed to conquer the landscape and to acquire the same luxury commodities popular among the consumer class of Europe. New England's native nations, meanwhile, utilized their access to European trade goods and weapons to secure power and prestige in a region shaken by invading newcomers and the diseases that followed in their wake. These networks of extraction and exchange fundamentally transformed the natural environment of the region, creating a landscape that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, would have been unrecognizable to those living there two centuries earlier.
