Abstract
The economic growth of the United States clearly accelerated between the end of the second war with England and the Civil War.1 This acceleration is evident not only in ‘extensive’ expansion — increasing output as a result of the vast increase in land and resources, labour, capital, and entrepreneurial talent — but also in the substantial increase in efficiency of productive factors which characterized the period.2
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Notes
For fragmentary evidence on land and inland waterways see George Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1951),
Chapter VII and T. W. Berry, Western Prices before 1861: A Study of the Cincinnati Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), Part I.
For data on ocean transportation see Douglass C. North ‘Ocean Freight Rates and Economic Development, 1750–1913’, Journal of Economic History, XVIII, No. 4, December 1958, pp. 539–55.
U.S. Bureau of Census, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Manufactures (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1865), p.v. Hereafter cited as Eighth Census, Manufactures.
G. H. Evans, Business Incorporations in the United States, 1800–1943 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1948), Chart 1, p. 13, Chart 3, p. 23.
J. P. Bigelow, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Statistical Tables: Exhibiting the condition andproducts of certain branches of Industry in Massachusetts, for the Year Ending April 1, 1837 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1838) and
Dewitt Francis, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Statistical Information Relating to Certain Branches of Industry in Manufactures for the Year Ending June 1, 1855 (Boston: William White, Printer of the State, 1856).
Folke Hilgerdt in Industrial and Foreign Trade (Geneva: League of Nations, 1945), p. 13, shows the United States with 23–3 per cent of world manufacturing output in 1870 far ahead of Germany (13–2 per cent) and France (10–3 per cent) and only exceeded by the United Kingdom (31–8 per cent).
A. O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), Chapter IV.
A. O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), Chapter VI.
See George J. Stigler, ‘The Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market’, Journal of Political Economy, LIX, No. 3 (June 1951), pp. 185–93.
V. S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, for the Carnegie Institution, 1929), p. 452.
For some indirect evidence of productivity changes see Caroline Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture, a Study in Industrial Beginnings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931), pp. 112–14.
George S. Gibb, The Saco-Lowell Shops, Textile Machinery Building in New England, 1813–1849 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 168.
See Blanche Hazard, The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), Chapters IV and V.
The two investigations were: The official reports presented to the British Parliament by Sir Joseph Whitworth and George Wallis, later published separately as The Industry of the United States in Machinery, Manufactures, and Useful and Ornamental Arts (London: George Routledge & Co., 1854), and Report of the Commission on the Machinery of the United States (Parliamentary Papers, 1854–55, L).
See Edgar M. Hoover, Jr., Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 268.
See Lance Davis, ‘Sources of Industrial Finance: The American Textile Industry, A Case Study’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, IX, No. 4, April 1957, pp. 189–203;
See Morris D. Morris, ‘The Recruitment of an Industrial Labour Force in India with British and American Comparisons’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, II, No. 3 (April 1960), pp. 315–20.
Thomas W. Page, ‘Distribution of Immigrants in the United States before 1870’, Journal of Political Economy, XX (1912), pp. 676–94.
Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), pp. 166–7.
For a more extended discussion of these three points see John E. Sawyer, ‘The American System of Manufacturing’, The Journal of Economic History, XIV, No. 4 (1954), pp. 361–79.
Zachariah Allen, Science of Mechanics (Providence: 1829), p. 349 as quoted in Gibb, Saco-Lowell Shops, p. 178.
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© 1963 International Economic Association
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North, D.C. (1963). Industrialization in the United States (1815–60). In: Rostow, W.W. (eds) The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63959-5_3
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