What resource was most important to the Southern slave economy in the 1800s?

American Economic Growth 1800-1860

INTRODUCTION

A person living in 1700 or 1800 or even before would not have been overwhelmed by the advances made during the previous century. But imagine Washington or Jefferson looking alee nigh 100 years to the automobile, light bulb, telephone, cross-country railroads (200,000 miles by 1900), body of water-going streamships, airplanes, skyscrapers, factories total of heavy mechanism and thousands of other advances. Although geniuses like Franklin and Jefferson might have foreseen such developments in their imagination, most people in 1800 could hardly conceive of such things. If one surveys the advance of science and engineering science over the centuries, it is apparent that for long periods the changes in the lives of working people were incremental. Sometimes, in fact, progress tended to reverse itself; the engineering achievements of the Romans, for example, were not replicated for much of the Middle Ages and Early on Mod period. And a person earning a living and in manufacture or farming in 1800 would non have led a life drastically unlike from the life of a small tradesmen or farmer a thousand years earlier. Every bit many historians take pointed out, it is incommunicable to underestimate the bear upon that the growth of engineering science had on the lives of ordinary people.The rate of change in homo society began to pick upward in the early 1800s and has been accelerating e'er since. Arguably, even the 20th century did not have such a profound impact on the way people lived their lives as the 19th.

Consider the railroad, for instance. Prior to the existence of widespread rail networks, the concept of time was i in which approximation was adequate for almost purposes. There was little need to know the verbal time for anything. True, send sailings were often timed to the hour, and stagecoach routes might have a set time for departure, and and then on. Information technology's not that clocks and timepieces were unheard of. But with the appearance of rail travel time had to exist regulated much more stringently, as interlocking rail lines needed to be coordinated so that trains could pass each other on shunts or sidings, connections could be made, and so that the new style of transportation could exist used efficiently. It was railroad operators who invented the time zones in America. With rapid communication through the telegraph, which necessarily accompanied the expansion of railroads, viii a.m. in New York had to be adjusted to match the same time of day in California.

Technology improved life in means nosotros tin can all-time appreciate during a storm which knocks out power, and we lose light and perhaps heat. Even if we must huddle in the nighttime nether a coating or swelter without air workout for merely a few hours, nosotros feel terribly deprived. Just imagine how life was altered when stoves and furnaces replaced fireplaces; when water was delivered through pipes rather than in buckets; when tools became more than durable and efficient and could be speedily replaced when cleaved; when improvements in the manufacturing of all kinds of mutual goods, from glass to paper to building materials, shoes, overcoats, eyeglasses and medical and dental apparatuses, amongst hundreds of such common items, fabricated life ever more tolerable and comfortable for the masses. And although progress was uneven, unsteady and unsure, information technology moved frontwards inexorably toward the modern age in which nosotros accept so many things for granted. Looking back, it sometimes seems harder for us to imagine life in 1700 without all the civilities we enjoy than it might have been for an American colonist to imagine driving an automobile. And the 21st century promises to bring changes that we in out time of accelerating technological modify can scarcely imagine.

Historians have analyzed American economical history from various perspectives, sometimes arguing that economic issues dominated American political developments, even to the writing of the Constitution. Those kinds of claims, oftentimes made by historians influenced by various Marxist theories, have been to a large extent discredited. In that location can exist no doubt, still, that the economic development of America is in many ways cardinal to our overall development equally a nation. Although the start steam engine, the starting time locomotive, and much of the earliest material machinery outset appeared in England, the evolution of technological advances on a grand scale occurred in America.

Information technology is an interesting coincidence that Adam Smith'due south The Wealth Of Nations, the "bible" of laissez-faire capitalism, was published in 1776, for the United States has conspicuously been the most successful capitalist nation in history.  Historian Carl Degler wrote in Out of Our Past  that "the Capitalists came in the get-go ships."  The Virginia colony was, after all, this formed every bit an investment company, from which those who ventured their capital hoped to gain profits. It can scarcely be doubted that economic bug were the driving forcefulness behind events that brought near the American Revolution.  Although that is not the whole American story, it certainly is an of import part of it. The get-go colonists to cross the Atlantic were certainly looking for more freedom, but information technology was as much freedom from economical want as from political control.

The Industrial Revolution came slowly and unevenly to America. unlike sections of the state advanced at different rates for easily understandable reasons. For example, since the Southern economic system was based heavily in agriculture, primarily in cotton, the evolution of industry in the South was relatively tedious. The factory system, discussed below, which grew up in the Northeast as function of the revolution in the textile industry, did not stretch fully into the S. Furthermore, the necessary majuscule investment for in industrial advancement was less likely to exist forthcoming in the South because investments in land, cotton wool and slaves was bound to exist profitable, whereas investment in new ventures such as technological innovation was always risky. Economists have determined that the average charge per unit of render on investment in the southern cotton fiber economic system averaged around 10% per twelvemonth, a good return by whatever measure.

America was something of slow starter in developing manufacturing and small industries. Around 1800 each family unit farm was, in effect, a pocket-size manufacturing plant, as family members themselves created most of what they needed—from elementary tools and nails to wear and cooking utensils. More substantial items, such as plows, harnesses and and so on, were either imported or manufactured locally.  Jefferson'south Embargo and the State of war of 1812 both demonstrated that the United States could not remain dependent on foreign imports, and Yankee ingenuity shortly led to economical progress. Nevertheless, economic growth in the United States before 1820 was built on agriculture and commerce. The success of the "carrying trades"—shipbuilding, for example—diverted investment from more risky manufacturing ventures, although some innovations, especially in the fabric manufacture, did appear.

The first phase of the industrial revolution really began in Bully Britain, starting with the invention of the steam engine by James Watt. The ideas generated and in England dealing with improved manufacturing and production techniques, notwithstanding, traveled sporadically across the Atlantic. Jealous of contest, the British government attempted to prevent the export of technology in social club to protect its own investments. But as so oft happens in such cases, ingenuity overcame the law, and in information was either smuggled out of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland or carried in the heads of people with memories potent enough to reproduce those ideas on the other side of Atlantic.

The Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1700s in Cracking U.k. and continued through the 18th and 19th centuries, profoundly altered a social and economic structure that had been more or less stable for centuries. As engineering science began to innovate mechanical devices to aid industry, many of them adult initially in Europe, American workers reacted to the new machines with uncertainty, concerned that wages might fall and that their economic independence and status might exist negatively afflicted (a fear that was realized in the later, post-Civil State of war industrial era.)  American shipping had enjoyed a period of prosperity between 1793 and 1805 but suffered when England and France restricted America'southward rights as a neutral nation. Thus alternative sources of economic evolution were needed.

The step of industrial and economic evolution accelerated throughout the nineteenth century. The Civil War impeded progress on such projects as the building of the transcontinental railroad. At the same time, the demands of that conflict as well stimulated invention and development, especially in areas such as medicine and the mass-producing of mechanism. Veterans of the war moved due west with the railroads, helping both to build information technology, and to settle with people the developments that grew upward alongside the tracks. By the finish of the 19th century the United States stood atop the world in terms of industrial progress. New York City would become the fiscal capital of the world, and the American economy dwarfed all others.

It started with the small factory.

Links to the Section on Economical Development

veneyeleer1949.blogspot.com

Source: http://sageamericanhistory.net/expansion_manifestdestiny/economicgrowth1800_1860/index.html

Share this post