Market Revolution

5 Key excerpts on "Market Revolution"

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  eBook - ePub

  The American Yawp

  A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 1: To 1877

  • Joseph L. Locke, Ben Wright(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 The Market Revolution

  William James Bennett, View of South Street, from Maiden Lane, New York City , c. 1827. Metropolitan Museum of New York.

  I. Introduction

  In the early years of the nineteenth century, Americans’ endless commercial ambition—what one Baltimore paper in 1815 called an “almost universal ambition to get forward ”—remade the nation.1 Between the Revolution and the Civil War, an old subsistence world died and a new more-commercial nation was born. Americans integrated the technologies of the Industrial Revolution into a new commercial economy. Steam power, the technology that moved steamboats and railroads, fueled the rise of American industry by powering mills and sparking new national transportation networks. A “Market Revolution” remade the nation.

  The revolution reverberated across the country. More and more farmers grew crops for profit, not self-sufficiency. Vast factories and cities arose in the North. Enormous fortunes materialized. A new middle class ballooned. And as more men and women worked in the cash economy, they were freed from the bound dependence of servitude. But there were costs to this revolution. As northern textile factories boomed, the demand for southern cotton swelled, and American slavery accelerated. Northern subsistence farmers became laborers bound to the whims of markets and bosses. The Market Revolution sparked explosive economic growth and new personal wealth, but it also created a growing lower class of property-less workers and a series of devastating depressions, called “panics.” Many Americans labored for low wages and became trapped in endless cycles of poverty. Some workers, often immigrant women, worked thirteen hours a day, six days a week. Others labored in slavery. Massive northern textile mills turned southern cotton into cheap cloth. And although northern states washed their hands of slavery, their factories fueled the demand for slave-grown southern cotton and their banks provided the financing that ensured the profitability and continued existence of the American slave system. And so, as the economy advanced, the Market Revolution wrenched the United States in new directions as it became a nation of free labor and slavery, of wealth and inequality, and of endless promise and untold perils.

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  Shenandoah Religion

  Outsiders and the Mainstream, 1716-1865

  • Stephen L. Longenecker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Baylor University Press

    (Publisher)

  Farmers routinely sold their surplus, often bartering it for consumer goods or raising cash to pay taxes. The outlines of the nineteenth-century Market Revolution had already emerged in the eighteenth century. 2 Yet enough economic change came early in the next century to justify the term “Market Revolution.” Economic relations became less local and personal and more regional, national, or interna-tional and increasingly impersonal. Misfortune in distant urban commercial centers caused far-reaching ripples, and cash shortages for international merchants could trickle down to the local level, depriving neighborhood entrepreneurs of the ability to purchase farm goods. International markets now linked subsistence farmers and handicraft artisans in rural hinterlands to sudden and fre-quent financial panics. Ruin came unexpectedly and mysteriously 80 / SHENANDOAH RELIGION from unknown quarters. As markets expanded and competition increased, masters with access to capital cut costs by “putting out” sub-divided work tasks to families doing unskilled piece work in their homes or by organizing cheap, unskilled labor in large, cen-tralized workshops, where supervision was easier. Traditional home manufacturing declined, and mechanization mushroomed; the spinning wheel, for example, commonplace in pre-market households, disappeared, replaced by water-driven looms in spin-ning mills, and Cyrus McCormick gave his reaper its first test-run on an Augusta County wheat field. This economic revolution came with a large social impact. Among the losers were journeymen: with skills displaced by machines, it became increasingly difficult for them to amass the large amounts of capital required to establish themselves as inde-pendent artisans. They often slid into the ranks of unskilled labor and became permanent wage earners. Journeymen and appren-tices no longer lived under the same roof as the master or consid-ered themselves part of their employer’s household.

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  Major Problems in American History, Volume I

  • Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde, , Elizabeth Cobbs, Edward Blum, Jon Gjerde(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The invention of electric telegraphy … represented a climactic moment in a widespread revolution of communications. Other features of this revolution included improvements in printing and paper manufacturing; the multiplication of newspapers, magazines, and books; and the expansion of the postal system (which mostly carried newspapers and commercial business, not personal letters). What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1818 – 1848 by Howe (2009) pp. 1 – 2, 4 – 7, 125 – 126, 128 – 129, 131 – 134, 213 – 214, 216, 222 – 223, 227, 242. By permission of Oxford University Press, USA. MARKET AND TRANSPORTATION REVOLUTIONS 231 Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Closely related to these developments occurred a simultaneous revolution in transportation: the introduction of steamboats, canals, turnpikes, and railroads, shortening travel times and dramatically lowering shipping costs … . Their conse-quences certainly rivaled, and probably exceeded in importance, those of the revolutionary “ information highway ” of our own lifetimes … . The most common name for the years … is “ Jacksonian America. ” I avoid the term because it suggests that Jacksonianism describes Americans as a whole, whereas in fact Andrew Jackson was a controversial figure and his political move-ment bitterly divided the American people … . Another term that has sometimes been applied to this period — more by his-torians than by the general public — is “ the Market Revolution.

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  A Comparative History of Commerce and Industry, Volume I

  Four Paths to an Industrialized World

  • David E. McNabb(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  First, except for the farthest reaches of westward movement, the general merchant of colonial times all but disappeared, to be replaced by spe- cialized firms that developed to meet the needs of the rapidly growing domestic and international markets. New inventions and advances in transportation, communication, agriculture, and industry helped fuel the tremendous growth. Entrepreneurs appeared everywhere, invest- ing in the emerging opportunities, forging the new American busi- ness system based on laws of supply and demand rather than the old mercantilism system and family-oriented business establishment and funding. During this transformative period, American business was particularly influenced by significant “revolutions” in three sectors of the economy: transportation and communication, agriculture, and industry. Advances in Transportation and Communication From colonial times to the early nineteenth century, the movement of goods from places of production to market and shipping ports continued to be a major brake on growth for farmers, planters, mer- chants, artisans, and consumers. Some freight did, of course, move over the primitive, rutted, and stump-filled roads, but in many cases the absence of roads meant that goods could only be transported by packhorse or on the backs of humans. With the absence of passable roads, early settlers had turned to rivers, creeks, and coastal estuaries P o s t – R e v o l u t i o n a r y Wa r C o m m e r c e a n d T r a d e 217 for transportation. But this was not always possible once the coun- try expanded off the eastern seacoast. Therefore, new methods had to found, and with limited capital, so did new ways of fund- ing. The answer was the development of the joint-stock develop- ment organization, often sponsored by a combination of public and private investments (Bryant and Dethloff 1990).

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  First World, Third World

  • W. Ryrie(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 The Market Revolution The shift towards market-based policies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, remarkable for being virtually world-wide, was a turning point in economic history. It was evident in the industrial democracies about the beginning of the decade and there were some signs of it earlier still. German Socialists moved away from traditional socialism in the 1970s and the French Socialist party did so rapidly while in power in the early 1980s. In Britain, while the Thatcher government was making radical changes, including privatisation, the Labour Party in opposition broke away from its socialist roots and accepted much of the Thatcherite revolution. Later Tony Blair led them further in that direction, breaking away even from the word `socialism'. In other European countries, such as Spain, there was a similar trend, and even before the collapse of communism in the East, the Communist Parties of Italy and France had moved far from their traditional positions. And in the United States, the 1980s were the dec- ade of two Republican Presidents, Reagan and Bush, and Clinton in the 1990s led the Democratic party far from the left-leaning ways of thinking that had characterised it since it was led by Franklin Roosevelt. Much more dramatic change followed in the Second World at the end of the decade. The collapse of communism in eastern Europe led to rapid moves towards a market economy in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. It is legitimate to regard this as part of the same world-wide phenomenon, but while there seems little doubt that the countries of east-central Europe are destined to be part of the democratic West, the outlook for the countries of the former Soviet Union is, even in the late 1990s, somewhat less clear.

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