7 - The United States in an Age of Global Integration, 1865–1897

Summary

Two interrelated processes of integration conditioned the development of the United States in the late nineteenth century. The first was the incorporation of the West and South into a Union that had been transformed by the American Civil War. The second was the ongoing integration of the world economy. Both were products of broader globalization in this period, and both were uneven and contested. Americans did not call the shots about the nature, pace and extent of this globalization, though politicians sought whenever they could to harness them toward their own ends. The US economy quintupled in size as the population of the United States rapidly expanded, especially in the trans-Mississippi West, where the dispossession of Native Americans and the construction of transcontinental railroads attracted new settlers and brought new lands into the world economy. In this the United States was not exceptional.