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Les Fondements Historiques de la Domination Economique Américaine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Gavin Wright
Gavin Wright*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

La prééminence économique des États-Unis est l'un des traits marquants de l'histoire mondiale du 20e siècle. La domination américaine a été si nette et si évidente qu'elle semble souvent ne requérir aucune explication. L'historien Paul Kennedy écrit quant à lui, dans son étude très appréciée, The Rise and the Fall of the Great Powers:

Les États-Unis semblaient posséder tous les avantages économiques dont certaines autres puissances détenaient une partie, mais ils ne comptaient aucun des handicaps de celles-ci… A la fin de la guerre de Sécession, les États-Unis ont pu exploiter, pour se transformer à une cadence stupefiante, les nombreux avantages dont ils étaient dotés: riches etendues cultivables, importantes quantites de matieres premieres, et possibilite de developper ces ressources grace a revolution particulierement heureuse de la technologie moderne (rail, machine a vapeur, equipement minier); faibles contraintes sociales ou geographiques ; absence de menace etrangere importante ; flux d'investissements etrangers et, progressivement, nationaux... Etant donne ces avantages, tout le processus de developpement etait virtuellement inévitable. C'est-à-dire que seule une opiniatre betise humaine, une guerre civile presque incessante ou une catastrophe naturelle auraient pu hypothequer cette expansion ou dissuader des millions d'immigrants de traverser l'Atlantique pour obtenir leur part d'or et grossir la main-d'œuvre.

Summary

Summary

The economic pre-eminence of the USA is one of the dominant facts of twentieth century world history, often taken as so self-evident and inevitable as to require no explanation. This paper argues to the contrary, that American economic leadership was far from inevitable, and indeed poses a challenge to historical understanding. Geographic size and natural resources were not in themselves advantageous, but they became so through the rise of an indigenous national technological community or network, engaged in adapting European technologies to the American environment. This proposition is illustrated with accounts of the so-called “American system ofmanufactures”, and of minerals as a knowledge industry. These two sectors laid the institutional foundations for the science-based industries of the twentieth century. American economic performance demonstrates the power of increasing returns to scale, as depicted in the models from the "new" or endogenous growth theory. But the effective economic scale of the US national economy was itself the cultural and institutional product of Amercian history.

Type
L'Historiographie Économique Américaine
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , June 1998 , pp. 537 - 567
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 1998

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