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International Trade and United States Economic Development Revisited*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

George Macesich
George Macesich
Affiliation:
Florida State University
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Extract

Mr. Williamson's comments on my article leave the issue between us ambiguous. I welcome this opportunity further to develop my own views regarding the turbulent period of the 1830's and early 1840's.

First of all, I believe that Williamson has overstated his case in attributing to me disregard of the importance of internal events in the United States. I advanced the hypothesis that the primary disturbing factor in the period 1834–1845 was an increase, and then a decrease, in the flow of funds into the United States, and the problem I wished to examine was the response in the American economy to this initial disturbance. As indicated in my article, the emphasis placed on external factors does not mean that internal events in the United States were negligible.

Type
Review Articles and Notes
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1961 , pp. 384 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1961

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References

1 Macesich, George, “Sources of Monetary Disturbances in the United States, 1834–1845,” The Journal of Economic History, XX, No. 3 (Sept. 1960), 407–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Indeed they suggest that on occasion changes in the supply of money, for example, can be brought about by internal events that can hardly be attributed to contemporary changes in income, for example, the alteration in the American monetary system in 1834. For a discussion of this episode, see Smith, W. B. and Cole, A. H., Fluctuations in American Business, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 78Google Scholar, and especially Laughlin, J. L., History of Bimetallism in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1901)Google Scholar.

3 The material in the following two paragraphs is from Jenks, Leland H., The Migration of British Capital to 1873 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1927), Chs. II-IVGoogle Scholar.

4 See, for example, Metzler, L. A., “The Theory of International Trade,” in Ellis, H. S. (ed.), Survey of Contemporary Economics (Philadelphia: The Blakiston Company, 1948), I, 211–22Google Scholar.

4 Ingram, James C., “Capital Imports and the Balance of Payments,” Southern Economic Journal, XXII (04 1956), 411–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Growth in Capacity and Canada's Balance of Payments,” Am. Ec. Rev., XLVII, No. 2 (03 1957), 93–104Google Scholar.

6 North, Douglass C., “The United States Balance of Payments, 1790–1860,” Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century. Vol. 24, Studies in Income and Wealth, National Bureau of Economic Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), Table 3, p. 581Google Scholar; cited by Williamson, J. G., “International Trade and United States Economic Development: 1827–1843,” The Journal of Economic History, XXI, No. 2 (Sept. 1961), Table 2Google Scholar.