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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Douglass North’s The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860, while not the most controversial of the works of “new economic historians” in the 1960s, was among the first and was probably the most widely used of any of these in undergraduate history courses. In addition to its widespread use—possibly the first introduction of many history students to an economic approach to their subject—it framed, if not originated, a number of hypotheses about the process of American economic growth and about various specific relationships which have been and remain the basis of empirical work. In examining its importance the question is not just whether on certain specific points North was right, but also whether the book generated important hypotheses for empirical testing. In these latter regards here clearly was an important book, and, while it may seem to be incomplete or to fail on some specific issues, we should add that even now it is often unclear what the “right” answers might be.
In preparing this review, I have benefited from discussions with Mary Young.
1 Englewood Cliff, N.J., 1961. Reissued in paperback by W. W. Norton, Company in 1966.
2 Callender, G. S., “The Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises of the States in Relation to the Growth of Corporations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 17 (November 1902), 111-162CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the introductions to various sections in Guy Stevens Callender, Selections from the Economic History of the United States, 1765-1860 (Boston, 1909). On Callender, see Engelbourg, Saul, “Guy Stevens Callender: A Founding Father of American Economic History,” Explorations in Economic History, 9 (Spring 1972), 255-267CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 See, in particular, North, Douglass C., “Location Theory and Regional Economic Growth,” Journal of Political Economy, 62 (June 1955), 243-258CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the subsequent discussion with Tiebout the following year.
4 North on page 68 notes: “Given the social structure, attitudes and motivation of American society, and the rich quantity and quality of resources which made even the self-sufficient farmer well off as compared with his European counterpart, the United States economy would not have stagnated.” But he argues both that: “Without cotton the development in the size of the market would have been a much more lengthy process,” and “cotton was the most important proximate cause of expansion.” These still suggest that attention to the preconditions remains a most fruitful area of research, particularly so given what we now know about economic growth in the eighteenth century (although there the “export base” model would still be considered quite appropriate). Harold Woodman raised the question of the reasons for, and possible shifts in, motivation in the United States, an important point (but not one incompatible with North’s) though, as written, North seems to suggest that the same motives were always there, but led to different observed patterns of response given different external stimuli. See Woodman’s, “The State of Agricultural History,” in Bass, Herbert J., ed., The State of American History, (Chicago, 1970), 220-248Google Scholar.
5 David, Paul A., “The Growth of Real Product in the United States Before 1840: New Evidence, Controlled Conjectures,” Journal of Economic History, 27 (June 1967), 151-197CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Note also that both these estimates and the evidence analyzed by Fogel, Robert W. in Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, 1964)Google Scholar, Chapter IV, present a quite different picture of the economic conditions in the 1820s than does North.
6 Goldin, Claudia D. and Lewis, Frank D., “The Role of Exports in American Economic Growth during the Napoleonic Wars, 1793 to 1807,” (Paper presented to the MSSB Conference on Exports and Growth 1975)Google Scholar.
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9 Lebergott, Stanley, “Labor Force and Employment, 1800-1960,” in Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800 in Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol. 30 (New York, 1966), 117-204Google Scholar.
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18 Berry, Thomas Senior, Western Prices Before 1861: A Study of the Cincinnati Market (Cambridge, 1943)Google Scholar.
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28 See the interchange between Fishlow and Fogel in Ralph L. Andreano, ed., New Views on American Economic Development: A Selective Anthology of Recent Work (Cambridge, 1965), 187-224.
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30 Lindstrom, Diane L., “Demand, Markets, and Eastern Economic Development: Philadelphia, 1815-1840,” Journal of Economic History, 35 (March 1975), 271-273CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the dissertation from which this abstract is drawn.
31 Herbst, Lawrence A., “Interregional Commodity Trade from the North to the South and American Economic Development in the Antebellum Period,” Journal of Economic History, 35 (March 1975), 264-270CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Again, see also the dissertation which is abstracted in this publication.
32 See Bruchey, Stuart, “Douglass C. North on American Economic Growth,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History (second series) 1 (Winter 1964), 145-158Google Scholar and North’s response in that issue. For a discussion of growth in the period to 1860 which draws out some of the implications of this critique, see also Bruchey’s, , The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861: An Essay in Social Causation (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.