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American Economic Growth Before 1840: An Exploratory Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

George Rogers Taylor
George Rogers Taylor
Affiliation:
Amherst College
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Extract

In developing the subject of this paper, “American Economic Growth before 1840,” I shall, relying for the most part on familiar materials, propose the hypothesis that economic growth per capita in the thirteen colonies of Britain in America advanced at a relatively rapid rate from about 1710 to 1775.1 shall also suggest that the level of living remained relatively low in these colonies as late as about 1710 and that for the new nation output per capita over the years 1775 to 1840 improved slowly if at all.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1964 , pp. 427 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1964

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References

1 U. S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Hearings, Historical and Comparative Rates of Production, Productivity, and Prices,86th Cong., 1st Sess.,1959, pp. 277–78.Google Scholar

2 ibid., p. 278.

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7 Gray, Lewis C., History of Agriculture in the Southern United States (Washington, D. C.: Carnegie Institution, 1933), II, 1024.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., I, 293.

9 The History of South Carolina from its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808 (Charleston, S. C., 1809), I, 123.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., I, 114–18.

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16 Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, p. 216.

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18 Martin, Robert F., National Income in the United States, 1799–1938 (National Industrial Conference Board Studies, No. 241 [New York: NICB, 1939]), pp. 8–12Google Scholar; Parker, William N. and Whartenby, Franklee, “The Growth of Output Before 1840,” in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century (Studies in Income and Wealth, XXIV [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960]), 191.Google Scholar

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23 If the quality of the northern farmers contributed to productivity in the colonial period, why, it may be asked, was it not important later? The answer seems clear enough: the most ambitious and able gave up the struggle against overwhelming odds and moved to the cities or to the frontier.

24 Computed from Historical Statistics, pp. 7 and 538.

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