Explains the emergence of industrial policy during the mercantilism of the Renaissance and later.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 1940 to 1973, the so-called golden age of American capitalism, with globally dominant industries and broadly shared prosperity.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 1750 to 1865, especially the fact that the US was founded as a protectionist nation with active industrial policies.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 1974 to 2007, the era when the US, faced with mounting economic problems, mistakenly sought to solve them by doubling down on free markets.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 2008 to the present, when the post–World War II consensus in favor of ever-freer trade started to collapse and get replaced by the protectionism and industrial policies of the Trump and Biden administrations.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 1866 to 1939, specifically how the modern industrial economy of the US was founded upon the protectionist and other policies of this period.

The mid-1800s in the United States witnessed not only a revolution in market capitalism but also in literature. This essay, accordingly, covers an era in which both capitalism took command of social life in the United States and literary discourse attempted to elevate itself into Literature. The cultural reach of the market, as evidenced by increasing textual engagements with Wall Street as a metonym for US finance, intensified at the same time as Romantic writers like Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden to live deliberately and fictional characters like Bartleby preferred not to. Scholars have imagined these two developments as opposite or separate spheres that, perhaps through the evolution of professional authorship, occasionally rubbed up against one another: literature and economics. This account holds that although literature could not escape its mediated relationship with readers through the marketplace, literary discourse attempted to transcend the sordid realities of capitalism.1 And, concomitantly, economic writing, in one influential account of nineteenth-century political economy, veered toward facts to distinguish itself from imaginative literature.2 Generically, then, these two domains started to diverge in the mid-century, a migration that at the same time illuminates literature’s propensity to function as economics.3