A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (review)

A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War. By John Majewski. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 214. Cloth, $50.00.)

John Majewski's interesting and well-argued book expands on his prize-winning dissertation, providing a compelling narrative of how a Northern and a Southern state diverged economically in the antebellum period. The book compares local economic institutions and developmental corporations in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and Albemarle County, Virginia, especially transportation networks and banks, as well as state-level economic development in the Old Dominion and the Keystone State.

Majewski finds that local economic institutions in early antebellum Virginia and Pennsylvania were similar in many ways. Banks and transportation projects were largely funded locally, and both Pennsylvanians and Virginians eschewed quick gains through stock dividends—which often were not forthcoming anyway—for a long-term strategy based on rising land values, market development, and a general notion of the common weal. He finds, however, that the coming of the railroad changed the situation. Local interests were unable to plan or find adequate funding for a well-integrated railroad system. In Pennsylvania, a group of Philadelphia financiers and entrepreneurs ensured that a coherent system was created through substantial capital investment and coordinated planning. In contrast, Virginia continued to rely heavily on local interests for such projects and a unified urban elite did not step forward to provide the necessary capital, centralized control, and political will to create and fund a master vision.

Ultimately, the author believes that the Virginia and Pennsylvania economies diverged because of Virginia's "failure to develop a large commercial city" from which the leadership and capital for projects could be drawn (3). He buttresses his argument with explicit comparisons of Philadelphia and Richmond, the two state's largest cities. Virginia's failure to develop a dominant city was caused by a series of factors, including a poorly integrated transportation system, the lack of a diverse and developed manufacturing base, and intracity and intraregional rivalries. According to Majewski, slavery played a significant role in Virginia's stunted development. He focuses on the lack of a local market periphery upon which Richmond entrepreneurs could have built a solid and diverse manufacturing base. Interestingly, he does not see the presence of slavery as a direct deterrent to industrialization, noting Richmond's flourishing tobacco factories that hired and owned thousands of enslaved workers. It was Virginia's thinly settled hinterland with its considerable slave population that failed to spark demand for consumer goods and thus create indigenous and varied industries.

Majewski thankfully discards tired dichotomies of "capitalist" and "anti-capitalist" when characterizing the two states' economies, and he likewise eschews the "Market Revolution" model used by many recent studies. Instead, he sidesteps such theoretical models and looks at the actual economic realities of his Pennsylvania and Virginia examples. He uses the term "economic development" in his subtitle, but it is through "market development" that he truly measures the differences between Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Majewski carefully considers several possible challenges to his study. He addresses the problem of comparing two states (and, in particular, two cities) whose economies appear to have diverged much earlier than the late antebellum period. Also, he recognizes that there were many different models of urban development in antebellum America. One might argue, for instance, that Lowell makes a more interesting parallel to Richmond than Philadelphia. Lowell and Richmond were very similar in the size of their populations (twenty-sixth and twenty-fifth respectively among American cities in 1860), and both had a very focused and strong manufacturing sector (tenth and thirteenth in value of product in 1860). Neither city was dependent on a local hinterland to sell their manufacturing output. One imagines, however, that Majewski would rightly point out that Lowell could afford such specialization because of the presence of Boston, while Richmond served as the closest thing...