Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

Economic Landscapes Yet to be Discovered: The Early American Republic and Historians’ Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy

Economic Landscapes Yet to be Discovered The Early American Republic and Historians’ Unsubtle Adoption of Political Economy JAMES L. HUSTON Economic history and the accounts of the early republic enjoy a somewhat strange but interesting relationship. Economic history, as presented either by cliometricians or by business historians, has been on the wane for some years; yet the need for accurate studies of the nation’s early economy has never been greater. The reason lies in the popularity of the ‘‘new social history’’ and the profession’s massive switch to that mode of investigation. The strangeness lies in the ironic fact that most social history relies upon a careful depiction of society’s economic base, the study of which has continued to stagnate. However, it may be that economic history (and political history too) may be making a resurgence in the guise of ‘‘political economy.’’1 Certain research areas in economic history have anticipated current interpretive trends and some others have perhaps been overdone. At the moment, the profession is preoccupied with the idea of ‘‘transnationalism .’’ Economic historians, especially of the colonial and early republican periods, long have held a transnational perspective because the enterJames L. Huston, Professor of History, Oklahoma State University, recently published Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (2003). 1. Just to underscore the point, all one needs to do is to plow through the pages of the Directory of Departments of History and note how few scholars label themselves economic historians. Moreover, they do not seem to overwhelm the Departments of Economics either. 70 • JAMES HUSTON prise and growth of the American economy always was tied to exports. For many years export and import statistics provided virtually the only reliable numbers that historians could find before the census of 1850 (for proof witness the appendices of Douglass C. North’s and George Rogers Taylor’s great works).2 Numbers for the domestic economy, except on a small local scale, have been much harder to come by, giving rise to the depiction of the years 1790–1820 as the statistical dark ages of American economic history. Some of that darkness has lifted, but forceful, detailed depictions of the national economy from 1790–1825 remain surprisingly elusive.3 Other topics have been the core of intensive research and controversy for decades: the transition from semi-self-sufficiency in agriculture to commercial agriculture (or the rise of capitalism), the creation of plantation society, the establishment of southern yeoman communities, the origin and then expansion of industrialization.4 Undoubtedly these topics will continue to entice researchers and yield new studies. In the 1990s, both the fields of economic history and political history found new life in the area that has come to be known as ‘‘political econ2 . Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York, 1961); George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815– 1860 (New York, 1951); see also Gary M. Walton and James F. Sheperd, The Economic Rise of Early America (Cambridge, UK, 1979). 3. On the other hand, see the recent work of Howard Bodenhorn and his discussion of investigations into the economic history of the early republic: A History of Banking in Antebellum America: Financial Markets and Economic Development in an Era of Nation-Building (Cambridge, UK, 2000). 4. Just to name a few, Peter Temin, ed., Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990); Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York, 1988); Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996); Winifred B. Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago , 1992); James A. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, 1991); Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville, 1992); Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York, 1989); Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington, KY, 1992); Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution : Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991). ECONOMIC LANDSCAPES • 71 omy,’’ and it...