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Jack Duncan, Taylor Bratton
Thematic Review- Business Growth/ Declines and issue
1700’s South Atlantic System
o Sugarcane plantations’ success raised trans-Atlantic slave trade to 4000 slaves annually
o English Sugar merchants invested in the profitable plantations in Jamaica
1763-1790
o Artisans won political influence which therefore boosted overall economic wealth
o Merchant defiance of sugar and stamp act
o Boycotts spur patriot women to make textiles (homespun act)
o Manufacturing expands during the American Revolution (1775)
o Cutoff of trade, severe inflation and War debt threaten economy (1775)
o Bank of North America founded (1781)
o Commercial recession (1783-1789)
Ch8- Capitalist commonwealth-Nation of merchants
o National banks reduced the need for soliciting credits from England
o First bank of the US was chartered to issue notes and commercial loans
o Jeffersonians said banks supported the rich and were too centered in the north
o State banks were often corrupted and issued ill-advised loans.
o Corruption caused the panic of 1819
 30% drop in world agricultural prices after Napoleonic Wars
o Americans experienced their first business cycle
 Unregulated market economy’s expansion and contraction of output and jobs
o Yeomen became part of the market economy (1820)
 Expanded output and sold goods throughout the nation
o Mercantilism: government assisted economic development
1790
o First Bank of the United States (1792-1811)
o States charter business corporations
o Outwork system increases
1800
o Cotton output and demand for slave labor expands
o Farm Productivity improves, plus Embargo encourages US manufacturing
1810-1850
o Second Bank of the US is chartered (1816-1836)
o A national economy emerges
o Cotton belt emerges in the south, market economy spreads worldwide
o Protective tariffs (1828, 1832)
o Panic of 1837 plus separate economic distress of 1857
o Commonwealth vs. Hunt (1842) assists unions, but workers remain servants
Ch 9- Economic transformation-Industrial and Market Revolutions
o Mass produced goods aided commonwealth system (US lead export of cotton and wheat)
o Construction of turnpikes and railroads expanded trade and transportation
o Divided labor by undermining artisans’ business, setting up large shops, and shoe factories with mass production
and price cuts.
o Factories were not made for outwork system products
o Outwork system- Products made in homes and sold (Factories not made for such products)
o Water power controlled flour mills, many factories were located around rivers
o Coal-burning steam engines
o Textile industry competed with Britain
 America had an abundance of natural resources
 Textile industry lured British for better work
Creating and preserving a Continental Nation 1844-1877
o Recession (Panic of 1837) causes some states to default on bonds to build canals
o Farm society expands into trans-Mississippi
o Railroads/manufacturing grow in North/Midwest (1850’s) to be stopped by crisis of 1873
o High protective tariffs enacted in 1862 railroad and national banking expand
o Sharecropping rises in south (1870’s)