The story told in this book brings together a new interpretation of American history beyond mainstream perspectives to chart the ways in which white-settler colonialism pushed expansion on the western frontier of empire, and locates the history through which empire gradually took on a capitalist form.
It follows the pathway of expansion from the making of an Atlantic world market through the creation of white colonies in New England and Virginia. From here the book charts the growth of empire across the north and south, highlighting the gendered dynamics of empire-building, and culminates in a discussion of the Civil War and the consolidation of over two centuries of capitalist development explaining how a society with capitalism became a capitalist society.
ISBN ; Publisher Pluto Press. Publication date and place Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.
It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. Political and Economic Systems Around the Globe. Search for:. Reading: Capitalism in the US Capitalism in the US Democratic capitalism is a political, economic, and social system with a market-based economy that is largely based on a democratic political system.
KEY points The United States is often seen as having a democratic capitalist political-economic system. The three pillars of democratic capitalism include economic incentives throughfree markets, fiscal responsibility, and a liberal moral-cultural system that encourages pluralism.
Some commentators argue that, although economic growth under capitalism has led to democratization in the past, it may not do so in the future; for example, authoritarian regimes have been able to manage economic growth without making concessions to greater political freedom. Proponents of capitalism have argued that indices of economic freedom correlate strongly with higher income, life expectancy, and standards of living.
Democratic Peace Theory states that capitalist democracies rarely make war with each other, and have little internal conflict. However, critics argue that this may have nothing to do with the capitalist nature of the states, and more to do with the democratic nature instead. Terms Capitalism : A socio-economic system based on the abstraction of resources into the form of privately-owned money, wealth, and goods, with economic decisions made largely through the operation of a market unregulated by the state Tripartite : In three parts.
Polity: An organizational structure of the government of a state, church, etc. However, polls have recently suggested that the ruling PAP party is suffering declines in popularity, suggesting that increasing material gains may not make up for a lack of political freedoms. The Singaporean government has introduced limited political concessions, suggesting that authoritarian capitalist systems may transition to democracy in time.
Democratic Capitalism and the US The United States is often seen as having a democratic capitalist political-economic system. The Relationship between Democracy and Capitalism The relationship between democracy and capitalism is a contentious area in theory and among popular political movements. Examples include: Singapore, which maintains a highly open market economy and attracts lots of foreign investment, does not protect civil liberties such as freedom of speech and expression.
Corporate An incorporated entity is a separate legal entity that has been incorporated through a legislative or registration process established through legislation. And even then, it was only law in the North. The Union passed the bills so it could establish a national currency in order to finance the war. The legislation also created the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency O. After the war, states were allowed to keep issuing bank charters of their own.
This byzantine infrastructure remains to this day and is known as the dual banking system. Among all nations in the world, only the United States has such a fragmentary, overlapping and inefficient system — a direct relic of the conflict between federal and state power over maintenance of the slave-based economy of the South. Both state regulators and the O. Moreover, banks are effectively able to choose regulators — either federal or state ones, depending on their charter.
Consumer-protection laws, interest-rate caps and basic-soundness regulations have often been rendered ineffectual in the process — and deregulation of this sort tends to lead to crisis.
In the mids, when subprime lenders started appearing in certain low-income neighborhoods, many of them majority black and Latino, several state banking regulators took note. In Michigan, the state insurance regulator tried to enforce its consumer-protection laws on Wachovia Mortgage, a subsidiary of Wachovia Bank.
The Supreme Court agreed with the O. Eventually loans like those blew up the banking system and the investments of many Americans — especially the most vulnerable. The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. Naturally, the first to cash in were the land speculators.
Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price. Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting.
A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation.
Floods became bigger and more common. As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. Just four years later, it harvested million pounds. In , there were 87, cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million.
In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification. Data seems to hold sway over every operation. It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.
When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners.
Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, investing in large gins and presses and experimenting with different seed varieties. To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations.
Rosenthal writes of one plantation where the owner supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised 16 enslaved head drivers and specialists like bricklayers , who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers.
Everyone was accountable to someone else, and plantations pumped out not just cotton bales but volumes of data about how each bale was produced. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of the British Royal Navy.
So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points.
This level of data analysis also allowed planters to anticipate rebellion. In this way, new bookkeeping techniques developed to maximize returns also helped to ensure that violence flowed in one direction, allowing a minority of whites to control a much larger group of enslaved black people.
American planters never forgot what happened in Saint-Domingue now Haiti in , when enslaved workers took up arms and revolted. In fact, many white enslavers overthrown during the Haitian Revolution relocated to the United States and started over.
Accountings took place not only after nightfall, when cotton baskets were weighed, but throughout the workday. The uniform layout of the land had a logic; a logic designed to dominate. When enslaved workers grew ill or old, or became pregnant, they were assigned to lighter tasks. Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude. In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use.
The Constitution is riddled with compromises made between the North and South over the issue of slavery — the Electoral College, the three-fifths clause — but paper currency was too contentious an issue for the framers, so it was left out entirely. Thomas Jefferson, like many Southerners, believed that a national currency would make the federal government too powerful and would also favor the Northern trade-based economy over the plantation economy. So, for much of its first century, the United States was without a national bank or a uniform currency, leaving its economy prone to crisis, bank runs and instability.
At the height of the war, Lincoln understood that he could not feed the troops without more money, so he issued a national currency, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury — but not by gold.
The South had a patchwork currency that was backed by the holdings of private banks — the same banks that helped finance the entire Southern economy, from the plantations to the people enslaved on them. Some Confederate bills even had depictions of enslaved people on their backs. In a sense, the war over slavery was also a war over the future of the economy and the essentiality of value.
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