Early American Economy

1085 Words3 Pages

In the early the American economy there were two types of resources, human and agrarian. Both resources played important roles in the growth of the American economy. Human resources; factorization and employment served as the foundation of the American economy, providing both the ingenuity and skill to bolster America’s self production of goods and services. the agrarian resources provided the much needed foodstuffs and raw materials to create the multitude of products produced in the new factories such as cotton fiber and textile. Although equally important in the American economy, the human resources of America helped shape and grow the economy more than the agrarian resources did. Prior to the creation of a new nation growth in the …show more content…

New inventions were being produced to make work more efficient, cost effective, and worker friendly, all thanks to the embargo imposed by Jefferson which bolstered the self production rather than importation economy of America. In the late 1700s to the late 1800s many inventions were created that bolstered the ability of the industrial industry. some of them include the automatic flour mill, this machine completed the entire process of turning grain into flour without the slow process of doing it by hand. The cotton gin, another important invention separated the raw cotton from the seeds and other debris, this machine increased the productivity of cotton manufacturing by 5000% (Gray). Lastly is mechanized textile manufacturing, textile manufacturing came into the US when Samuel Slater came the US disguised as a laborer, he had the designs for a textile machine in his head and set out to create a factory for this high demand product, after beginning his factory Slater jumpstarted the factorization of the US. With the creation of these new factories lead to the unemployment of skilled craftsmen who originally created products now mass produced and became workers for the factories. these skilled craftsmen soon demanded better working conditions and better wages and formed the first worker unions (History.com-Labor Movement). These unions helped protect worker wages and working …show more content…

These plants were in high demand internationally and many farmers benefitted from the heated demand for more of these products. Before 1720 most farmers had subsistence farms; farms that only grew enough to supply the family and small trade. Thanks to the opening of the international market to farmers subsistence farming became a thing of the past. After 1720 the demand for food products from America exploded, many European nations needed vast amounts of wheat, corn, and tobacco to fill the growing markets for products made from these items. To fit this demand, farmers expanded their farms to large proportions into what we now call plantations, these plantations were quite large in size and required many hands to maintain them. As a seemingly perfect solution plantation owners began to buy many slaves to maintain their farms at a cost of nothing to them. The use of slaves slowed down the economic growth of the US by preventing large quantities of money from continuously circulating and instead made many men rich and even more dirt poor. while all of this was going on, in Europe British and French navies were capturing American ships and impressing their crews into service, because of this Thomas Jefferson imposed a blockade on all American trade between itself and Britain/France. As a result many of these large plantations lost the majority of

Open Document