Traditional explanations for this metamorphosis into a post-Malthusian regime assume that the ultimate cause of growth was some characteristic unique to the North’s free-labor economy. Writers have credited an individualistic culture, Puritanism, open land and high wages, amorphous “Yankee ingenuity,” government intervention in the economy, and government nonintervention in the economy. Yet we now also know that even as the entire economy became more productive, from 1800 to 1860 raw cotton production gained in efficiency still more quickly than other sectors of the economy. The increasing
...more
