Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy (Markets and Governments in Economic History)

by Douglas A. Irwin

The American farmers at the outset of the Revolution were utterly dependent, therefore, for their growth and prosperity, on the sale of farm produce in overseas markets, as were American fishermen and lumbermen. Any proper economic map of America at the beginning of the Revolution would show America as a mere fringe between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, with a network of lines crisscrossing the Atlantic between America and the West Indies, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the British Isles. Most Americans of the eighteenth century understood this, and they were more concerned with what went on in those areas than they were with what went on a hundred miles inland from the ocean, for it was in the far-flung seaports scattered around the Atlantic Ocean that Americans marketed their surpluses of tobacco, rice, indigo, wheat, and Indian corn. Hence it was that American newspapers were filled with political news, and crop and weather conditions even in such far-away places as Turkey and Russia, for what happened there might well affect the price of American wheat and corn.

Explains why USA has historically taken so much interest in global affairs, especially Europe