Prior to the Industrial Revolution, America possessed a predominantly agrarian economy and generated wealth through the trade of tobacco, and resources such as lumber, minerals, fur and fish. England, rich in resources thanks to its colonial acquisitions, benefited from a series of technological breakthroughs to become the worlds first industrial power in the late 18th century. Though the English attempted to monopolize their technology and skilled labor through legislation, industrialization spread throughout Europe and reached America. The Second Industrial Revolution, which took place roughly between 1870 and 1914, established the United States as the worlds foremost industrial power.

Most 18th century Americans lived in self-sustaining rural communities. The Industrial Revolution witnessed the evolution of large urban centers, such as Boston and New York City, and spurred a massive internal migration of workers. The Industrial Revolution also stimulated the rise of unskilled labor. Prior to the 19th century, most Americans not employed in agriculture performed some kind of skilled trade. The advent of industrial production removed the necessity of apprenticeship for craftsmen and commoditized labor itself. The Industrial Revolution also created a wide availability of cheap commodities, which engendered a consumer culture that marked the end of many rural Americans’ subsistence lifestyle.

The American Industrial Revolution announced the arrival and predominance of capitalism, an economic principle that Adam Smith theorized in Wealth of Nations, and that Karl Marx elaborated upon in his magnum opus, Capital. The factories that sprang up in the Industrial Revolution illustrated the capitalist principle of wage labor, in which workers disavowed ownership of the means of production in return for an hourly wage. This process concentrated wealth in the hands of industrialists, whose fortunes became tied to the fluctuations of a consumer market. During the Industrial Revolution, capitalist America, with its large population and vast natural resources, became an economic juggernaut that took advantage of a vast internal and international consumer market.

The political implications of the American Industrial Revolution included the rise of the United States as a global economic power, the clash between traditional culture and modern progress, and the passage of labor-related legislation. The Civil War represented a conflict between an agrarian society, which relied upon slave labor, and an industrial society in which paid employees fueled a consumer economy. The expansion of the American economy had international repercussions, including the opening of relations with Japan and spurred rapid territorial growth. Urban workers also became a vocal political class, and encouraged the passage of legislation such as the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

Topics covered in this
chapter
Industrialization and the geographical
expansion of capitalism.
The rise and fall of industrial regions over time.
The concept of spatial divisions of labor.
The growth of new industrial spaces since the
1970s.
Spaces of consumption, particularly the notion
of a global consumer culture and local places of
consumption.
Chapter 4
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Industrialization in which the pursuit of profit has been the key
driving force behind development. Over the last four
hundred years or so, this has led to the emergence of a
single world economy as capitalism has spread geographically from its origins in Western Europe across
the globe to incorporate virtually all countries and
regions. This process of expansion has transformed
pre-capitalist societies and systems, not least through
the process of colonialism, which reached its high
point in the late nineteenth century. Despite periodic
setbacks and reverses, including serious challenges
from alternative social systems such as forms of communism in the Soviet Union and China during the
twentieth century, capitalism has continued to expand.
Indeed, the latest stage involves the incorporation of
former socialist countries through Chinas open-door
policies and following the collapse of Communist
regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe.
The growth of capitalism has been not only uneven
geographically but also historically, with periodic crises
like the Great Depression of the 1930s and the stagflation (a combination of economic stagnation and
rising inflation) of the 1970s posing particularly serious
problems. Such crises seem to reflect, among other
things, a tendency towards over expansion as favorable
economic conditions encourage firms to produce more
and more goods, leading ultimately to a slump when
the market cannot absorb all this output. Such internal
contradictions of capitalism were recognized by commentators as diverse as Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter
and John Maynard Keynes, leading them to forecast or
fear its demise. Adopting a longer-term view, however,
capitalism has proved remarkably durable and adaptable in finding short- and medium-term solutions to
its internal crises, although it has never been able to
completely solve the underlying problem of overproduction. As we have seen, the regulation approach
explains this in terms of the role of historically specific
regimes of accumulation like Fordism in sustaining
and stabilizing capitalism (section 2.4.3). Since the
early 1980s, the spread of neoliberal policies has shaped
the development of a new phase of capitalist globalization (Harvey, 2005).
4.2 The Industrial
Revolution and the
geographical
expansion of
capitalism
The growth of industrial production from the late eighteenth century was supported and facilitated by the
geographical expansion of capitalism. The great
increase in output and productivity associated with the
application of new technology and the development of
an elaborate division of labour within factories
required, as Adam Smith observed, a corresponding
increase in the size of the market. At the same time,
industrialization was dependent on an increased
volume and range of raw materials, drawn from different parts of the globe. Through the growth of
capitalist production and trade, an international division of labor was created during the nineteenth
century. This involved the developed countries of
Europe and North America producing manufactured
goods while the underdeveloped world specialised in
the production of raw materials and foodstuffs. This
global trading system was supported and justified by
the doctrine of comparative advantage, classically
expressed by David Ricardo, the great English economist, in 1817. It emphasizes the benefits of
international trade, stating that countries should
export the goods that they can produce with greater
relative efficiency. In recent years, the theory of comparative advantage has provided an important
intellectual foundation for the dominant neoliberal
ideology of globalization.
While the growth of a world economy can be traced
back to the voyages of exploration and discovery in
the sixteenth century, geographical expansion gained
new momentum as the Industrial Revolution took off,
culminating in the age of empire between 1875 and
1914 (Hobsbawm, 1987). The inherently expansive
nature of capitalism as an economic system has
underpinned a search for new markets, new sources of
raw materials and new supplies of labor, forging
economic relationships between territories on a global scale.