The United States As A Developing Nation: Revisiting The Peculiarities Of American History*

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that the economic departure of the United States after the Civil War marked a ‘Second Great Divergence’. Compared to the ‘First’, the rise of Britain during the Industrial Revolution, this Second Great Divergence is curiously little understood: because the United States remains the template for modernization narratives, its trajectory is more easily accepted as preordained than interrogated as an unlikely historical outcome. But why should development have been problematic everywhere but the United States? This Viewpoint argues that a robust explanation for the United States's rise is lacking: it can neither be found in an economic history literature focused on factor endowments nor in internalist Americanist historiography, which often reproduces overdetermined accounts of modernization inspired by Max Weber. The most promising avenue of inquiry, we argue, lies in asking how American political institutions configured what should properly be called an American developmental state. Such a perspective opens up a broad comparative research agenda that provincializes the United States from the perspective of development experiences elsewhere.

Provincialising American Capitalism: From Universal Instance to Contingent Case

“…However, these analytics are interrelated; illustrating how one of the least explored elements of the study of American capitalism is the very descriptor "American" (Kramer 2016). While the US uniquely developed from a peripheral cash crop exporter to the world's most powerful industrial nation, its triumph obscures the contingencies of this trajectory even among otherwise critical commentators (Link and Maggor 2020). This article examines that paradox by way of a methodological critique of how a diverse set of radical critics have conceived of capitalism in America and its relationship to capitalism as a whole.…”

Political contestation and the Second Great Divergence

“…For the United States in the late nineteenth century—as for China, Japan, or South Korea today—reform was less the byproduct of industrialization than its catalyst . State actors, as the historians of capitalism Stefan Link and Noam Maggor have written, echoing two decades of scholarship on the political economy of late‐nineteenth‐century U. S. industrialization, were not merely reactive “‘reformers'” who arrived late on the scene to reorder what was “otherwise assumed” to be “autonomous ‘economic’ change, driven by private interests.” On the contrary, they participated directly in “shaping and re‐shaping the economic order, rather than merely remedying its worst tendencies after the fact” (Link & Maggor, 2020: p. 295).…”

“…17 17 One target of this critique has been fin de siècle U. S. investigative journalism. Muckraking posed no fundamental challenge to the economic order, Link and Maggor observed, since it merely refined the “ideological distinction between legitimate and benign capitalist behavior and its illicit counterparts” (Link & Maggor, 2020: p. 287). …”

“…The late-nineteenth-century U. S. national government did shape the rules of the game, as Bensel documented decades ago. Yet it operated in conjunction with a constellation of subnational institutions that included state legislatures, state courts, and city councils (John, 2010;Link, 2020;Link & Maggor, 2020;Maggor, 2017aMaggor, , 2017b. In many instances, these institutions operated at cross purposes, creating an uneven, highly variegated, and bewilderingly complex regulatory landscape that could be maddingly corrupt and strangely perverse.…”

Introduction: Rethinking the American Renaissance

“…Recently, however, they have needed to distinguish it from what some are calling the second great divergence: the acceleration of the United States economy around the turn of the twentieth century -a divergence as dramatic as the first. 1 This special collection is devoted to bringing this and other recent developments from outside the discipline of architectural history into conversation with US architecture of the time -and in particular with its pre-eminent expression, the American Renaissance.…”