The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900

Abstract

In the last twenty-five years, historians have been losing interest in economic history, a subject now taught mainly by economists, and in political history, a subject now taught by almost no one outside political science departments unless the period in question happens to be the postwar moment of Cold War and civil rights. The political scientists who have meanwhile been rethinking and rewriting the history of American politics in the absence of historians are known as the “new institutional-ists.” They are a motley crew, to be sure, with many disagreements among themselves, but they do share three characteristics. First, they treat Walter Dean Burnham, Karen Orren, and Stephen Skowronek as the founders of their approach to political history, and they regard Studies in American Political Development as their journal of record. Second, they insist that economic growth and development are “constituted” or determined by political decisions and public policy; they are “bringing the state back in” as a way of demonstrating that certain paths of development—“alternative tracks,” as Gerald Berk puts it—have not been foreclosed by the weight of the past. Third, they tend to equate the “anti-monopoly tradition” of the nineteenth century with democratic politics as such.