American Enterprise Institute

Capitalism and the American Revolution

Economic Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution Notes

  1. The 1789 population estimates are from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, “Slave, Free Black, and White Population, 1780–1830,” https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm. This source seems intelligently compiled. It uses data from the first federal census in 1790 to extrapolate back to 1789 the 7.8 percent of blacks who were not enslaved—and were among the considerable number of free blacks who fought on both sides in the Revolution.
  2. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Random House, 2012), 357.
  3. Jeremy Black, Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519–1871 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011).
  4. J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–48, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/465917.
  5. David A. Blum and Nese F. DeBruyne, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, Congressional Research Service, July 29, 2020, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf.
  6. Ben Baack, “Forging a Nation State: The Continental Congress and the Financing of the War of American Independence,” Economic History Review 54, no. 4 (2001): 639–56, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0289.00206.
  7. Baack, “Forging a Nation State.”
  8. Larry Sawers, “The Navigation Acts Revisited,” Economic History Review 45, no. 2 (May 1992): 262–84, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1992.tb01301.x.
  9. On this point, see Lawrence A. Harper, “Mercantilism and the American Revolution,” Canadian Historical Review 23, no. 1 (March 1942): 1–15; Robert Paul Thomas, “A Quantitative Approach to the Study of the Effects of British Imperial Policy upon Colonial Welfare: Some Preliminary Findings,” Journal of Economic History 25, no. 4 (1965): 615–38, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/quantitative-approach-to-the-study-of-the-effects-of-british-imperial-policy-upon-colonial-welfare-some-preliminary-findings/1A0191715C8F10F1ED01E2894CF0E50F; and Gary M. Walton, “The New Economic History and the Burdens of the Navigation Acts,” Economic History Review 24, no. 4 (November 1971): 533–42, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1971.tb00192.x.
  10. Gerald Gunderson, A New Economic History of America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); and Joseph D. Reid Jr., “Economic Burden: Spark to the American Revolution?,” Journal of Economic History 38, no. 1 (March 1978): 81–100, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/economic-burden-spark-to-the-american-revolution/5D1EF4BF6F14CE036ED6E67DB1DBF6FF.
  11. For notable examples, see Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); and Bruce Ackerman, We the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991–98).
  12. Robert A. McGuire, To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
  13. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991). Charles Sellers used similar formulations in many writings.
  14. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 16th ed. (London: A. Strahan, 1825), 3:326.
  15. Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
  16. Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” in Stephen Kurtz and James Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 26–27.
  17. Abigail Adams, letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241.
  18. Samuel Johnson, “Taxation No Tyranny. An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress,” Northern Illinois University Digital Library, April 4, 1775, https://digital.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-amarch%3A88769.
  19. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 651.
  20. Mark O’Brien, When Adam Delved and Eve Span: A History of the Peasants’ Revolt (London: Bookmarks, 2016).
  21. Richard Rumbold et al., “The Last Words of Coll. Richard Rumbold, Mad. Alicia Lisle, Alderman Henry Cornish, and Mr. Richard Nelthrop Who Were Executed in England and Scotland for High Treason in the Year 1685,” University of Michigan, https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A57890.0001.001. Thomas Jefferson paraphrased this line without attribution in his June 24, 1826, letter to the mayor of Washington, DC—the final letter he wrote—yet he did not liberate even by his last will and testament his enslaved people, as George Washington had. See Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger Chew Weightman, June 24, 1826, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-6179. Thus in practice was the practical force of “all men created equal” among enlightened Virginians.
  22. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020); and James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 407–29.
  23. A similar effect was achieved in the northern German lands by the Zollverein in 1834 and by the German Empire in 1871. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though it had 11 official languages, was always a big free-trade zone internally. The US was externally a thoroughly protectionist country until the Kennedy Round of the 1960s, as were Austria, Germany, and Hungary on a similar timescale. But the claim, seeking to justify fresh protectionism, that protective tariffs in European countries and the US explain these countries’ economic successes is mistaken. The internal markets were huge.
  24. Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
  25. Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter Lindert, “America’s Revolution: Economic Disaster, Development, and Equality,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, July 15, 2011, https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/americas-revolution-economic-disaster-development-and-equality.
  26. On this point, see Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment” (working paper, Economic History Seminar, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, November 29, 2018), https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/McCloskey_HowGrowthHappens.pdf.
  27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 116.
  28. Abraham Lincoln, “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address” (speech, Washington, DC, March 4, 1865), https://www.nps.gov/linc/learn/historyculture/lincoln-second-inaugural.htm.
  29. Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns,” Liberty Fund, 1819, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-ancients-compared-with-that-of-moderns-1819.
  30. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “1941 State of the Union Address ‘The Four Freedoms,’” Voices of Democracy, January 6, 1941, https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/fdr-the-four-freedoms-speech-text.
  31. Oakley Hall, “Powder River Country: The Movies, the Wars, and the Teapot Dome,” in Paul Andrew Hutton, ed., Western Heritage: A Selection of Wrangler Award–Winning Articles (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).