[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Industrialization in the United States During the Late
While these lines as per major reasons for the rapid industrialization of the United States in the late Nineteenth Century are being written, United States is changing at a breathtaking speed. The terrorist attacks have taken everybody by surprise, unleashing enormous hopes for freedom and economic development. At the same time, by upsetting well-established equilibrium, they have produced great uncertainty regarding the future and have created the potential for new instability.
Meanwhile, United States is not only putting the finishing touches to the single American market to meet the 1992 deadline but also embarking on fresh negotiations for political unity among the Twelve. Experts in social and political sciences have been surprised by the speed at which reality has surpassed their most optimistic forecasts. It is therefore natural for the economic historian to reach for the tools of his or her trade in trying to make sense of the overwhelming unfolding of history that, thanks to live television broadcasting, is taking place literally under one’s eyes.
Needless to say, such epochal upheavals defy any attempt at drawing ‘lessons from history’. For sure, we know only that the ‘long-postwar’ is over. The political and economic setting in which the future generations of Americans are likely to live will be different from that in which we grew up. It is likely that similarities will be found more with previous periods in history than with the most recent one.
On the one hand, some aspects of the pre-1914 ‘belle époque’ are likely to revive: free movement of goods, capital and labour in a context of fixed exchange rates. On the other hand, the collapse of a large empire and the re-emergence of nationalism within small, newly-independent states will re-create some features of United States as it emerged, which put an end to the World War......
