Of all the Arabized poets of the Hebrew Golden Age in al-Andalus, Moses (Abū Hārān) Ibn Ezra is the one whose poetry most resembles that of an Arabic poet. Yet his literary career was more varied than that of most Arabic poets, reflecting the interests of the Jewish aristocrats of his age. The interplay of Arabo-Islamic and Jewish elements, a fascinating feature of the lives and careers of all the leading Hebrew poets of al-Andalus, is so fully developed in him as to render him a model case of an Andalusian Jewish intellectual.

Ibn Ezra’s life is known only in outline (Ibn Ezra, Selected Poems xxiii–xxxix; Schirmann 380–420). He was born in Granada, around 1055, to a distinguished family, several of whose members were, like Samuel and Joseph Ibn Nagrila in the preceding generation, in the service of Ḥabbūs and Bādīs of Granada. Moses’ elder brother Isaac (Abū Ibrāhīm) seems to have been married to one of the Nagid’s daughters. As a young man, Moses studied at the academy of Lucena, training ground for many of al-Andalus’s courtierrabbis. The academy was headed at the time by Rabbi Isaac Ibn Ghiyāth, the premier rabbinic authority of al-Andalus and the premier liturgical poet of his generation.

A powerful member, briefly, of a moribund dynasty, an insider and yet simultaneously an exile, Ibn Ḥazm was a loyal upholder of the waning Umayyad caliphate of Spain, itself in exile from the place of its origins. Indeed, as the caliphate of Córdoba crumbled, Ibn Ḥazm’s loyalty intensified; in the chaotic period of savage bickering among the party kings, his fidelity to the extinguished dynasty became a fixed principle, at one with the high status accorded to faithfulness (wafāʾ) throughout his thought. Ibn Ḥazm’s allegiance to Umayyad claims was quixotic and stood in inverse proportion to his hopes. Though banished more than once because of his Umayyad sympathies, Ibn Ḥazm viewed his exile in purely transcendent terms. It was, he declared, the out-of-placeness of the man who no longer sets hope in the life of this world that occasioned his estrangement. His unwavering reliance on reason in the face of fanaticism isolated him still further. To an old friend he wrote, in a treatise on the true nature of belief, “this is what attaches us one to the other for we are strangers [ghurabāʾ] among those fanatically opposed to anyone who concedes this world to them so that his belief may be vouchsafed” (Risālat al-bayān 3:187).

In November 1982, during a brief stop in Toledo, Pope John Paul II was greeted by representatives of that city’s surviving Mozarabic community and presented with a tenth-century prayer book. It is not known whether John Paul, an amateur linguist of some note, opened this artifact of Christian fidelity, written in a characteristically Andalusi-Arabic hand, and read its first line: “bi-smi llāhi r-raḥmāni r-rahim“ [In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate].

This manuscript was a fitting gift for the first visit by a reigning pontiff to Spain. Given by the descendants of a people with a complex, hybrid identity and received by the literal successor of the men who helped extinguish important features of that identity, it was freighted with meaning and irony. That it survived to the present day, when so many other Iberian Arabic texts were willfully destroyed, is remarkable. That 3,300 descendants of the Mozarabic culture that produced it still proudly call themselves Mozarabs is astonishing. One would have assumed that Mozarabs, as a group, had disappeared sometime before Cardinal Cisneros, seized by a revisionist’s mania for antiquities, attempted to revive their dead liturgy in the early sixteenth century. Yet there they were, in Toledo, in 1982, still in the same place they were last seen nearly six hundred years earlier, still wearing the tattered shreds of their historical identity. For the modern Mozarabs, with their culture long abandoned and their traditional languages gone – Arabic banished from Iberia five hundred years earlier, and the Mozarabic Romance dialect extinct – all that persists of that earlier identity is an ancient Latin liturgical rite – an un-Arabized religious remnant of a pre-Muslim Visigothic past, now sustained with regular but poorly attended masses in the Toledan cathedral’s Mozarabic chapel – and the belief that their foreparents once remained proudly Christian on an almost entirely Muslim peninsula.

While the shift from Muslim to Christian rule in Aragon in the twelfth century was a major political upheaval, the identity and religion of the resident population remained relatively static due to protective royal edicts that guaranteed rights such as the practice of religion and freedom of movement. Thus, in 1365, approximately 235,000 Mudejares (Muslims under Christian rule) still lived in Aragon. Despite plague, emigration, and conversion, even as late as the fifteenth century a census documented a Muslim population of 11 percent in Aragon and 10 percent in the city of Teruel.

The Mudejares were skilled in construction and built several churches in Teruel, of which the remains of four survive. Santa María Mediavilla, which dates to 1342, replaced an earlier Romanesque church to which a Mudejar tower was attached in 1258. The tall, rectangular, brick tower that spans the street is decorated with panels of interlacing arches, bricks set in a saw tooth pattern, framed ajimez (paired) windows, and green and white glazed tile that was the specialty of the Mudejar potters of Teruel. The Tower of San Martín was built in 1315 in the area that had been the intra-muros Muslim quarter after the conquest. It too consists of a tall rectangular block arching over the street, ornamental brickwork, and glazed ceramics. The surface of the majestic tower is crisply textured, colorful, and gleams in the sunlight.

In eighth-century Córdoba, a public architecture emerged that – like the Palace of Madīnat al-Zahrāʾ – blended Roman, Visigothic-Christian, and Syrian-Muslim elements. Córdoba’s congregational mosque exemplifies the integration of different architectural traditions. It was built on the site of a Visigothic church that, according to legend, stood on the ruins of a Roman temple. Centuries after the founding of the mosque, chroniclers described a church that was first divided into Muslim and Christian halves and then bought and replaced with a new mosque in 169/785–170/787. That this closely resembles the story of the adaption and rebuilding of the Damascus mosque casts doubt on the authenticity of the Córdoba account but indicates that even several hundred years later, the Syrian origins of the mosque resonated.

The Great Mosque consisted of a walled courtyard and a rectangular prayer hall of nine or eleven aisles running perpendicular to the qibla wall. A taller and wider central aisle led to the mihrab, a niche in the qibla wall that indicated the direction of Mecca and hence the orientation of prayer. However, in actuality the orientation was incorrectly skewed to the south, either in deference to an earlier mosque on the site or as a mirror of the correct orientation of Damascus, the home of the Umayyads and first great Islamic center.

In the year 1078 at the age of twenty-four, ʿbd al-Jabbār ibn Ḥamdīs, the scion of a Muslim family that had inhabited Sicily for generations, left his homeland and set out in pursuit of fame and fortune. He had lived his youth in the splendor of a privileged class of landed gentry. But the times were changing: by the beginning of the third Islamic century in Sicily, internal strife was tearing apart the Muslim community. War, disease, and destruction were wreaking havoc on the land, while the hordes of Norman armies lay in wait, preparing to carve their name on Sicilian history. As political stability and economic security declined, so too did the courtly atmosphere of the princely palaces in which poets like Ibn Ḥamdīs could pursue lucrative and prestigious careers.

Since the opportunities for a promising professional poet, particularly a court panegyrist, were to be found elsewhere, Ibn Ḥamdīs chose temporary exile, first to al-Andalus and then to North Africa, to make his fame and fortune as a poet-warrior. Like all good native sons of Sicily, Ibn Ḥamdīs had every intention of one day returning home. But the return to his beloved homeland would never come to pass. The pain and regret he suffered would be a constant theme in much of his poetic oeuvre throughout his long life. In the sixty years he lived following his departure from Sicily, Ibn Ḥamdīs witnessed the destruction of Muslim Sicily by the Norman armies, the fall of Muslim principalities to the Reconquista in Spain, civil wars, plagues, the death of most of his relatives, and finally, his own blindness at the end of his life.

The preceding chapters of this volume have elaborated upon two interrelated themes defined by Robert Gallman in Chapter 1; the persistent if occasionally interrupted long-term growth of the American economy, and the structural reorganization of economic institutions, practices, and norms that compel us to characterize the growing economy in certain ways – as, say, industrializing, or centralizing, or, to use terms with greater ideological resonance, as moving toward a system of free enterprise or toward capitalism. This final chapter, while referring frequently to both economic growth and structural change in economic affairs, will explore some of the most significant interrelations between these two phenomena and the more purely social relations of Americans during the “long nineteenth century.” Put in slightly different terms, it asks: how shall we understand the ways in which economic development influenced and was influenced by changes in nineteenth-century American society?

This distinction between the “economic” and the “social” is arbitrary to the degree that it represents divisions within modern social thought (and the departmental structure of modern universities) rather than in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, and we will see that it is more useful and convincing in some settings than in others. The search for all of the “social implications” of economic development, moreover, is an impossibly large task, and the qualifier “most significant” leaves an assignment that is daunting enough, even if one were to presume to know exactly where the “economic” ends and the “social” begins.

INTRODUCTION

On four occasions during the twentieth century major international confrontations led American society to shift substantial amounts of labor, capital, and technology from peacetime employments to production for national defense and international war: World War I, 1917–1918; World War II, 1941–1945; the Korean War, 1950–1953; and the Vietnam War, 1964–1973. Significant resources were also committed to national defense during the four decades of the Cold War, 1947–1989. With the exception of the Civil War, the typical nineteenth-century share of military expenditures in U.S. gross national output, expenditure, and income (hereafter GNP) was well below 1 percent. Conquering and pacifying the Western regions of the nation and defending the lengthening land and sea borders were the principal aims of nineteenth-century national security policy. U.S. foreign policy deliberately sought to insulate the nation from the international conflicts of the imperial European nations.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century several factors began to change American national security policy. First, American overseas trade and investment interests expanded; as the last continental frontiers were settled, overseas economic opportunities gained attractiveness. Second, the major European powers expanded their imperial rule in Africa and Asia, areas where the United States heretofore had had relatively unfettered, though largely untapped, trade access. Finally, the major European powers became involved in a naval arms race. In the mid-1880s the U.S. Congress began to appropriate substantial funds for heavily armored and gunned naval vessels to patrol the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans thousands of miles off the North American shoreline.

(GALLMAN)

Notable contemporary efforts to measure the scale and performance of the U.S. economy were made in the nineteenth century. (See Robert E. Gallman, “Estimates of American National Product Made Before the Civil ar,” in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 9 [1961, supplement 397–412]). The best of this work was by Ezra Champion Seaman, Essays on the Progress of Nations (New York, 1846, Supplement I, 1847, Supplement II, 1848, 2nd ed. 1852, 3rd ed. 1865); see also, The American System of Government (New York, 1870). Seamen invented a conceptual system very like modern national accounts and made excellent estimates for 1840, 1850, 1860, and 1869. He also derived the size distribution of income in the late 1860s, on the basis of income tax data.

In the early twentieth century Willford Isbell King and Robert F. Martin (the latter on behalf of the National Industrial Conference Board) prepared national product figures for various dates in the nineteenth century: King, The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States (New York, 1919) and Martin, National Income in the United States, 1799–1938 (New York, 1939). The Martin estimates for the antebellum years were subject to a devastating critique by Simon Kuznets (“Long-Term Changes in the National Income of the United States of America since 1870,” in Simon Kuznets [ed.] Income and Wealth in the United States, Trends and Structure, Income and Wealth, Series II [Cambridge, 1952], 221–41, and “National Income Estimates for the United States prior to 1870,” Journal of Economic History, 12 [1952], 115–30).

OVERVIEW AND ORGANIZATION OF THE CHAPTER

This chapter focuses on the nature of the macroeconomic growth process that has characterized the United States experience, and manifested itself in the changing pace and sources of the rise of real output per capita in the U.S. economy during the past two hundred years. Our main interest is, indeed, in the twentieth century, but we believe that its major characteristics and the nature of the underlying forces at work are most clearly seen in comparisons between the century just past and the one that came before.

A key observation that emerges from the long-term quantitative economic record is that the proximate sources of increases in real gross domestic product per capita in the century between 1889 and 1989 were quite different from those which obtained during the first one hundred years of the American national experience. Baldly put, the national ecomomy moved from an extensive to an increasingly intensive mode of growth, and its development at the intensive margin has become more and more dependent upon the acquisition and exploitation of technological and organizational knowledge.

Our first objective, therefore, must be to assemble and describe the components of the U.S. macroeconomic record in some quantitative detail, in a manner that exposes the nature and dimensions of the contrast between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We approach this task within the well-established framework of “growth accounting.” This enables us to show the secular acceleration that occurred in the growth rate of total factor productivity, which is the weighted average of the productivities of capital and labor, and the growth in the importance of total factor productivity as a source of labor productivity and per capita output increases.

INTRODUCTION

For almost three-quarters of a century, from the end of World War I until the early 1980s, the United States was the world’s largest capital exporter. In the last decade of the previous century, Americans had begun to finance economic activity in Canada and Mexico; until recently these transfers grew and their geographic focus broadened. Over the past decade, however, the world’s largest creditor has become its largest debtor.

Before 1914, however, it was Europe who acted as the world’s banker; and within that continent, it was Britain who was the senior partner. Moreover, over the course of the nineteenth century, it was the United States that received the lion’s share of Europe’s foreign investment. Unlike their great grandchildren, nineteenth-century Americans displayed a high propensity to save. Although the evidence for the early years is sketchy, the share of net capital formation in net national product appears to have averaged about 6.5 percent in the years between 1805 and 1840 and to have risen to almost 20 percent by the end of the century; and most of the resources that were diverted from consumption were domestic not foreign.

INTRODUCTION

With labor productivity and real wages lagging in the United States since the mid-1970s and inequality on the rise, many have questioned what has gone wrong. The vibrant American economy of the immediate post–World War II era appears sluggish. Labor productivity was equally sluggish during other periods, although none lasted as long as the current slowdown. The recent rise in inequality has returned the nation’s wage structure to that experienced around 1940 rather than introducing inequality of unprecedented proportions.

Most relevant to placing the current labor market in a long-run perspective is that labor gained enormously during the past hundred years. Some of the gain was reaped through real hourly wage increases and enhanced employer-provided benefits. Some came in the form of decreased hours per week and decreased years of work over the lifetime. Still other gains accrued to labor in the form of greater security in the face of unemployment, old age, sickness, and job injury. Many of these gains were obtained when labor unions were weak. That is not to say that organized labor added little to labor’s increased economic welfare over the past hundred years. Unionized labor earned between 5 and 20 percent more than nonunionized labor of equal skill during most of the period, and nonunionized labor in America may have benefited from the “voice” of unionized labor, particularly with regard to hours reductions. But there is no hard evidence that the American labor market was fundamentally transformed by unions in the same manner that European labor markets, with their institutional wage setting, employment security laws, mandated works councils, and centralization of collective bargaining, have been.

REAL AND IMAGINED CAUSES

The worldwide Depression of the 1930s was an economic event of unprecedented dimensions. There had been no downturn of its magnitude or duration before, and there has been none since. It stands as a unique failure of the industrial economy.

Economic activity in the United States declined from the middle of 1929 through the first few months of 1933. This four-year decline was not smooth, but it was nevertheless an unprecedented and bewildering fall in production. Industrial production declined by 37 percent, prices by 33 percent, and real GNP by 30 percent. Nominal GNP, therefore, fell by over half. Unemployment rose to a peak of 25 percent and stayed above 15 percent for the rest of the 1930s. There were many idle economic resources in America for a full decade. Only with the advent of the Second World War did employment rise enough to absorb the full labor force.

This large event has to be evidence either of a great instability in the economy or of a great shock to it. Traditional scholarship tended to emphasize the former; recent work concentrates on the latter. An older view saw events in the United States in isolation. More recent scholarship insists on the international scope of the Depression and the need to see the United States in an Atlantic if not a world perspective.

Government regulation of business in America has reflected a unique mix of ideas, policies, and institutional arrangements. In Europe, Japan, Canada, and Latin America, combinations of state-owned enterprise and discretionary administrative supervision were the normal forms of governmental control of business. In the United States, by contrast, semi-autonomous bureaucracies, with formalized procedures and close judicial oversight, developed detailed control over a substantial segment of private enterprise.

Government regulation in the United States has generally not been an affirmative public act, primarily because the citizenry has been so suspicious of central government authority. In political debate, proponents of regulation have felt compelled to argue that some sorts of market or managerial failure justified regulatory intervention. These include what economists call externalities (such as environmental effluents), informational problems (such as consumer-product labeling), public goods (airwaves or the banking system), the presence of natural monopoly (in which one firm has lower unit costs than two or more firms at any level of output), and anticompetitive behavior (leading to price discrimination or collusion). Yet, quite often the impetus for federal regulation came from business managers seeking to mitigate “excessive” domestic or international competition, macroeconomic instabilities, perceived structural problems (such as depleting resources), or even political interference (from state and local legislatures or popular movements).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century a substantial proportion of monetary transactions in the United States were conducted with specie (gold or silver coins), in particular the Spanish peso. Merchants used bills of exchange and other financial instruments, and several private banks and the First Bank of the United States had been established, but commercial banking was in its infancy. By 1914 the United States had become one of the world’s leading financial powers; it possessed a well-developed banking system and a broad array of non-bank financial intermediaries. Watching over all stood the newly created Federal Reserve System. The development of the financial system in the interim had followed an erratic path. Wars, financial crises, changes in governments, changes in ideologies, and chance events often had produced substantial changes in the financial order in short periods of time. And it had been an unpredictable path. Often a very different path might have been followed were it not for the arguments laid out by a single individual or a single vote cast on an important bill. There was a tendency, moreover, to pass legislation that would have prevented the last crisis, only to discover that the next crisis presented entirely new features. Politicians, like generals, tended to fight the last war. Only by immersing oneself in the actual course of American financial history can one understand how the financial system evolved from its colonial roots to the complex system of specialized financial institutions that existed on the eve of World War I.

FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CANADIAN ECONOMY

For the economy of Canada it can be said that the nineteenth century came to an end in the mid-1890s. There is wide agreement among observers that a fundamental break occurred at about that time and that in the years thereafter Canadian economic development, industrialization, population growth, and territorial expansion quickened markedly. This has led economic historians to put a special emphasis on the particularly rapid economic expansion that occurred in the years after about 1896. That emphasis has been deceptive and has generated a perception that little of consequence was happening before 1896. W. W. Rostow was only reflecting a reasonable reading of what had been written about Canadian economic history when he declared the “take-off” in Canada to have occurred in the years between 1896 and 1913. That was undoubtedly a period of rapid growth and great transformation in the Canadian economy and is best considered as part of the twentieth-century experience. The break is usually thought to have occurred in the mid-1890s, but the most indicative data concerning the end of this period are drawn from the 1891 decennial census. By the time of the next census in 1901, major changes had begun to occur. It fits the available evidence best, then, to think of an early 1890s end to the nineteenth century.

The bibliographic essays include author contributions for all but two of the chapters. Chapters 2 and 14 include such extensive reference citations that we felt that separate bibliographic essays would not be necessary.

ABRAMOVITZ AND DAVID

Statistical Sources: Trends and Fluctuations

The most convenient, authoritative compilation of long-term statistical information is the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975).

The following paragraphs contain references to outstanding sources of statistics on particular subjects together with discussions by the compilers of the estimates and of the forces governing their trends and fluctuations.

Paul A. David, in “Real Income and Economic Welfare in the Early Republic,” Discussion Paper in Economic and Social History No. 5, March 1996, University of Oxford, presents the basic estimates of national product used in this chapter for the period 1800 to 1840. Alternative estimates may be found in Thomas Weiss, “U.S. Labor Force Estimates and Economic Growth, 1800-1860” in Robert E. Gallman and John Joseph Wallis (eds.), American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War (Chicago, 1992). The figures underlying the estimates used in this chapter for the decades from 1840 to 1890 were made by Robert Gallman, “Gross National Product in the United States, 1834—1909” in Dorothy S. Brady (ed.), Output, Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 30 (New York, 1966). These, however, have now been superseded by his estimates presented in Vol. II of The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, “Economic Growth and Structural Change in the Long Nineteenth Century.”

U.S. TRADE AROUND 1800

Trade was on the minds of the entrepreneurs who financed the first settlements in the Americas. They dreamed of riches – the kind that could come only from exploiting the natural resources of areas newly opened to European settlement and exporting the products. They did not envisage financing subsistence farmers or artisans or manufacturing settlements serving local markets.

As it turned out, the American colonies were, in their early days, heavily involved in exporting. They probably exported something like a quarter of their production in the early years of the eighteenth century (Gallman, and Lipsey, both in Davis, Easterlin, Parker, et al., 1972). By the end of the eighteenth century that export propensity had been cut in half. Thus, around 1800, something like 10 to 15 percent of U.S. output was exported (ibid., and Shepherd and Walton 1972, 44). To some extent, that decline in the export propensity could be attributed simply to population growth – larger countries tend to trade less in proportion to their output than smaller countries – but the decline in exporting was too large for much of it to be attributed to that cause.

INTRODUCTION

In 1990, for the first time, a majority of the U.S. population lived in metropolitan areas with more than one million people. More than half of these thirty-nine areas were in the South and West (see Figure 2.1). Only five such areas (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Pittsburgh) had existed in 1900. Then they held 15.5 percent of the U.S. population, and all were in the Northeast and Midwest. During the intervening decades the boundaries, internal structure, and economic roles of U.S. regions and urban areas altered dramatically.

A national economy can be thought of spatially in at least two ways: as a set of regions or as a system of cities. These are not mutually exclusive. Although often defined by industrial specialization (agricultural, extractive, or manufacturing), a region also can be defined as a nodal metropolis structuring a surrounding area. Historically, regions and cities have influenced each other in numerous ways. But in the United States and else-where their relative importance for economic growth has changed over time. The system of cities has assumed the dominant role in the twentieth century.

Growth in capitalist economies depends upon continually shifting boundaries or frontiers: spatial, technological, and social. The expectation of high financial returns on each of these frontiers, although not always realized, drives the investment that sustains aggregate growth. New territories are developed and new cities constructed. Technological innovations are conceived and embodied in equipment and organizations. Firms do not simply reallocate resources already employed, but expand and contract the social boundaries of the system of firms.