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.