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15 - U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800–1913

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Robert Lipsey
Edited by
Stanley L. Engerman  and
Robert E. Gallman
Robert Lipsey
Affiliation:
National Bureau of Economic Research
Stanley L. Engerman
Affiliation:
University of Rochester, New York
Robert E. Gallman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary

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.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge Economic History of the United States , pp. 685 - 732
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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