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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2012
Transportation, especially inland transportation, has played a more important role in the economic development of the United States than that of any other nation. After a long, slow start in which it faced the necessity of dealing across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the young nation found itself expanding westward across an equally vast land mass, without much idea of how its people might conveniently get to the Promised Land or how they would send its fruits back to market. Until the problem of inland transportation began to be solved following the War of 1812, America remained just another of the important maritime nations of the world, tied to a coastline and the few miles of coastal plain that bordered it. Such areas of the world had been virtually synonymous with “civilization” for many centuries; but in a generation or two after about 1815, the ancient domination of the sea was emphatically erased.
1 “Size and Profitability of English Colliers in the Eighteenth Century,” Business History Review 51 (Winter 1977), 460–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See the review by T.C. Barker of Aldcroft, Derek and Freeman, Michael, eds., Transport in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1983).Google Scholar Barker, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (London), 16 December 1983, 1410, comments that “the chapters on coastal shipping and ports, both hitherto as under-studied as canals have been overdone, … provide clear evidence of the growing importance of non-canal transport. … It is a pity that the editors have chosen to bring the Industrial Revolution to a sudden halt (as the old-fashioned political historians used to do) in 1830.”