In Walter A. Friedman’s American Business History: A Short Introduction he traces the rise of business in the United States from the time of the arrival of the European Merchants in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries all the way to today’s large enterprises and businesses. Not only does Friedman talk about America’s rise to power through business, but he also writes about its culture and societies.
He starts off with the late 15th Century and talks about the European Settlers’ desires to mine more and more from the land of the Americas and this jumpstarts capitalism in the New World. Friedman mentions the different settlements trading different goods, for example the French on the North found their land to be valuable in animal fur while Virginia colony was exposed to Tobacco by John Rolfe and began exporting it. These trades along with Companies such as the Virginia Company (1606), East India Company (1600) and Massachusetts Bay Company (1628) etc. began a new surge of commerce and trade.
The Way to Wealth (Friedman 13) stood out to me the most since I wasn’t aware that’s where the “American Dream” stemmed from. It is said that Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth” (1758) says the way to achieve prosperity and wealth is by mastering in a trade and by working hard in it, and that this is the way out of poverty, and something that is still relevant, and applicable to this day. “Wastefulness and sloth” is still something that is considered today to be a root cause of poverty and lack of success, and his famous “time is money” is a phrase still used routinely today. It also made me think how even though Americans were against inherited aristocracy, it’s still a human desire to want to pass on your wealth and accomplishments on to your next generations.
Throughout these Chapters, Friedman stresses on the exports and imports of the United States and how it began to shape the economy to become what it is today. Regardless of the challenges at the time, capitalism helped carve America into the Global Powerhouse it is today. From Farmers in the South to the merchants in the East, all had one goal, establishing themselves and their families in the New World.
A thoughtful post, and good breakdown of the Friedman chapter. I wonder if you could have enhanced this further by drawing on some of what we’ve been discussing in class. How did joint-stock companies minimize risk and make long-distance oceangoing trade feasible? What did the networks of Atlantic and global trade created in the 16th–18th centuries look like? Are Franklin’s appeals to hard work and thrift and warnings against “sloth” an example of what Weber called “the Protestant ethic”? If capitalism (a term Friedman doesn’t use) led to the emergence of the U.S. as an economic “powerhouse,” how can we best define it, and how did it change over time?