Walter A. Friedman, America Business History: A Very Short Introduction, focuses on business revolutions and, innovations commencing from the very first colony to modern-day corporate America. Friedman accesses how the United States rose its economy to be a capitalist superpower. The author structures the book in a specific format enabling the reader to see the transformation in how America made its income and profits. Friedman makes it very clear not to disregard any of the unjust ways in which America makes money from taking land to slavery. The book makes a big emphasis on the differences each period had advanced technologically leading to America’s exponential income bloom.
The book initiates with the discovery of the first encounters of capitalism on North American soil. The different joint-stock companies such as The Virginia Company or the Massachusets Bay Company commence the change of an era. This was the beginning of labor occupations in America, when cultivation of the land was needed for the growth of cash crops such as tobacco (Friedman, 8). The introduction of merchants arose and imports and exports created the next steps towards the innovations in capitalism.
Friedman makes the emphasis on exports and imports and the effects it had on the newly formed United States. The discovery of having to find other methods of survival using the available resources that the colonies had. Each had different resources from the land. Not every colony had the same fertile soil of geographical landmarks. As the United States started to expand and gained more territory a more stable economy and the system started to form. Influential figures such as Hamilton started to create an impact after the independence. Hamilton Report on Manufactures lead to change for industries and the foundation of a National Bank led to a more progressive method of a democratic system of government (Friedman, 17). Other resources such as cotton, roads and canals, whale oil, and exports to other locations in the Caribbean marked the difference from grazing cash crops to expanding internally and being recognized as an independent nation. Friedman makes a big emphasis that the changes do not occur instantaneously, instead, it took decades even centuries of labor to make progress in the next steps of capitalism.
I don’t know if it’s just a by-product of the way Friedman writes, but much here is vague and unspecific. What is the structure of this book, since you mention it? What were some of the technological innovations he describes? If capitalism was “discovered” during this period, does that mean that it “arrived on the first ships” (i.e., Europeans brought it with them), or that something about the process of colonization and settlement brought about the economic system we know as capitalism? Try to avoid such vague phrases as “the beginning of labor occupations,” and “the next steps towards the innovations in capitalism,” and consider including some dates so that the reader knows what specific “decades even centuries” the author is describing.