building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (1791) is the programmatic document of the
opposition to that well‐rooted economy in the new American Nation, which hinged
on land rents and on agricultural investments. As the main circumstances in favour
of industrialization (protective prices, premiums and subsidies to favour private
initiative, the introduction of new labour via immigration, the division of work, etc.)
were identified, the report insisted mainly on the political arguments, proposing a
doctrine of free‐trade, which intended to stimulate the commercial elements of the
Northern States.
Historic events have demonstrated Hamilton’s extreme farsightedness in imagining
a modern, capitalistic economy, but they have also highlighted the total
indifference to a uniform implementation of such demands in the different States of
the Union. The idea according to which “Whatever, besides, tends to diminish in
any country the number of artificers and manufacturers, tends to diminish the
home market, the most important of all markets for the rude produce of the land,
and thereby still further to discourage agriculture” 29 could be true in the East,
where the harsh climate, the not particularly fertile lands and the limited availability
of agricultural soil had favoured a scientific approach to crops.
In the East it was customary to take advantage of crop rotation and to make use of
fertilizers; in the South, on the other hand, the abundance of fertile soil and the
more massive use of slavery had favoured an intensive agriculture based on
exploitation of the soil, cultivated mainly with tobacco, sugar cane and cotton 30 .
Eugene Genovese, a scholar of policies linked to slavery, analysed the economic
limits of such practices:
The weakest economic point in the South lay in the low productivity of
its workforce. The slaves’ work was mediocre. Strict surveillance made it
possible to make them work reasonably well in the cotton fields, but the
cost of such surveillance during one or two operations was prohibitive.
Slavery hindered the radical process to update technology, which could
have substantially increased productivity. These obstacles to
technological progress caused irreparable damage to agriculture in the
South, as it was precisely the improvement of tools and machinery
29 SMITH, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Forgotten Books,
2008 (first ed. 1776), p. 521
30 To study in depth: GRAY, Lewis Cecil, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860,
Washington, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933
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