Even accounting had to evolve new tools to allow the efficient management of the vast emerging enterprises.Īnd it wasn’t always government that led the way to reform. Not only did modern capitalism evolve at this time, but the rules needed to govern that capitalism and prevent the development of a plutocracy also had to be developed simultaneously. A booming industrial base and a rapidly expanding capital market on Wall Street provided the synergy that produced the colossus of the book’s title. At the same time the huge increase in the national debt turned Wall Street from a minor player in world markets into the second largest financial market on the globe, after London’s. Brands opens his account just after the Civil War, which had greatly fostered American industry with its unprecedented demands for guns, powder, railroad rails and rolling stock, blankets, uniforms and a thousand other industrial products. This is warts-and-all history, but the warts don’t get undue attention. He has no ideological ax to grind, providing a rounded and largely fair portrait of the capitalists and the world they made. In “American Colossus” he paints a broad picture, putting the growth of American economy firmly in the political and social context of the time. Brands, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and one of the country’s foremost historians, has written first-rate biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson and both Presidents Roosevelt, as well as numerous other books on American history.

Brands tells this story of extraordinary economic transformation in his new book, “American Colossus.” Mr. By 1900 it was producing more steel than Britain and Germany combined and exporting it profitably to both those countries. In 1860 the United States had imported almost all its steel the product that was increasingly the measure of economic power at that time from Britain.

In those decades the American economy exploded in size, becoming by far the largest, most productive and most technically advanced in the world. Far less noted, however, is that this nation’s extraordinary power and influence in the 20th century and beyond has been largely a product of the remarkable 35 years that followed the Civil War.

It has often been noted that while the American union was established by the Revolution, the American nation was forged only upon the awful anvil of the Civil War.

Hw brands traitor to his class