250 YEARS: The United States – from independence to empire
Part One: the revolution.
On the 4th July 2026 it will be 250 years since the 13 British colonies in North America declared independence from the British colonial power at a congress in Philadelphia. Since independence, the United States of America, as it came to be called, expanded to the West to encompass the whole continental area and later built an overseas empire in the Americas and on to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, the US had become a major economic and industrial power, and by the end of the WW2 in the 20th century, the US became the dominant industrial, financial and military power globally. ‘Pax Americana’ epitomised the period from mid-20th century to its end. However, in the three decades of the 21st century, that dominance began to give way (relatively) to new emergent economic and political rivals.
The rise of US capitalism over 250 years mirrors almost exactly the rise of capitalism to become the dominant mode of production globally. In the mid-18th century, capitalist accumulation was still very much confined to trade and even less to farming. Industrialisation was not the motive force of growth and the vast majority of the population in the Americas, Europe and Asia lived and worked on the land.
1776 was also the year that the Scottish enlightenment economist, Adam Smith, published his still famous book, The Wealth of Nations, which provided the theoretical and empirical foundation for the ending of feudal and semi-feudal restrictions on growth and prosperity. Smith argued that the wealth of nations should and could be built on free markets for buying and selling, with minimal government interference and with the ending of state-controlled monopolies. Such freedom would enable increased ‘division of labour’ to maximise productivity and the accumulation of capital. The rise of US capitalism has personified Smith’s expectations – but it has also starkly revealed the faultlines and contradictions in the capitalist mode of human social organisation.
The rise (and fall?) of US capitalism can be divided into four historical periods: 1) 1776: independence from British colonial power and the expansion of the US empire; 2) 1861-64: the Civil War that forced the submission of the slaveholding states to federal power and accelerated industrialisation and capitalist markets throughout the continent, along with the expansion of the US empire into the Americas and the Pacific; 3) 1941-45: after two world wars, US global hegemony was confirmed and the international rules of trade, order and institutions came under US control; and 4) from 1991: with the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union collapsed, but ironically, far from the US sustaining total global dominance (with the ‘end of history’), US imperialism went into relative decline, both economically and politically, even if it is still by far the most powerful nation on the planet.
The Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 did so first and foremost to obtain ‘home rule’ from Britain, in order to gain specific political and economic rights denied by the British Crown (which had also denied such rights to Ireland at the same time). But the Founding Fathers in no way wanted a systemic restructuring of society . Led primarily by the wealthy planter and mercantile elite, their goal was to eliminate British interference, while preserving established social hierarchies and property traditions. However, to succeed in their aims, the elite had to enlist the support of the poor farmers and the multitude in the coastal towns. So, as in any such rebellion or revolution, the War of Independence developed into a class conflict within the ‘national’ struggle for freedom from British rule. Apparently, “all men are created equal” (of course, not women, not slaves, not native Americans), said the Founding Fathers. So even in a highly unequal society that was the 13 colonies, some encouragement had to be given to the poor multitude.
Indeed, from the Boston Tea Party in 1773 through Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Revolution became a civil war. By 1780, about a third of the roughly 2,100,000 free citizens of the British colonies that became the ‘United States’ would have described themselves, with mixed idealism and self-interest, as Patriots. But another third stayed loyal to the British Empire. Threatened with being tarred and feathered, having their property seized, about 60,000 of these roughly 700,000 Loyalists decamped to Canada or Britain. The final third of the colonists occupied the uneasy middle. They were not willing to pledge their lives and fortunes to a bloody, collective war with the British Empire, but neither would they sustain a fierce and also bloody loyalty to the British king and country.
Historians calculate that 25,000 to 70,000 Patriots died directly because of the war, killed by camp fever and musket fire. Some 7,000 Loyalists did too. An additional 130,000 Americans were killed by a spike in smallpox that the movement of populations during the war exacerbated. The American revolution was hell. Nearly as many died relative to the population as in the civil war of the 1860s, ie almost 4 percent of the free population. By comparison, about one-third of 1 percent of Americans died in World War II. The Revolution for ‘democracy and independence’ was a bloody business.
The struggle for independence became a war and a civil war first because of the deteriorating economic situation for the British empire after they managed to defeat the French in so-called seven years war of 1764-71, in which many colonists and native Americans fought. From the early 1600s, British settlers in North America had relied on overseas trade for their well-being. Trade furnished the colonists with clothing and blankets, nails and firearms, cooking implements and metal goods, and other tools and materials that could not be produced locally. Without these imports, their standard of living might have suffered so much that they would not have stayed.
But after the French war, booty from the French and revenues from British troops stationed in North America disappeared. Interest rates soared, forcing real estate prices ever downward, eventually to a half or even a third of their highest point. The colonists appealed to the Mother Country Britain for aid, but at every turn, the British Crown and its parliament in Westminster looked to get the colonists to pay from the war against France.
First came onerous trade restrictions that cramped intra- and intercolonial trade. Cut off from traditional trading partners abroad, the colonists could not earn sufficient foreign exchange (species) abroad. Next came the Currency Act, which made it unlawful for the colonies to issue any more fiat paper money. Then came the straw that broke the camel’s back: the Stamp Act, which required colonists to pay a tax on any printed material (that encompassed everything from legal documents to newspapers). The Patriotic elite roused the population to oppose ‘taxation without representation’ – somewhat ironic given that back in Britain much of the people had to pay taxes decided by a parliament that elected members from just 1% of British adults.
The call for ‘democracy’ sounded the bell for independence. In January 1776, Thomas Paine, a poor artisan who had immigrated from Britain, wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense, presenting in an exciting and impressive fashion the case for an independent Republic, not just representation under the British Crown. It was a massive best seller (100,000 copies) and spread across all classes and especially to the rank and file in the Patriot army.
But democracy in Paine’s sense was not the aim of the Founding Fathers. Throughout the war against the British, they were determined to ensure that any radical democratic movements and proposals were stopped. Military leader, George Washington, one of the richest men in the colonies with thousands of slaves and many acres of land, tried to stop the recruitment of slaves to the army even as the British were offering freedom to them if they joined the Crown’s ranks. Eventually, Washington had to give way. But he still crushed any rebellions and mutinies in the army, just as Cromwell had done in the 1640s English Civil War. The most famous of these attempts to turn independence into economic equality was the so-called Shays rebellion in 1780, after the war against the British had been won.
Such rebellions frightened the merchant and slave-holder elite and encouraged them to ensure that the loose Confederation of colonial states was solidified into a Constitution deliberately designed to curb any democracy for the many over the few. There was to be a President to replace the British King and the revolution’s military leader Washington was elected by acclamation as the first. And there was to be a Senate composed of the elite to ensure no anti-business, anti-slavery and anti-land majority would hold sway. The President would be elected not by a mass adult vote, but by an ‘electoral college’ that strengthened the slave states and weakened the most populous states in the North. And there would be a Supreme Court of elected-for-life judges that could block any measures that were ‘unconstitutional’.
Those who looked to rebel against this ‘stitch-up’of democracy were greeted with vicious repression or the cry: “Go West, young man” – ie go beyond the Blue Ridge mountains to seek your fortune. From the very beginning of the revolution, both the elite and the multitude in the colonies looked to gain lands in a massive continent as the way to increased their prosperity. The British had blocked this and assigned those lands to the native American nations. With the defeat of the British, the flood to the West began – acting as a powerful safety valve against rebellion within the ex-colonies. The native American tribal nations were subject to relentless policies of genocide (similar to that now repeated in Gaza), with their populations decimated and their food sources (buffalo) annihilated. Meanwhile, slavery in the southern colonies was cemented, despite the British attempts to end it globally.
The American revolution was thus a ‘bourgeois revolution’ (with some peculiar institutions left intact – requiring further action later). Yes, the revolution had to mobilise the poorer classes to succeed, but only to establish an independent capitalist state that would eventually rule the world.
In the next part, I shall look at the American economy in the 19th century: the expansion of an empire across the continent and Latin America; and after the civil war in the 1860s, the industrialisation of America and its further imperial expansion into the Pacific.
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